One of Us (17 page)

“No thank you,” I said. “I need a clear head.” Daniel opened his mouth. “And the same goes for Daniel.” He shut his mouth again, and folded his arms in a sulk.

“Mind if I do?” Chris asked. “I hate having a clear head.”

I laughed, shook my head. He sat down with an envelope balanced on his knees and built a joint with swift and delicate movements. It was funny, most people who I know who smoked could be so stoned that they would have trouble sitting upright, but when they were skinning up they were as precise as a brain surgeon. Chris finished, lit up, and took a deep drag like the first breath of a man who has been held underwater and then let go.

“Mmmm, mmmm,” he said, and held it out. “You sure?”

“Sure thanks.” Daniel pretended that he was looking at the picture, and hadn’t heard any of this.

Chris smoked in silence for a while, then said, “How do you know Tessa then? You from college?”

“No, I am not at college. I don’t know Tessa, to be honest. But she knows a friend of mine, who I am trying to find.”

“Oh, right.” Long drag. Long breath out, sweet smoke streaming across the room. “Who’s that then? I know a lot of Tessa’s friends.”

I described Sean. Chris frowned in thought, then shook his head. “Not sure that rings any bells. How’s she know him?”

I told him that Sean had gone to a class with Tessa. “Ah,” Chris said. “Ah. There. Yeah.” He thought for a moment or two. “Look, tread carefully when she comes in, yeah? Don’t worry, she’s cool, but this thing she was going to, with your mate? She’s a bit upset about it. Didn’t really do for her what she thought it would, and she had such high hopes.”

“What class was it?”

Chris looked at me for a moment, while he took another hit, then at Daniel. “Don’t know your friend that well, do you?”

“He kept a lot of things private. And he must have stopped the class not long after I met him.”

“Fair enough. Guess it didn’t work for him either. I don’t know all the ins and outs, but it was some group therapy. Cognitive whatsit.” Daniel, who was still looking at the picture, made a noise, and turned it into a cough. I glared at his back. “Sitting round in a room, talking about how fucked-up everyone is. Didn’t think it would work for Tessa, but she was all full of it, what it was going to do for her. Think I do remember your mate, actually. Bit lanky, fairish hair?” He looked out of the window. “Here, she can tell you herself. But go easy, eh? She’s fragile.”

A key rattled in the front door.

“In here, sweetheart,” Chris called, his voice soft as if he was calling to a shy cat that might run away. “You got visitors.”

A girl peered round the door. She did not look like she was very happy at the idea of having visitors.

“Oh, hello,” Tessa said, and a smile very quickly came and even more quickly went, as if she could not keep it there. She did not move from behind the door. All I could see of her was a small white face, dark make-up around her eyes making it look whiter, and dyed black hair which hung across half of it like a curtain.

“Hello Tessa,” I said. “My name is Anna, and this is my friend Daniel.” I found myself talking to her as if I had been talking to a child. “I am sorry to bother you, but I was hoping you could help me.”

“Me?” she said. “Help you?” She laughed a very quick and nervous laugh. But she still stood behind the door.

“She’s a mate of Sean’s,” Chris said. “Sean from the group. You know?”

“Oh Sean,” she said. “Yes.” She thought for a moment and then arrived at some kind of decision, because she came into the room, and perched on the edge of a chair. She reminded me of a bird that at any moment might take flight. I stayed very still, and spoke softly.

“I am sorry to bother you,” I said.

“No, no, it’s OK,” she said, and laughed the very quick and nervous laugh again. “No bother at all, no, no bother.” Tessa twisted a silver ring around and around on her finger. “You’re friends of Sean’s.”

“I am. And I’m looking for some help because I am worried about Sean.”

“Worried? Oh, what’s wrong?” She fluttered with anxiety.

“Sean has had...things happen which have upset him a little. And he has left his flat, left his job, and I am worried about him. I need to find him, even if just to know that he is all right. He is my friend, and he has been good to me when I have needed help. So now I look out for him, make sure he is OK.”

“I haven’t seen him for weeks,” Tessa said, twisting and twisting at the ring. “I’m so sorry, but I haven’t. I stopped going to the group, and I’m not very good at keeping in touch.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “But right now, I don’t know where to look. I need anything that might help me find where he could have gone to. A friend he might have stayed with. Someone who might have seen him. Anything.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tessa said. “I’m sorry, I’m useless.”

“No,” I said very quickly, “not at all. I was not expecting...but it was worth a try. I am sorry to take up your time.” I stood up, and she quivered in her seat as if I was about to strike her.

Chris had tuned out of the conversation and had been staring out of the window. As I stood though, he frowned and snapped his fingers a couple of times.

“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on, hang on. Or am I thinking of somebody else? No, I’m sure it was him. You remember, Tess, we was out, and I saw someone we both knew, and you said you knew the bloke who was talking to him, he’d been in your group? Who was it we saw?”

Tessa thought for a moment and then said, “Yes, I remember. But we didn’t go and talk because I wasn’t handling being out and I wanted us to get home as soon as we could. I remember. We were passing the indoor market. I hate that place, it’s so claustrophobic.”

I waited. Daniel paced up and down, not very good at hiding his impatience. Chris pulled a face. “Trouble is, it was someone I knew he was talking to, but I can’t remember who.” He bit his lip and drummed his hand on the side of the chair.

“Dave?” Tessa said. “Oz? Sam?” Chris shook his head. “Not someone I know really well. But someone I know.”

I stood still, not wanting to break any train of thought, and willed Daniel to do the same. Then Chris slapped his hand on his leg, and punched the air. Tessa trembled like a leaf in the window, and he gave her a look of apology, and then a big grin. “Jonesy,” he said.

Tessa’s mouth opened in a big O. Then she smiled too. “You’re right,” she said. “It was Jonesy. And they were talking like they knew each other.”

Daniel gave me a questioning look. I shrugged. Sean had never mentioned anyone called Jonesy but then again he did not talk about lots of things in his life.

“Jonesy’s all right,” Chris said. “He’s part of the squat scene, you know. Used to run a soundsystem, what was it called. Can’t remember. Started with an S. It’ll come back to me. Did loads of parties, back in the day. He was all right, was Jonesy. Tall lad, used to have his hair purple, but dunno, might have changed.”

Chris trailed off.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It may not help,” Tessa said. “I don’t know how well he knows Sean.”

“It is something,” I said. “Which is more than we had when we came here. So thank you.”

Chris got to his feet. “Last I saw him, he was living in this squat, ah, which was it? He moved around a bit. Let me think, it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Daniel looked at me, and I pretended not to see the expression on his face.

“Ranson Square. That’s it, certain. Ranson Square. Down near the river, just after the old ropeworks on Argyle Street. It may have all been pulled down now, they were going to build on the land, and I haven’t been that way for ages. But it’s worth a try.”

I took a napkin from work out of my pocket, and wrote down the number of the phone at work. Peter wouldn’t like it, but at least I would get the message, if they phoned when I was not there. I did not trust that the same was so in the hostel.

“Thank you,” I said. “If you see Sean, or hear anything...”

“Sure,” Chris said, holding out his hand for the note. “We’ll give you a shout, no worries. Good luck.” Daniel muttered something and headed for the door. I smiled goodbye at Tessa, and she gave me a wavering smile back. She was still perched on the edge of the chair, and on the edge of this world. One day, I thought, she would just take flight and never come back down again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“So, we going to this squat?” Daniel said. We had walked back into town together. I looked at my watch. I did not have that long before I had to start work.

“Might be best first thing in the morning,” Daniel said. “If you’re pushed. At least you know you’ll catch them in. Not going to be your up and about early types, are they?”

“You are probably right,” I said. “As long as I get there before Corgan, the bastard. Why can he not drop down dead now, a heart attack, one moment alive, the next moment on the floor, dead?”

“’Cause life’s never that fair, is it? Do you want me to do him for you?” Daniel said. “I could, you know.”

“Of course you could,” I said.

“Don’t take the piss, I’m serious.”

“You against Corgan?” I saw the expression on his face. “Sorry. I do not want to sound like I am taking the piss. He’s a brutal man Daniel, you know that. And you are not.”

He glared at me. “I could be,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“OK,” I said, because if I said anything else, it would sound as if I was mocking him.

“Besides,” he said after a while. “There are other ways.”

“I do not follow,” I said.

“He might be able to take me in a straight fight,” Daniel said, as if he was admitting a distant and unlikely possibility. I thought that Corgan would beat Daniel without breaking into a sweat or putting down his cup of coffee. “But there are other ways.”

“I am sure there are.”

“You don’t take me seriously, do you?”

“I do, Daniel.”

“I got the contacts, you know. Like, I could walk away from here, make a phone call, get a gun, just like that.”

“Don’t even talk like that Daniel.”

“Do you not believe me then? I fucking could, half an hour. You want, I’ll go get it now, prove it to you.”

“I believe you, I believe you. I don’t need proof. And you don’t need a gun.”

He stared at me for a little while, and I could tell that he was not happy.

“Sometimes I don’t think that you take me seriously,” he said. “Think I’m just a little kid.”

“Not fair,” I said. “I do take you seriously. I just do not need you to keep trying to prove it to me.”

He stared some more, then a smile stole onto his face, and the smile turned into a big grin. He laughed, like a naughty schoolboy.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“No, tell me.”

“Don’t dare,” he said.

“Tell me!”

He laughed again. “See, prove my point for me. I was just imagining Anna with a gun. Christ, it’d be a massacre. Corgan...bang! Someone who borrowed your toothpaste without asking...bang! Someone who looked at you the wrong way...bang! Fucking massacre.”

Now it was my turn to pull a face. “You make me sound like I’m always cross,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s unfair,” he said. “Not always. I’m sure there’s the odd moment. Maybe when you’re asleep,” and then I proved his point for him, by elbowing him hard in the soft part of his upper arm and walking off towards town.

“Look, I dunno if I can be around tomorrow,” Daniel said when he had caught me up. “Sorry. And that hurt. Anyway, things to do tomorrow that I can’t shift. For the man, you know. He doesn’t take no for an answer. If I could be here, I would.”

“It is not a problem,” I said. “I will go and find this Jonesy, talk to him. I appreciate you being here today.”

“No problem. Bit weird, them two.”

“You didn’t have to come with me,” I said.

“I know,” he grinned. “But I did, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. “You did. And thank you.”

We stopped, standing very near to each other. He was going one way, I was going another. Daniel looked at me, a long look without saying anything. He stepped forward, so that we were toe to toe. I looked up.

“Bye,” I said, and I stepped back very quickly, before it was too late and anything could happen. “Peter is a bastard if I am late. Thank you, again. Really.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said, and he smiled a smile that said he knew that I knew, but he had to try, didn’t he. “Let me know what happens. And you take it easy and watch yourself, yeah?”

“I will,” I said, and I walked away.

I had told a little lie, as there was an hour before I had to be in work. It wasn’t worth going back to the hostel, so I wandered down streets of shops, looking at the mannequins in the windows, watching the people shopping, the children trailing behind leaving sweet wrappers wherever they went, the assistants wrapping and bagging and looking at the clock after every third customer. Once, in another life, I shopped. Now, I looked for bargains, and made things last and got used to wanting, and used to not having. Spoilt girl, I thought. Stop your whining, and think about people like Elena’s son. And I did, and I knew that life could be worse. But it still did not stop me from missing the time when everything was easy. And then I thought about where that time came from, and what paid for it, and I stopped trying to think at all. Just as I always had.

I came close, sometimes, but then I would back away, as if I had touched something hot.

“What time do you call this?” I had not seen my father that night, sitting in his armchair in the dark.

“I’m not a child, you don’t need to wait up for me.”

“Not a child. Listen to her. Anna, you have school tomorrow, you have exams soon that will take you to medical school if you pass them, you are not to stay out this late.”

“Sometimes I think you want me to be a doctor more than I do.”

He got up out of his chair.

“You can
be
something, Anna. Do something with your life. Go places. Don’t be like these girls who do not study because all they can think about is some mechanic who is promising them the moon but will leave them with nothing more than oil stains on their dress and a baby in their belly, these girls who end up with nothing, worth nothing. I want more for my daughter.”

“So tell me: what do they do, those girls, Daddy? What do girls who are desperate do? Tell me.”

He looked at me for a long time, without saying anything. Then he turned and left. “Go to bed, Anna,” he said as he walked up the stairs. “Think about your studies. Not about things that you do not understand.”

Or things that I did not want to understand.

On the way to work, I splashed out on a packet of beef crisps and a Mars Bar, a king-size one because a girl has to pamper herself sometimes and make herself feel special.

It was in the slow time, early evening. The customers who stopped in on the way home for a burger, looking guilty because they would be eating again in an hour or two, had gone. The crowd that wanted to grab some food in town before they started on the drink had not yet arrived. In one corner of the restaurant, a couple of teenagers sat over an hour-old milkshake and when they thought that nobody was looking they kissed as if they wanted to get through to the other side of each other. A middle-aged man sat in another corner, making his way through Peter’s Mega Meal, reading a newspaper and looking too often at the kids when he thought that nobody was looking. I could not decide whether he was reliving memories of his own childhood, the sweetness of that first kiss, or if he was just a pervert. Peter was in the kitchen, trying to fix a deep fat fryer that no longer fried. I cleaned up, restocked the burger boxes and the pizza boxes for the evening rush. Standing doing nothing was not something that I liked, and also, it gave me time to think.

The door banged open and shut, and I dropped my cleaning cloth into a dish of bleach, and wiped my hands, ready to serve. Then I took a step back.

“My angel.” It was Kav. The man whose bullet wound I had treated as my first job for Corgan was leaning on the counter. “My Florence Nightingale. Still think you’d look canny in a nurse’s uniform, mind. One of them short ones, with the stockings.”

“I’m not a nurse,” I said.

“More’s the pity.”
“If you are ordering food, order. If not, go away.”

“I don’t want a burger, sweetheart.”

“Then you have come to the wrong place.”

“Oh no,” Kav said. “I don’t think I have.” He looked me up and down, like I was dancing for him in a club. The uniform I wore for work was very far from what you could describe as being attractive. The red shirt made me look as if I was a children’s entertainer, and the scratchy grey trousers hung baggy where they should cling and clung where they should be baggy. I realised though, after a few days in the burger bar, that to many men this made no difference.

“All we do here, is sell burgers,” I said. “Chips and pizzas. Chicken nuggets and sausages in batter. If you don’t want that, go.”

“Not quite all you do though, is it pet? Not from what I’m hearing. You’ve been doing more than that. I understand you and me have something in common.”

“You like pretty dresses too? Yes, you look the type.”

“Feisty.” Kav grinned. “I like a lass who puts up a bit of a fight.” With his little goatee beard and his dirty grin, he looked as I imagined the devil would look.

“Lucky for you then,” I said. “Because I imagine the only way you get a woman is to force them.”

His grin slipped, just for a moment. Then came back. He leaned even closer. I leaned away.

“Aye, lass, well maybe we’ll find out one day, eh? You and me. You won’t be so gobby with your fucking mouth full.”

He stared at me. I stared back. The counter did not seem like much of a barrier between us. He laughed. “We’ll see. Sooner than you think, if you don’t watch yourself. Anyway, what we’ve got in common is one daft lad, one very daft lad. I think you know who I mean, pet. Because little birdies tell me that you’re looking for him too.”

“Little birdies say lots of things,” I said. “And when you go past they shit on your back.”

“No-one shits on my back, sweetheart. Not if they have any sense. And never twice. I trust what I’m hearing, and what I keep hearing everywhere I go is your name.”

“I am a popular girl.”

“Aye, I bet you are. But listen to this: I want that lad, you understand me? And nothing’s going to get in the way of that, especially not some mouthy tart who doesn’t even belong in this fucking country anyway. ’Specially not when we’re both meant to be working for the same boss. If I had my way I’d be making you talk now, but Corgan says it’s too much effort to find another one like you. So you do yourself a favour, before you really fuck me off, be sensible. I want to find your mate. If you know where he is, and don’t tell me, Corgan’ll change his fucking mind, and I’ll get the green light to make you. I’m
going
to find him. Just don’t get in my way. And if you know where he is, you let me know.” He slid a piece of paper across the counter, with two phone numbers on it. “Top one’s me, bottom one’s Corgan. You phone one of us, mind. Or if you fancy an evening out, let me know that too. I could give you a night you would remember, pet.”

“Back when I was a medical student, I had classes in the morgue,” I said. “Pathology. There was a man, I remember. About your age. About your height. He had spent three days in the river before he was found.”

“Oh, aye? That a threat of some kind?”

“No,” I said, and smiled sweetly. “It is just that I would fuck him before you, any time.”

He lunged across the counter, grabbed my top, and pulled me towards him. The middle-aged man folded away his newspaper in a hurry and scurried out of the door. The teenagers were joined at the lip again and would have been oblivious had the restaurant fallen down around them.

“One day Corgan will be done with you.” His face was close to mine, his breath strong with tobacco. “And then, pet, he’ll give you to me. And when he does, the first thing I’m going to do is make you—”

“Put her down. Now.”

The man looked across at Peter, who was advancing round from the kitchens.

“You stay out of this. Not your business.”

Peter reached the counter next to me. He was red in the face, and breathing hard. “I said let her go.”

“You don’t want to be getting involved, pal, believe me—”

Peter growled like an animal and lifted the cleaver that he used to separate burgers when they were frozen together. “Let her go.”

Kav stared at him for a moment, and then dropped me. He rolled his shoulders back, straightened the cuffs on his jacket. He jabbed a finger at me. “You, remember what I said.” And then he jabbed the finger at Peter. “And you, I’ll remember your face. I’ll be seeing you.”

Peter said nothing, just stood still, impassive, holding the cleaver. The man spat on the floor, and then walked out.

The two teenagers, who had finally noticed that something was happening outside of their skins, watched him go out, wide-eyed. Then they looked at Peter. They looked like they were too scared to move.

“You all right Anna?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, thank you. Thank you, Peter. I’m sorry. I hope this doesn’t come back on you, on the restaurant. If you want, I will leave.”

“I didn’t just front some thug down only to have you leave. I’m short-staffed enough as it is.”

“Thank you,” I said again. “I am really sorry. You scared the shit out of him, you know.”

Peter grinned. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” He looked very pleased with himself, and seemed to be standing a couple of inches taller than he usually did. “I did. He wasn’t having any of it, was he? Look, you all right to carry on?”

“I’m fine, he won’t be back.”

Peter went back to being serious again for a minute. “What you’re mixed up in...”

“I am not going to share. No way, Peter. I have involved you enough.”

He didn’t argue. “If you need...anything. Let me know.”

“I will.”

“But more than anything else, you get yourself out of this, whatever it is. It’s not drugs is it?”

“No drugs. I don’t need them, not with the coffee we serve in here.”

“Less of that,” he said, “It’s gourmet coffee that. Says so on the machine.” He looked at me for a moment, then walked back into the kitchen. “I need you, Anna,” he said. “So you stay safe.”

“I will try,” I called after him. I screwed up the paper that Kav had given me and threw it in the bin with the chips scraped from the floor. I made a chocolate milkshake, extra large, and I took it with two straws over to the two teenagers. “Here,” I said. “Enjoy this. And always use a condom. Listen to me, I am a doctor. Well, medical student.”