by Kevin Brooks
‘Your past, Raymond,’ she said softly, indicating the card on her left, the Nine of Spades. ‘You’ve not always had the happiest of times, have you?’ She looked at him. ‘It’s been hard… looking for things, things that weren’t always there.’ She paused for a moment, glancing down at the cards again, and I could see the sadness weighing her down. ‘There was a time, I think, when you had what you needed. When you were young… I think you had some closeness then. You had some security. But there have been too many troubles since. Too many misunderstandings… misplaced desires.’ She looked up again, her eyes seeming to reach out across the table. ‘Nothing is to blame, Raymond,’ she whispered powerfully. ‘These things… your world… the way you see things, the way the world sees you… these things are your things, your life… you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Raymond breathed.
‘You know the moments of light.’
He nodded.
She looked down at the cards again. ‘Your cards,’ she muttered, moving her hand over all three of them, ‘three Spades… their darkness tells me of hard times. Confusion. Anxiety. Perhaps even…’ She hesitated a moment, placing her finger on the middle card, the Ten of Spades. ‘Your moments of light… you must hold on to them. Even now…’ She tapped the card. ‘This is now… the present. A time of great change. The things around you are moving – your friends, your places, your…’ She frowned slightly. ‘Your concerns.’ She looked up at Raymond. ‘You have great kindness.’
He shook his head. ‘No…’
‘Selflessness then. You care for others without thinking of yourself.’
Raymond said nothing.
The woman smiled. ‘Your moments of light put the darkness to shame.’
Raymond was never very good with compliments, and as I looked down at him, sensing his awkwardness, I couldn’t help smiling at the flush of embarrassment reddening the back of his neck. I had no idea what was going on, but whatever it was, it somehow gave me an immense sense of pride.
It was a nice moment – a moment that seemed to float in the air – and as I stood there in the cooling silence of the tent, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted it to be the end – no more words, no more noise, no more nothing. If I could have waved a wand and magicked us both out of there while that moment was still all there was…
But there was no magic.
There never is.
The moment always ends.
I looked down as Raymond nervously rubbed the back of his neck. I saw his hand, his bitten-down fingernails, the dusty shine of his unruly black hair… and I saw him lean forward and point to the last card on the table, the Ace of Spades, his eyes fixed anxiously on the woman.
‘Is this my future?’ he asked her.
I could see a strange conflict in her eyes as she looked back at him, and when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly hesitant. ‘It’s difficult sometimes…’ she told him. ‘I have to read each card in relation to the other cards… and sometimes this can make things unclear…’
‘It’s a bad card,’ Raymond said. ‘The Ace of Spades.’
‘Not necessarily –’
‘The death card.’
The woman shook her head. ‘It’s not that simple, Raymond. Yes, it can be a very destructive card, but it can also mean the end of the bad times and the beginning of something new.’ She looked at him. ‘Life is not life without death.’
Raymond stared at her. ‘Is someone going to die?’
She didn’t answer him for a moment, and I felt like screaming at her – don’t hesitate, for God’s sake, just say no! – but she seemed curiously reluctant to commit herself. I realize now that it was a difficult question to answer. Is someone going to die? Well, of course, someone was going to die. Someone, somewhere, is always going to die. But that wasn’t what Raymond had meant, and the woman was perfectly aware of that.
‘Our futures are infinite,’ she said eventually. ‘Every second of every day, we choose which way to go. And every time we make that choice, another aspect of ourselves – another self – makes a different choice. So everything is always possible, and everything always happens. But because we are only one among an infinity of ourselves, the odds of anything happening to us, at any particular time or place, are almost non-existent.’
‘But things happen,’ said Raymond.
‘Yes, things happen.’
‘Bad things?’
She nodded. ‘Sometimes…’
‘Tonight?’
She gazed silently at Raymond for a second or two, her eyes gleaming darkly, then she slowly leaned back in her chair and smiled. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘you should go home. It’s late. You’ve had a long day.’ She glanced up at me. ‘And I think your friend here is anxious to be somewhere else.’
Despite everything, I found myself smiling at her.
She smiled back at me, then stood up and gazed down at Raymond. He didn’t move for a moment, he just sat there, perfectly still, staring intently at the cards on the table.
‘Raymond?’ the woman said.
He looked up at her.
‘Go home,’ she said gently.
He seemed a little unsteady as he got to his feet, and when he turned round to face me, his skin was very pale.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, smiling. ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ He looked around the tent for a moment, frowning slightly, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was, then he turned back to the woman and bowed his head at her.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She bowed back. ‘Thank you.’
They carried on looking at each other for a while, and I thought one of them was going to say something else, but after a few seconds Raymond just turned round and started heading for the doorway. As I turned to follow him, I heard the woman calling out quietly.
‘Wait, please,’ she said.
I thought she was talking to Raymond, but when I glanced over my shoulder I saw her scuttling up to me, her eyes fixed on mine. I looked round and saw Raymond disappearing out of the tent.
I quickly turned back to the woman. ‘I’d better go –’
She put her hand on my arm and looked me in the eye. ‘Look after him,’ she whispered urgently. ‘I know you don’t believe in these things, but please… take care.’ She squeezed my arm, then gave me a little shove. ‘Go… be with your friend. Take him home.’
Raymond was waiting for me outside the tent. He was just standing there, seemingly oblivious to everything around him – the crowds, the noise, the lights, the madness – and as I went up to him, I could see that familiar lost and lonely look on his face. The quietness, the stillness, the faint secret fluttering of his lips.
‘Hey,’ I said to him.
He looked at me.
I smiled. ‘The toilets are just over there.’
‘Toilets…’ he muttered, gazing slowly in the direction of the Portaloos.
‘I don’t know about you,’ I said. ‘But I really need to go.’
He didn’t say anything, he just carried on staring into the distance.
I took his arm. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘You don’t really believe in any of that stuff, do you?’ I asked him as we walked over to the toilets.
‘I don’t think it matters…’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Anything.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but the future… all that weird stuff about infinity and choices… I mean, she’s supposed to be a fortune-teller, but it seems to me like she was trying to say that it’s impossible to know what’s going to happen.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Raymond said again.
I didn’t know what else to say. I mean, what can you say when someone keeps telling you that nothing matters?
‘It’s all right,’ Raymond said suddenly. ‘I know there’s nothing to worry about. They’re only cards. Cards don’t mean anything.’ He looked at me, his eyes worryingly bright. ‘What I
can’t understand is where we are.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Where are we in time?’ he said. ‘You know… where do we exist? When do we exist? In the past, the present, the future? I mean, we don’t live in the past, do we? And we don’t live in the future. So that only leaves the present.’ He was grinning a bit too madly for my liking now. ‘But when’s the present?’ he said. ‘When is now? How long does it last? A second, half a second… a millionth of a second? You can’t just be alive in a millionth of a second, can you? It doesn’t make sense.’
None of it made any sense to me.
Raymond suddenly flinched and clutched at his stomach.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
I quickly ushered him over to a vacant Portaloo. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, opening the door for him. ‘You’ll be all right…’
He groaned and heaved.
‘Go on,’ I told him, guiding him inside. ‘I’ll wait for you…’ I glanced at the adjacent cubicle and saw that it was vacant. ‘If I’m not here, I’ll be in there, OK?’
He stumbled inside and pulled the door shut.
I heard him retching and throwing up, and the sound of it made my belly start heaving. Swallowing hard, I hurried over to the Portaloo next door, yanked it open, and got to the toilet just in time.
Eight
I only stayed in the Portaloo for as long as it took to do what I had to do, but unfortunately I had to do quite a lot, and you can’t exactly rush things when you’re in a situation like that, can you? I mean, I’m not going to go into any details or anything, but if you’ve ever been stuck in a shoebox-sized cubicle, desperately trying to empty yourself from too many orifices all at the same time… well, I’m sure you’ll understand.
I did my best, though – I tried to hurry – and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in there for all that long. Three or four minutes, maybe…
Five at the very most.
And, besides, I’d told Raymond to wait for me, hadn’t I? If I’m not here, I’d told him, I’ll be in there.
I’d told him that.
But I suppose I should have known better.
I should have known he wouldn’t be there when I came out.
I wasn’t worried at first, I just assumed he was still in the toilet, and even when I saw someone else going into the Portaloo next to mine, which I knew was the one that Raymond had been in, I still didn’t want to admit to myself that anything was wrong. I’d got the Portaloos mixed up, that was all… I’d made a mistake. Raymond must have been in another one…
But I knew I was only kidding myself.
Why else would I be looking around, trying to see where he was… why else would my heart be beating so hard?
He’d gone. He wasn’t there.
‘Shit,’ I muttered.
I stayed where I was for a while, just looking all around, but it was so hard to see anything through all the crowds, and everything was still spinning and whirling and flashing and crashing, and the lunatic music was still blaring out… it was useless.
Raymond could be anywhere.
I looked over at the fortune-teller’s tent, wondering if maybe he’d gone back there, but all I could see was the fortune-teller herself, standing quietly in the doorway of the tent, watching all the people pass by. She hadn’t seen him, I was sure of that. No matter what I thought of her – and I still didn’t know what that was – I knew she wouldn’t be standing there so calmly if she’d seen Raymond walking around on his own. I could still hear the urgency in her voice – Look after him… be with your friend… take him home – and there was no doubt in my mind that she’d meant it.
No doubt at all…
I started walking towards her.
I really don’t think that I did have any doubts, I was simply heading back to the fortune-teller’s tent because I didn’t know where else to go. She was there, that was all, a familiar face in the crowd, and even if she didn’t know anything – and I was fairly sure that she didn’t – at least I could talk to her. And there was something inside me just then that really needed to talk to someone.
I was still looking around as I walked, still keeping my eyes open for Raymond, and as I passed a little burger kiosk, about ten metres away from the tent, I thought for a moment I’d found him. A bunch of kids in front of me were making a lot of noise and shoving each other around, and as one of them dived to one side and barged another one into a passing group of girls – causing a gap to appear in the crowds – I caught a quick glimpse of a sad-looking face up ahead… a face that I knew. I realized almost immediately that it wasn’t Raymond, and even as I started moving to one side to get a better look, I already knew who I was going to see.
It was Pauly.
He was sitting on a bench over to my left, just a few metres away. The bench was set back in a little gap between the burger kiosk and a row of litter-filled oil drums, and Pauly was just sitting there, all on his own, staring straight ahead.
I don’t know what made me do it, but instead of just going up to him, I found myself edging round the back of the burger kiosk and watching him from the shadows. Physically, he didn’t look anything like Raymond, and despite my guilt-fuelled desperation to see Raymond’s face, it was hard to believe that I’d mistaken Pauly for him, even if it had been only for a moment. But as I stood there watching Pauly now, I began to see things in him that I hadn’t really seen before – a lostness, a loneliness, a darkness – and I realized that maybe he wasn’t that different from Raymond after all.
He hadn’t moved since I’d been watching him – he was still just sitting there, slightly hunched over, and he was still just staring straight ahead, peering intently through the passing crowds at something on the other side of the walkway. I leaned to one side and followed his gaze, trying to see what he was looking at. It was hard to focus on anything at first – the streams of people kept getting in the way – but after I’d been staring for a while, my eyes got used to looking through the spaces in the crowds, and I began to see things quite clearly.
Between the far end of the Portaloos on the right, and three parked fairground lorries on the left, there was a ragged square of shadowed ground. Another lorry blocked the back of the square, and behind it I could just make out the railings of the recreation ground and the dimly lit street beyond. Generators were chugging away at the back of the lorries, their thick black cables snaking out in all directions, and the trampled ground was littered with empty beer cans and burger boxes. The square was relatively dark – the high-sided lorries shading it from the lights of the nearest rides – but there was still enough residual light to make out the faces of the figures hanging around in the shadows. Most of them were just faces, the kinds of faces you’d expect to see in a nowhere place – hard and empty, hooded, drunk. They weren’t doing much, just the usual slouching around, watching and waiting, hoping for something to happen. Just off to one side, though, standing with their backs to one of the lorries, there were two figures I didn’t expect to see.
Eric Leigh and Wes Campbell.
That’s who Pauly was watching – Eric Leigh and Wes Campbell.
I looked back at Pauly for a moment, wondering what the hell was going on, then I turned my attention back to Eric and Campbell. Although they looked quite comfortable with each other – standing side by side, talking quietly, their shoulders occasionally touching, their heads occasionally nodding – they both seemed kind of anxious about something. Their eyes kept flicking around, especially Eric’s, and it was pretty obvious he’d rather be somewhere else. As I carried on watching them, I realized that their attention was fixed on something, or someone, in the darkness at the back of the Portaloos, and I thought for a moment that it might be Raymond. Maybe he was hurt or something… maybe he’d come out of the Portaloos and something had happened to him, he’d got beaten up or something, and now he was lying in the darkness at the back of t
he Portaloos…?
But I quickly dismissed that idea. Even though Eric had never really cared too much about Raymond, I was still pretty sure that he wouldn’t just stand there doing nothing if he knew that Raymond was hurt.
No, I told myself, even Eric wouldn’t do that.
I still carried on looking, though, scanning the area around the Portaloos, just in case something had happened, but there was no sign of anything untoward, no evidence of anyone getting beaten up… and definitely no Raymond. I saw some of the people I’d seen with Stella earlier on – a few of her hangers-on, the guy with the camera, one of her security men – and I watched them for a while, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything. They were just hanging around, trying to look cool – which wasn’t that easy in front of a row of Portaloos. I couldn’t see Stella anywhere, so I guessed she wasn’t with them any more… and even if she had been, I was pretty sure that Raymond wouldn’t have hooked up with her again.
Or maybe he would…?
Christ, I didn’t know what to think.
I shook my head – sick of myself for not knowing what I was doing – then I went over and sat down beside Pauly.
It took him a second to realize who I was, and as soon as he did, his face suddenly changed. The sadness disappeared, the loneliness left him, and he was back to his old grinning self.
‘Hey, Pete… you all right?’
His eyes seemed blurred for a moment, and I wondered briefly if they were trying to catch up with the rest of his face, trying to fit in with the mask…
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, rubbing his eyes and frowning at me. ‘What are you looking at?’
