Black Rabbit Summer

  ‘Raymond’s missing too.’

  ‘Raymond?’ he said. ‘What’s Raymond got to do with it? He wasn’t even…’

  ‘He wasn’t even what?’

  Pauly hesitated, a quick nervous grin. ‘What?’

  ‘Raymond wasn’t even what?’ I repeated.

  ‘No, nothing… I mean, he wasn’t on the news… Raymond wasn’t. You know, there wasn’t anything about Raymond on the news.’

  I stared at him. He was avoiding my eyes again now, pretending to look down the street at something. He scratched the back of his neck, rubbed his bare belly, picked at a scabbed cut under his eye…

  ‘Are you going to ask me in?’ I said to him.

  ‘What?’ he grinned.

  ‘Ask me in.’

  ‘I was just going out –’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what the police were asking me?’

  ‘They’ve talked to you?’

  I nodded. ‘This morning.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Let me in,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

  There was no summer in Pauly’s house. Despite the heat outside, everything inside was cold and clammy and dim. It felt like a house that had never seen any light.

  As I followed Pauly up the narrow stairs to his bedroom, I wondered where his parents were. Sleeping? At work? Downstairs? I hadn’t seen or heard anyone else, and the house felt really empty, but I got the feeling that it always felt like that, so there was no way of knowing if his parents were at home or not. Not that it really mattered. But as I was thinking about it, I realized that I didn’t actually know anything about his parents. I couldn’t remember ever seeing them, and I couldn’t remember Pauly ever mentioning them. They might not even be a them, for all I knew. They could be divorced, separated, dead…

  ‘Mind the newspaper,’ Pauly said as we reached the landing. ‘The fucking cat’s been sick again.’

  I stepped over a sheet of stained newspaper and followed Pauly into his bedroom.

  It wasn’t very nice in there. I mean, I’m not saying my bedroom’s the tidiest place in the world, but Pauly’s room wasn’t just untidy, it was a filthy stinking mess. There was crap all over the place – empty KFC boxes, piles of dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays, flies buzzing around unwashed plates. The bed was unmade, the sheets all grubby and stained, and the whole place smelled really bad, kind of sour and sweaty and stale. Everything about the room made me feel dirty – the dirty floor, the dirty cheap furniture, the dirty pictures tacked carelessly to the walls. The curtains were closed, so there wasn’t much light, but there was enough to see that some of the pictures pinned to the walls were computer printouts of Stella. They were sad and seedy little things – A4 sheets, badly printed in black and white, grainy shots from the Internet.

  ‘What?’ said Pauly as he saw me looking at them. ‘They’re only pictures. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen them.’

  ‘I haven’t got them all over my wall.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘They’re pictures of Stella, Pauly,’ I said. ‘Stella’s missing –’

  ‘So what? You think I had something to do with it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that –’

  ‘You think I’d have her picture on my wall if I’d had anything to do with it?’

  I looked at him. ‘I’d take them down if I were you,’ I said. ‘Before the police get here.’

  ‘Why’d they want to see me anyway?’ he said. ‘What’ve you told them?’

  ‘Nothing. They asked me about Saturday night, that’s all. I had to tell them about the den.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘They wanted to know who was there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Raymond’s missing, for Christ’s sake. That’s why.’

  ‘Oh, yeah… I thought you meant…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He went over to his bed, picked up a shirt from a pile of dirty clothes and put it on. ‘So what’s happened to him then?’ he said casually, moving over to a cluttered computer desk. ‘Raymond, I mean. Where is he?’

  ‘If I knew that,’ I sighed, ‘he wouldn’t be missing, would he?’

  ‘Yeah, right…’

  Pauly was standing at his computer desk now. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I could tell from the vagueness of his voice that his mind wasn’t on Raymond. He was concentrating on something else – picking something up, putting it in his pocket, picking up something else, opening a drawer, putting something in it, closing the drawer…

  ‘I told the police you were at the den,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t say anything about later on.’

  He turned and looked at me. ‘Later on?’

  ‘When I saw you by the Portaloos. Remember? You were sitting on a bench, and I was looking for Raymond, and you were watching Eric and Campbell.’

  ‘I wasn’t watching them –’

  ‘Yeah, you were. I was standing behind you for about five minutes. I was watching you.’

  His face darkened. ‘You what?’

  ‘You were watching them, Pauly. I know you were.’

  He was staring at me now, his eyes cold and hard, and just for a moment there was something about him that scared me. It wasn’t a physical fear. I mean, I didn’t actually think he was going to do anything to me. But I could see the possibility of some kind of violence in his eyes. It was really weird, as if he was someone else, someone I’d never known.

  And I wondered then if I’d ever known him.

  The moment didn’t last very long, though, and as he shrugged his shoulders and lit a cigarette, his eyes lost their coldness and the Pauly I did know came back.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ he said, blowing out smoke. ‘What if I was watching them? There’s no law against watching people is there?’

  ‘Why were you watching them?’

  He stared at me, thinking things over, then he moved over to his bed and sat down. ‘All right,’ he sighed, resting his cigarette in an ashtray, ‘I was watching them, OK? But I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. I was just watching them, you know…’

  ‘Why?’

  He closed his eyes and put his hands to his face, and for a second or two I actually thought he was going to start crying. But he didn’t. He just rubbed his eyes and slowly dragged his hands down his face, as if he was preparing himself for something really difficult. He took a breath, opened his eyes, picked up his cigarette, and looked at me. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to know what they were doing, OK? That’s all. I saw them together, and I didn’t know… you know… I didn’t know why they were together. Eric and Wes. It wasn’t right, you know?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The scab under his eye had come off and the cut was bleeding. He wiped it with his hand, then wiped his bloody hand on the bed. ‘You know what Eric’s like,’ he said nastily. ‘He doesn’t belong with people like Wes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He tilted his chin at the window, indicating the streets of the estate outside. ‘This is our world – mine and Wes’s. Eric’s got nothing to do with it. If he came down here, he wouldn’t last five minutes.’

  ‘What – because he’s gay?’

  ‘No, because he’s Eric.’

  It might not sound as if it made much sense, but at the time I thought I knew what Pauly was trying to say. Wes Campbell was one thing, and Eric was another. Whatever they both meant to Pauly, they weren’t supposed to have any connection. They were different parts of his life. Different circles, different lives. They didn’t belong together.

  ‘Where did they go?’ I asked him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eric and Wes. At the fair, when you left me on the bench – you followed them, didn’t you?’

  Pauly didn’t say anything for a moment. He fingered the cut on his face again, wiping off a little more blood, then he stubbed out his cigarette
, got to his feet, and started heading for the door. ‘I need a piss,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  He closed the bedroom door as he left.

  The bathroom was right next door to his bedroom, so I could hear him going in and shutting the door. I waited until I heard him peeing, then I crossed over to his computer desk and quietly opened the drawer. Lying on top of a jumble of CDs and DVDs was the stuff Pauly had picked up from the desk and hidden away: a plastic prescription bottle full of small blue pills, a lump of cannabis wrapped in cling film, and some sparkling white powder in a little polythene bag.

  As I was standing there looking down at all this stuff – wondering what the pills and the powder were, and why Pauly had bothered hiding them away from me – I heard the faint mutter of his voice from the bathroom. It sounded like he was talking to someone. I listened hard, trying to work out what he was saying, but all I could hear was the sound of his voice – a low, cautious whispering… too muffled to make any sense.

  After a minute or so, the whispering stopped and I heard the toilet flush. I closed the desk drawer and went back over to the other side of the room.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Pauly said as he came back in.

  I watched him as he went over and sat down on his bed. He didn’t look at me, and he didn’t say anything either, he just sat there – staring at the floor, chewing his lip, jiggling his heel up and down.

  ‘Who were you talking to?’ I asked him.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘I heard you talking –’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just now, in the bathroom. I heard you talking to someone.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It was probably the people next door… you can hear everything through these walls.’ He looked up and grinned at me. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I hear sometimes… I mean, just the other night –’

  ‘I don’t really want to know, thanks.’

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  I looked at him. ‘You still haven’t told me about Eric and Wes.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I asked you where they went.’

  He frowned. ‘When?’

  ‘At the fair,’ I said patiently. ‘When you followed them. Where did they go, Pauly?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You followed them –’

  ‘Yeah, I know… but I couldn’t find them.’ He looked at me. ‘Honest, Pete… I don’t know where they went. I thought I saw them going through that little side gate – you know, the one that leads out into Port Lane – but when I got there, there was no one around. I mean, I looked for them, I went up and down the road for a bit, but I couldn’t see them anywhere.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not much,’ he shrugged. ‘I hung around the gate for a while, just in case they came back… and then I went home.’

  ‘So you didn’t see them at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve got no idea where they went?’

  ‘I just told you –’

  ‘Have you seen either of them since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you spoken to them on the phone?’

  ‘What’s this –?’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘Why?’ he said, staring at me. ‘I mean, what does it matter? What’s all this got to do with anything anyway?’

  I looked at him then, wondering what he was… and who he was… and what I was doing here in this dirty little room. What was I doing? Why was I asking him all these questions? Was it simply because I wanted to know why Eric had lied about Saturday night? I mean, what did it matter? What did it have to do with anything?

  ‘I don’t know…’ I heard myself whisper.

  My voice seemed a long way away.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Pauly. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else…’

  His voice… his words…

  ‘Pete?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, glancing quickly at a clock on the wall. ‘I’ve really got to go, OK? So, you know… if you don’t mind –’

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ I told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That cut under your eye… it’s bleeding again.’

  Pauly didn’t say anything after that. He just wiped the blood from his face and walked out of the bedroom. I followed him silently down the stairs. He didn’t say anything when he opened the front door and showed me out, and when I stopped on his step, staring stupidly at the empty space where my bike had been, he just gave me one of his grins.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  Pauly was still grinning as he went back inside and shut the front door.

  Riding my bike was another one of those things that I’d pretty much given up in the last few months. Just like football and playing the guitar, it simply didn’t interest me any more. So I wasn’t really that bothered about my bike being stolen. And, if I’d been anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been bothered about having to walk home either. But I wasn’t anywhere else – I was on the Greenwell Estate. And even as I left Pauly’s house and started walking up the street, I could already see a bunch of hard-looking kids hanging around the corner up ahead, and I knew they were watching me, waiting for me, waiting to have some fun… and I also knew that they had my bike. I could see one of them sitting on it, a shaven-headed kid of about fourteen. As I looked at him, he grinned at me, stretched out his leg, and stamped his foot into the spokes.

  It’s hard to look casual when you’re scared, but I did my best – casually crossing the road, casually pretending that I hadn’t seen anything, that I was just some kid… just going somewhere else. I casually turned left and headed down a side street.

  I didn’t actually start running then – you don’t start running until you really have to – but I was walking pretty quickly. The side street led me down to a little pathway, through to another street, and then I turned left again, down to the end of the street, then down another pathway and across a little playing field, and from there I could see the road that runs alongside the docks.

  I stopped for a moment and looked over my shoulder. The Greenwell kids were following me. They weren’t running or shouting or anything, they were just idly following along behind me. There were about half a dozen of them – white tracks, basketball shirts, gold chains glinting in the sun.

  As I hurried on down to the dockland road, I kept glancing over my shoulder to see what they were doing. At one point, I saw three of them peel away from the others and head off away from them, almost doubling back. I didn’t understand it at first, and I wondered for a moment if I was just being paranoid. Maybe they weren’t following me after all? Maybe they just happened to be going in the same direction as me, and now three of them just happened to be going somewhere else? But then I saw where they were going, and I suddenly realized what they were doing. The three who’d split away from the others weren’t just going somewhere else, they were heading down to the far end of the dockland road, blocking my way back to St Leonard’s Road.

  My only option now was to cross over the dock road, find my way into the wasteground, and head up into Back Lane.

  The wire fence that screens the wasteground from the road used to be a rusty old thing full of holes, so it used to be really easy to get through, but it wasn’t any more. It was a new fence, a lot higher than the old fence, and as I crossed the dock road and stopped in front of it, there wasn’t a hole to be seen.

  I looked back across the road and saw the three Greenwell kids heading straight for me. They were about fifty metres away now. And when I looked to my right, I could see the other three moving towards me from the far end of the road.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  I hadn’t reall
y been all that scared until now. I’d been a bit worried, and I’d had that horrible fluttery feeling in my belly, but I hadn’t really thought I was in any real danger or anything. I mean, I’d been scared, but I hadn’t been running scared. Now, though… well, now I was beginning to feel more and more trapped.

  So now it was time to start running.

  I headed off to my left, away from the kids coming down the dock road, and as I ran I kept my eyes on the fence, looking for a way into the wasteground. I could hear rapid footsteps behind me, so I knew the Greenwell kids had started running too, but I didn’t waste any time looking round at them. I just kept going.

  I was trying to think as I pounded along the pavement, trying to work out where to go and what to do if I couldn’t get into the wasteground – where does this road take me to? where can I go from there? how can I find a way back home without getting the shit beaten out of me? – and I was just beginning to realize that I didn’t have a clue where I was going or what I was going to do, when suddenly I saw a gap in the fence. It was right at the end of the wasteground, just next to the car park of a grotty little docklands pub – a section of fence where the wire mesh had been ripped away from its supporting post and folded back, leaving just enough room to squeeze through into the wasteground.

  I lunged through it, gashing my arm as I went, and then I quickly looked round to see where the Greenwell kids were. They’d all joined up again now, the six of them running in a ragged group along the road, no more than twenty metres behind me.

  I got going again, running hard across the wasteground towards the gas towers.

  I was feeling more hopeful now. I knew where I was again, and I knew where I was going, and I knew that if I could just get past the gas towers, then up the steep hill and into Back Lane, I’d probably be OK. I knew every inch of Back Lane, and once I was there, I’d have all kinds of options. I could head for home, or back towards the recreation ground, or up the bank and into the old factory. If necessary, I could even just find somewhere to hide. So I was running without too much fear now, just running fast, but not too fast, trying to keep steady, trying to avoid all the rocks and rubbish and holes in the ground…

  The wasteground is a weird kind of place. I don’t know what it used to be, or even if it used to be anything, but it’s always had a really strange feel to it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s almost as if it’s a separate little world, with its own unique atmosphere and terrain. The ground is mostly bare. An uneven expanse of crumbly old concrete, covered with a thin layer of sand and earth, it’s dotted here and there with strange little bushes and stunted trees that never seem to get any bigger. There are piles of rocks and rubble all over the place, huge heaps of tangled metal, and several deep ponds full of oily grey water. The whole place looks grey. Even the bits of it that aren’t grey – the bushes and the trees, the thick green moss surrounding the ponds – it all looks grey. But then, beyond all the greyness, on the high concrete walls that span the far side of the wasteground, where the skateboard kids spray-paint their comic-book scenes of cities and streets, there’s a wonderful explosion of vibrant colour. Metallic reds, sunburst yellows, purples and greens and electric blues…