‘Duck.’ He spoke clearly, pointing to a wooden duck.
Automatically, Justin got up and fetched the duck.
‘See?’ said Charlie.
As if a one-year-old could sort out his problems, Justin thought. He patted his brother’s head and went out alone, trailing self-pity like a snail.
Charlie looked at the duck and sighed.
Justin closed the front door behind him and set off, making a point to stamp in every puddle as he ran along. He needed the sensation of shattering house after house until the only structures left in his neighbourhood were abstract shiny fragments of brick and pebble-dash. The filthy rainwater soaked into his trainers and socks but he didn’t notice. You run today, he said to his legs, to his thighs, his buttocks, his ankles, his elbows, his torso, his shoulders and knees. You get on with the mechanics, I’ve got things to think about.
His body, eager to be of service, obeyed.
Somewhere, quietly in the background, he heard the steady beat beat beat of his feet on the pavement, reliable and automatic. In the foreground his thoughts floated free, riding his body’s wake as it flew through the grim outskirts of Luton.
For a while he let his eyes half-close and felt the damp breeze cooling his feverish brain. He tried to empty it, pull the plug on the humiliations of the day and let them flood out behind him on to the road like bathwater. And then slowly, gradually, he began to inhale thoughts to fill it again. He breathed in deeply through his nose, and into the empty cave of his skull flowed the swirling vapours of people, ideas, desires.
He inhaled Agnes, fluorescent lime and sparkly. He was her TV makeover project, the one where a SWAT team revamps your kitchen, bathroom, garden, wardrobe, sex life. In hope and desperation, he had given her his brief for a new body and soul, and she was doing her best to comply. It wasn’t her fault the experiment was a failure.
Agnes wasn’t disdainful, he was convinced her affection for him was at least partially genuine. It was the why that puzzled him. Perhaps to her, he was the ultimate charity case, malleable, desperate and faintly entertaining. She obviously wasn’t interested in him, interested in that way. Was she? Could sexual feeling be totally one-sided? While he ached with lust, was she thinking about shoelaces?
There was so much he didn’t know.
He thought about Peter, cheerful as chocolate, forever coasting on some gentle equatorial current. What was it about Peter? What clause of exemption allowed him to be gawky, uncool and invulnerable?
Then there was fate, that soft presence, the seducer at the edge of the abyss, luring him into the path of danger, lulling him into a comfortable sense of security, enticing him into a shell game he was guaranteed to lose.
He felt worn out from turning left when he meant to go right, saying no instead of yes.
And yet. If he stepped on a crack…
His life stretched before him like some diabolical obstacle course. The mines had been hidden, dug deep into the ground. He merely had to predict their positions and avoid blowing himself to kingdom come.
He left the pavement and began to run along the verge. The uneven surface caused him to stumble.
Think about something else, he told himself. Something pleasant. He thought about Shireen’s peculiar come-on. He inhaled the thought of his encounter with her, gold, fragrant and heavy with the incense of ambiguity. He concentrated hard, letting her fill him, pushing fate out of his brain, replacing its gloomy miasma with her imperious sexual buzz. In his head he explored her body, ran his hand down the sensuous curve of her contempt, closed his eyes and buried his face in the sullen, silky weight of her indifference. He let his heart pump her bright aura through his veins like morphine, like adrenalin, warming and energizing the machine, causing it to glide, accelerate.
There was no affection in his recollection of their encounter, no fantasy that they would walk hand in hand sharing little jokes and pet names. Instead, he fast-forwarded to the party where they might have danced sweatily to some trendy DJ. He’d have taken her hand and led her through the teeming crowd to a quieter place, a bedroom where they would fumble for each other, igniting something panting and desperate and then follow it through, not to the point of humiliation and terror, but far enough to make him feel less like a huge pulsing pink neon sign reading VIRGIN.
Sprinting, panting, exhausted, he felt the final shreds of gilded cloud dissipate, leaving him alone, a lost boy in a bleak landscape, his brain weighed down with the grim reality of his life. It wasn’t Shireen he was interested in anyway. Almost any girl, it seemed, could cause his body to respond, inspire a spasm of grateful sexual desire. He was at the mercy of the entire female sex. His weakness made him vulnerable to the worst sort of danger. He would enter the swamp like a blind man, slip slowly down into the sucking whirlpool of the unknown, waving. Drowning.
He stopped running, finally, hands on knees, breathing hard, checked his watch, and waited while his brain drifted back into his body. He felt the pain dripping down his left hamstring, chest heaving, face hot, feet sodden and blistering.
He had left Luton behind, reached the outskirts of Toddington. Twelve miles. It was pouring now. All around him the world was slowly turning to mud. Tired and soaked, he began limping home.
19
Shireen went to Angel’s party with Alex. Alex had a car, plenty of confidence and no brain to speak of. He was definitely not gay.
Alex and Shireen could have been matched by class vote, so compatible were their vital statistics: identical good looks, identical social status, identical attitudes of genetic superiority in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. At Angel’s party they danced together, drank plastic cupfuls of cheap red wine and snogged sweatily in the corner. Alex pushed Shireen down on a pile of coats, put one hand under her bra, and with the other guided her perfectly manicured fingers down to the tangled bulge at his crotch. He moaned, and Shireen turned her face away, faintly disgusted.
Eventually they left together and spent a steamy half-hour in Alex’s car, during which Shireen provided the requisite sexual satisfaction. Her new boyfriend did not return the favour, a fact she might have resented had she given it much thought.
In any case, the pairing stuck. From that evening, Shireen and Alex attended class together, ate lunch together, did homework together. They only avoided full sexual intercourse together due to Shireen’s squeamishness about bodily fluids and Alex’s squeamishness about condoms.
Everyone at school knew about their attachment and felt cheered, secure in the knowledge that all things find their proper level; that the world is run by strict, transparent rules, and that elegant constructions rule romance as well as nature.
The information reached Justin, who feigned indifference.
Inwardly, however, he felt depressed by his growing collection of missed opportunities. The fact that he wasn’t particularly interested in Shireen didn’t stop him from feeling that he had failed to grasp the potential of their fledgling relationship. Not only was he a failure as a possible boyfriend, but his fate had expanded to include indifference and insignificant failures piling up inch by miserable inch to create an Everest of wasted effort, a teetering peak from which he would eventually fall to his death.
Agnes seemed to have forgotten he existed, or at least that was how he interpreted her silence. Ten times a day he sat immobilized in front of the telephone, rehearsing casual conversations in his head. For the first few days, Boy had watched intently, curious and encouraging. But even he gave up when it became obvious that Justin could not bring himself to act.
He took to his bed, told his mother it was flu, and stayed there for days, tossing in a fever of self-doubt. His mother knocked tentatively on the bedroom door each morning, felt his head and pronounced him ‘not quite so warm as last time’.
Not warm at all, he thought. Frigid, in fact.
The ring ring ring of the telephone disturbed his dreams. Eventually he answered it.
‘What’s happen
ed to you?’ Agnes was irate. ‘You’ve dropped off the face of the earth. What did you think of the pictures?’
‘What pictures?’
What pictures? Agnes shook her head. He was some cool character, that Justin Case. ‘Never mind. When can we meet?’
‘I’m not well.’
She snorted. ‘You don’t sound ill. You sound depressed. When was the last time you went out?’
He could hear her frown. ‘I went running a few days ago.’
‘Aside from running. School, the shops, a film, a friend. Anything.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Think.’
‘A week or so?’
She hadn’t seen him in two. ‘You’re agoraphobic now, are you?’
‘No,’ he said, annoyed. ‘I just don’t feel like going out.’
‘Justin, no one except little old ladies with hundreds of cats stays home for a whole week. It’s not normal. What are you doing now?’
‘Nothing.’
Agnes sighed. ‘I’ll come and get you,’ she said, and hung up.
When he answered the door his appearance shocked her. He’d lost weight and his skin looked faintly greyish. He wore rumpled sweats and his hair was long and greasy.
‘Yuk,’ she said, ‘you look disgusting.’
‘Thank you.’
His mother emerged from the kitchen with Charlie in tow. She introduced herself to Agnes, holding out her hand with a diffident smile. ‘How nice to meet you.’
Agnes studied her face for a clue to Justin’s pathology. He didn’t exactly look like his mother, but then it was hard to find the resemblance when one person was so striking and the other so middle-aged. Like most people’s parents, she looked worn and a little shapeless, her lips the same colour as her skin, her hair beige and feathered into layers. From the creases around her eyes, Agnes guessed she was in her mid-forties. And there was definitely something of Justin in her expression after all. Something hesitant, off-balance.
Agnes followed Justin upstairs to his bedroom where a boom box screamed out noise with a massively overbalanced bass line. She wondered how anyone could live in such a pit of a room. It stank of male hormones and misery. She threw open a window, stood for a moment to inhale the cold clean air, then sat on the bed and looked him over.
‘Don’t you think you’re taking this doomed youth thing a little too seriously?’
‘Try living it.’
‘There’s a fine line, you know. Between looking romantically shabby and just looking horrible.’
Justin’s eyes narrowed with anger. ‘I’m not interested in your fine line, and it’s not romantic. And you may as well leave because I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Don’t be snippy, it doesn’t suit you.’ She took his arm and flashed her most beatific smile. ‘Come on, some air will do you good.’
She waited for his resistance to dissolve, then tugged gently on his elbow. He dragged his feet like a child as she steered him down the stairs to the front hall, where his grey coat lay on a chair by the door. Agnes picked it up and handed it to him.
When she opened the door he hesitated, turning to look behind him.
She sighed. ‘Leave the dog. Let’s go.’
But the walk was not a success. Despite the crisp autumn day and a bright blue sky, Agnes’s voice gave Justin a headache, and his legs felt tired and heavy. When at last they reached home, he said goodbye without raising the subject of another meeting, went straight to his room and lay down. When his mother knocked, offering dinner, he pretended to be asleep.
He dozed, waking long after midnight to the sound of a regular thudding noise coming from his brother’s room. After a few minutes, he slipped down the hall to investigate.
Peering around the door, he saw that Charlie was wide awake and studying a picture book. Across the room was a large, untidy heap of books that he’d flung from the cot.
At the sight of his brother, Charlie squeaked with delight. Face alight, he stood up and held out his arms. Justin switched on a lamp in the shape of a toy boat and swung the child up and out of his padded prison, plunking him down on the floor, where he sat wearing his stretchy sleepsuit and an expression of intense concentration.
‘Blocks,’ he said, pointing a chubby hand in the direction of the toy box.
Justin rummaged through the soft toys, musical instruments, games, sweets and lost socks, tossing out as many of the painted wooden alphabet blocks as he could find.
‘Do you want to make words?’ Justin asked, pleased with his own altruism. Poor linguistically challenged little sod. Maybe he could teach him to swear.
His brother busied himself with the blocks. J, S, T. He fixed Justin with an intent look.
Justin shook his head. ‘That doesn’t spell anything,’ he said, reaching to find a vowel. ‘Look, C-A-T, cat.’
The child sighed and snatched the blocks back, adding more letters to the ones on the floor.
J, S, T, N, C, A, S. There was a shortage of vowels.
Justin’s attention wandered. He was already bored with this game. The child added an ‘E’ to the end, and clapped his hands. ‘Look.’
‘Yes, fine, OK.’ Justin drifted back into humouring mode. ‘Hooray, well done, excellent. What have you spelled?’
He glanced at the letters, looked again, and froze. The blood drained from his face, and he stared at his brother. ‘Jesus Christ, how on earth did you do that?’
The child, busy with his task, didn’t look up.
H, A, T.
Justin stared. ‘Justin Case hat? What? What are you trying to write?’
With a look of infinite patience, Charlie began to adjust the letters. ‘Look,’ he said again, with satisfaction.
Justin looked. The letters had been divided more carefully now, leaving large spaces between words so there could be no doubt as to the meaning.
JST IN CASE WHAT.
He looked at Charlie, then down again at the words.
Just in case what?
Just in case something irreversible occurs. Just in case he was maimed, injured, died. Just in case something so horrible happened to him, or to someone he knew, that he would never, ever recover.
Was it possible that the child understood the meaning of his own question? Could he have arranged the letters as a premeditated act? Or was it like monkeys at typewriters and eventually, if left here with an infinite supply of blocks, Charlie would fill the room with Hamlet?
The sheer cosmic strangeness of his brother’s feat and the unlikely question in the cryptogram made Justin tremble. I must ask him, he thought, I must find a way to communicate with him. He fumbled for more blocks but it was too late. The child was fast asleep, fat pink fingers wrapped around the leg of his sock monkey.
Justin replaced him carefully in his cot, tucked a blanket under him and slowly returned to his own bed. There he lay, spooked, a spinning pin in a celestial bowling alley.
Perhaps I could offer fate a truce, he thought. A deal. You live your life, I’ll live mine. No surprises, no one gets hurt.
He fell asleep at dawn.
20
I don’t make deals, Justin. I deal.
And here’s how your cards are falling: a couple of negligible hearts. A joker. A sad little club.
Will you draw?
Oh look! The ace of spades.
I am sorry.
21
Justin awoke at noon with a start. He knew instantly and with utter certainty that he had to leave home. Fate was closing in, sending ominous messages in strange guises.
Just in case what? Oh ha ha. Why don’t you talk to me instead of channelling evil questions through Charlie as if he were some sort of human Ouija board.
Just in case what?
Even in the bright light of day, the only response he could think of involved a thousand hellish possibilities. But it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do. Packing a bag with a change of clothes and a toothbrush, he cracked open the door to his room and st
epped out, ready to begin his journey.
Hello, said Charlie from the floor at his feet. One fat hand gripped his toy monkey, the other guided a large wooden spoon through the air like an aeroplane. Justin lowered himself to the floor and looked his brother in the eye. ‘What was that business in the night?’ he asked gently. ‘Since when have you learned to spell?’
Charlie held his brother’s gaze for a moment before answering.
It was an important question I asked you in the night, he said, and you need to answer it or you’ll never get over that time I tried to fly.
‘Blocks!’ he said emphatically, hitting the floor with his spoon.
Having expected no further explanation, Justin kissed the child, tucked his passport into his pocket, called his dog, told his mother his school trip had been moved forward a week, and set out for Luton Airport.
As he stepped on to the local bus, Justin felt the gravitational tug of his past loosening. It was a good feeling. The open road beckoned. The closer he came to the airport, the freer he felt, like a comet streaming off into a weightless infinity of possible encounters.
Main terminal, his stop. The whoosh of automatic doors and the sweep of steel and glass excited him. There were no curtains, no occasional tables, no kitchen utensils. No heaps of dirty laundry or drawers filled with tartan pyjamas. There was no letter box. No milk on the doorstep. Nothing domestic, cosy or familiar; nothing with his scent or his name or his NHS number on it.
Why hadn’t he realized it before? The problem was all around him. The stuffy little room. The conventional parents, the dismal house. The street. The school. Here, all the little threads that connected him to earth could be broken. He was in transit, on the lam. He was Gulliver, Neil Armstrong, Bonnie and Clyde, all rolled into one.
Making his way to the information desk, Justin obtained an application allowing an unaccompanied minor to travel abroad, filled it out and forged his parents’ signatures, bought a sandwich and a coffee, and settled in to wait for a flight. One by one he considered destinations: Verona, Antalya. Rhodes, Zakynthos, Barcelona. Salzburg, Salonika. Istanbul. Nîmes, Brest. Halifax.