Off Script

by Graham Hurley

  SIX

  Malo arrives that same evening. He knows the address because he helped move Pavel in, and when I try and find out exactly what’s brought him down to see me, he just shrugs. Clem’s been a pain. He fancies a weekend away. He’s had enough of London. He wants a bit of sanity back in his life.

  None of this is remotely surprising. My son has a very developed interest in his own well-being, something he may have picked up from his years when he believed Berndt was his dad. H – his real father – has done his best to knock him into shape, which is admirable, but a sizeable monthly allowance and a brand-new Audi convertible certainly haven’t helped.

  It’s still barely eight and I’ve yet to eat, and when Malo announces that he’s starving, I suggest a curry. Malo, who wants to laze in front of the TV, thinks I mean a take-out. I don’t.

  Ignoring his protests, we walk into town. There’s an OK Bangladeshi restaurant on the main square and a glance through the window confirms that it’s nearly empty. Perfect. Malo orders chicken jalfrezi, which also happens to be H’s favourite dish. I settle for tarka dahl, rice, and a couple of veggie sides. While we wait for the food to arrive, I press him about Clem.

  ‘Has she thrown you out again? Be honest.’

  Malo says no but I sense he’s lying. In these moods, denied his precious telly and probably still hungover, he has a sullenness that some women of his own age find wildly attractive. One of them has just walked in with, I assume, her boyfriend. She’s insisted on a table that gives her a perfect view of my moody adolescent and they’ve already established eye contact.

  Malo is blessed with coal-black curls and near-perfect cheekbones. Lately he’s taken to wearing a three-day growth of full-face beard and it suits him. With the right lighting and a good director, he could make a decent stab at a young Heathcliff. Period costume? Shirt ripped open to his navel? Thunderstorms rolling across the Yorkshire moors? Bring it on.

  For a couple of minutes, he won’t talk to me, but a second pint of Cobra perks him up. He wants to know about the windsurfing, and about Carrie. I tell him that she’s really busy just now, her hands full with Pavel, but I have another idea.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Kitesurfing.’

  ‘Kitesurfing? But you told me she doesn’t do kitesurfing.’

  I tell him again that Carrie is otherwise engaged. Kitesurfing is becoming hotter by the day and this little town happens to be home to a world champion.

  ‘This is a guy who doesn’t care about gravity. He has one of those boards that rides high out of the water. A puff of wind, and he’s airborne. Seeing is believing. The man belongs in a circus.’

  ‘He does lessons?’

  ‘Alas, no. Too busy. Too much in demand. But I’ve found another guy who’s in the same league. Better still, he’s French. Jean-Paul. You’ll love him.’

  ‘How much will he cost me?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘But you’re telling me he’d take me on? Teach me all this kite shit?’

  ‘I am.’

  My son, bless him, is an easy sell. After I’d left the police station, I’d spent half an hour or so in the town centre, watching the rough sleepers. Of Carrie’s visitor there was no sign but a final exchange with Geraghty had stuck in my mind. These people are a little tribe of their own, she’d told me. Anyone new to the town, and they’d know about him within hours. The invitation was unspoken but it confirmed what I’d already assumed. If I really want to find this troubled youth, then here’s where I might start. Watching one of the tribe hunched against the wind, rolling himself a thin doobie, I remembered another phrase of Geraghty’s. The wild. Richly appropriate.

  My next port of call was one of the town’s kitesurfing shops. I’d heard of Jean-Paul through Carrie and the shop belongs to him. For quite a lot of money, he’d be very happy to offer my son one-to-one tuition plus a deal on a brand-new rig once he’d got the hang of it. This little arrangement, I point out to Malo, will be far from cheap, but he knows that nothing in life comes free and when I mention a tiny job I have in mind, he simply nods.

  ‘Sure.’ He grunts. ‘Whatever.’

  Whatever? Without mentioning Carrie, I describe a youth, probably in his mid-teens, maybe older, with a blue football top and braces on his teeth. He may be new to the town and Malo would be doing me a very big favour if he could track this person down.

  ‘Why? What’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing. Yet.’

  ‘So why do you want me to find him?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. All I need is a name. Plus a clue to where I might be able to lay my hands on him.’

  I mention the rough sleepers. For a can or two of industrial-strength cider, I’m sure they’d be happy to talk.

  ‘You think this guy is homeless?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. This isn’t the biggest town in the world. It shouldn’t take you long.’

  ‘And the kite thing?’

  ‘Starts the day after you find him.’

  Malo nods. One of my son’s few saving graces is an appetite for a challenge. He loves putting himself to the test, shaming anyone silly enough to doubt his awesome talents. H did just this a couple of years back, inviting him to organize a charity trip to the D-Day beaches and, to our delight, the results were spectacular.

  The food arrives. Malo has kept half an eye on the girl at the neighbouring table and appears to have lost interest.

  ‘She’s a dog,’ he says. ‘Help yourself to jalfrezi.’

  Next morning, to my intense satisfaction, I get up and wander into the lounge to find Malo already gone. He’d slept on the sofa, curled under a couple of blankets I’d found in a cupboard in Pavel’s bedroom. Not only were the blankets neatly folded at one end of the sofa but the twenty pounds I’d left him for expenses was untouched. Better still, he’d written a note. I’d left one of the doors to the balcony half-open so he could doze off to what Pavel calls ‘the music of the Exe’. In the middle of the night, according to the note, my son has risked frostbite by getting up and pulling the door shut. Why don’t those fucking birds go to sleep like the rest of us? he’d written. I read the note to Pavel. He hasn’t got much time for Malo, and it showed. Tant pis, I thought, brewing some fresh coffee and wondering how my son was getting on.

  He didn’t return until early evening. Carrie and I had spent the day quietly avoiding each other. I told her I was more than happy to keep an eye on Pavel, and that she was welcome to take the day off. Whether she did or not, I’ve no idea. Pavel and I passed an agreeable Saturday afternoon picking our way through more of Ernst Jünger’s diary entries, and by the time Malo returned, Carrie had definitely gone.

  ‘Well?’

  Malo is excited. I can see it in his eyes. I’m waiting for details but my son knows exactly how to tease an audience.

  ‘Anything to drink?’ He’s looking at the open kitchen door.

  I fetch a couple of bottles from the fridge. Czech pilsner is Pavel’s tipple of choice. A single mouthful of Urquell, he says, and he’s back on the Charles Bridge, staring down at the water, wondering about the darkness to come. Since he went blind, Prague has remained his all-time favourite city, a source of dreams he insists on sharing the next day, either face to face or on the phone. The small print of these fantasies he’s lifted from our nights together before he had the accident that paralysed him, but the settings – a series of improbable boudoirs in the depths of the old city – are a mystery.

  I settle on the sofa. I want to know about rough sleepers.

  ‘Amazing people.’ Malo is drinking straight from the bottle. ‘Loved them all.’

  He canters through a list of street names: Bender, Stax, Angel, Zig Zag, Virgil, Killibegs. He’d come across them this morning in the Strand, as close as Exmouth gets to a town square. A group of them had settled on a bench and everyone had a can in his hand.

  ‘They were happy to talk?’

  ‘Not at first. I tried but they blanked
me.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘A couple of them had a chess set. It’s a dodge to get people to part with money. They think it’s a good look, playing chess.’

  ‘At that time of day?’

  ‘You’d be amazed. People on the way to the station. Old ladies walking their dogs. A couple of low-lifes playing chess? Brilliant.’

  It was Berndt who got Malo into chess and there were a couple of years in his early teens when it became a real passion.

  ‘You challenged them to a game?’

  ‘We had a conversation.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The rules. They were clueless. They were just moving the pieces around the board, totally random.’

  Totally random. This strikes me as a very serviceable metaphor for madness, for lives untethered, or perhaps for The Wild itself.

  ‘So, what did they say? When you pointed all this out?’

  ‘They laughed. They thought it was really funny. One bloke, Stax, is really bright. It’s marketing, man …’ Malo is an excellent mimic. ‘It’s got fuck all to do with any rules. You want money, you look serious, you’re sitting cross-legged beside the board, you’re studying the play, you move a pawn or two, you make a mistake, you shake your head. You’re clever, you’re educated, but you’ve fallen on hard times. Pity’s the name of the game. And you know why? Because pity, done right, opens purses. And purses give you money. And money buys you stuff. This is kosher, Mum. This is the way he talks. It’s brilliant, fucking awesome. I told the guy he should be writing books or doing stand-up and you know what? He told me to get a life.’

  It turns out that Malo stayed with this little group for most of the morning, drifting around the town centre from favourite site to favourite site, pausing from time to time to lift a quid or two from a bunch of regulars.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how much money they make. Chess does it for some of the punters, but the real earner is the dogs. Some of the old ladies have almost adopted them. If it isn’t money, they turn up with a tin or two of Pal and a sandwich from the Co-op for the owner. It’s all first names. Stax even has a bank account. Can you believe that?’

  This seems to me to be rather heart-warming. What’s harder to imagine is quite where Malo fitted in. Trophy guest? Snooper from the revenue? Born-again Christian?

  ‘I was the entertainment.’ He grins. ‘They spent most of the time taking the piss. They thought I was some kind of journalist at first, after a story, and I was OK with that, but Stax didn’t buy it at all. Not that it mattered.’

  This is developing into a travelogue. My son has ventured into the wild and returned with unimaginable goodies. Where most of them doss at night; how bacon and cheese – easy to sell on the estates – are the items of choice when you fancy a spot of shoplifting; why Bargain Booze and Iceland are must-visit destinations as soon as you’ve begged enough for another evening’s oblivion; how, on a Friday, a two-line text can summon the dealer from Exeter with his little bags of reliable gear. Glimpse by glimpse, Malo is burrowing deeper into the netherworld of this sleepy little town.

  Thanks to my son’s own flirtation with drug dealing, all too recently, I happen to know quite a lot about lives lived in the shadows. But just now I’m more concerned with a youth with a football top and a talent for housebreaking.

  ‘Any luck? With our young friend?’

  Malo is halfway through a story about a recent small-hours incident in the Shoe Zone shop doorway when he breaks off.

  ‘You were right, Mum. They know him. They call him Moonie.’

  ‘You met him?’

  ‘No. I tried, but I couldn’t find him. Stax says he’s been in town around a month. Started off kipping in one of those shelters on the seafront. Since then he’s moved on, but no one seems to know where.’

  ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘They all agreed he was crazy. Not off his head. Not pissed. Not out of it. Just crazy.’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘Yeah, full-on Tune.’

  ‘Tune?’

  ‘Loony. Stax says having a conversation with the guy is impossible. He says it’s in the eyes. He looks at you, but he doesn’t look at you. The word he used was “creepy”. As in creeps you out.’

  ‘Not part of the tribe, then?’

  ‘No way. These people look out for each other. They bicker all the time, just like kids, but basically they’re all signed up for the same thing. Indoors scares the shit out of them. Having a roof over their heads means responsibility, bills, people knocking at the door. Better to spend the night with each other in some shop doorway, and then move on. You’re right. It’s a tribal thing. They’ve formed a circle and the rest of us are on the outside looking in.’

  ‘This is you speaking?’ I’m impressed.

  ‘Stax. The man’s wasted as a dosser. Not that he’d ever admit it.’

  I nod in agreement. My bid to disentangle my son from some very heavy drug dealers led me to a similar conclusion. Out in the darkness, out in the wild, lurk good things as well as bad.

  ‘And Moonie?’

  ‘I’ve got a list of places to check. It’ll be dark by nine, so we’ll start then.’ He drains the last of the Urquell and then shoots me a grin. ‘Another? While we’re waiting?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yeah. I thought you might come, too.’

  We set out after supper. Pavel has thrown up a couple of times for no obvious reason and I’m reluctant to leave him, but Felip is in charge and says there won’t be a problem. Pavel, he says carefully, suffers from bad nerves. He gets upset easily and that’s when what’s left of his body gives him away. When I press him further, wondering what might have triggered this latest bout of vomiting, he won’t say but his eyes slide sideways towards Malo and I think I understand. Men, as I know to my own cost, are hopelessly territorial. Pavel can’t stand the thought of another male in my life, even if this one happens to be my son.

  Distant church clocks are tolling ten o’clock as Malo and I make our way along the seafront. A thin drizzle is drifting seawards in the throw of light from the lamp posts on the promenade and I can hear the rasp of surf from the darkness at the foot of the beach.

  ‘Where first?’

  ‘The Land Train.’

  I’ve seen the Exmouth Land Train, a deeply retro amusement for the benefit of visiting tourists. During the day, it clank-clanks around the town picking up and setting down, while at night it’s put to bed beside a garage at the back of a car park near the lifeboat station. Malo, sensibly, has laid hands on a torch. An area of flattish turf behind the garage is a favoured dossing spot. Here we find discarded rectangles of flattened cardboard boxes but no bodies, least of all Moonie.

  Malo’s flashlight lingers on a couple of discarded syringes beside the cardboard. Stax, he tells me, refers to these as ‘electric blankets’. All the comforts of a good night’s sleep, he says, without the hassle of plugging the fucking thing in. I follow the logic but what really grabs my attention is the stencilled warning on the damp cardboard. Extreme Caution, it reads: Battery Acid.

  Next stop is a patch of woodland and undergrowth on a feature called Orcombe Point. During the summer, especially, this is a favoured dormitory for the town’s homeless, but the cold and now the rain must have put them off. We find a couple of festival tents badly in need of TLC, and a scatter of empty tinnies, but nothing else. To my surprise, Malo isn’t the least bit downhearted.

  ‘Town,’ he says briskly.

  En route back along the seafront we check every shelter, just in case, but all but one are empty. The latter happens to be the last. A youngish woman has just been servicing a much older man. Malo appears to know her.

  ‘Moonie?’ he enquires.

  ‘Exeter, my lovely.’ She’s folding a ten-pound note into her ample cleavage while her client zips up. ‘He hates this fucking weather.’

  The news that Moonie has sought shelter elsewhere brings our search to an end. Exeter,
Malo explains, has a handful of hostels where street people can kip. Most of them prefer to take their chances in the open air here in Exmouth but Moonie appears to be the exception. Tomorrow, Malo promises, he’ll come up with a list of these hostels and either he or I will pay them a visit. Meanwhile there’s a pub he’s heard about that doesn’t shut its doors until midnight. He checks his watch, and then shoots me one of his melting smiles before offering me his arm.

  ‘Shall we?’

  SEVEN

  The pub Malo suggests, the Venture Inn, is packed. It’s Saturday, open-mic night, and a small stage in one corner of the cavernous bar has been spot-lit. Threadbare gold lamé curtains supply a backdrop and just a soupçon of showbiz. Tables press against the stage and recede into the semi-darkness.

  The last act, featuring a thin, heavily tattooed elfin figure in her late twenties, is just finishing to a storm of applause and the landlord is already lining up repeat orders as drinkers get to their feet and head for the bar. The singer milks the applause and does the phony thank-you thing, her right hand pressed to her heart. This is all lovely but on the evidence of the last thirty seconds, there’s only one problem. She can’t sing.

  A beered-up stranger has just appeared from nowhere. He stands in front of me, his half-empty glass tipped at an alarming angle.

  ‘Aretha Franklin? Don’t you love her?’

  As it happens, I do. The woman with the tatts has just been treating us to her take on ‘A Natural Woman’. This, to be frank, comes as a bit of a surprise. Aretha had girth, body, soul, and a voice. No disrespect, but the woman with the tatts, aside from the scary purple hair, has none of those assets.

  Drunks are often very intuitive. My new friend can read my mind.

  ‘Not impressed?’

  ‘I can’t really say. We’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My son and I.’ I nod towards the bar. With commendable guile and both elbows, Malo has jumped the queue and acquired a pint of something fizzy plus a large glass of red. He joins us in time to head off a rant by the drunk about the last act. Claudine appears to be a town favourite. He says she hogs the stage on most of the open-air raves in one of the town’s parks. She’s flat as a pancake and can’t hold a tune to save her life. Expecting something very different, I can only agree.