Another Place

by Matthew Crow

  He looked bemused at first, and then the clouds parted and the question made sense to him.

  ‘I don’t think anyone does,’ he said. ‘Not really. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t even know myself half the time,’ I said, trying not to cry. ‘I just feel like everything I do is wrong. Every thought I have is backwards or inside out.’

  ‘I thought I did,’ he said, quite rightly ignoring my wallowing. ‘I thought I knew Sarah. I mean, I did, more than most, but I thought I knew what had happened to her, too,’ he said.

  Ross was hurting, I could see that. But then so was I. As I watched him I felt passing guilt that my first thought on letting him into my house was to try and have sex with him. Not that there would have been much effort involved. Ross was like a kebab. Every girl had had him at least once when they were drunk and there was literally no other option available. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, had ever woken from the experience feeling anything other than nausea and mild regret. Ross included, probably.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realised Ross probably went home with every girl who asked, not because he had some insatiable urge, but because more often than not it meant he had somewhere warm and dry to stay for a length of time.

  As for me, it wasn’t lust that had made me consider sleeping with him that evening. Between the depression and the recovery and the various tablets I was on, I was as uninterested in sex as I’d ever been. If anything it was vanity. I had felt so lousy for so long. Donna had just itemised my human failings in ugly detail. I wanted to prove that I could bring some happiness or pleasure to a person, bring something more than just pain and regret, even if only for a fleeting moment. But I looked at Ross, sitting on my dad’s sofa, and I knew I couldn’t sleep with him, just to make myself feel better. I’d known him for as long as I’d known anybody and he didn’t need me taking advantage of him on top of everything else.

  In the end, maybe the fact that I’d realised that before acting on my impulse, was proof that I wasn’t all bad.

  ‘What happened?’ I said to Ross once more, moving closer. ‘I know you cared about her, you’ve told me that. But enough now.’ I took hold of his arm. ‘You tried to help her. You thought she’d gotten away. But she didn’t, you know that now. So, why did she disappear that night? Why did she die?’

  Ross sighed and looked at me, wiping his mouth into an ‘O’ shape as he shuddered once. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, Claudette,’ he said.

  I stayed quiet. This time I wanted the truth.

  ‘We were close,’ he began carefully. ‘Me and her. I loved her. Not in that sort of way. But the way you love someone you know is good inside. I tried to help her that night.’

  Ross said that in the days leading up to Sarah’s death she was being followed. Her every move was traced by Dan’s hired help, who skulked and stalked. Everywhere she walked she cast at least three shadows, whilst Dan and his ghouls searched for their missing stash.

  ‘She started hanging out at Grey’s House not long after I did, once she got moved to the home,’ Ross said. The thought that a life around Dan Vesper was somehow more inviting than the house where you were supposed to be cared for, broke my heart. ‘She needed somewhere to go and Dan had an open door policy when it suited him.’

  ‘How does he do it?’ I asked. ‘How does he get so many people to work for him?’

  ‘What? Like you, you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, well I was doing it for a reason,’ I said. ‘To understand Sarah.’

  ‘Dan recognises damage,’ Ross went on. ‘He’s always got a quick fix for whatever hole you need filling. You might need money. You might want something that’ll make you forget who you are for the night. A bed for a while,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘And that’s fine. But by the time you’ve got what you needed your debt is bigger than you could ever imagine. You can never repay Dan, you can only keep him sweet, or hope to.’

  ‘So Sarah got in over her head.’

  ‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘We all did, in a way. But Sarah wanted out. Got clever, started skimming profits here and there. She knew I wouldn’t say anything. She knew I cared about her too much.’

  ‘And Dan found out?’ I asked and Ross nodded.

  ‘That night he got the hell in him. Sarah had been to the Mariners because she was due paying.’ Ross laughed again. ‘She was brazen; I’ll give her that. She’d been robbing from him for weeks, but she’d create holy hell if her pay packet was ever delayed.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was the usual there. A few lads. But Dan was there too. That’s when she knew it was bad. Dan never goes to the Mariners. He’s at the top of the pile. Keeps himself removed from the heart of the operation. When she saw him she knew. She knew she was going to die that night.’

  ‘But nobody murdered her,’ I said. ‘She drowned.’

  Ross shook his head.

  ‘Dan made us leave the room. Sent us all downstairs. Said he wanted what was his. So we left.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘I don’t know. But she got away,’ Ross said. ‘At first.’

  Ross told me how they sat and listened from downstairs, in the creaking, unlit entrance to the Mariners. He told me how they felt rats scurry across their feet as, upstairs, voices got quiet and then loud again, and then louder still. He said there was the sound of a slap, and then another, and then a tussle before glass broke above them and the entire building began to creak and shake.

  ‘That’s when Dan came downstairs, doubled over and holding his balls. His fists were red raw and covered in blood and he was furious. She’d gone through the window, climbed down the scaffolding. He sent us after her. Said he didn’t care how many parts she came back in, that he wanted her and his money.’

  ‘So you chased her?’ I whispered quietly, desperate to hear what Sarah’s last hours entailed but keen not to throw Ross off the story’s bleak track.

  He nodded.

  Some men made it into cars and tore along the roads and the back alleys, shining headlights into wheelie bins – checking back yards and boarded-up shops that Sarah had known how to get into.

  Others made way on foot, tracing their way down towards the beach, and out towards the lighthouse, but couldn’t make the walk due to the ebbing tide.

  ‘I walked down the promenade with another two lads. I went first. They were fat and I know what the rocks are like down there. I can get over them in no time.’

  ‘Sarah could too,’ I said, having seen her navigate the patch like a gymnast on more than one occasion.

  ‘They were slipping and yelling all the way. They were well behind by that point. I reached the edge of the rocks and made my way along the beach…’ Ross shivered a little. ‘I only just saw her. She was walking out, into the water. It was already up to her chest. She went slowly, so nobody would hear her, right underneath the pier. She must have heard me because I saw her turn to look at me one last time before she made it to where she had wanted to go. By the time the other lads caught up, I told them I couldn’t see anything. I wasn’t lying, either. She was well hidden behind the beams.

  ‘They spent all night up there, keeping an eye on the beach. It must have been raining because when they got back the next morning they were soaked through and grey, like they were dying,’ he said. ‘She must have held on for hours. She must have been so cold.’ Ross stopped, held his face in his hands, and cried. ‘I tried to help her,’ he said between sobs. ‘And I thought she’d gotten away. I thought she was gone.’

  I was shaking too. I leant over and hugged Ross until his bony body stopped shaking and his sobs were gentler, more controlled.

  ‘I know you did,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  The police had already announced that they were no longer treating Sarah’s death as suspicious. The spotlight was dimmed. The town could relax.

  There would be no arrest.

  There would be no trial.

  There ha
d been no murder.

  But Sarah had been killed. She’d been killed over and over again before she was taken by the waves.

  I imagined her alone that night, growing cold and then warm, accepting the tiredness that surrounded her as the waves rocked her to sleep, like a mother should have done. I saw her, in my mind’s eye, dragged out to sea; rushing on a current until she moved so fast it was like she wasn’t moving at all, travelling towards nothing for ever, to some sort of freedom where she could finally sleep.

  Then I imagined her body ripped backwards. Her clothes removed by the groping waves. I saw her being pulled back – back through the sea, back from peace, to the harbour and the estuaries where she would have walked when she was alive. Back through the narrow passages to where she was found; naked and stained like church glass, glittering with silt. I saw her cast in clay, stuck to the wall of some riverbank where with dead eyes she watched over the town that had killed her, the town that thought she had slipped away quietly. I imagined her watching every bowed head as the investigation made progress, hoping that they’d get away with what they’d done to her. I imagined her watching every public mourner who’d looked away as she was diminished, day by day, by an unkind life, by people who took from her and took from her until the only way she could live was to risk being killed to get away from it all.

  Mr Fitzpatrick and I had done everything we could to see that the children’s home got what was coming to them. But no matter what the police reports said we all bore responsibility for Sarah. Nobody could trace where her desperation had started. But it had ended cruelly and unnecessarily at the hands of Dan Vesper. And I owed it to Sarah to let the world know.

  ‘I hate him too, Ross,’ I said quietly as he began to calm. ‘I hate him so much.’

  Ross unfurled from our hug and looked at me.

  ‘But what can you do?’ he asked. ‘What can anybody do?’

  ‘He can’t be caught for killing Sarah but that doesn’t mean he can’t be trapped.’

  ‘He’s stronger than us,’ Ross said, shaking his head.

  ‘But we’re smarter than him. Trust me,’ I said. ‘I just need one thing from you, and I’ll see to the rest,’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I need you to tell me what it would it take to get Dan into the Mariners,’ I said. ‘And I need you to help me do it.’

  20

  After the Storm

  We were the only people sat on the seats outside of the café. The sun shone but not brightly. Both of us wore T-shirts and concentrated hard not to shiver. Neither of us were willing to acknowledge we were too cold for such a continental set-up.

  Jacob sat in front of me looking slightly wronged and slightly accusatory at the same time.

  ‘So are we going to talk about it?’ he asked meekly, though his face suggested that he wanted to do anything but.

  ‘Haven’t you and Donna had adequate time to analyse the situation?’ I snapped, tipping teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into my tea. ‘Apparently you make quite the team when it comes to problem-solving.’

  Word had reached him via Donna that we’d had a falling out. Or rather that I’d been assassinated with words in the middle of Donna’s box bedroom. I ignored seven texts and an unusual midday knock on my front door. I eventually relented the third time he tried to phone me. I knew once the phone rang that he had significant feelings about what had transpired. The only reason anybody our age used their phone as a phone was: a close friend or relative had died and a text would be inappropriate.

  They were a drug dealer.

  They’d missed the last bus home and needed a lift.

  Or, more often than not:

  They’d fucked up and needed to sort something out ASAP.

  Jacob sighed and put his hand out, gently holding my wrist, to stop the sixth sugar from hitting my cup.

  ‘What exactly is it I’ve done wrong?’ he asked with an arched eyebrow. ‘What have we done that’s so bad.’

  I made an ugh sound at the use of ‘we’ and maintained eye contact as I spooned one last heaped measure of sugar into my coffee.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said sharply.

  ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Because it doesn’t feel like that.’

  ‘No,’ I said, sipping my tea, which by that point was mostly syrup. My insides zinged to life with the warm hit of sugar. ‘That’s not what I meant. It wasn’t that you did nothing wrong. Doing nothing was what you did wrong.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, wearily. ‘Glad we cleared that up then.’

  I swore at Jacob as I placed a handful of spinning coins on the table for my tea and toast and made my way towards the promenade.

  Not many people were out and about that morning. It was too late for the rush hour flow of bodies hurrying for the bus, but too early for most people to be mooching about looking for things to do.

  I slid beneath the rusted bars and dropped down to the lower promenade, picking up my pace as Jacob dropped down behind me and attempted to keep up.

  ‘So, what?’ he said, trying hard to maintain a steady tone despite being out of breath. ‘You’re angry that I made a friend other than you? That a girl might have been interested in me?’

  ‘You know that’s not true!’ I yelled, spinning around. ‘Stop making out like I’m being unreasonable. I don’t care what you do and who you do it with. But you and Donna? That’s different. It feels like a betrayal.’

  I stopped short. The word fit so perfectly. Maybe I was being unreasonable. Maybe I was being unfair. Certainly I was being unkind. But I felt betrayed by the situation, though still couldn’t explain why. It just turned out he hadn’t fit the exact mould I’d cast for him.

  ‘How have we betrayed you?’ he asked, his voice beginning to rise. ‘By making friends, by getting close at the wrong time?’

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘Because you’d have reacted like this.’

  ‘Not if you were honest in the first place.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘You want everything laid out perfectly, Claudette. You want everything in its place but it’s not. Life is messy and it’s complicated.’

  ‘Oh you’re so wise.’

  ‘And you’re so dumb. You’re smart, yeah. But you’re dumb. You’re doing things all wrong. You’re trying to do so many things at once that you’re achieving nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘You’ve really got me down to a T, haven’t you?’ I said, turning to leave.

  ‘Well if I’m so annoying then why do you bother, Claudette? Surely I’m not worth the effort. I didn’t ask for any of this. You came to me. You pestered me. What exactly is it you expect? What exactly is it you want from me?’ he asked.

  I spun around, tears of fury and frustration salting the rims of my eyes.

  ‘Everything!’ I yelled, so loud even I was shocked. ‘I want everything. All at once and for ever. And fuck you for not giving it to me!’

  This was the truth.

  This was my truth.

  It was how I felt about Jacob. How I felt about the world.

  Jacob had been my opportunity to become a blank page. With him, as with no one else, I found the bare foundations of myself upon which I could build the girl I knew I could be, become the person I wanted to be seen as.

  My anger wasn’t at him, not really. I was angry at myself. Everybody likes the idea that they are seen by others the way they see themselves. That beautiful. That clever. That able. That unique. Whatever it is. But we’re messy creatures, and we’re broken goods and we’re full of stupid mistakes, and to expect anyone to see you without your errors is unreasonable to the point of stupidity. That I’d even thought this, least of all pinned it on Jacob, was on me. But I was damned if I was going to admit it.

  I stood for a moment feeling pathetic, sobbing uncontrollably in the middle of the promenade, my head in my hands, my arms shivering in the shady breeze of the concrete stretch. It wasn’t long before Jacob came towards me and
wrapped me in a hug.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, trying to wriggle from his embrace, for some reason. I began to laugh through my tears and I could feel a smile in his voice as he spoke gently to me.

  ‘You’re impossible,’ he whispered, holding me tighter as I relented.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really don’t. I don’t know who I am.’ I said, laughing, ‘I don’t know what I want. I’m just…’

  ‘You’re just looking for your place in the world,’ he said. ‘Like everyone else. Congratulations, Claudette. You’re normal.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, ‘I am special and I am different. My pain is unique.’

  ‘Yeah, so’s everyone’s,’ he said, holding me tighter still. ‘You’ll figure yourself out one day,’ he said.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me?’ he asked, passing our shared weight from foot to foot so that we rocked gently like a pendulum. ‘I’m a lost cause. One of life’s eternal travellers. I’ll keep moving until I stop for ever,’ he said and sighed.

  ‘It just seems like such a waste,’ I said quietly, suddenly aware of just how much I’d miss him once he was gone. ‘Any one place would be lucky to have you for the duration.’

  He laughed and kissed my head.

  ‘I don’t know what version of you I got over the last few weeks, but I liked her, for what it’s worth.’

  I liked you too,’ I said. ‘I wish you could stay a bit longer.’

  ‘I know. But I can’t. I just wish…’ he said, trying to find the right words. ‘I just wish we’d met in a place we both wanted to be.’

  ‘I just wish that place existed,’ I said flatly, my head pressed against his T-shirt, staring out into the endless grey slab of the sea.

  ‘I think it does. And I won’t stop looking until I find it,’ he said.

  ‘Text me when you get there?’ I asked.

  ‘Deal,’ he said.