by Matthew Crow
It was the sort of institution that had fixed bars on the windows and glass on the hallway carpet. A place where nobody ever locked the doors to their rooms because everyone was either too poor to steal from or too frightened of one another to even try it.
In an upstairs room somebody spun dance music on a set of decks that jarred and scratched every thirty seconds or so.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Dan said of the DJ, as we made our way towards the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Evan’s always been a stuck record. I’ll sort him out once we’ve all got a drink.’
Jacob and I kept as close to Ross as possible as we entered the large, sparse kitchen. There were pockets of people huddled in groups, sitting on benches or folding chairs, sharing bottles of vodka and cigarettes.
The room felt heavy and full of regret. Nobody really wanted to be there.
‘This one’s on us,’ Dan said, as a bottle of cider was passed to my lips and held upwards. I instinctively sealed my mouth shut. My hands gripped tight to my sides and I concentrated on not choking, but Dan tipped the bottle higher and higher until I couldn’t help but drink. ‘There’s a girl,’ he whispered through a rictus grin. ‘You were thirsty.’
‘Thank you,’ I said shakily, wiping my lips as the bottle was lowered and handed to some unseen hands behind us.
‘No worries,’ said Dan, who began pushing slowly up against me, gently but insistently moving me away from the others. No more safety in numbers. ‘Just remember you owe me one.’
As soon as were separated, Jacob was accosted by two red-eyed men in tracksuits, who held his arm and began admiring his tattoos.
‘You enjoying yourself?’ Dan asked.
Whether it was the drinks or the hour, my head became light and distant. Not in the buzzy way that hurried drinks in a nightclub could induce; rather, it was a shift in my sense of perspective. I felt as if I were suspended between dream and waking and I could not quite be sure what was real and what was not.
I squinted to stay focused as the noise in the room grew more frantic and, all around us, bodies moved more frenetically, convulsing. Low-level chatting became urgent and pitched, reptile tongues licking the air. Beads of sweat formed across the crown of my hairline. I gripped a kitchen counter tight. I focused on the Emergency Exit sign. The familiar object in the unfamiliar environment comforted me. Even better, it implied a way out.
‘It’s been a blast,’ I managed. ‘Thanks again for the job. And thanks for having us tonight. I can’t stay long. I told my dad I’ll be home. I was once an hour late for dinner and he called the police,’ I joked, laying the groundwork for a swift departure and praying that the notion of the authorities would at least buy me some leeway.
Dan smiled and looked at me, turning his head from side to side.
‘Are you sure you’re OK? You look like you’re having one of your turns. Let me take you upstairs so you can lie down.’ He tightened his hand around my wrist.
‘No,’ I said, perhaps more forcefully than I’d imagined. Something told me that if I lay down that night I would not stand back up any time soon. ‘I’m fine. Thank you.’
‘You’ll have to make sure you have a good time instead of a long time then,’ he said, and stood back an inch, expectantly. I forced a laugh from my throat like a splinter and he nodded approvingly.
‘Ross is great,’ I said. ‘I’ve known him since we were kids.’
‘He’s still a kid,’ Dan said, glaring over to where Ross had been. ‘Are you cold?’ He spun back to me, his eyes bloodshot, and his face a horror of angry vessels and pallid skin. He looked like Dad that time he came down with swine flu – only instead of the limp uselessness of illness, Dan had a jumpy, eager energy like a spider trapped beneath a glass.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look relaxed,’ he said. ‘Do you want something to relax?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘maybe I am just cold after all.’
‘You go to school then yeah?’ he said, his eyes darting from side to side he was trying to cross a busy road. He sniffed deeply and jerked his head towards me, urging an answer.
‘Um, yeah. I’m in Ross’s year.’
‘So you knew Sarah?’ he asked, increasing his intensity. When I didn’t answer immediately, he repeated his question.
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘But not very well.’
‘She ever say anything?’ he asked.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘The thing is, Claudette. Here I am paying you for a job, happy to have a new friend, and you fall so completely off the radar that I can’t ever get hold of you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as the room began to fade in and out of itself like a revolving door spun too fast.
‘I’m just confused, that’s all. You know what it’s like to be confused, don’t you, Claudette?’ Dan placed one hand on my shoulder, and whispered, ‘Where is it that you’ve been? I texted. I waited. Nothing. Where is it that you go?’ He moved closer to me, and I felt a numb black wave wash over me before I forced my eyes wide open.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, gripping the countertop like a life raft. ‘I lost my phone…’
‘Funny that. So has Ross,’ he said, his hot breath against my neck; the only thing in the room I could be certain of.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tried, as he moved even closer. ‘I think I know what you’re looking for. Sarah had something of yours, didn’t she?’ I asked, supressing my fear and excitement as Dan’s eyes flickered sharply and dangerously like oil tossed on fire.
Dan grabbed my arm tight and pulled me as close to him as he could without possessing me entirely.
‘What do you know?’ he whispered into my ear, hot and jagged as the party played on behind him, oblivious to his fury.
‘She kept them with her secrets,’ I whispered back, as coolly as I could muster. ‘Sarah was lucky; she did have some real friends in this world. Friends that knew her for who she really was. Friends that new about the places that were special to her.’
My speech cut short as Dan dug his hands into my arm until I could feel my bone give to his pressure. He breathed in deeply, raising the hairs on the back of my neck as he inhaled my scent.
‘You’re playing games you won’t win, Claudette. That girl took a lot of money,’ he said sharply into my ear. ‘A lot of what was mine.’
‘And you took everything that was hers,’ I hissed back, feeling repulsed as my lips brushed against his ear. ‘She needed help and you used her. She needed a friend and you hurt her. Only it’s not like your shitty pile of drugs, is it? Because she can’t get back what she lost.’
‘Where is it?’ he demanded, before loosening his grip as three men entered the kitchen, each carrying a gym bag. He gripped my shoulders, one hand on each, as the men clocked him, nodded once and headed out into a back room.
‘Shit,’ he whispered in their direction before turning back to me. ‘This I have to sort out. But don’t you go anywhere.’
‘I wouldn’t get too excited,’ I said coldly. Dan’s attention pulled towards the demands of the men. ‘Like you said, I get confused sometimes.’
‘You what?’
‘Well, whatever Sarah had of yours certainly isn’t where she left it,’ I said, taking a bottle of spirits from the counter. ‘I mean, after I told the police I’m sure they’ll have taken them somewhere else. If you want them you’ll have to ask them. I’m sure they kept them safe,’ I said as Dan’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket.
‘You have no idea what you’ve done, Claudette.’
‘Here Dan,’ I said, handing him the bottle. ‘You don’t look yourself. Have one on me,’ I said as he laughed once.
‘You don’t go anywhere,’ he instructed, taking the bottle with one hand and grabbing the sleeve of my vest into a tight fist with his other, as if trying to pin me to the spot. ‘We’re going to have a real chat when I get back,’ he said as he left, nodding his head as if certain of the repercussions I was
to face.
I had no intention of staying put.
I slipped through the kitchen as carefully as I could. A man laughed and held on to my arm as I passed him, but I shook him off and continued. My head was pounding and my legs felt like lead, but I managed to make my way upstairs one step at a time, holding on to the wall for dear life.
Upstairs I slowed down at every open door, frantically looking for Ross.
In some there were couples awake and wired, lying together on filthy unmade beds.
In others, men sat facing one another, leaning against walls with their heads bent back and their open mouths pointing up at the ceiling; their eyes glazed and cloudy, like fish on the turn.
It was in an attic bedroom that I eventually found him sitting alone on a single mattress on the bedroom floor.
‘Ross, I don’t feel well,’ I said as he hurried over and led me gently to the mattress.
‘What have you done?’ he asked when I was settled. He handed me a can of flat pop to sip from.
I looked around the sad room. My head was starting to clear, slowly and not entirely, but enough so that I could recognise myself and my surroundings. I noticed his school bag, lying abandoned at the foot of the makeshift bed.
‘Do you live here or something?’ I asked.
Ross shrugged and looked up at me. His eyes were red but not the way Dan’s had been. All of a sudden it hit me: he had been crying. I wanted to hug him.
‘Why don’t you just go?’ he said, rubbing his tired face, bending his knees up to meet his chest.
‘I thought you were living back home?’
Ross never had a real ‘home’, so to speak. He had beds in houses – sometimes family, sometimes not. Never the same place for more than a few months at a time.
‘Not everyone’s got it as easy as you, Claudette,’ he shot back nastily.
‘Yeah, my life’s a real bed of roses,’ I said quietly, wiping a thick slick of sweat from my face, and he apologised.
‘I just stay here sometimes.’
‘One of Dan’s lost boys.’
‘At least with him I’m someone’s boy.’ His eyes welled up. ‘I thought she’d got away,’ he said quietly, keen not to be heard by anybody outside, and keen to do his best to disguise the fact that he was crying.
‘Sarah,’ I said. ‘I thought you said that she was where she belonged?’ Ross’s breathing became heavier, and his tears more pronounced.
‘I thought she was. I thought she’d really done it, escaped, made it out. I was just… I didn’t want anyone to know that I knew,’ he said, shaking his head as he pressed his eyes with his palms, chastising them for his tears.
‘Anyone to know what? What happened to her, Ross?’ I asked, stretching out my hand and gently rubbing the back of his neck, cautiously, the way you would a stray cat in an alleyway.
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘She was getting away. And I thought she’d done it. I thought she’d gone.’
‘Gone where?’ I asked.
‘Just gone!’ he yelled before simmering back down and curling back in on himself, apologetically. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have no one, Claudette. Nobody helped her. Not her parents. Not the children’s home. Not Dan. I thought she’d finally gotten away, like she’d always wanted to —’ Ross said, wiping his eyes as I smiled sadly, thinking back to the girl forever walking ahead into the distance. The more he opened up about her it seemed that whichever version of Sarah you were presented with, the one aspect of herself she could never disguise was her insatiable yearning for another place. ‘I thought I was helping by not saying anything,’ Ross whispered, his head bowed as his eyes skittered nervously across the doorway, wary of the walls that didn’t so much talk but listen in that awful place. ‘I thought by not saying anything, not saying anything to you, not saying anything to the police, I thought I was helping her,’ he said, his voice barely audible above his staggered breath. ‘But it turns out I wasn’t helping her. I was helping Dan without realising it. Helping him get away with what he did to her,’ he said as a tear cut down his cheek and merged with the floor.
‘You’re better than them, Ross,’ I said quietly, gripping the back if his neck as he squinted through tears. ‘Don’t ever let them think you’re not.’
‘What you doing?’ he said, with a sad laugh, wiping his eyes as he sniffed and coughed his way back to a state not far from composed. ‘You don’t say nice things to me.’
‘Yeah, well. You’re a dick. But compared to what I’ve seen tonight you’re golden.’
‘I hate him so much,’ Ross said. ‘I hate him, and I know he hates me.’
‘We can take him down,’ I said quietly. ‘But we can’t talk here. Meet me one day this week. You’ve got my number, so use it. My dad works nights at the moment, so you can come round then. I want to know what you know.’
‘I’m not sure you mean that,’ he said, widening his eyes to emphasise the depth and weight of his burden.
‘I do,’ I whispered as heavy footsteps crossed past the door followed by lighter ones, following.
‘Fine,’ he whispered. ‘Fine. But you really should go now. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.’
17
Proof
Half the town were out the next night, though the mood was unusually sober.
The police were re-enacting Sarah’s last movements. We’d all been told in advance.
Huge lamps with silver surrounds blasted night-time into day. Men rode cameras along tracks laid down in the sand as they traced her last known steps.
It was a fortnight ago but it wasn’t.
She was alive but she wasn’t.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the performance.
The girl playing Sarah pressed a hand to her freshly blacked eye as she wiped away a tear. She stumbled through the sand; whether she was supposed to be acting drunk or she simply wasn’t used to the soft ground beneath her feet was not made clear to us. Nothing was. The directors and camera men had asked the crowds repeatedly to return to their houses lest a stray sneeze or a small child ruin a good shot on a tight schedule.
Nobody listened.
We just watched as Sarah’s ghost moved towards the wooden plinths beneath the pier before somebody shouted ‘CUT’ and the lights dimmed to black.
Nobody knew what had happened to Sarah, was the upshot.
Off the record, Adam told us as much as he knew.
The cause of death had been drowning. And yet for all she’d slipped and gone under there were still fresh wounds that nobody could explain.
An anonymous phone call had been made about fresh evidence in the lighthouse – the specifics of which Adam could not divulge – in what was fast becoming just another unexplained tragedy. The investigation had been under scrutiny from the start, but now questions were being asked about how the discovery was missed in the first place. Fingers were being pointed.
Still nobody knew how to find whatever it was they were still missing to bring this case to a close.
‘It’s a zoo in the station at the moment,’ Adam told us, as we made our way towards the crowds. ‘Everybody’s just seething. It doesn’t help that the reporters have taken the story and run with it.’
‘Why are they still here at all?’ Donna asked, as over the road two men in bomber jackets took photographs of the crowd and the film crew converging on the beach.
‘She was young, she was pretty. Everyone loves a mystery,’ he shrugged. ‘All the better if it photographs well.’
‘That’s bleak,’ Donna said. ‘It’s the sort of thing I’d say.’
‘If you caught who did it, would they make you a proper policeman?’ I asked Adam before correcting myself. ‘I mean, not just a community officer.’
Adam shrugged again as we reached the crowd.
‘Don’t know. I don’t think they’ve thought that far ahead. Just trying to keep afloat under the pressure of it all at the moment,’ he said, as two clipboarded offici
als rounded us together like well-trained sheepdog and demanded our silence.
‘Where were you last night?’ Donna whispered as quiet descended and Fake Sarah made her first of many trips to the sea that night. ‘You’re never around any more. I miss you.’
I was about to answer her, albeit vaguely, when over the heads of the crowds, in the doorway of the Mariners, I saw Mr Fitzpatrick. Only he wasn’t alone. He was with a girl. A small girl – no older than ten – wearing a filthy tracksuit and a look of pure, unadulterated horror as she watched Sarah’s body double walking across the beach.
I recognised her instantly: the girl from Jacob’s photographs. Almost as blurred and borderless in real life as she was in his pictures, but her stance and size left me with no doubt.
A stage-light popped quietly, raining glass and sparks onto the sand below.
‘Who’s the girl?’ I whispered to Donna, nodding towards the Mariners, where Mr Fitzpatrick was ferrying the reluctant girl away from the re-enactment.
Donna raised herself to tiptoes and scanned across the crowd of heads towards the horizon.
‘Dunno,’ she concluded. ‘Probably his granddaughter or something.’ She turned her attentions back to the cameras.
‘No…’ I said, watching him lead the girl down an alleyway. ‘Mr Fitzpatrick doesn’t have anyone,’ I said. ‘Only me.’
‘Jesus,’ Donna whispered. ‘There’s a good line to take anyone to the end.’
‘Dickhead,’ I hissed, as an old lady eating a sandwich from cling-film wrapping turned and glared at us.
‘Shhhh.’ Donna briefly pressed two fingers to her lips. ‘Some of us want to know how this thing ends,’ she said, with a roll of her eyes.
In the café afterwards Jacob offered to buy us a coffee, but I said I’d prefer chips and a milkshake.
‘You’ve got a really sophisticated palate,’ he said as he sat down and handed me my offerings. He took a sip of his overpriced cup of foam.
‘I know what I like and I like what I know,’ I said, drenching the chips in vinegar and salt before cramming four into my mouth at once.
