Authors: Kevin Brooks
I wondered if I was going mad.
I knew it was possible.
This whole thing, everything that was happening to me… it could all be some kind of delusion. I could be imagining it all. Maybe I
had
killed Casing in a frenzied attack and this was the only way I could cope with it – by making it unreal, by making it something else… by making
myself
something else. I didn’t know if that was possible or not, but I’d seen enough therapists over the years to know that I couldn’t dismiss it.
It wasn’t impossible.
But then, I thought, if I
am
going mad, if all of this
is
some kind of delusion, I shouldn’t be aware of it, should I? Because being aware of it means it’s not a delusion. And I
am
aware of it. So it can’t be a delusion. So I’m probably not going mad after all.
But I wished that I was.
The bus stopped at a junction. A siren started wailing on the street behind us, and everyone on the bus looked out of the window as a police car screamed past in a blaze of flashing lights, and then – before I had time to think about it – it was gone again.
I breathed out quietly.
I put my hand inside my coat and gently felt my stomach.
Whatever it was that I’d seen last night… whatever it was, it was there. No illusion. No delusion. I saw it. It was there.
You have to accept it.
Accept it and what?
Nothing. Just accept it.
I glanced across at the man who’d been in front of me in the queue. The man going to Stratford. I studied him – lank hair, cheap jacket, sickly pale skin. What does
he
know about himself? I asked myself. Does he care how he works? Does he care what’s inside his body? Does he
know
what’s inside his body? No. He has no idea what makes him move, what makes him breathe, what makes him
him.
He doesn’t keep his body alive – it uses him to keep
itself
alive.
About twenty minutes later the bus pulled into a bus depot and the lank-haired man started getting up out of his seat, so I guessed we were at Stratford. I got up and followed the man off the bus. He paused for a moment to light a cigarette, then he put his hands in his pockets and sloped away across the concourse.
He might not know what’s inside his body, I thought to myself, but at least he knows where he’s going.
I didn’t have a clue where I was going. I was just standing there, looking around, seeing what there was to look at. I saw a futuristic-looking bus depot with a weird white roof. White Teflon pillars with upturned Teflon umbrellas on top. I saw a train station across the road. A broad paved area, buildings, lots of shiny black glass. And opposite me, on the other side of the road, I saw the
entrance to a covered shopping centre. Colours, plastic, people.
I thought about it for a moment…
Bus depot.
Train station.
Shopping centre.
… then I headed off towards the station.
I bought a Travelcard from a ticket machine, took the Central Line to Liverpool Street, then changed to the Circle Line and got off at King’s Cross. A maze of tunnels and escalators led me up to the mainline station, and I headed across the concourse towards the ticket office. I paused at the doors, took off my hat, then went inside.
The ticket office clerk was a fat black lady.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Single to Edinburgh, please.’
Her fingers skipped over the buttons of her keyboard.
‘When are you travelling?’ she asked me.
‘What?’
‘When are you travelling?’
‘Now, the next train.’
‘£93.10,’ she said.
I give her Ryan’s Visa card. She swiped it through her machine and I hoped I’d guessed right. I knew they’d have a trace on Ryan’s card, but I was guessing they wouldn’t stop it. Because if they stopped it, I’d run, and they didn’t want me to run. They just wanted to know where I was. So they’d let Ryan’s card go through and then they’d get down here as quickly as they could. They’d surround the station. They’d search the trains. They’d question the ticket
clerk – what did he look like, where was he going? – and she’d tell them what I looked like and where I was going. But she’d be wrong.
And I was right.
The credit card went through without any trouble. The ticket clerk passed me a receipt. I signed it –
David Ryan
– and passed it back. She didn’t even look at the signature on the back of the card, just slipped me a train ticket and a copy of the receipt, then yawned and looked over her shoulder at a clock on the wall.
I left the ticket office, went back down to the Underground station and jumped on a Piccadilly Line train. As the doors closed and the train headed off into the darkness, I allowed myself a little smile. By the time Ryan and his people had got to King’s Cross, surrounded the station, questioned the ticket clerk, searched the Edinburgh train and finally realized that I wasn’t there, I’d not only be
somewhere
else but – with a little bit of luck – I’d be someone else too.
I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes.
For the first time in what felt like ages, I knew where I was going.
Until all this happened, I’d never really thought about my mother that much. I’d never tried to find her, or find out who she was. I’d never felt the need to find out why she didn’t want me. What was the point? She didn’t want me. She’d left me in a pram outside a maternity hospital. As far as I was concerned, that’s all there was to it. I didn’t have a mother. She just didn’t exist.
But now…
Well, now it was different.
Now I
had
to think about it, because now there was a possibility that none of it was true. It was all a lie. I
wasn’t
abandoned at birth. I
wasn’t
an orphan. My mother’s non-existence had nothing to do with her not wanting me: she simply didn’t exist. I had no mother. Never did. I was just a thing – a birthless and ageless thing – and things don’t have mothers.
I was still trying to think about it as I got off the Underground train at Finsbury Park, but I couldn’t quite get hold of anything. My thoughts were floating, drifting… strangely unreal. It was as if I was stuck in a continuous awakening from a dream. Everything around me
seemed detached and remote – the rainy streets, the dark skies, the taxi places and convenience stores. I was there, within it – moving, being, taking up space – but I had no natural connection to it. I had no belonging.
I started walking down Seven Sisters Road. It was raining hard now, soaking me to the skin. When I dipped my head, drops of rain dripped from my hat and I caught the drops on my tongue. They tasted cold and bitter.
I walked on, lost inside myself.
Looking for my self.
I knew I
had
a self, a past, a history, but it all seemed so vague – half-remembered images, broken pictures of places, people, feelings, days – and I didn’t know if it really belonged to me or not. I didn’t know what I could trust any more.
What could I trust?
All the Homes I’d ever lived in, all the foster parents, the carers, the social workers, the therapists… could I trust them? Maybe they’d never been what they seemed. Maybe they’d never been there to look after me – they’d been there to watch me instead. To observe me. To study me. Maybe they’d all been in on it from the start… whatever
it
was.
Maybe even Bridget was in on it.
It was painful to think about, but I knew it wasn’t impossible – that she’d been part of it, that she’d known all along, that there’d been nothing wrong with her sister on Monday…
I didn’t
want
to believe it.
But I just didn’t know.
I didn’t know what to believe any more.
∗
I’d nearly reached Manor House now. The park was on my left and the junction with Green Lanes was just up ahead. There was a fried chicken place across the road. I wasn’t hungry, but I hadn’t eaten for a while and I knew I ought to get something inside me. Food. Fuel. Energy.
I needed food.
My body needed food…
It didn’t make sense.
I breathed, I ate, I drank, I consumed. I excreted. I slept. I dreamed. I hurt. I was affected by drugs – alcohol, anaesthetic. I had bad feelings. Good feelings. I had desires. I got tired. I thought of things – good things, bad things, useless things. I didn’t want to die. I laughed. I smiled. I hummed, I whistled, I yawned. I followed the functional rules of an organism. But I seemed to be made from non-organic materials…
It just didn’t make sense.
It didn’t matter.
I crossed the road, bought two pieces of chicken, fries and a coffee, then took it all back over the road, went into the park and sat down on a bench.
The chicken was undercooked. Hot on the outside and cold in the middle. The fries were hard and black round the edge, and the coffee was weak. But it was all right. It was food and drink. It was fuel. It was energy.
I shovelled it down and thought about where I was going.
It’s hard to make friends when you’re moving around all the time, and I’d spent all my life moving around. Different
Homes, different schools… a couple of years here, a couple of years there. I’d never spent more than a couple of years anywhere. So I’d learned a long time ago that it just wasn’t worth getting attached to anyone, because as soon as you did, they were gone. And I’d always liked being on my own anyway. I’d never enjoyed all the stuff that goes with friendship – all the rules, all the games, all the ups and downs. And, besides, even if I had been bothered about making friends, it wouldn’t have made much difference, because most people didn’t seem to like me much anyway. I don’t think they
dis
liked me. I mean, they didn’t hate me or anything. I think they just found me unsettling…
I read something once that one of my social workers had written about me. We were in her office, discussing my monthly report, and when she got up and left the room for a minute I leaned over her desk and sneaked a look at my file.
Robert has always been a rather solitary boy,
she’d written.
Despite the disrupted nature of his schooling, he has a keen – if slightly strange – intelligence, and often displays a maturity beyond his years. Socially, however, he shows little interest in his surroundings, and at times can be worryingly undemonstrative and somewhat cold. Previous carers have found this discomforting, and unless Robert’s problems are addressed, his prospects of finding a long-term placement remain poor.
So maybe that’s why people found me unsettling, because I was
undemonstrative and somewhat cold.
Or maybe they’d always sensed something unhuman about me. Or, then again, maybe they’d just never liked me that much.
I guess I’ll never know.
Not that it matters.
All that matters – and all I’m trying to say – is that just because I didn’t have any friends, that didn’t mean I didn’t
know
lots of people. Because I did. I’d been to dozens of schools and dozens of Homes, and over the years I’d met thousands of people.
And one of them was a kid called John Blake.
And it was Blake who’d taken me to see Eddi Ray.
And that’s who I was going to see now.
I’d met John Blake a few years earlier when I was living at a Home on the outskirts of Chelmsford. He was a couple of years older than me, a real hard-head. One of those kids who live for the bad stuff – robbing, fighting, taking drugs. He didn’t care what he did, and he didn’t care what it did to him. He just did it. None of the other kids liked him much, and I didn’t like him either, but for some weird reason he kind of latched on to me for a while. I don’t know why, but he was always trying to get me to go places and do stuff with him.
Come on, Rob, let’s go for a drink. Let’s have some fun. Come on, I know where we can get some gear…
That kind of thing.
I usually turned him down –
No thanks, John. I’m all right. Yeah, I’ll see you later
– but when he asked me one day if I wanted to go to London with him, I surprised us both by saying yes.
I still don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was just bored. Bored with saying no all the time, bored with never going anywhere. Bored with being boring. Or maybe it was something more than that. Maybe it was something to do with now…
Is that possible?
Could I have known things back then without being aware of it? Could I have known that John Blake was going to take me somewhere that might prove useful in the future?
I don’t know.
Probably not.
But he
did
take me somewhere useful.
Eventually.
He spent most of that day in London getting wrecked – drinking with his hard-head friends, popping pills in tower blocks and squats, shoplifting in Oxford Street. He tried to get me to join in –
come on, Rob, have a drink, have a smoke, enjoy yourself
– but I was fine as I was. Just hanging around, watching. Just being there. It wasn’t much fun and I wished I hadn’t agreed to come, but it didn’t really bother me. As far as I was concerned, it was just another time and another place.
It was some time in the late afternoon when John suddenly decided to visit Eddi Ray.
‘Hey, Rob,’ he said, ‘tell you what… let’s go see Eddi. You’ll like her, man. She’s cool.’ He was talking like that by then – like he was full of shit. Which he was. ‘She’s my brother’s ex,’ he explained. ‘Left him when he got banged up. Took over most of his business too.’ He laughed. ‘He’s going to kill her when he gets out.’
And that was about all there was to it.
He took me to see Eddi Ray.
We went to her flat in Finsbury Park.
We hung around for an hour or so, and then she threw us out.
It wasn’t much of a night to remember.
But I remembered it. Partly because Eddi Ray
was
really cool, and partly because she was just the kind of person I needed right now. But mostly I remembered it because no one knew that I knew her, apart from John Blake, and he’d died from an overdose about six months ago. So
no one
knew that I knew Eddi Ray. No one at all. And if no one knew, then Ryan wouldn’t know.