That Summer He Died (19 page)

‘All right,’ she echoed, taking another drag of her joint. James sat down next to Alex. ‘Nice place you got here,’ he said.

Georgie giggled. ‘Yeah, right.’

Alex pulled the tartan wash bag from James’s grip, put it on the table before him and unzipped it. ‘Down to business,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what Uncle Alex has got in his bag o’ tricks.’

The sound of the zip and Alex’s accompanying words acted like a catalyst on Georgie, shaking her from her dazed state. She shifted smoothly to her feet and came and sat opposite James at the table. Hazel slid along the bench next to her and leant forward. Her hair fell across her face as she peered into the bag. Then she tossed it back and stared into Alex’s eyes.

‘What’s your buzz?’ he asked.

The girls looked at each other. Georgie’s lips stretched back over her uneven teeth as she mouthed the letter ‘E’.

‘What’re they like?’ Hazel asked.

‘Good. Reliable. Quick up. Long stay. No aggro.’

‘How much?’

Alex named a price.

‘OK,’ she said quickly. ‘We’ll take ten.’

He counted out ten pills and pushed them across the table. ‘That it?’

Hazel picked up one of the pills and rolled it between her forefinger and thumb, examining the design on it. ‘Two grams of charlie as well,’ she said. ‘And some K for the come down.’

‘You’re not new to this, are you?’ he said. He totted it all up and Hazel paid.

‘A quick toot on the house then, girls?’ Alex then said, grinning.

Hazel nodded, grinning, and Alex took a wrap from the bag and opened it on the table and quickly cut out four lines.

Hazel pulled a handbag off the shelf behind her and rummaged through it until she found her purse. She produced a ten-pound note from it and rolled it into a tight, nostril-sized pipe.

‘No,’ Alex said, resting his hand on her forearm. She pulled back, surprised. ‘What?’

He took a thick bundle of notes from his pocket, peeled off a fifty and rolled it up. He passed it to her. ‘If you’re gonna do something, might as well do it properly.’

Hazel smirked. She took the note from him and vacuumed up one of the lines. Her head reared back, eyes closed. Her nose twitched and she sniffed, over and over, like a rabbit in a lab experiment.

‘Good?’ Alex said.

‘Fucking excellent.’ She grinned.

Alex reached over and took her hand in his. Nothing was said, and they couldn’t have touched for more than a second, but James, just like them, understood that the connection initially made between their eyes had gone further. Then Alex’s hand withdrew, the fifty safe in his grasp. He did a line and passed the note on to Georgie. She went next, then passed it to James.

A second’s hesitation. . . Then, fuck it, James thought. He was here now, had already committed himself. And the JD in the car and the rush of the ride had already loosened him up and left him feeling reckless.

He quickly did the line and the buzz hit him smack in the back of the head. He opened a beer and drank. Then did another quick line along with the rest of them as Georgie put on some tunes.

Half an hour on, a couple more beers and another line down, they were all sitting round the caravan’s tiny table, smoking fags and drinking JD, and talking bollocks and laughing.

Watching the daylight creeping in through the half-closed slats of the blinds, casting his suit trousers into pinstripe, James felt like it should instead have been the middle of the night, and that he should have been stumbling out of some club, he was so caned.

Hazel was sitting next to Alex, her arm draped proprietorially across his shoulder as he fixed them another line. Laughing, she dragged him down to the end of the caravan, to where the fold-down bed was, and pulled a curtain across.

James realised Georgie was gazing into his eyes.

‘Do you like me?’ she said.

‘Er, sure. . .’

‘I mean, really like me?’

She leant into him and he felt the harsh fumes of her breath funnel up his nostrils: JD blended with cigarette smoke. He lifted his head and found her lips. His tongue brushed against hers. Her hand stroked down from his hair, over his neck and on to his shoulder. She squeezed at the bow of muscle there as her tongue probed deeper. When she pulled back, he heard himself gasp.

‘Nice,’ she said, looking down, her hand caressing his erection through his trousers.

He felt his trouser zip slide down more than he heard it. But the sound was part of it, too. The sound of the zip and the music. The taste of the smoke. The smell of her perfume cutting through it like a flower shop on a London roadside. Her face. Still. Like a painting in a gallery. He could feel the tingle of apprehension in his groin spreading across his body. She gripped him hard and went down.

He just watched, riding the high. . . like he might not be able to withstand it. . . like he might burst. He could feel his breath coming strong, the same as that day on South Beach as he’d run towards Surfers’ Turf and Murphy.

And Suzie. . .

Georgie’s hair shimmered across his lap as she clumsily jerked his trousers down, like seaweed beneath the waves. She produced a condom from somewhere and rolled it on, then hoisted up her skirt and stretched her knickers aside. He pulled her to him then on to him. They started moving together, he pushing up her t-shirt and fumbling with her bra strap, not caring if they could be heard, not caring at all.

*

An hysterical shout. What the. . .? Georgie followed his stare towards the curtain that was now shaking as if choreographed, moving in time to the sound of falling objects. Other noises: grunts; breaking glass. Another shout, the words incomprehensible this time.

‘Sounds like someone else is having fu—’ Georgie started to say.

The curtain hissed aside. Alex lurched into view, his shades perched at an absurd, uneven angle, his hair tousled. His t-shirt was missing, his jeans unbuckled. His belt fell across his thigh like an exhausted tongue.

Georgie’s voice was sharp with surprise: ‘What the fuck—’ Hazel appeared at Alex’s side, her breasts half-covered by a towel she was clumsily attempting to wrap herself in.

‘Pigs,’ she squealed. ‘Fucking pigs! Outside.’

Alex slid into motion, an athlete released from the starting blocks, his bare feet crossing the floor to the table like he was performing the triple jump. The bag was there, open. A wrap lay on the table beside it.

‘Lock the fucking door!’ he was shouting as he packed the bag and zipped it tight. ‘And get rid of the fucking pills.’

Georgie was already off James and diving for the door. She flicked the catch, dragged a chair across the floor and jammed it under the handle. A fist pounded on the outside.

‘Where?’ Hazel was screaming, staring in panic at the pills on the table.

Alex turned round, a look of disbelief on his face. ‘I don’t fucking know. In your mouth. Up your arse. Just get them out of fucking sight.’

‘Open up,’ a shout came from outside. ‘Police. Open the door, or we’ll break it down.’

Hazel cupped one hand beneath the edge of the table and swept the pills into it with her other hand, looking absurdly domesticated for a second, like she was sweeping crumbs away, clearing the table at the end of a family meal.

She spun round and ran back to the bed. The towel fell as she disappeared through the doorway, and James watched her bare arse disappear from sight as she jerked the curtain across behind her.

‘Right,’ Alex shouted at him, striding past, the wash bag now in his hand. He tugged at the blind on the window at the back of the caravan, creating a gap, and checked outside. ‘All clear. That dumb shit Murphy hasn’t even got the brains to surround the Indians before he opens fire.’ He looked sideways at James. ‘Time to get your Nikes on, mate.’

James stared, blinked once, twice, tried to take in what he was saying, but couldn’t. What was he on about? Doing a runner? He’d seen the window when Alex had checked through the blind. It was constructed of two panes of glass divided by a thin, unvarnished wooden strut. The only part of it that opened was at the top, a gap maybe wide enough for a cat to squeeze itself through. Not a human, though. Not them.

Something harder was thumping against the door now. James turned and watched the thin wood bow inwards, again and again, like it was preparing to give birth.

Alex shouted at the door: ‘All right, I’m coming! I’m fucking coming, all right.’

He turned the music up full volume. The caravan throbbed with bass. He turned back to James, held the bag out towards him, and shoved his face up close to James’s ear.

‘Now or never,’ he said. ‘Them or me. Make your fucking choice. We get caught with this and we’ll do time. So when I say run, you fucking run like you did when we found Dawes. You run and you don’t look back.’

Run?

More pounding at the door. More shouting. The boom-ba-ba-boom of the bass. When Alex stepped back, James was still gripping the bag. This was wrong. What the fuck was he doing? How could today have turned into this?

Alex was already moving swiftly over to the kitchen area where he grabbed a scum-encrusted aluminium saucepan out of the sink, weighed it in his hand, then sent it clattering to the floor and picked up a heavy cast-iron frying pan instead.

Back by James, he told him, ‘Soon as I do this, you get the fuck through there and pull your shirt over your head and you run.’

‘What about you?’

‘Me? I’m gonna let myself be caught.’

Alex flashed his teeth in a feral grin. He pulled the string which hung down along the window frame and raised the blind fully, revealing the world outside like a stage.

‘Count of three, OK?’ he instructed.

James nodded, peering through the window. It backed on to another caravan. A gap of maybe four feet lay between the two structures. And still no one was visible out there.

Too late to back out now. So instead James did the maths.

Once he landed, he’d have to break right, duck round the other caravan. Head for the back of the property. The woods lay that way. Safety. Somewhere so safe that a corpse could remain undiscovered there for days. He could make it. Murphy was overweight. He’d be slow.

He could leave those fuckers for dead.

‘One,’ Alex began, ‘two. . .’

And as Alex reached three, he brought the frying pan crashing down against the glass. The window split in two, disintegrating like a dropped ice sculpture. Claws of glass hung stubbornly to the frame and Alex attacked them with rapid movements, snapping them off from the wood.

‘Do it!’ he roared.

And James did. And as he did – as he vaulted through the window and landed in a crouch on the ground, the bag clutched to his chest with one hand, the other already dragging his shirt up over the lower part of his face in a defensive mask – adrenaline burnt like electricity through the circuit of his veins.

He was alive.

He got to his feet and ran.

James kicked himself out of the hotel bed early on Thursday morning and took advantage of the breakfast thrown in with the price of the room. He slopped the bacon, eggs and toast down into his fizzing stomach.

After the incident with Suzie the day before, he’d resorted to an evening of satellite TV and half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And now he was paying for it. He looked across the dining room. Two waiters were chatting in the corner, but otherwise it was empty. A rectangle of grey sky filled the window. Fresh, cold air. Just what the head-doctor ordered.

He picked up his car and called in at a garage at the top of the high street, stocked up on petrol and cigarettes, then headed round past St Donal’s and on to the road to Alan’s place.

If the town had changed, the countryside roundabouts had stayed the same. As the car cut through the lanes, James anticipated the switchbacks and straight runs, as familiar with the route as a Grand Prix driver on his penultimate lap. Maybe more so. His memories of it were close up, in the kind of detail you only got from walking. When he’d lived here, his main form of transport had been his feet. He hadn’t passed his driving test. Hadn’t had any choice but to walk, unless Alex or Dan had given him a lift.

He pulled into Alan’s drive and stopped the car, stubbed out the cigarette he’d been smoking and replaced it with another, switched off the engine and closed his eyes. He smoked in silence for a minute in a futile attempt to calm his nerves, then slowly opened his eyes.

You can deal with this. You can cope.

But still, the further he looked up the drive, the more he felt like retching. Too much shit had gone down here. Too many memories he’d tried too hard to forget.

And yet, now he was back, he understood that he’d never really killed them off. Everything was how he’d left it. The outbuildings still stood in need of repair. Alan’s house, with its shabby windows staring back at him like blind eyes, left him feeling hollow and depressed. Forget the fact that Jack Dawes’s place had been turned into a museum. This place was as much of a museum as Jack’s house would ever be.

Somewhere here the kid James had once been was waiting for him. And James was going to have to face him. He was going to have to face up to what he’d done.

He restarted the engine and drove into the yard at the front of the house, parking alongside Alan’s Land Rover. Jesus. He couldn’t believe his uncle had kept it this long. Its engine had been spluttering like an asthmatic back when James had spent that summer here, so Christ knows how wrecked it was now.

He’d guessed right about Alan. Things obviously hadn’t picked up for him after James had done a bunk. He stared through the windscreen at the front door of the house, his earlier feeling of nausea returning as he imagined what kind of state it would be in inside.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and happened to glance in the rear-view mirror. A white van was parked next to one of the barns – the same barn, James guessed, where those kids had found Alan’s body.

The barn door was ajar. A flash of motion inside made James’s heart skip a beat. A man dressed in work clothes stepped out through the door and froze, clocking James clocking him.