Being

by Kevin Brooks

  I stuffed the videotape into the rucksack, leaving everything else, and went across to the door. I paused for a moment, listening at the door, then I slowly opened it. The hallway was empty. I put my hand in my pistol pocket, moved out into the hallway, and paused again.

  Which way should I go?

  The lifts were to the left; the stairs were to the right.

  Come on, think.

  Which way?

  Left or right?

  I turned right and headed for the stairs.

  Just as I got to the stairway door, I heard footsteps down below. Hurried steps, coming up the stairs. I let go of the door and stepped back, scanning the hallway for another way out. I glanced down at the lifts, then back at the stairs again.

  The lifts were too risky.

  Maybe I could go up the stairs…?

  Then I saw the door. It was just past the stairway. A glass-panelled door with a sign on it: no admittance - staff only. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just hurried over, glanced quickly through the glass panel, then pushed open the door and stepped through into a cold and gloomy corridor. As the door swung shut, I heard the distant ting of the lift arriving behind me. I turned round, crouched down behind the door, and peered back through the glass panel. At the end of the hallway, two figures were emerging from the lift. One of them was a sharp-eyed woman in a cream-coloured raincoat. The other one was Ryan. Black coat, hard face, cold silver eyes. As he turned and said something to the woman – who I guessed was Hayes – a third figure entered the hallway from the stairs. A dark-haired man in a suit. He passed directly in front of me, headed down the hallway and stopped outside room 624.

  I squatted down, out of sight, then turned round and started crawling away from the door. After I’d gone about ten metres or so, I got to my feet and started running - down the corridor, through another door, then along another short corridor to another door and a zigzag flight of stairs.

  As I hurried down the stairs – my footsteps echoing around the cold stone walls – I felt an empty sickness growing inside me. It wasn’t a physical sickness, it was just the sudden realization that what was happening was happening. I was running. I was being chased. I was being hunted. It was happening. And it wasn’t anything like a scene from a film or a book, or something from a dream. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t a game.

  It was just shit.

  At the bottom of the stairs was another door, this one marked PRIVATE. It was a drab-looking thing, barely painted, with a tarnished brass handle and a flap of frayed rubber fixed to the bottom edge. I shoved it open and found myself in a greasy little room with a bank of grey lockers around the walls. I guessed it was a staffroom. There was a table, chairs, a hot-water urn, a sink. Across the room was another door. As I headed towards it, I reached up and snatched an old trilby hat from the top of one of the lockers. I put it on. It was a good fit. A pathetic disguise, but a good fit.

  I was halfway through the door when a distant shout broke the silence: ‘Angela!’

  A man’s voice. It came from the corridor outside. I heard footsteps approaching, then the shouting voice again: ‘Angela! Where are you?’

  I hurried through the door, along another dim corridor, through another door, along another corridor… doors, corridors… doors, corridors… I just kept going. The further I went, the gloomier it got. Cheap linoleum flooring, stained and curled. Clammy-looking walls, dripping pipes, peeling paintwork…

  ‘Who are you?’

  The voice came from behind me. I stopped suddenly and turned round. A dark-eyed girl in a green uniform-dress was standing in a doorway, staring at me. She looked nervous and offended, rubbing a thumb into the palm of her hand. The name badge on her dress said ANGELA.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I’m lost. I’m a guest… I… uhh… got lost.’

  ‘This is staff only,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m lost.’

  She closed the door behind her and stepped to one side, revealing a sign on the door that said ladies. She was very short, this Angela, just over five feet tall. She had a plain face and small features. Her dark-brown hair was fastened with a plastic hairband. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. She was looking at me as if she was trying to place my face, and it was making us both uneasy.

  ‘Where did you get that hat?’ she asked me.

  ‘What?’

  She was looking at the trilby on my head. ‘That’s Walter’s hat.’

  ‘Who’s Walter?’

  ‘That’s his hat. Why are you wearing his hat?’

  ‘I’m not… this is mine. I’ve had it for ages…’

  She stepped back a little more, glancing nervously over her shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she repeated. ‘This is staff only.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ I smiled at her. ‘Do you think you could show me the way out?’

  ‘Back there,’ she said, gesturing with her head, ‘the same way you came.’

  I smiled again. ‘Is there another way? Out on to the street? I was on my way out, you see. I have to meet someone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  It was a good question.

  ‘Well… I’m late. I got lost. I have to meet someone.’ I shrugged. ‘I just thought there might be another way out. You know, a back exit.’

  I was doing my best, but it didn’t seem to be working. Angela kept edging away from me.

  ‘You have to go,’ she said.

  I pointed down the corridor. ‘Can I get out down there? Is there a back door?’

  She didn’t answer, she just stared at me, chewing on her lip, and I could see that she was losing it. Her eyes were blinking too fast. Her lips were quivering. Any second now, I thought, she’s going to start screaming. And I knew I couldn’t let that happen. I could feel my fingers tightening on the pistol in my pocket. I didn’t like how it felt. I didn’t like what I was thinking.

  But then, somewhere in the distance, a door slammed shut, breaking the silence, and Angela suddenly said, ‘Just down there, at the end of the corridor. There’s a door on the right.’

  And without another word she scuttled away.

  I watched her go, wondering if this was how it was going to be from now on – running all the time, lying to people, scaring people, not caring, just doing what had to be done.

  I didn’t like it.

  The door on the right at the end of the corridor was a fire door. I pushed down on the bar and stepped out into an alleyway lined with wheelie bins and piles of flattened cardboard boxes. Nothing happened. No gunshots, no blinding lights, no shouts to surrender. It was cold and wet. The sky was yellowy-grey. The air smelled of traffic fumes.

  I hitched the rucksack over my shoulder, pulled down my hat and headed for the street.

  8

  A thin grey drizzle of rain was falling when I came out of the hotel alleyway on to the street. The roads were busy, packed with rush-hour traffic, and the narrow pavements were crowded with people on their way to work. I glanced down the street to my left. The hotel entrance was about twenty metres away. Two uniformed policemen were guarding the doors, and standing next to them was a man in a bulky black coat. The man in the coat was talking to someone on a hand-held radio. Police vehicles were parked on double-yellow lines in front of the hotel – two patrol cars, a Transit van, a Range Rover.

  I stepped back into the alleyway, wiped some sweat from my brow, then cautiously leaned out and took another look.

  The hotel doors were opening now. A familiar-looking head popped out and said something to the man in the coat. The man in the coat listened, then nodded, and the head popped back in again.

  Ryan.

  The man in the coat said something to one of the police officers, then he moved down the steps and started scanning the street. I waited until he was looking away from me, then I stepped out of the alleyway and turned right, wa
lking as confidently as I could. No faltering, no running, no looking back. I was just another body in the street. Same as all the rest. Going to school, going to work… just another human being.

  A short distance ahead of me, a single-decker bus was juddering to a halt at a bus stop. As the doors swooshed open and a ragged queue of people started shuffling forward, I joined the back of the queue and started shuffling along with them – just another passenger, going to school, going to work. Same as all the rest. We smelled of sweat and damp clothing. We slid our feet, taking tiny little steps, inching towards the bus doors. We were impatient and tired, cold and wet.

  Rubbing wearily at the side of my face, I risked a quick glance at the hotel.

  There were more men milling around the entrance now. More men, more searching eyes. More cars pulling up. As I watched, some of the men started running towards the alleyway.

  Passers-by were beginning to stop and stare.

  I heard a shout, the blip of a siren, street murmurings.

  ‘What’s going on?’ someone in the bus queue said.

  I kept my head down and kept shuffling. The queue was getting shorter. I was nearly there now.

  Another shout rang out from the hotel: ‘Round the back!’

  I stepped on to the bus.

  The man in front of me dropped some coins into the bus driver’s tray.

  ‘Stratford,’ he said.

  The driver pressed buttons.

  The man took his ticket.

  And now it was my turn. I had no idea where I was going. I didn’t even know where I was. The driver was looking at me.

  ‘Stratford,’ I told him, dropping some coins into the tray.

  He pressed buttons.

  I took my ticket.

  The doors closed, the bus lurched and we were away.

  I moved along the aisle and sat down.

  The bus was on the same side of the road as the hotel, so I knew we’d have to pass it, and I knew it seemed stupid. But I was hoping that Ryan and his men wouldn’t expect me to be stupid. I was hoping they’d expect me to move away from the hotel, not towards it.

  That’s what I was hoping.

  Even so, as the bus approached the hotel, I started hiding my face, turning away from the window… but then I realized that all the other passengers were staring curiously through the window, trying to see what was going on at the hotel, which made me look out of place. And I didn’t want to look out of place. Out of place was out of place. Out of place was bad. So, pulling down the brim of my hat, I joined in with everyone else and stared through the window at the hotel.

  The entrance was crowded now. Uniformed police, hotel staff, Ryan’s men, Hayes… and there, standing alone in the midst of all the frenzy, was Ryan himself. Silver-eyed and alert. Motionless. Like a Buddhist assassin. Without moving his eyes, he barked an order to a man beside him, and immediately the man lifted a radio to his ear and gave out a message.

  Power.

  Ryan had to have power. Who else but a powerful man could place a false story in the newspapers? And he had to be clever too. He knew he couldn’t tell the rest of the world about a sixteen-year-old kid who wasn’t human, so he’d turned the kid into a murderer instead. And everyone hates a murderer. So now Ryan had the rest of the world on his side.

  The bus moved on, past the hotel, and when I was sure that I hadn’t been seen, and I was fairly sure that no one was following me, I settled back into the seat and tried to relax.

  But I soon realized I couldn’t.

  The man sitting in front of me was reading a newspaper. It was the Sun, and he was looking at the sports pages, so I couldn’t tell if my picture was on the front page or not, but as I cautiously gazed around the bus, I realized that most of the other passengers were reading newspapers too. And even if Ryan’s story about me was only in the Daily Express, which I somehow doubted, there was still a good chance that someone on the bus was reading a newspaper with a photograph of me on the front.

  I tugged down the brim of my hat, pulled my collar up and slouched down low in the seat. I was nothing… nothing worth looking at… just another tired passenger, going to school, going to work… slumped in the seat, leaning against the window, head in hand… tired and cold… same as all the rest.

  It was the best I could do.

  I felt empty.

  Used up and dirty.

  My clothes were damp with sweat and rain. My eyes hurt. The back of my neck was throbbing. My hands felt itchy, as if they were covered with some kind of invisible residue.

  The bus moved on.

  Things and places passed by. Shops, offices, cars, people. Normal people doing normal things – walking, talking, frowning, smiling. They all seemed distant to me now. Different. Disconnected. Unrelated. They weren’t the same as me any more. I wasn’t the same as them. I was here, they were there. And the world out there had become something else. It was an alien territory now, a place where I didn’t belong. The only world left to me was the world that turned behind my eyes… and I wasn’t even sure I could trust that.

  I wasn’t sure of anything.

  What was I?

  What could I be?

  Where did I come from?

  Was I born? Was I created?

  Was I flesh and blood?

  Or not?

  And, if not, so what?

  If I couldn’t tell the difference, what difference did it make? What’s the difference between complicated meat and complicated metal? What is a life? What makes a life? History? Time? Memories? Senses? How do you see things? What do you see? How do you hear things? How do you feel? How do you do anything? How do you breathe? How do you grow? How do you think?

  I wondered if I was going mad.

  I knew it was possible.

  This whole thing, everything that was happening to me… it could all be some kind of delusion. I could be imagining it all. Maybe I had killed Casing in a frenzied attack and this was the only way I could cope with it – by making it unreal, by making it something else… by making myself something else. I didn’t know if that was possible or not, but I’d seen enough therapists over the years to know that I couldn’t dismiss it.

  It wasn’t impossible.

  But then, I thought, if I am going mad, if all of this is some kind of delusion, I shouldn’t be aware of it, should I? Because being aware of it means it’s not a delusion. And I am aware of it. So it can’t be a delusion. So I’m probably not going mad after all.

  But I wished that I was.

  The bus stopped at a junction. A siren started wailing on the street behind us, and everyone on the bus looked out of the window as a police car screamed past in a blaze of flashing lights, and then – before I had time to think about it – it was gone again.

  I breathed out quietly.

  I put my hand inside my coat and gently felt my stomach.

  Whatever it was that I’d seen last night… whatever it was, it was there. No illusion. No delusion. I saw it. It was there.

  You have to accept it.

  Accept it and what?

  Nothing. Just accept it.

  I glanced across at the man who’d been in front of me in the queue. The man going to Stratford. I studied him – lank hair, cheap jacket, sickly pale skin. What does he know about himself? I asked myself. Does he care how he works? Does he care what’s inside his body? Does he know what’s inside his body? No. He has no idea what makes him move, what makes him breathe, what makes him him. He doesn’t keep his body alive – it uses him to keep itself alive.

  About twenty minutes later the bus pulled into a bus depot and the lank-haired man started getting up out of his seat, so I guessed we were at Stratford. I got up and followed the man off the bus. He paused for a moment to light a cigarette, then he put his hands in his pockets and sloped away across the concourse.

  He might not know what’s inside his body, I thought to myself, but at least he knows where he’s going.

  I didn’t have a clue where I was
going. I was just standing there, looking around, seeing what there was to look at. I saw a futuristic-looking bus depot with a weird white roof. White Teflon pillars with upturned Teflon umbrellas on top. I saw a train station across the road. A broad paved area, buildings, lots of shiny black glass. And opposite me, on the other side of the road, I saw the entrance to a covered shopping centre. Colours, plastic, people.

  I thought about it for a moment…

  Bus depot.

  Train station.

  Shopping centre.

  … then I headed off towards the station.

  I bought a Travelcard from a ticket machine, took the Central Line to Liverpool Street, then changed to the Circle Line and got off at King’s Cross. A maze of tunnels and escalators led me up to the mainline station, and I headed across the concourse towards the ticket office. I paused at the doors, took off my hat, then went inside.

  The ticket office clerk was a fat black lady.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Single to Edinburgh, please.’

  Her fingers skipped over the buttons of her keyboard.

  ‘When are you travelling?’ she asked me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When are you travelling?’

  ‘Now, the next train.’

  ‘£93.10,’ she said.

  I give her Ryan’s Visa card. She swiped it through her machine and I hoped I’d guessed right. I knew they’d have a trace on Ryan’s card, but I was guessing they wouldn’t stop it. Because if they stopped it, I’d run, and they didn’t want me to run. They just wanted to know where I was. So they’d let Ryan’s card go through and then they’d get down here as quickly as they could. They’d surround the station. They’d search the trains. They’d question the ticket clerk – what did he look like, where was he going? – and she’d tell them what I looked like and where I was going. But she’d be wrong.

  And I was right.

  The credit card went through without any trouble. The ticket clerk passed me a receipt. I signed it – David Ryan – and passed it back. She didn’t even look at the signature on the back of the card, just slipped me a train ticket and a copy of the receipt, then yawned and looked over her shoulder at a clock on the wall.