“But where had he been going for so long?” his dad said through his tears. “He’s been giving me money all the time. Where did he get it from? Tell me that.”
“Maybe the Zealots have been providing it for him,” suggested Adam.
His father shook his head. He could not believe it. For Adam, too, it was impossible to take in. All his life Jess had seemed so ordinary — colorless, even. Now it looked as though they knew nothing about him at all.
“What does it mean?” he asked his dad.
“For you?” asked his father. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
Every now and then his father came out with these mean little remarks. Adam should have been used to it by now but they took his breath away every time.
“It means work. No more school for you. We have to find you a job. Unless you can find one for me, of course.” His father held up his ruined hand and shook it in the air.
Quietly, Adam got up and went to his room to lie down. Some time later, he heard his father go in to see his mother and she began to weep again. He could hear his father’s voice softly murmuring, trying to console her. He felt his own grief at the back of his throat like a hard lump, but there were no tears, not yet. He lay there for a long time and tried to imagine what had happened, and what it meant, and found that he wasn’t able to do it. After a time, he began to cry, too. Then he fell asleep.
* * *
At about six o’clock, he woke up from an otherworldly dream and realized that he was late. Tonight was the night. He had a party to go to.
As quietly as he could, Adam got up and began to dress in his best clothes. He knew he shouldn’t go, but he also knew that he wasn’t going to stop himself. Already, through the grief and shock of what had happened, he could feel the world closing in around him. No school, no education — no life. He was going to end up like his mum, working the phone at the call center for fourteen hours a day. This party might be his last chance. As for Lizzie — anyone could see she was too good for him. He wasn’t going to tell her what had happened, or what it meant. It was too humiliating.
Before he went out, Adam rooted around under his bed and pulled out the condoms he kept hidden in a little cardboard box. He put them in his pocket, all except one, which he took to an old electrical socket in the wall that had been disconnected ages ago. He unraveled the tiny copper threads sticking out of the wall and used one of them to pierce a hole in the condom. It was tiny; you’d never know. Sitting on his bed, he texted her.
Getting ready to go, he wrote. And then he typed in the magic words: I love you.
Such a little phrase, I love you. What did it mean? It meant: I want to spend my life with you. I want you to give me your life. Please love me back.
He got up and crept downstairs like a thief in the night. He caught the bus out to Stockport to meet her. On the way, a text came back.
I love you too Adam.
Adam put the phone in his pocket. The bus pushed forward through the end of the day. He leaned his head against the window and felt tears leak out of his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand. In his pockets, the condoms were coming along for the ride — the good ones in the left, the bad one in the right.
Of course he wasn’t going to do it. Of course not. How could he do that to Lizzie? Even though, with Jess gone, she was his only way out.
A YOUNG WOMAN WAS BEING BEATEN UP IN A SHIPPING container.
The container was one of several thousand in a vast open-air facility close to the railway line in east Manchester. The boxes were stored two, three, or more high in long lines, row after row of them stretching off into the distance toward the vanishing point, as if some gigantic autistic child had arranged them this way. It had. The child’s name was industry. A few decades ago, the place had been buzzing with activity, tractor trailers driving to and fro up the aisles, forklift trucks lifting the boxes on and off the flatbeds, stacking them, storing them, emptying them. Now, with the recession in its twentieth year, all was still — on the outside, at least. Hidden away inside many of the boxes it was a hive of activity.
The young woman doubled up from a violent blow to the stomach, but didn’t fall down, as she was held up from behind. Someone delivered her a blow to the kidneys; another at the front punched her in the face. Then they let her fall. She hit the carpet with a thud.
“Ready?” said the stocky man with graying hair who was directing the beating.
The young woman shook her head, dribbling blood and spit onto the carpet. With a grimace, the older man stamped on her thigh and she curled up in pain.
From the inside, you wouldn’t know they were in a container at all. It was carpeted, decorated with striped wallpaper, furnished with a desk and executive chair, coffee machine, and other office equipment. Around and about, other containers had been converted into dormitories, living spaces, more offices, a gym, cafeterias, and several laboratories. This was a factory. They made Death.
Florence Ballantine sat back on his desk and gestured with his finger for the lads to carry on. Either the girl was tougher than she looked, or else she genuinely did know nothing about it, but Ballantine was certain of one thing: The Death that had been handed out in Albert Square on Friday night had come from his facility. There were going to be a whole lot of kids dying suddenly next week. That was fine by him — except that instead of buying it in the post-Jimmy euphoria, they’d got it for free, at his expense. That was another matter altogether.
The stuff had to be his. Apart from the fact that he was the only man on the planet making cheap Death, he kept tabs on every single pill that left the production line, and he was several thousand short.
“Smack her in the kidneys or the tits. I don’t want any damage to her beautiful mind,” said Ballantine to the heavy working on the girl. The last thing he wanted was for her to be unable to work. He needed her, at least for now. This girl and her friend, who had already been through this procedure, were Zealots, contracted in to oversee the manufacture of black market Death at Ballantine’s facility. Why the rebel group would want to help him make Death was beyond him, but he certainly wasn’t going to say no — at least until he’d worked out how to make it himself. But that was proving harder than he’d thought.
The heavy delivered a good one to the kidneys. The girl collapsed onto the ground, groaning, and was sick on the carpet. Fuck! Guys just didn’t know how to deal out violence these days. The office would stink of disinfectant for the rest of the day.
Ballantine bent over her with his hands on his knees. “Your boyfriend told us, anyway,” he said. “We just need to corroborate his story. Might as well,” he said temptingly. “This is just violence. You wouldn’t want me to tell these boys to step it up a notch, would you?”
“But I don’t know!” insisted the girl, and she started to cry.
Ballantine nodded. One of the lads kicked her in the breast. She curled up around it, panting with pain and writhing around. But she still wasn’t talking. It looked like she really didn’t know.
In that case, it had to be one of his own guys who had stolen the pills. Ballantine could feel his blood pressure going up at the mere thought.
“My turn,” said a voice behind him. “I got something I want to try …”
That was Christian, his son. Ballantine looked distastefully at him. He looked like a freak — forty-five years old and he dressed like a kid in baggy jeans, a baseball cap, and a T-shirt with a picture of a girl in a bikini snowboarding. What sort of gangster dressed like that? Fuck’s sake.
“You leave her alone,” he said. No way was he going to let Christian have a go at her — he’d ruin her for good, knowing him. It was just his bad luck to have a psycho for a son. He peered into his eyes suspiciously.
“Are you taking your fucking meds?”
“Jesus, Dad, do we have to talk about this in public?” Christian whined.
“Is he taking his fucking meds?” demanded Ballantine, addressing a big man s
tanding by Christian’s side — Vince, his bodyguard.
Vince nodded. “Absolutely, Mr. Ballantine. Every day. I take them out of the packaging myself.”
Ballantine glanced again at his son, who was seething at being reminded in front of the boys that he was a psycho on meds. Then he looked down at the girl, who had got herself up onto her hands and knees, bleeding from her nose and mouth.
“I’m telling you, kid,” he said, “if you’re lying to me, it won’t just be you. It’ll be your family, it’ll be your friends, it’ll be the people you met on the bus coming to work this week. OK. Until we find out who’s been stealing from me, you stay at the terminal. You don’t go anywhere. You don’t go for a shit without telling me about it. Now get her out of my sight.”
The girl was dragged out. Ballantine didn’t like people outside in daylight, but it wouldn’t do any harm for the rest of the staff to see someone limping about. Good for discipline.
One of the guys shook his head. “Tough kids,” he said.
“Tough kids?” sneered Ballantine. “They’re chemists, right? That’s both of them we’ve done good and not a word. They only got out of university a year or so ago; they don’t have it in them. Which means, gentlemen, that one of you, or one of your staff — which amounts to the same thing — is stealing drugs off me. I am not a happy man.”
The guys shuffled their feet and looked anxious.
“We have a leak.” Ballantine thought about how angry it made him and he started yelling. “Have you any idea what this operation cost me? This is a fucking big risk and I am being let down badly here. People are taking this stuff for free. You hear me. Fucking free. Jesus!”
“Mr. Ballantine, those kids are lying. They have to be lying. Everyone else is watertight; they’re the only ones we never worked with before.”
“Where did kids like them learn to take a beating like that? University? They teach getting beat up as a chemistry unit at university? No. So you better find out who it is before I do it myself, OK? Because when I do find out, I am going to sack whoever was involved, and I am going to sack whoever was in charge of them. It should never have got this far.”
The guys shuffled their feet awkwardly some more. Getting sacked from this firm meant losing a good deal more than your job.
“Back to work. Christian, Alan. Distribution. I want that drug on the street before it starts to occur to people that it’s not a good idea to take it. And this time, I want them paying for it.”
Sulkily, the guys edged out and hurried off to work on their own staff. Someone was going to have to take the rap for this. All they cared about was that it wasn’t going to be them.
WHEN LIZZIE RECEIVED ADAM’S “I LOVE YOU” TEXT, IT TOOK her by surprise. It didn’t make her feel happy though — it made her anxious. How come? Wasn’t it exactly what she’d wanted?
She did want it. But …
The thing was, it was so quick. She hadn’t even thought about love until the night before last, when Jimmy Earle died onstage in front of them and they’d spent the night out on the streets, caught up in the riots. It had been the most amazing night. If he’d had said it then, she’d have believed it. But now, in the cold light of day, she was less sure. If this was love, she was still falling. Why did he need to rush in and make out that it had already happened?
It made her feel cross, with herself as much as him. There were a hundred voices in her heart, and ninety-nine of them were overjoyed. But one was going, “Yeah? Ya think?” And Lizzie being Lizzie, ninety-nine out of a hundred just wasn’t good enough.
She picked him up at the cinema, and he looked dreadful.
“You OK?” she asked.
“Yeah, great, I feel great. Hey, I’m so looking forward to this,” he told her, and he shot her a smile so sickly, so unfamiliar, she was shocked.
By the time she got the car on the highway she’d worked out exactly what was going on. He’d told her he loved her and now he was regretting it. Just like a boy. Just like Adam! One minute you were the center of his world, the next he treated you like you’d pissed on his chips.
One thing was for sure — he’d still be wanting the shag she’d promised him. See about that, then, she thought. She pulled out into the fast lane and put her foot down, ninety miles an hour. Maybe the atmosphere would improve at the party. The sooner they got there, the better.
* * *
Julie’s house was set back from the road, so they passed it twice. There were electric gates, painted black and gold, and a drive winding up through young rhododendrons. Then they turned the corner and saw the house.
“Ta-da!” said Lizzie.
It was ridiculous. It was half mock Tudor, half Swiss chalet, but with turrets. Adam and Lizzie sat and goggled at it. Was it fabulous or was it hideous? Adam had no idea.
“It must have been built by a footballer,” said Lizzie.
There was a bit of field set aside for the parking lot, full of expensive cars — a couple of Ferraris, an old Roller, any number of Porsches and Jags. Lizzie parked and looked over at Adam. He gave her another ghastly smile.
“I love you, Lizzie,” he said.
“Ads …” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She got out of the car and led the way toward the house.
* * *
Lizzie’s cousin spotted them as they came in and rushed over to meet them.
“Lizzie! You made it.”
“Julie! This is Adam …”
“Guys! Excuse me, I just want to borrow her for a moment — hey, Adam, get a drink, they’re over there.” She waved a hand over to the left and moved off to the right, pulling Lizzie with her. “We won’t be long,” she said.
Lizzie just had time to turn a surprised smile on him before she was hauled away into the crowd and hurried up the stairs.
“You are not going to believe some of the people I’ve got at this party,” said Julie. “They practically own the world!”
“Is this your parents’ place? What happened to that nice house in Knutsford?”
“Daddy got seriously rich.”
“I thought he already was seriously rich.”
“He got seriously richer.”
“That was such a great house! This place looks like it was designed by a footballer.”
“It was!”
They collapsed laughing up on the stairs.
“Do they know?” asked Lizzie. “Your parents? Won’t they go mad when they find out you’ve had a huge party here?”
“They’re away in … on holiday somewhere. They’ll never know. The cleaners will come in. Professionals.”
“But stuff gets broken. Stuff always gets broken. They’ll know.”
Julie stopped and put her finger on the side of her nose.
“No one would DARE. I have people at this party who will absolutely deal with anyone who gets out of order. If anyone so much as sneezes on the pizza, they will literally get turned inside out.”
Lizzie laughed, a little uncertainly. “What sort of people?”
“People you would not believe. I won’t even introduce you to them. That sort of people.”
Julie was drunk, and her bright eyes indicated alcohol wasn’t all she’d had. She pulled Lizzie into a little room, and fetched a mirror out of a drawer with several lines of white powder on it and a fifty-pound note rolled into a tight tube.
“Be careful. It’s not cut.”
“What is it?”
“XL5.”
“What’s that?”
“Rocket fuel. Try it.”
Lizzie paused, then bent down to sniff up the end of one of the little lines. “Wow,” she said.
“Isn’t it? Get this — I’m not paying for any of it. The booze — anything!”
“Who is?”
“Older men.”
“Julie!”
“Not that sort of older men. Not like they want favors. Like, I want a party and they want a party, and I have th
e house so they provide the drinks and the … ‘nasal comestibles,’ you know?”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“My brain. My whole body!”
“Yeah, innit? Come on! I’ll introduce you to some of them.”
“But not the older ones.”
“No! Not the older ones. Not the ones I won’t introduce you to. The guys you’re going to meet will all be top-notch, high-quality boyfriend material.”
“I have a boyfriend. You just pulled me away from him. Can I take some of this down for him?”
“That’s not a boyfriend. In entertainment terms, he’s a night in with a bag of chips and Netflix.” Julie slipped her a blister pack from the back of the drawer. “I mean something with a bit more of a kick. I’m talking about nightclub boyfriends. I’m talking about boys who know parts of your body you didn’t even know existed. That one is so generic.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Come on! I’ll introduce you.”
* * *
Adam had rarely felt so out of place. All around him, the beautiful people draped themselves on items of expensive but badly chosen furniture, or gathered in groups across the expanse of cream carpet. A girl in a pair of jeans that cost more than Adam’s dad’s monthly pension sucked on a joint and watched Adam’s best leather jacket — it had cost over a hundred pounds secondhand — turn into a laughable rag on his back.
The beautiful people averted their beautiful eyes.
He made his way to the bar, a long table carpeted with bottles of every form of alcohol known to man. A barman in a white suit on the other side raised an eyebrow at him.