By CLARE LONDON (3 page)

“Max?” Jack’s hand pressed more tightly.

That was the day I realized everything had gone wrong. My move to London should have been a great adventure, a way to express my rebellion, releasing my much wilder side, embracing the independent me. Yet there I was, on my knees in a charity-shop shirt and worn jeans, sobbing pathetically over my only real friend, who lay dying in the street while everyone else backed off, scared. And I was fucking scared too.

“Max!”

This time I turned to face Jack, the club coming back into focus around me. “Sorry, man.”

“Tell me,” he said. He couldn’t hide the urgency in his tone.

“Stewart Matthews,” I said. “That was his name. About twenty years older than me, well educated, from a good family. A really great guy. Always reasonable, always fair, even when I was the most trouble I’ve ever been.”

“This was when you were first in London?”

I nodded. “It wasn’t… what I thought it’d be.” Jack was obviously a damned good friend, because he didn’t interrupt, just waited for me to go on. “I was lost, Jack. A real fucking mess. I never thought I was vulnerable, but I saw so many that were… and then I realized I was headed the same way. Thinking I was so bloody clever, picking up with a crowd because I wanted to belong, not because I felt good with them. And out of control. Too fucking fond of grabbing what was on offer, too greedy, too easy. That’s all I ever was.”

“No,” Jack said, sounding fierce. “That’s not bloody true.”

“Stewart was a youth worker at a local center. He knew a lot of the kids on the street wouldn’t come to the center unprompted, even if they needed help, so he used to go out to meet them. Just for a chat and an occasional coffee, you know?”

“You liked him.”

“Yeah. He was great to talk to. We had a similar sense of humor. I could talk about my Uni days without being mocked about getting above myself.” I smiled through the sadness. “He reminded me of you guys in some ways.” I suspected it was more like Stewart reminded me of the days when I had a decent place in life.

The friendship stalled my destructive tendencies for a while. Stewart pulled me out of the crowd, encouraged me to help him with his work at the center. We mended the pool table, set up a bike repair stall, ran a couple of football tournaments—laughable shambles but careless fun. He talked to me about things beyond the next packet of smokes and how to avoid the landlord at the latest squat. He wanted to help me, but he never pushed too hard. Knew he shouldn’t have to, that I had to find that way myself. It was obvious he’d already found his own place in life—a job he enjoyed, satisfaction, respect. I wanted that too. I always knew it, even while I was chasing the kind of excitement you get from booze and one-night gropes in dark, dirty back streets.

“Max?” Jack was looking worried again. “Do you want to tell me… how did he die?”

All of that satisfaction and respect crap didn’t save Stewart in the end. He picked me up one night outside the local club on Dean Street, where I was doing some unofficial cleaning work, and we were going back to his flat for coffee. We had plans to discuss the center’s forthcoming Christmas celebrations. It was a humid, misty autumn night, and although the main streets around Soho were familiar, many of the cut-through alleys weren’t safe. London was a teeming mass of excitement and opportunity, but danger as well—like any major city. Too much sordid social history, too many shadows.

We took a route around the gardens at Soho Square, despite the area’s dodgy reputation at night. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been through there plenty of times with no trouble, and we wanted to catch the tube at Tottenham Court Road out to Stewart’s place in Camden. But before we even made the turn at the end of the road, one of the shadows darkened ahead of us and materialized into a man in a hoodie. Stewart and I both hesitated, and I caught a glimpse of something that glittered. I barely had time to form the word knife in my mind before the guy put his head down and barreled into Stewart.

It all happened too quickly. People say that, don’t they? But it was true that night. Stewart went down on his knees on the pavement with a guttural oomph. Acting purely on instinct, I launched myself at the guy. Yeah, me, Max Newman—tall and skinny, who never darkened the door of any gym, who had no relevant qualifications except for an occasional scrappy street fight at pub closing time over possession of a spliff. I punched him clumsily in the stomach before he kneed me in the balls and ran off, back toward the club we’d just left.

When I rolled over, wheezing, I found Stewart lying beside me, still and pale on his back on the cold ground. A few people who’d been leaving the club at the same time gathered at a cautious distance. No one spoke. A slow trickle of dark liquid eased out from under Stewart’s coat, following the path between the paving stones. No body movement, no expression on his face, no flicker under his closed eyelids. There was no sign of the knife, but it was obvious Stewart had been stabbed. I just couldn’t—wouldn’t—understand why.

“Mugging,” I said slowly, dully. “They said it was a random mugging.” The club where I’d been working was small but fashionable and often featured in the city entertainment press. But it hadn’t always been that way. Before it was taken over the previous year, it had been a seedy, dull little place, long overdue for renovation and making do with facilities that would never have passed a Health and Safety check. It was a haven for lost youths who hadn’t anywhere else to go apart from a grubby shared room—yeah, just like me. It also attracted more than its fair share of local gangs and dealers. I guess some of them hadn’t moved on yet.

Stewart’s youth center was rough and ready, based in a local church hall, but he called it a refuge, and he set it up for those very lost youths who still caused trouble on the streets. He was proud of it and had all kinds of plans for decorating it and bringing in modern facilities and games equipment, but he never had enough authority, and definitely never enough cash. To some of the guys who hung around the club, he was a joke. A couple of times he got beaten up, so I was told. But he kept on trying, chatting to anyone who welcomed him, offering company at the center without strings, and maybe some other future in life.

Until they took his life away from him. What kind of fair was that?

But what was worse, and despite what I told Jack, I’d always suspected it wasn’t a random mugging. Stewart only ever carried a couple of tenners in his wallet, and in his pockets were his keys, a Travelcard, and a disposable lighter. He liked the red ones with the Arsenal crest stamped on them. He didn’t smoke, but it was his favorite football team, and offering the lighter for their cigarettes was one of the ways he got chatting with kids.

He still had all of it on him after he was stabbed; it didn’t make sense. That night, as I knelt beside him, crying, I knew I had to pull myself together enough to yell for someone to call 999. But I knew he was already dying. So that’s when it happened—something more cowardly, more disgusting than I’d ever done before. Something I wasn’t going to forgive myself for, not for a very long time.

I ran away.

What could I say in my defense? I’d personally tried to find an excuse for months and failed to find anything comforting. At the time, I was confused and scared and looking for a chance to break away from that lifestyle, but that didn’t excuse the fact I left Stewart dying on a pavement, victim of a horrible crime, alone and abandoned by anyone else who knew him.

That was the point when I decided things had to change for me. That I had to change them. I’d stop the drinking and casual sex and the abuse of whatever other substances were on offer. I ran away from those bright but destructive lights and found myself back in the place I grew up. Back to the sea, to the couple of friends I had left, and a different life. It was a sorry flight, an escape, or maybe a new start—a refuge of my own.

I wasn’t too sure at the moment which.

THE throb of the club beat seeped into me, jolting me back to the present. I focused back on Jack’s look of concern. He was mercifully silent, perhaps realizing I didn’t want to go into any details. To be honest, I didn’t think the words would come out. And it was all behind me now.

Wasn’t it?

The music never stopped, but it changed to a cheeky fanfare, announcing that Louis was ready for his spot on the small stage beside the music desk. This time there were encouraging catcalls and clapping from the dance floor. Jack and I both stood up, looking back toward the entrance to the bar. Jack’s eyes flashed with excitement, and his attention was obviously torn between supporting me and following Louis’s set.

“Go and watch from the front,” I said.

“You—”

“Go!” I pushed him none too gently, but I smiled to let him know it was fine with me. “I’ll follow in a minute.”

With an apologetic shrug, Jack left the lobby and hurried back to the dance floor. I followed more slowly, watching Jack wriggle his way through to the front of the crowd to watch the show. I stayed at the back. Not that Louis wasn’t exciting—his dancing always was. Tonight’s set was based on a pastiche of On the Town, complete with full US naval uniform, at least when he started. His style was a mixture of the athletic grace of Gene Kelly and the blatant sexuality of the best kind of pole dancer. He lost most of his clothes by the end of it, of course, but he had the kind of attraction that made guys remember his face as well. Something about the smile: half-mischievous, half-provocative. There was plenty of applause and whistling, so it was obviously a popular session, and I was confident they’d want to hire him regularly. He hadn’t found any acting roles recently, so it’d be a bonus for him and Jack to have extra income coming in.

I glanced at my watch: it was nearly 1:00 a.m. The music shifted tempo again and the lights dimmed on the stage. The set was over and general dancing started up again. The crowd in front of me split into smaller groups, some of them moving onto the floor, some of them retreating back to the bar. I made my way to our previous table, and Jack came to join me.

Louis came over to us, his bare limbs shining with sweat as he batted off a crowd of clamoring, ever-hopeful hands at his arse. His eyes were bright and fierce, his smile elated. He’d slipped on a clean sleeveless shirt over a pair of his own brief shorts, but Jack told me the two of them wouldn’t stay at the club much longer. Louis was always keen to get home and washed up properly after a dance spot. For the time being, he slid into the seat beside Jack and their existence shrank back to each other. With a happy shake of his head, Louis refused my offer of another bottled water, and I don’t think either of them noticed when I left the table and went over to the bar.

I ordered a beer for myself. Tonight it tasted as sharp as if I’d been waiting for weeks, not days, for a drink. I savored the cold, blissful shock of it in my throat, the dribble of condensation on my hand from the bottle. Glancing back over to the table, I saw Jack and Louis had been joined by another couple of friends. They were all laughing, distracted. I finished the first beer quickly and ordered another. I meant to take my time drinking this one, but the cool liquid was both stimulating and seductive. I was still shaken from my talk with Jack, so I found a spot at the bar where I could lean on the counter, resting my back against a pillar. It meant I wasn’t jostled too often by other customers and I could look back over the seating area. The hope was that I’d calm down and recover my equilibrium, but the cruel, sorry memories of London wouldn’t leave me alone. I lifted the bottle to my mouth and back down a few more times and felt my mind retreat into itself, away from the hubbub and flashing lights. When I nodded to the barman for a third beer, I felt a residual sway in my body. Shit, I was out of practice.

This time I was handed a paper napkin with the bottle. I glanced at it, intending to discard it back on the bar. It was a promotional sheet with “Compulsion” written across one corner in bold but elegant script. Below that was printed “a Medina Group venue” and the website details of the new owners.

My stomach clenched. The words blurred slightly as my head spun with both anger and shock. It was a coincidence, wasn’t it? I peered at it again as if I’d discover I’d misread it. Wishful bloody thinking. I crumpled the napkin with more force than was necessary and dropped it back on the counter.

My memory flared again: that hideous night when Stewart was knifed, and my struggle to get any help or acknowledgement. I sucked in a breath, my skin prickling, as cold as if I were outside again in the friendless night. I recalled the way people moved away quickly rather than get too close to secondhand horror; my despairing glance back at the club, and the bouncers standing like immutable rock outside the doors, careless of what was happening; the people shapes blurring in my tears, shifty shadows in the neon light from the club’s sign…

A light that flickered through the name in some fancy designer script but still clearly announcing: “a Medina Group venue.”

I GRIPPED the edge of the counter, suddenly dizzy as I rested my half-full bottle back on the top. It was then, while I was trying to come to terms with way too many disturbing memories, that I saw him. A man who stood at the other end of the bar, nursing a clear drink, leaning casually on the shiny beer-stained surface. Just another guy, I told myself.

I didn’t listen.

He was as tall as I was, dressed in similar black jeans, though they were better fitted than my low-slung style, and snug around his compact arse. His shirt was long-sleeved, tucked into his jeans and buttoned to halfway up his chest. It was pale, perhaps a cream or a gold color—I couldn’t decide which under the dim lighting. I could see the shadows of a well-developed chest under the fabric, wide shoulders, and skin that was darker than mine. Mediterranean, maybe. It was a look I always liked.

Of course, I didn’t ogle men, not nowadays. I kept my head down and my needs tight inside. Had done since… well, since I came back to Brighton, according to my would-be matchmaking friends. I’d be lying if I laughed off what Jack said earlier: I knew I got plenty of come-on looks when I was out. And I had dated—well, now and then. I just didn’t let it go any further than casual. It was the safest strategy I could think of. That rush of lust and excitement and carelessness had led me into trouble all my adult life. I was determined to control it now.