Welcome To Wherever You Are

by John Marrs

  As he took a break from flirting with the girl Matty had pointed out, Declan trudged across the sand to check on his friend and bumped into a fellow hosteller. They’d seen each other around the building many times and had enjoyed brief conversations, but the beach was the first place either of them had taken any time to do more than exchange pleasantries.

  The conversation flowed naturally without Declan relying on his tried and tested lines, jokes and flattery, and he became slowly aware that he was winning her over simply by being himself. For the first time in a long time, if ever, Declan found himself making plans to meet a girl the next morning for breakfast, rather than waking up with her.

  Nicole was feeling the same way. Butterflies only circled her stomach when something awful loomed, but now, chatting to Declan, their wings felt lighter. Their easygoing repartee came as a welcome distraction from Eric’s betrayal, Ruth’s breakdown and Tommy’s mood swings. Declan made her laugh at a time when she’d have been well within her rights to cry until Christmas.

  With plans made, Declan traipsed towards Matty with a spring in his step.

  ‘Lazy bollocks, you’ll never guess who I’ve been gassing with,’ he began, and sat down beside his friend. Declan couldn’t take his eyes off Nicole as she chatted to another hosteller, occasionally looking over to him but pretending she wasn’t. ‘That Nicole girl, Tommy’s mate. She’s a bit special that one, d’you hear me?’

  When Matty didn’t acknowledge him, Declan turned to see him lying on his back, his head resting on a folded blanket and his eyes snapped tightly shut. Declan turned his head again to stare at the party in front of them.

  ‘Hey, sleepy head, party’s over. Let’s get you home.’

  Even as the words tripped from his mouth, Declan knew Matty had left him. For a full minute, he remained as lifeless as his friend, processing the fact that the inevitable had arrived.

  Then, gently, he placed Matty’s limp hand into the palm of his own and stared up into the night sky as a fireworks display illuminated them in whites, greens and oranges.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ Declan whispered. ‘I’m still not ready.’

  CHAPTER 88

  ‘Stuart.’

  Tommy pronounced such a simple word with such venomous precision, there was no doubt in Jake’s mind his cover was blown. But he didn’t want to admit it.

  ‘No, that’s not possible,’ Jake muttered, his muscular shoulders dropping by the weight of his shame.

  ‘It is, Stuart, believe me. I am walking, talking, proof that it is possible.’

  Jake took two steps back, and with wide-open eyes, he glared at Tommy, hoping to find something in his friend’s expression that revealed this was some kind of sick prank. But there was nothing but abhorrence etched deeply into Tommy’s face.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ONE DAY EARLIER – VENICE BEACH

  In desperate need of solitude in a city of noise, Tommy slipped José a bag of weed and locked himself in the store cupboard of the hotdog trailer.

  The 10 foot by 10 foot room was windowless and reeked of cheap frankfurters, but it was air conditioned, and most importantly, quiet. Tommy felt like someone had used his head as a football, leaving his thoughts jumbled and nonsensical. The dark clouds were rolling in as everything he thought he knew about Jake was in flux.

  He removed his iPhone from his pocket and waited for a signal to appear, then he skipped through his photos until he found the one with Jake’s torso tattoos on display. Then, making a mental note of the final coordinates, he typed 52.2189N and 0.9202W into the search engine. He watched carefully as they threw up the location of where Jake’s journey had begun – Hunsbury, Northampton; the place where Tommy’s life changed with the speed of the car that smashed into him; the tarmac graveyard where his brothers were killed and he was left to die; where Stuart Reynolds ceased to exist and the journey of Jake Bellamy began.

  A strangely calm Tommy took the memory card he had, until now, refused to view and placed it inside his camcorder. His finger hovered above a button, then he closed his eyes and braced himself before he pressed play.

  First came what he’d recorded as their car drove through the streets of Northampton, and goosebumps bubbled across his arms upon hearing the voices of his brothers teasing him about porn websites they knew he secretly surfed. Then came their words of encouragement about finding a job, and Tommy knew what was coming next.

  The footage was shaky as his camera had flown around the car upon impact, and then the screen turned black. Tommy sat in silence recalling the smells of broken fluid pipes, the sharpness of glass crunching beneath his legs and the sounds of panicked onlookers outside. He remembered the confusion over what had just happened before he realised Lee and Daniel’s fate.

  He hadn’t realised he’d closed his eyes until a noise brought him back to his senses. He thought someone else was in the room, before noticing the camcorder hadn’t stopped recording that day. It must have landed somewhere near to him on the back seat, he thought, and when he’d moved, it had sprung back to life, the autofocus settling on the shattered windscreen.

  At first he heard the concerned voices of witnesses in the distance, then slowly, he watched as a figure – a face mainly shadowed by a hoodie – slowly limped past the car.

  Tommy rewound the footage and watched it again, and then pressed pause. When he zoomed in, Stuart and Jake’s bloody face filled the screen.

  *

  TODAY

  ‘We looked at each other, do you remember?’ continued Tommy. ‘You were running away from the Mini when suddenly you turned around . . . and just for a split second we made eye contact. Then puff, you disappeared, just like that.’

  In rare moments when Jake’s subconscious caught him off guard, he recalled the moment that altered the course of his life with such clarity, it was like yesterday. Then in the days that followed as he plotted starting his life anew in a succession of cheap hotel rooms, he’d turn the television off and avoid newspaper pages when confronted by the names and faces of those he killed so as not to risk humanising them.

  ‘Tommy . . .’ Jake began, his eyes having conceded defeat. But Tommy wasn’t prepared to listen.

  ‘It was a journalist who tipped us off that the police were looking into you in connection with the crash, but the police refused to confirm it, even after you supposedly died. And I remembered seeing you on TV the morning of the accident; they said you had something to do with the death of that soap star. I mean, I knew who you and your shitty band were anyway, but I’d never really taken much notice of you. Then as hard as they tried, the police couldn’t find any concrete proof it was your fault. Your fingerprints were all over that car so it should have been a no-brainer, but there was never any evidence you were behind the wheel that day. Your manager refused to confirm you’d stolen it; there was no footage of you on CCTV, no blood or DNA on the airbag, and no you. They couldn’t even question you because you’d vanished. And then when they told us it looked like you’d killed yourself, everyone thought it was something to do with that girl dying. The police never named you as a suspect in our crash so you got away with it. But I knew who you were and what you did, and even hearing one of your songs, like the one the girls were dancing to on the Xbox game, made me so angry.’

  Jake brushed his hand through his hair and rubbed his cheeks. He’d spent the last few years learning how to organise his thoughts and place those that frightened him to the back of his mind. He’d explored a multitude of religions and belief systems; he’d learned from teachers and seers and read books and pamphlets, all to help him understand how to move forward and turn his back on the reckless stupidity of his actions. His ribs were inked with the coordinates of every location he’d seen, to remind him of how far he had travelled both physically and spiritually. And just when he’d forgiven himself for his actions and found the peace he craved, his past and his present were colliding with the speed of a runaway freight train.

  ‘
I was obsessed with you at first,’ Tommy continued. ‘I must have surfed a thousand pictures of your face to try and work out if it was you I saw while I was trapped in the back of the car and I could never be 100 per cent sure. But my gut instinct was that it was you. I hated you . . . in fact hated is probably too much of an understatement. But your suicide, well, that made the pain ease a little – not much, mind – but eventually it was just about enough to help me crawl out of my hole and start trying to live my life again. Only now I find out you’re not just alive but that you and I have . . . that we’ve . . . shit, I can’t even say it . . . now you’ve made me hate both of us, not just you.’

  Jake swallowed hard, his arms and legs trembling with Tommy’s every word. Eventually, when he thought Tommy was ready to listen, he spoke.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tommy, I’m so, so sorry,’ he began. ‘I need you to understand, I was a different person then; I was so fucked up – I’d lost everything I’d ever worked for. I was at such a low point and I wasn’t thinking straight, and when that accident happened, I panicked and I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘So what you chose to do was to run away. You killed my brothers and then you ran away.’

  ‘People on the street were coming to help you, I saw them, that’s why I left. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘But you didn’t know that for certain, did you, Stuart?’

  Jake’s lips parted and he wanted to defend his actions but he knew he couldn’t.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ continued Tommy, before raising his fist and catching Jake clean on the jaw.

  CHAPTER 89

  Savannah dreamed she was floating somewhere between the bed in her new home and the ceiling above her.

  She felt her body drift through the door and turn mid-air above the landing and gradually descend the stairs. But when she felt two arms supporting her back and legs, she understood she wasn’t floating, she was being carried.

  She opened her eyes but the walls surrounding her swirled like water slipping down a plughole. Her lips and throat felt parched and when she tried to speak, she could only hear herself mumble. Instantly she likened the feeling to when she stumbled out of the club and into the path of Peyk’s car and a new terror began to rip through her. But her body was too sedated to spring back into life.

  Savannah was lugged across the hallway and paused when she reached the lounge. Through her misty eyes, she thought she saw Jane, sitting on a wooden chair with something covering the smile Savannah had found so kindly. Something wasn’t right, and when her eyes slowly began to focus, she quickly realised Jane’s mouth had been gagged and her arms and feet bound to the wicker chair legs.

  Scared, Savannah desperately wanted to kick and punch the person carrying her, but her limbs barely twitched. However, it was enough to make the person whose arms held her notice the dead weight he was lifting was reviving.

  ‘It’s okay, Savvy, I’m gonna get you out of here,’ a male voice whispered. Savannah’s tired eyes slowly widened. She looked down at his strong, bare, brown arms and then up towards his face.

  ‘Michael?’ she mouthed, and felt the familiar warmth of his breath as he carried her out the front door, down the path and towards his station wagon that had been parked out of view for much of the day.

  CHAPTER 90

  Jake staggered backwards and clutched the jaw Tommy had just whacked.

  Tommy clasped his fist with his other hand, in obvious pain but trying hard to disguise it. Jake began to pace up and down, hoping the movement would jolt his thoughts back into a normal running order.

  ‘What happened, happened, and there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by where I haven’t prayed to God it hadn’t,’ Jake offered, his palm still clenched to his face. ‘You don’t know how bad I feel.’

  Tommy narrowed his eyes and laughed. ‘How bad you feel, Stuart? Really? So this is about how you feel, is it?’

  ‘No, no, that’s not what I meant,’ continued Jake, closing his eyes and growing frustrated with himself. ‘Tommy; Stuart Reynolds died as well that day. I don’t want to be the person I was then, and I’m not, I swear to you, I’m not. You know me, the real me.’

  ‘The real you is a coward who thinks a couple of months in a Buddhist temple means he’s absolved of all his sins. Well, newsflash, Stuart, you’re not. It’s nowhere near enough.’

  Suddenly Jake’s emotions got the better of him and his eyes became watery. ‘Tommy, please . . .’ he begged and put his hand on Tommy’s arm.

  ‘Take that off me or so help me God, I will kill you.’

  ‘I understand why you’re upset.’

  ‘You have no idea what I am!’

  When Tommy felt Jake’s fingers grip him tighter, Tommy pushed him hard in the shoulder. Desperate to prove to Tommy his sincerity, Jake tried to hold Tommy’s arm again, but Tommy punched him hard on the side of his face. Jake lost his balance and fell to the ground as Tommy winced at the pain in his knuckles and fingers.

  ‘Why did you run away?’ yelled Tommy. ‘Why did you just leave us?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking straight,’ continued Jake, pulling himself up to his feet. ‘I didn’t think there was anything I could do to help.’

  ‘You couldn’t know that because you didn’t stay to find out.’

  ‘I know! I know! But Tommy, we can work our way through this, I know it won’t be easy, but I really believe we can if you just try. You have to give me a chance.’

  ‘You know what the most pathetic thing about all of this is, Stuart?’ Tommy wiped his eyes and sniffed up the mucus dripping from his nostrils. ‘Me. I’m the most pathetic thing because I thought if I couldn’t “be” you then maybe I could be “with” you. How fucking stupid is that? That I wanted to be with the person who destroyed my family.’

  ‘It’s not too late, I promise you.’

  Tommy shook his head and glared at Jake. He had said everything he needed to say but he felt no better. Jake’s explanation hadn’t made a blind bit of difference and Tommy knew he must walk away now or risk his anger getting the better of him.

  As he began to leave, Jake grabbed hold of his arm one last time. And it was all that was needed to tip Tommy over the edge. Tommy hit Jake again, missing his face and catching his neck. Jake staggered backwards and Tommy’s second blow caught him on the bridge of his nose. Both of them heard the bone pop. Neither the noise nor the pain in Tommy’s fist stopped him from raining more blows on Jake’s head as his adversary attempted to shield himself with his forearms. Jake refused to retaliate and staggered backwards into the railings while Tommy continued on autopilot, unleashing every drop of wrath and ferocity his body possessed until he was close to empty.

  There they remained, rooted to the floorboards of the pier, exhausted, battered, bruised and breathing heavily before Jake finally spoke.

  ‘I love you, Tommy,’ he pleaded.

  One final blow to the side of Jake’s head was all it took for him to topple backwards off the pier and into the choppy waters below.

  CHAPTER 91

  ‘He’s dead,’ came a voice in a measured tone.

  Tommy stopped in his tracks, and turned around slowly to see Declan staring at the words Welcome to Wherever You Are on the poster in the hostel reception before him. Tommy’s mind raced ten to the dozen, trying to figure out how Declan could have known what had happened between him and Jake on the pier.

  ‘He’s dead,’ repeated Declan.

  ‘It wasn’t what it looked like,’ Tommy replied carefully. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘He was my best mate.’

  Tommy paused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Matty’s . . . gone. He’s . . . dead.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, I’m sorry.’ Tommy felt a combination of relief that his secret was safe and sympathy for Declan’s loss.

  The diversity of Venice Beach’s occupants and visitors made the unusual, usual. So nobody who passed Declan carrying Matty’s body over his shoulder along the board
walk had given the friends a second glance.

  Once Declan had returned Matty to the security of the hostel and carefully laid his body on his bed, he was at a loss as what to do next, so he ventured through the silent corridors and back towards reception. There, he slumped to the floor and leant against a wall, entwining the fingers of both his hands together like he was in prayer. He fixated on the poster’s words and knew that without Matty by his side, Declan had no idea where he was.

  Meanwhile Tommy was short of breath, having run the mile and a half from Santa Monica back to Venice, only stopping midway to prop himself up against a parking meter and to vomit into the road.

  Over and over again, he replayed the two seconds it took for Jake to disappear over the pier’s railings and the heavy sound the water made when his body plunged into it. Tommy squinted into the dark waves below him, horrified by what he’d done, calling Jake’s name, not Stuart’s, but receiving no response. He sprinted the length of the pier and then back on himself across the beach, rushing waist high into the water shouting for Jake over and again. In desperation, he used the flashlight app on his phone, but it wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate more than a couple of metres ahead. And after a frantic fifteen minutes or so, he knew it was too late.

  Tommy hurried back towards the beach party and his head swept from side to side, hoping against all hope to catch sight of a soaking wet Jake amongst the revellers, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Suddenly feeling exposed and vulnerable, Tommy made the decision to return to the hostel.

  It was only while he ran that Tommy noted the irony of his actions. He had followed the same path as Stuart Reynolds; rather than face up to a terrible mistake, contact the authorities and suffer the consequences, he’d taken the easy way out and simply run away. Nevertheless, by the time he reached the hostel entrance, he knew he was in too deep and had to clean up the mess he’d created.