Grim

by Gavin McCallion

  A note: I'm not at all proud of my behaviour in the year leading up to my kidnapping. I feel like, of all the ages for a broken heart, seventeen is the worst. There's too much going on: leaving school, going to college, discovering alcohol, maybe leaving home - all that crap would hit the head of a well-adjusted person with all the force of a hammer.

  Me? Oh, I showed up on the first day of college and started tearing shit up right away.

  Again, not proud.

  So...

  ~

  Ejaculating Declan was the first boy I decided to try.

  Before college, I identified as an excellent gay girl. At college, I didn't know what I was. Heartbreak wrecked me. I couldn't tell if I was gay or if I just fell in love with my best friend, who happened to be a girl.

  (Not proud. Not proud. Not proud.)

  So I thought I'd try a boy.

  Not a snarling idiot boy, though. Seventeen-year-old guys treat any lesbian like any porno where gay means bisexual, so I punched a lot of them at a lot of parties in my first few months. None of them would do. I wanted a nice boy that might treat me with some semblance of respect in the bathroom of a flat party.

  Ejaculating Declan.

  In a sentence: on the night I met him, he was shy as fuck, and then he pumped a blow-up doll full of beer, punctured a hole in its vagina (I suppose) and drained the whole lot into - but mostly around - his mouth, to rapturous applause.

  He made me laugh. He was the one.

  I was wearing a top I... shouldn't have been wearing, and he hadn’t stopped gawping at me all night because of it.

  He had big doe eyes and lacked the nuts to come say hi to me. That was the kind of guy I needed. A nervous one. A coward. One that couldn't talk to a girl with most of her tits hanging out, but had no trouble performing cunnilingus on a blow-up doll filled with beer.

  Plus, he had delicate cheekbones that helped the transition.

  I moved quickly so he wouldn't change his mind, barely even introducing myself before I dragged him into the bathroom at that terrible party full of terrible people.

  My first sexual experience with a boy.

  In a sentence: I hopped up on the sink, he pulled my left boob out of my top, I pulled his willy out of his jeans, and it blew up all over my leg.

  It was fucking disgusting.

  I had to pick a nervous one.

  He offered me all sorts of favours instead, but I figured - by the way my boob popped back into my top when he unclamped his hand - we were done.

  I left the party after that, having confirmed I was definitely gay and also that I one hundred percent did not like semen.

  ~

  So, with that unpleasantness out the way, this girl outside the college showed Tom her phone. She showed him a post from a boy who was still looking for me - Ejaculating Declan.

  I guess he fell in love with me that night or something. It happens.

  He found out who I was and started to, kind of, stalk me I guess? He showed up at all my gigs without ever saying anything to me, just watching and even going so far as recording them for us. I guess he thought he might be able to get closer to me if he offered us free recordings? I don’t know. Whatever his plan was, he was doing it all wrong.

  Anyway, I vanished.

  He noticed.

  People forgot, but not Ejaculating Declan, oh no. He kept the hunt going via social media and public Facebook groups around the college.

  FIND CORA, he cried, as his followers scrolled past.

  Fortunately, somebody paid attention. She showed the phone to Tom, who showed Grim.

  Grim asked the only question worth asking, letting hope crack his heartache. 'Have you spoken to this boy already?'

  'No,' Tom replied, letting hope crack his anger.

  He had a fresh lead.

  Someone he hadn't spoken to, someone with new information.

  Tom immediately asked where Ejaculating Declan lived.

  ~

  They walked to the student accommodation in complete silence.

  Call it quiet determination, but it wasn't. Grim was heartbroken, and Tom felt awful. Since they're boys, and boys are the fucking dumbest, they didn't talk.

  So in silence, they crossed the car park, past Tom's car - wasting another perfect opportunity to put the fucking cloak back on - and left the campus.

  Across the road and through a cute little park that shone in the dying Hadleigh sun, sat the student rooms.

  They were hellish. They presented one of those chicken-or-the-egg questions: what came first, the hellish conditions of the rooms or the students' hellish treatment of the rooms? Either way, neither of them cared anymore. The committee that ran them made sure they were just functional and the students made sure they destroyed everything every weekend.

  In a similar vein to the campus across the way, it was grey and not tall enough to contribute to the reflective forest of buildings in the middle of the city.

  Tom and Grim approached with focus. They (adorably) pressed the buzzer for a few different rooms before they realised none of them worked and the door was open.

  From the outside, the building didn't seem so bad, but the inside was terrible. If the common room of the college smelled like the inside of a kebab box, then the lobby of the student rooms stunk like the inside of a kebab box used as an ashtray. A corridor of empty bottles and crushed cans greeted my Dads.

  Tom - a liberal drinker, to say the least - was taken aback. Sure, a lot of students would be above the age of eighteen, but a lot wouldn't. He couldn't fathom how there were no safeguards in place to stop the ground floor of the student accommodation swimming in drink like this.

  At the end of the hall, they found a stairway. At the foot of it lay three mattresses for anyone who couldn't navigate the stairs. They were not dry.

  'Fucking hell. I nearly let Cora stay out here,' Tom said, choking on the stench.

  Grim ignored him and climbed the steps.

  ~

  I asked Tom about this, and he said he knew he had an apology to make, but didn’t know how to bring it back up.

  Boys are the dumbest.

  ~

  Ejaculating Declan lived on the fifth floor, and the lifts didn't work.

  Ten years backwards, Tom would've thrown his head back in defiant laughter at the idea of five floors. He would blast up them and still have the energy for fifty press-ups at the top. He would make it look easy.

  At forty-five years old, fat, wet and hungover, five floors almost killed him. He made it to the top and politely requested they stop for a minute when they got there.

  Grim, who'd lost the ability to lift his legs the height of a standard tread by the third floor and tripped three times as a result, obliged.

  Eventually, they got their shit together and wandered down the hall to Ejaculating Declan's room. It was one of a string of identical doors ready to fall off their hinges.

  Grim gave it a delicate chap.

  A shuffle on the inside followed, one of a student who only just got out of bed.

  'Lo?' called a scratched voice from the other side.

  'Hello, sorry to bother you, we-'

  'Open the door, it's about Cora Quinn.' Tom intervened.

  Ejaculating Declan opened the door with a degree of caution he did not need.

  'Oh for fuck...' Tom said upon sight of the wreck stood before him.

  Ejaculating Declan's head bobbed around on top of his neck, which plunged into a half-zipped zipper, which sat above his boxer shorts.

  'Cora? I love 'er,' he slurred.

  'Great. We know you're looking for her, we wanna talk.'

  Ejaculating Declan swayed on the spot. 'Love 'er, so much.'

  Grim stepped in, probably sensing Tom tighten his fists. 'Sorry to bother you. I'm her Da... I'm- we're looking for her.'

  'I love 'er.' Ejaculating Declan turned around and ambled back into his room. He left the door open, so Tom and Grim followed.

  ~

  Aga
in, I met the guy once and he came down my leg. I could count the number of words I said to him without taking my socks off. Tom and Grim should have been reporting him to the police.

  ~

  Ejaculating Declan hobbled over to his bed and climbed in, snoring again in seconds.

  'Uh,' Grim started.

  Tom stopped him. 'Don't. We'll wake him if we need him.'

  As they investigated the room, they surmised they might've found the cleanest one in the whole building. Sure, it was tiny and a bad fart hung in the air, but aside from that and the destroyed heap of the owner, the room presented itself well. A bed, a computer desk, a drawer set and a wardrobe, all clean.

  Tom sat at the desk, opened up Ejaculating Declan's laptop and rummaged through his files.

  Grim's huff broke for bewildered statements like 'oh right...', 'how did you-', and 'with no wires?'

  Tom just didn't have time to explain the whole internet to the man. He searched Ejaculating Declan's folders, Facebook, Twitter, DM's, Whatsapp history and documents folder, only to come up with nothing.

  Tom leant back in the chair and pressed both hands to his face. 'MotherFUCKER. '

  Ejaculating Declan snorted at the sound, almost waking.

  'He's got nothing,' Tom continued as he stood.

  'How... how can you tell?'

  'Doesn't matter man. He knows less than us. He thinks plants are erasing memories or something, I dunno, I skim-read. The point is he's got nothing.'

  'Well maybe if we wait until he wakes up, we could ask-'

  'That looks like it could take days. Come on.' Tom made for the door, nursing the idea of getting back on the drink.

  Instead of following, Grim lowered himself into the chair in front of the laptop. 'I think I'll catch up to you, I want to take a look.'

  'I told you, he's got nothing.'

  Grim had never seen a laptop's tracker pad before. 'There are no clicks on this...'

  'Tap it.'

  'Tap it?'

  'Tap the pad, c'mere.' Tom leant over Grim's shoulder and touched the pad for him, triggering the mouse to click on the videos folder.

  'Fascinating,' Grim said. 'Oh.'

  'Aye, that's his porn collection, can we go?'

  'Should we not, like, go through it?'

  'Wank on your own time.'

  'Have you been through all of... this?' Grim pointed at the screen while recoiling like he had never seen porn before.

  'It's porn. If Cora's in there I'd rather not know.'

  Grim used the down arrow on the laptop to scroll, and it didn't take long. Tom had been in a hurry and ran a search on the folder for my name. Had he searched the folder manually, he would've let the icons - sorted alphabetically - get to E, for Ellie's Guilt, the name of my band.

  'Is this...' Grim tapped the pad and opened the video.

  ‘Hold on.' Tom grabbed Grim's shoulder because sure enough, Grim had only gone and found some bootlegged footage from a gig I had played before I went missing. A week before I went missing, to be precise - a pretty fucking important night: one of the nights Tom knew nothing about, a night my band somehow forgot about, and a night Ejaculating Declan caught on video.

  Tom shooed Grim out of the seat and started clicking. He checked the date and location of the recording and then copied the file to a USB drive lying around Declan’s desk.

  'I haven't been there, this is one of the days I'm missing. Come on.' Tom yanked the drive free from the computer, spun around and hurried for the door.

  'Wait, w-wait!'

  Tom looked over his shoulder and saw Grim leaning over the laptop on a paused still of the footage. His face pressed to the screen, as close as he could get. 'Is this her?'

  'Aw.' Tom gripped the USB drive in his right hand and the door handle in the other, desperate to make a move. 'Aye, on the drums, that's her.'

  'I can't see...'

  Tom wished he were heartless.

  He let go of the door and put the drive in his pocket. Back at the computer desk, he sat Grim down and played the footage full-screen.

  In renewed silence, they watched the whole show. It was the best gig I ever played.

  ~

  It was a lovely idea and all that, but they basically wasted half an hour. They had a lot to do before Grim was due at a beekeeper's house for a send.

  ~

  Twenty-Eight

  Under the Hood III: The Other Missing Day

  Tom had a map that told him where I was, every night, for the fortnight leading up to my disappearance. It had two holes: the night I went missing, and the night Judge Rabbit's staff handed me a business card. Tom figured drink-induced amnesia paired with the general shittiness of people was to blame.

  But on the second night, I played a half-hour gig to a hall full of people.

  They got in the car with a renewed focus. Tom spoke as he clambered over the passenger seat. 'We're gonna go show this footage to her singer. I've asked her about this night like four - unf -' he hit his head on the car's ceiling '- four times, and she said she stayed in. But she played a fucking gig. With Cora. How does she forget that?'

  Tom got himself comfortable while Grim followed him in with moderate ease.

  They ignored the cloak in the back seat - again.

  'Maybe she had been drinking?'

  'So much she forgot she was playing a gig? She'd have to be drinking in the weeks of practice leading up to it too, as well as every day since. She's not telling us something, or there's something much fucking weirder going on.'

  Tom snapped the speed limit as he shot out of Hadleigh, back to the outskirts and around its edge to a small scheme of flats on the coast. They just about kicked the girl's door in when they got there.

  She didn't remember Tom, and he didn't have time to explain himself again. He asked for the use of a laptop, which she eventually relented to giving him, but only after he promised her previously unseen footage of her band being spectacular.

  Her first words, thirty seconds into our band's first song on the screen: 'I don't remember any of this.'

  She swore on her mother's life she had no recollection of playing the gig.

  Off the back of that, they were forced to consider the idea that something much fucking weirder may be going on.

  Nobody could quite explain why they couldn't remember. When Tom reminded them, they clicked their fingers and felt immediately terrible because they allowed themselves to forget. 'Aw aye...' they say, 'the police never found them?'

  And Tom would take a measured gulp of his drink.

  'You think something's... making people forget?' Grim asked, struggling to hide scepticism in his voice.

  Tom rested his head on the steering wheel. They were in the middle of congestion, crawling back into the centre of Hadleigh. 'I'm not seein' any other reason. That girl back there couldn't remember - at all - being on stage with Cora. She couldn't remember even when I showed her the video.' He sat up and drove a few feet forward, continuing. 'It's happened before with the girls Cora went out with on the night she vanished. I got a hold of the security tape from the door. They're all there with Cora, none of them could remember her being there.' The car stopped again. Tom thumped his head down. 'I could believe they forgot Cora was with them, blame that on drink, but forgetting a whole night? Nah.'

  He heard Grim speak, processing it. 'Right so... something's happened on both these nights... that- I'm sorry, something is doing this?'

  'If we can ever get to this fucking bar she played, we'll find out.'

  Tom was impatient, obviously, but this particular brand of impatience grew from hope. He didn't like hope. He wanted to know - one way or the other - if he would able to find his daughter today, and he didn't like to be held up by something as inconsiderate as traffic.

  He told himself to calm, he had to quell hope the best he could. He had been burned a million times before by the prospect of finding me and calling Mum and getting a gym membership and only visiting the pub once a week aft
er a hard day. He couldn't allow it to happen yet. While this was the closest thing he'd had to a breakthrough in a long time, it still didn't mean much. He had proof to say I was somewhere, at a certain time, but it still didn't tell him where I'd gone.

  He pushed the hope away, but not quite out of reach.

  He wanted to be able to reach for it later.

  ~

  Amongst all the fuss, and it makes me so fucking angry, the boys didn't think about the cloak in the back seat.

  Meanwhile, a beekeeper on Wilson's Well put his daughter's dinner on for the last time.

  ~

  It was six o'clock on a Saturday night in the middle of Hadleigh. The sunlight faded, replaced by wreaths of ninety-watt bulbs in matte, dim colours. The skin of the slow-moving, half-drunk populace of Saturday-night Hadleigh reflected the colours, their drinks lit-up in any hue but their original as their owners floated from pub to pub.

  It was not the place for anyone in a hurry.

  Amongst them, Tom and Grim battled through, very much in a hurry.

  The Ivory was a hole. One door sat in front of a staircase, leading into the ground with no defined uniformity. It didn't appear to be open, but the door was unlocked so they let themselves in. Down the rabbit-hole, they went, down into the guts of Hadleigh, past bare-brick walls covered in old posters advertising old tribute acts of old bands.

  The lighting was shitty, and seeing how Grim had a difficult time getting down stairs even in broad daylight, he tripped a lot.

  Each time he balanced himself on Tom, who was a couple of steps ahead of him. Were Tom a lighter man, both of them would've ended up at the bottom of those stairs much faster.

  The staircase led out into a small hall with a stage, a bar and some seats. Those posters from the staircase were pasted all over the walls in there too, only bigger. Two distinct groups of teenage wasters huddled around each other, messing about with instruments that weren't yet plugged in - they turned to the two old guys that entered but didn't say anything. The floor was sticky, and the room smelled like sweat and spilt drink, but so did Tom.