Chapter Sixteen
‘Can you see anything?’ Ben wiggled underneath me, shifting my weight more evenly across his shoulders.
‘Can’t you stand still?’
No answer. Of course. No way even Ben could lip read when my head was four feet above him and hanging over three strands of barbed wire. I clung to the top of the wall which ran around the outside of the tiny yard belonging to Le Petit Lapin, desperately trying to steady myself against the brickwork. There was no sign of any burning, just a couple of plastic patio chairs where presumably Mairi and Saskia put their respective feet and hooves up during slack spells.
I slapped Ben’s shoulder and he lowered me to earth, sliding me down the wall and gasping in an unflattering way.
‘Woah! You’ve got thighs like steel, woman.’ He ruefully rubbed the back of his neck. ‘So? Anything doing?’
‘Not really. I need to get inside.’
‘Come on. It’s only in really bad films that the villain leaves incriminating evidence lying around.’ Ben looked at my face. ‘Oh, please! Tell me you aren’t going to break in?’
‘There’s a little window down in the back office. I reckon I can crack it. In and out and she won’t even know.’
‘Yeah, right. And how are you going to do that eh? Pop home for your Girls’ Book of Breaking and Entering?’
‘No, I’m going to thank God for historic cities building regulations not allowing shop owners to replace old latch windows. Bunk me up.’
‘Jem?’ He was staring at me now. ‘You serious?’
‘Bunk me up,’ I repeated.
‘Hang on. This is more than I signed up for. You said you were just going to have a look in the yard—’
‘—where there’s nothing to see. So now I’m going in.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘Are you with me?’
‘Sheesh. All right, Don Corleone. Don’t get your salami in a twist.’ Ben bent and formed his hands into a cup. ‘But I’m not sure I can bunk you right up there. I mean, Christ, woman, how much do you weigh?’
‘You’d better hope I get arrested,’ I said, putting one toe into his palm. ‘Because if I don’t, you are going to pay for that remark.’
I didn’t need him to put any effort in. The action came back to me as easily as if I’d done it yesterday. Toe in, spring off the back foot, balance against the wall and — up. Ben straightened, looking surprised.
‘Jem?’
I was already taking off my T shirt, wrapping it over the barbed wire. ‘Have you got a credit card on you?’
Ben was staring at my chest. At least I was wearing a half-decent bra, although the balconette style made my boobs look fuller and more barely restrained than should have been the case. ‘What? You want me to pay to cop an eyeful?’
‘Just hand it over.’
He raked about in pockets, eventually finding a card. ‘American Express?’
‘That’ll do nicely.’ I grinned down at him as he stretched up with the card. This was feeling more and more like the old days. I straddled the barbed wire, carefully holding the padding. ‘Okay. In and out.’
‘What if someone comes?’
‘It’s three o’clock in the bloody morning. Who do you think is going to come?’
‘We’re here.’
‘Well, if any burglars arrive, tell them this place is spoken for. All right?’
I dropped down into the yard, my hands sweaty, my heart thumping and my chest attempting to escape. All the old feelings, all the old thrills. ‘Jem?’ I couldn’t see him, the wall was a good nine-feet high, so I didn’t bother responding. ‘Be careful,’ I heard him breathe.
I crossed the yard, pulled one of the plastic chairs up to the window and used the credit card to slip the latch. One hop and a wriggle and I was inside, although I left some of my skin on the frame. I nearly called back to Ben but realised it was futile.
I’d become an expert on sussing out a place without going any further than point of entry, I had better eyes than most for the tell-tale signs of advanced alarm systems. Saskia had nothing. The cheapskate. Although, I thought as I circled the shop floor, there was nothing here that even the most desperate of burglars could want. The till was empty with the tray pulled out to show there was no cash and as for the items on sale — well, I guess if you wanted to beat someone to death they might come in handy.
Ben was right. There was nothing here. To corroborate Jason’s story all the boxes of Rosie’s cards that I’d seen on the night of the party were gone. I went back into the office and noticed an appointments diary on the desk beside the telephone. Using the tip of one finger I flipped it open.
All right, so I’d hardly expected Saskia to have written ‘TODAY MY PLANS COME TO FRUITION’ across the pages in lipstick, but I was unprepared for the sheer dullness of the entries. For example under today’s date was ‘4pm, Oscar, Orthodontist’. The poor kid was only five and she was already having him fixed. He hadn’t even got all his teeth yet.
I flipped back further. Three days ago. The night of Ben’s aborted dinner party with Rosie and me. Nothing but a lightly pencilled ‘A’. And then a question mark. Further back, and all that seemed to concern Saskia was the coming and going of Alex and Oscar’s various appointments. All I managed to learn was that Alex was out a lot and poor little Oscar was undergoing major restructuring work. God, she was a boring woman. I was flicking through dates now, anything that sprung to mind. On my birthday apparently Oscar had a music exam, on Rosie’s a book test. On 20 February, the day Harry was born, she’d written ‘A out’. As in he was somewhere else, or he’d decided to confess to being gay?
I replaced the diary and went back out through the office window, removing any spare skin from my ribs on the way. I carefully levered it shut with Ben’s card; although I couldn’t relatch it from this side I could leave the arm lying along the frame so hopefully Saskia would think that it hadn’t been properly closed.
I moved the chair up to the wall and used it to get enough of a boost to climb back to the top. As I jumped I gave the chair an almighty kick which sent it right to the far side of the yard, where it tumbled onto its back as though a gust of wind had caught it. I paused by the wire to untangle my shirt then dropped lightly back into the alleyway where I landed beside Ben, who was leaning against the wall trying to look nonchalant.
He jumped. It was disconcerting to have him flinch every time I arrived unexpectedly.
‘Hey. Anything?’
‘Apart from Saskia conducting a father-and-son time-and-motion study, nope.’ I flicked out my T shirt. There were only a couple of snags in it from the wire. God, I was good. I went to slip it on but Ben put a hand on my arm.
‘Wait.’
‘What?’ His hand was warm, his fingers soft. Adrenaline was still burning its way through my synapses and leaving a bitter, dry taste in my mouth. ‘Ben?’
Pressure on my forearm until I turned, reluctantly. ‘Yeah. I thought so.’ Then a finger ran down my spine. ‘You’ve got a gang mark.’
How the hell did he know? ‘It’s just a tattoo,’ I said lightly. My skin prickled around the blue stain on my shoulder blade as though it was bursting through my flesh.
‘What? I can’t see your face.’ Ben spun me so that my bare back was pressed against the roughness of the wall. ‘Now. Say it again.’
‘It’s nothing. Just a pattern.’
‘Bugger that . You’ve been in a street gang. Where? Why didn’t you say? And what the hell happened to you?’
Adrenaline drained. I was flat, empty. Goosebumps broke out across my chest and shoulders and my skinned ribcage ached. ‘I . . . I don’t know . . . I . . .’
Ben let me go and raised both hands to rumple through his hair. ‘Jemima.’
And suddenly I wanted him to know. All of it. All of me. ‘Take me home,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you.’
A half-smile. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’
I met his eye steadily. ‘Only you, Ben. Only you.’
* * *
Ben’s house was silent and dark. As we went in he turned on lights, flipping switches like a man possessed, room by room until we reached a small study off the kitchen where he only turned on a lamp. There were bookcases against all the walls, a table and sofa, deep carpet on the floor. It was snug.
‘Okay.’ Ben slumped onto the sofa, reaching for a whisky bottle and glasses from the little side table. ‘Go on.’
I hovered uncertainly, finally settled for sitting on the floor in the corner furthest away from him. ‘First tell me how you knew.’
‘Hang on. You’re the one with the secrets and I’m the one answering the questions? What’s wrong with this picture?’ The mouth of the bottle jigged against the glasses as he poured us both a generous measure. ‘All right. Mark. Drummer in Willow Down.’
I took the glass but didn’t move closer to him. Just rested my back against the wall. ‘He was in a gang?’
‘No, you plank. He’s a sociologist.’
‘Your drummer is a sociologist?’
‘They’re not all two brain cells and seven pints of sweat. Anyhow. These tattoos were his idea.’ Ben rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his encircling tribal mark. ‘He took it from the street gangs where they use them to mark their own, to strengthen the group bond. We all had one, all four of us. Same tatt, same spot, to remind us we were all in it together.’ He rubbed the mark thoughtfully.
‘So you’re not going to believe I got drunk one night and picked it out of a tattoo parlour window?’
He smiled. Leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, slopping whisky unnoticed over the couch. ‘Nice try. But I’ve seen the textbooks.’
I took a deep breath. ‘All right. But listen up because this is a once-only story.’
‘I’m listening, Jemima.’ Then a little grin. ‘Figure of speech. But I’m here.’
Where to begin? As someone once said, at the beginning . . . With thoughts and memories I’d blocked and denied for so long that even I couldn’t be sure how accurate they were. Rewritten and reworked they might be, edited for all those snaggy moments of sibling rivalry and parental arguing, but they were all I had. It was time to own up to them. ‘I had a great life. A mum and dad who loved all three of us completely. A good school, nice house, I had riding lessons twice a week and the boys did rugby and . . . never mind. It was normal, you know?’
Ben didn’t move. Kept his eyes fixed on my face.
I lowered the barrier even further, until images came with the emotions, pictures of twisted metal, and I had to work not to let it all come screaming back in full technicolour. ‘When I was fifteen there was an accident. A stupid, stupid accident, something so random . . . Mum was driving Dad to work. She wanted the car because hers was in the garage or something, so she was going to drop him off. I had a competition to go to, show jumping I think, and she didn’t want me to miss out so she . . . And they crashed. No-one knows what happened, she just lost control and hit a bridge.’ I rubbed my chest, trying to ease an ache that would never heal.
Ben hadn’t even blinked. ‘And they both . . . ?’
‘Yes. We were told it was instantaneous but — you always wonder, don’t you? Anyway. There was no family to take us in. Randall was sixteen, but he was told he was too young to be allowed to take charge of us because Christian was only twelve. So they were going to split us up and put us in foster homes.’ I looked down at my hands, knitting my fingers in my lap. Only realised what I was doing when Ben reached across very gently and tipped my head back up so he could see my lips. ‘We ran away.’ A burp-like giggle escaped. ‘We were so na?ve, you see. Stupid, middle-class kids who thought real life was like some kind of early-evening kids’ TV, living in an empty house, taking food from the supermarket to eat. But we were scared. We’d lost our parents, we didn’t want to lose each other too, and we thought we’d only have to wait until Ran was eighteen, and then he could adopt us and we’d get a flat and live together and . . . Too much TV, as I said.’
Ben sighed. It had a catch in it.
‘And then this gang found us. We were hiding out in a disused warehouse, starving because none of us knew how to shoplift, we were all too scared of getting caught, and it turned out we were hiding in a crack den.’ I gave a sudden, shocked laugh. ‘We didn’t even know what a crack den was . But these guys, they took us in, me and Ran and Chris and they looked after us. Properly, I mean, they got us a place to live and food and stuff. And okay, so we didn’t go to school much or anything but we were together, things were fine. Say what you like about street gangs, but they look after their own.’
‘You joined a gang ?’ Ben’s surprise was almost comical.
‘We talked posh. Well, according to them we did, anyway. And it’s surprising what people will believe from someone who talks “posh”. The gang used us, con tricks, distraction, that kind of thing.’ I took a long, deep breath. ‘I got the mark, I went on jobs. I was good .’ I defied Ben to speak but he stayed silent, watching me.
Breathe, Jemima. Breathe. It’s all over now.
‘Despite it all, Ran and I stayed clean, it was the only way to be ahead of the game, to be in control. But Chris . . . he joined a band.’ I gave a smile which was like a humour black hole. ‘Always loved his guitar, did Christian. Obsessive. Thought he’d make it big, get discovered, that kind of thing. He thought he could handle anything, he was very young, didn’t know what he was getting into, he didn’t know how hard it would be to get out of, he thought he could drop it any time but—’ I stopped.
Ben leaned forward and refilled my glass. ‘We’re talking about what? Heroin?’
I talked to my drink. ‘Have you ever? Tried it, I mean?’
Ben shook his head. ‘Nah. Hate needles, hate smoke. I’ve done most things but not smack. I know Zafe did it once or twice but . . .’ he shrugged. ‘Nothing heavy.’
‘It was heavy for Chris. Five years it took but eventually . . . he dumped the band, vanished for days, turned up rambling and sick. Even . . .’ I gave a strangled hiccup of ironic laughter. ‘Even sold his guitar. We tried to straighten him out, Ran and I, but—’
‘You have to want to stop. I should know. No-one can tell you.’
Despite the cosiness of the little room the air felt like a corpse. I should have known Ben wouldn’t flinch at this story. I should have trusted him.
‘While this was all going on I . . . got together with Gray. Ran warned me off him, told me to keep away but, I dunno. He was sexy. Dangerous but sexy. And I was seventeen, thought I was in love, so of course I wouldn’t listen to my brother, I mean, what did he know—’ My voice cracked and I took a deep gulp of the whisky, even though it was bitter and hot in my throat. ‘I thought love was meant to be like that.’
I could see Ben open his mouth to ask what it had been like, then think better of it. A little shiver ran over his skin and I saw the goosebumps rise.
‘Then Chris OD’d. One day, down a back alley in Bristol. He’d been sold some stuff that was pure and we didn’t find out for a week.’ I tilted my chin up to stop my voice cracking. I could still smell the smoky, foul odour that I’d grown to associate with Christian, still taste the fear at the back of my throat. ‘Ran found the guy who’d supplied Chris. It took time to track it all back, but he found him. Killed him.’ I licked my lips. There were no tears. Not now.
‘Wow.’ Ben rubbed the back of his neck. He was about to say more but I leaped in. He had to know it all.
‘I was there, I begged Ran to stop but he wouldn’t. Just kept on and on . . .’ I half covered my ears as though I expected the echoes still to be sounding. ‘I called an ambulance, and I lied, Ben. Told them that there was another gang trying to take over the area, that there’d been a fight. Oh, the police found out I was making it up, of course, it was hardly CSI and I’m not exactly a criminal mastermind. They got hold of Randall, open and shut case. I went to prison as an accessory.’ The cells, the noise, the relentless banging. No peace. Never any peace, not now .
‘But why? Why all this, over something that wasn’t your fault?’
‘Because the dealer was Gray.’ I drained the nearly full glass in one gulp. ‘And now you know. My judgement in men is so crappy that I spent nearly five years with a guy who was dealing heroin and I didn’t know. He was selling to my own brother and I didn’t know .’
‘Shit.’ Ben put down his glass.
I started talking quickly. ‘Ran went down for murder. For life. I was only inside six months and while I was there I learned to make jewellery so I took that and I ran away.’
‘And you’re still running?’
I nodded. Five years of running, of setting up and moving on. Of living in people’s spare rooms, in guest houses and squats. Of making just enough money to eat.
‘But why? What are you running from?’
‘Memories.’ I held out my glass for a refill and was proud of the way my hand didn’t shake. ‘I’ve blocked this all out. There’s some kind of psychologist’s word for it, but I’m good at not remembering now, if I don’t try it all stays dark. Ran died in prison. Knife fight. And once he was gone there was nothing to hold me, nothing to stay anywhere for. So I’ve kept on travelling. It keeps . . . it keeps the memories from surfacing. That’s why I didn’t know anything about Willow Down. I was abroad, working anywhere I could get a bed for the night. I’d make a few pieces and sell them to get enough money to move on whenever . . .’ I tailed off.
‘Whenever you felt you were getting settled? Oh, Jemima.’
I drained another glass. ‘And my name isn’t Jemima. It’s Gemma. Gemma Bredon. I chose Hutton off the map one day when I was passing through. York seemed such a nice place. Then I started supplying Saskia regularly. I met Rosie and I thought — I thought it might be different this time.’
Ben’s eyes were immense in the lamp light. ‘And I thought I was damaged,’ he said softly.
The whisky was making my head swim. ‘I’m pissed,’ I announced.
‘You wouldn’t have told me, not without a bit of Dutch courage.’ Ben held out an arm and hauled me to my feet.
‘I wanted you to know.’ His body was pressed against me, I could feel every bone through his clothes and smell the fresh, clean scent of him. His hair brushed against my neck. ‘But I thought you might hate me for it.’
‘Jem. What kind of guy do you think I am?’
‘It’s the fact you’re a guy. That’s all.’
He frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I rocked on my feet. ‘You know you said you didn’t date? Because you were afraid, of rejection, of not being perfect, of—’ I gestured rather wildly. ‘Of whatever,’ I finished. ‘I don’t date because I don’t want to make those mistakes again.’
I felt him flinch he was so close to me. ‘Like how?’
‘Look. Gray wasn’t — he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend, you know what I mean?’
‘ Jem .’ He breathed it rather than saying it.
‘There were other girls. And he’d flaunt it, tell me who he was getting off with, what they did for him that I didn’t. And he’d make me . . . He used me for everything, I was like his toy, you know? Something for him and his friends to play with, something that would take anything, do anything. And yeah, I knew deep down that’s not how it should be, but — I stayed. And, since then, I’ve promised myself no men. Nothing. Until I can feel that I’m a person, you know? In my own right, a something. Not just a thing bringing nothing to the relationship except my body. That’s why — I thought I was making it, with Saskia’s shop stocking my buckles and my website and everything and now, one by one, it’s all going down the pan and I’m right back where I started.’ I caught the sob before it escaped. ‘And I won’t be used again, Ben. I won’t.’
He took half a step away. ‘You think I’d use you? Christ, Jem, it’s not like that, not at all .’
‘I need to know that when . . . if . . . I walk away, I’m still the person I was. That I’m not losing myself by giving myself to someone. I can’t trust and I can’t . . . won’t depend on anyone for anything. So you can see, I’m not really girlfriend material.’ I stopped, aware of how stupidly close we were to one another.
‘Jem, we’re friends. You must know that, even with all the shit that you’ve had before, you must recognise a good thing when you see it?’
Now it was my turn to step back, to widen the physical gap as the psychological one was becoming a chasm. ‘You mean that because you’ve got all this . . .’ I swept an arm round indicating the house. ‘That I’m supposed magically to throw off the memories of everything that’s happened to me? Because you’ve got cash to spare, suddenly the death of my brothers doesn’t matter ?’ My voice was icy.
‘That’s not what I meant at all and I think you know it. You’re using your past to stop you from having to make yourself a present.’
‘You know nothing about it.’
‘Yes, I do.’ His voice was low. I had to lean a little closer to hear him. ‘What do you think I was doing, Jem? Pushing everyone away, keeping the deafness secret? It was all so that I never had to face up to it. If I never told anyone then maybe it wasn’t real, maybe I wouldn’t have to live with it forever. That’s what you’re doing, denying the problem, moving on whenever life starts to get real just so you never have to face it.’
‘You know nothing ,’ I repeated and stalked out of the room feeling the weight of his gaze on my back. I looked over my shoulder, just once, to see him raking his hands through his already dishevelled hair and rubbing his tired-looking face and I almost turned. Almost. I wanted him so much that it ached. But why would things be any different here, with him?