Finding Joe

by Anthony Masters

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “You were very rude to your father.”

  Jake didn’t reply.

  “What’s happened between you and Joe?”

  At last he had found someone to talk to and too eagerly Jake seized the opportunity. “He pushed me in the lake.”

  “What lake?”

  “The lake on the marsh.”

  “But it’s filthy. I didn’t see any wet clothes.” Mum stared at Jake as if she didn’t believe a word he was saying.

  “I dumped them in the laundry basket.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t want you to know. Not then.”

  “I thought I smelt something nasty.” Mum paused. “Why did he push you in the lake then?”

  “Because I asked about his dad.”

  “Ah.”

  “What was wrong with that?”

  “I hope you didn’t make a joke of it, Jake.” She looked disapproving, traitorously not on his side after all.

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Well?” Jake asked impatiently.

  “This is a very bad time for Joe.”

  “I know.”

  “He and his dad were close.”

  “I know,” Jake repeated doggedly.

  “It’s a bad time for Joe,” she repeated.

  “You said that before.”

  “Don’t you care?” Mum asked him accusingly.

  “Don’t you care I got pushed in the lake?”

  “Of course I do. It was wrong of him. But did you provoke him?”

  “No way.”

  “You’re sure?” she repeated.

  “I told you, I didn’t.”

  Mum sighed. “I’m sorry there’s been this quarrel. It’s the marathon next week. I thought you and the twins and Joe would run together. Your dad would be so pleased.”

  “I might.” Joe was grudging, only seeking her affection.

  “I hope you will.” Mum suddenly beamed at him, looking pleased. “Now why don’t you come down and have something to eat?”

  “Dad said I couldn’t.”

  “He won’t mind, particularly if he knows you’re going to run.”

  Bribery – that’s what it is, Jake thought as he got off the bed and followed her downstairs.

  Then he started to think about Joe all over again, still wondering exactly who he had so suddenly become. It was a very disturbing thought, but the question was beginning to worry him and Jake wondered if it had occurred to Paul and Barry.

  They had always gone around together. They’d seemed to fit in although they were all very different, and for a moment Jake wondered why. He’d never really thought about it before, but suddenly it seemed important. Then Jake found a clue to their friendship: they had never asked questions of each other and had just accepted each other’s differences. Jake still reckoned he knew Barry and Paul pretty well, but now he felt he’d never known Joe at all and if the rumours were true about Barry and Paul, he guessed they probably felt the same.

  The Marsh Marathon had been run on another cool day, promising conditions for the hard slog of the twenty-kilometre course.

  Over three hundred contestants took part and Jake, who had not spoken to Joe since he had started training with the twins, was somewhere in the middle, his heart not in the race at all. The loss of Joe’s friendship, his obvious contempt, the ducking in the lake had all contributed to such a sense of loss that Jake could barely cope. Dad had practically ignored him over the last few days, openly encouraging the twins and making loud and obvious use of his favourite phrase, “getting stuck in”. Mum, however, had been more sympathetic and warmer, as if she was beginning to understand at last what it was like to be an outsider, someone who just didn’t, couldn’t measure up.

  “Do your best, love,” she told him on the day of the race. “That’s all you can do. That’s all any of us can do.”

  But Jake knew that to really succeed you had to go the extra mile, that you had to do far more than your best, to pull out every inner resource you had and the trouble was that Jake didn’t feel he had any left.

  Suddenly Jake realized he wanted to lose, to rebel against the “natural athlete”, the “getting stuck in” of it all. Jake wanted to be his own person, free to chose whether he would win or lose – and this time he wanted to lose, to rebel against Dad’s ambitions and Joe’s contempt.

  Gradually Jake had dropped back into the still milling crowd of runners, deliberately slowing up, wanting to finish late or maybe not finish at all.

  He jogged along easily, without the need to increase and maintain his pace, without the need to find that final rush of adrenalin that Joe had no doubt manipulated on their challenge run round the lake. But he missed that final effort almost as much as he missed Joe.

  Eventually Jake reached the tape, not actually at the end of the last group of runners but somewhere just past the middle. As he jogged in, he saw his parents staunchly clapping and then the twins lying flat on their backs on a grass verge near the arterial road. Joe was standing over them, their leader, justifiably proud. He didn’t look at Jake. It was as if they didn’t recognize each other.

  Trucks thundered past on the dual carriageway, the sound of screaming steel drowning the tannoy. To Jake, the thunder was only a mirror of his own pain.

  “Well done, Jake,” Mum said encouragingly, unable to conceal the look of disappointment that carried a hint of impatience.

  Dad glanced up and shrugged, then gave a watery smile and a muttered regretful, “Well done.”

  Another wave of hatred filled Jake as he slowed down.

  “How did you get on?” he asked perfunctorily as Tom and Sam got slowly and stiffly to their feet.

  “Tom came in eighteenth, and I came in twentieth.” Sam paused, looking at Joe uncertainly.

  Then Tom continued. “But Joe – he came in sixth. Isn’t that brilliant?”

  Jake nodded, but avoided Joe’s sudden mocking gaze.

  “Well – at least you could congratulate him,” Dad snapped.

  Jake remained silent.

  Part Three

  The Game

  Jake shivered, suddenly cold in the clammy evening, while in the distance thunder growled again.

  Paul groaned and woke, his hands reaching for his head, half sitting, ankles locked together, groaning again. “I’ve got a headache,” he announced as Barry also sat up, grey and ill.

  “What’s the time?” he asked.

  “Nine,” said Jake woodenly.

  “We slept for a couple of hours then.” Barry stretched and yawned.

  “I’ve got a headache,” repeated Paul, like a child needing comfort. “Anyone got any aspirin?”

  “No,” said Jake.

  “Never touch the stuff,” muttered Barry.

  “Great.” Paul got shakily to his feet and looked around him. “It was a waste of time building this platform,” he said. “We can’t see anything anyway.”

  “It’s night,” said Jake flatly.

  “Even if it wasn’t, the other trees are too high. We were idiots. We behaved like stupid kids.”

  “It was fun.” Barry seemed buoyant.

  “Yes,” agreed Jake, more uncertainly.

  “So where we going to sleep?” asked Paul, expecting a solution.

  “We could build bivouacs.” Barry seemed excited by the idea. “And make a fire. We’ve got matches.”

  “We’ve got to save some for the fags.” Paul needed to be negative.

  “We haven’t lit up so far,” said Barry in surprise. “Want one?”

  “Don’t fancy it. Not with this headache.”

  “Let’s climb down then,” said Jake, thinking he ought to make a contribution, still disturbed by his memories. “You’re good at lighting fires, Baz. Paul and I can build the bivouac.”

  They nodded apathetically and began to clamber stiffly down from the platform via the smaller tree, then stood st
ock-still, as if they were finding their ground legs again.

  They hung around indecisively while Barry wondered if they were going to remember how to build the bivouac – and he was going to remember how to build a fire – without Joe.

  “OK,” he said, awkwardly taking over as leader, without any sense of natural authority. In Joe’s shadow, Barry felt inadequate. Joe would never have let them drink the whisky so early and then go to sleep at the wrong time. With Joe, they would have worked first, lit the fire, built the bivouacs and then drunk the whisky. They would have got drunk – with the possible exception of Jake – and slept like logs, working off their hangovers next morning. Joe was our leader, Barry thought. No doubt about that. Is our leader, he added quickly, but at the moment Joe seemed incredibly remote as if he had disappeared from the very face of the planet.

  Barry suddenly wondered why he had so rarely been to Joe’s house. Only Paul had visited regularly and only Paul knew Joe’s parents. He had always said they were great. The whole family were great and always happy and really together. He had used the word “great” a good deal. Could they be so amazingly great? After a while, Barry had stopped asking about them.

  “Well?” demanded Paul, interrupting Barry’s thoughts.

  “Well what?”

  “You said ‘OK’. OK what?” Paul was impatient.

  “OK. I’m trying to remember –”

  “What Joe used to do?” asked Paul.

  “What Joe would do,” Barry corrected him, wondering why he was being mentioned in the past tense so often. After all, he’d only bunked off for a couple of days.

  “He used to find a good tree and put some branches round the base, like, at an angle. Then you get some ferns and plug them in to make the bivouac waterproof.”

  “Sounds a lot of hassle,” said Paul, still nursing his headache.

  “It is a lot of hassle,” agreed Barry. “But worthwhile. There could be a storm tonight and we’ll get soaked if we don’t make a decent bivouac.”

  “Or get struck by lightning,” contributed Jake.

  There was a long silence as more thunder rumbled, but it was still some distance away.

  “Let’s go for it,” said Barry as he began to collect twigs for the fire, setting them up in a wigwam shape, realizing that building his fire was like building a miniature bivouac. Except for the convenience of a central tree they had much the same shape.

  But suppose the tree was struck by lightning? Would they all be roasted alive as they slept? Barry worked harder, trying to dismiss what he considered were childish fears, stock-piling pieces of wood while Jake and Paul dragged fallen branches to a sturdy oak they had selected, beginning to arrange them around its trunk.

  Gradually, Barry began to slow down, finally admitting that there was little satisfaction in all this effort. They all seemed to have lost the impetus they had had when they were building the platform in the tree. Jake and Paul were sullen and he was uncertain.

  We lack direction, thought Barry, who went to Mass every Sunday and had originally believed in God as a begowned and haloed figure, drifting about, doing good, directing away like there was no tomorrow. Had he seen Joe in almost the same role? he wondered in sudden solemnity. Maybe, at one time, but over the last few weeks he had been more like the devil incarnate.

  Eventually, to the surprise of everyone including himself, Barry managed to light a reasonable fire and Jake and Paul erected a substantial and almost inviting-looking bivouac.

  Their success filled them with more confidence, and they once again plunged back into the childhood they had experienced when they were putting up the tree house. It gave them a new sense of freedom.

  Barry and Paul had brought sausages, bacon, eggs and bread as well as a frying pan, and buoyed up by their efforts they cooked supper, generously sharing with Jake and beginning to try to work out where Joe might be.

  “I bet you he’s hitched a lift in a truck,” said Barry.

  “Where to?” asked Jake.

  “France, maybe.”

  “What would he go there for?” demanded Paul.

  Barry shrugged, not wanting to talk about something that Joe might have wanted to keep private.

  “What would he do there?” repeated Paul, with a sudden edge of anger in his voice.

  “Dunno.”

  “What do you know about France?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I still reckon he’s camped out here,” said Jake. “Somewhere.” He wanted to be optimistic, could detect Paul’s mood swing and needed to calm him. “I’m sure we’ll find dear old Joe in the morning.”

  There was no response.

  “What’s his mum like?” asked Barry suddenly. “I’ve only met her a couple of times.”

  “She’s terrific,” said Paul.

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” risked Jake.

  “She’s terrific,” repeated Paul. “Nice-looking. It wasn’t fair.”

  “What wasn’t?” asked Barry.

  “Her old man going off like that.”

  “Didn’t they get on?” asked Jake.

  There was a silence. “Of course they did,” replied Paul, looking uneasy. Then he said, “Joe didn’t like talking about – personal stuff.”

  “But he was close to his dad?” persisted Barry.

  “Of course he was,” said Paul. “But I don’t want to say any more.” He sounded adamant. “It’s not fair to Joe.”

  There was a long silence as Barry poked at his fire and Jake whistled tunelessly. Sparks flew up into the night sky and swollen clouds raced across the jaundiced face of the moon.

  “Let’s play the game,” said Barry suddenly.

  “What game?” muttered Paul.

  “You know what game.”

  In a monotone, Jake began to explain the rules. He had never liked the game and didn’t want to play. But he had noticed in the past that people – mainly Dad – had always got at him for not joining in. So if he explained the game, emphasized how childish it would be, then maybe the others would be put off playing. But even as he spoke Jake knew they remembered every detail without his help, yet they let him talk on. “Someone goes out and hides in the undergrowth for a fixed length of time and then they try to get back to base without being caught.” Jake paused. “You’ve got to get back to base somehow. You can’t be caught. And if you are –”

  Paul grinned. “You have to fight with your bare hands. Kids’ stuff.”

  Jake felt a sense of relief. Last time, when Joe had been with them, Jake had been the victim and had been badly beaten up by Barry who although small was amazingly wiry and strong. Jake didn’t like fighting games any more than he liked being told what to do. It wasn’t as if he was a wimp; he was just uneasy about the physical contact. Once he had been told by his mother, “Fighting’s how boys make love.” Ever since then, Jake had wondered if fighting was wrong in a special way. The problem was that sometimes he dreamt of fighting, and when he woke Jake was confused by the dampness beneath him.

  Surely they weren’t going to get into that all over again? Please let Paul say no. But why hadn’t Joe? His thoughts were in turmoil and he didn’t want any of them, just like Paul didn’t want to talk about Joe.

  “It could be fun,” said Barry.

  “Wake us up a bit,” muttered Paul.

  Jake’s heart sank. “I think it’s stupid.”

  “Then I’ll be stupid,” grinned Barry. “I’ll hide and I bet you I get back.”

  “You’re on,” said Paul.

  Part Four

  Barry

  Barry glanced down at his stopwatch. He had found a good hiding-place in a dark and ivy-smothered gully and knew he had five minutes before he had to try to get back to the camp-fire. He guessed that Paul would put Jake on guard duty and attempt to head Barry off himself. They had never clashed physically before, even when they had played the game, taking care to avoid such a confrontation. He guessed they would be evenly matched, and in the past h
e hadn’t wanted to try. Now Paul had elected to confront him – and Barry had agreed to challenge Paul.

  Did they need to hurt someone? Each other?

  Were they both going to substitute for Joe?

  While Barry waited for the minutes to tick away, he dwelt with more clarity on why he hated Joe so much – and had intended never to see him again. In fact, he hoped he’d fallen under a bus or got knocked over by a truck. Then Barry felt horrified at what he had thought. God would be angry with him for thinking like that.

  He had only elected to join the search party because it would have looked bad if he didn’t. Yet his hatred for Joe was a deadly force inside him, building all the time.

  Joe had taken Roz.

  Roz, the love of Barry’s short, determined life.

  His parents had always been devout as their parents had been before them and expected their children would follow in their footsteps. Barry had never been able to make up his mind. In a way he had begun to want out, in another he couldn’t bear to abandon the surety and familiarity of his religion. He had three brothers and three sisters, none of whom seemed to feel the increasing desire for freedom that he did. Barry often thought of travelling round the world – or just taking off and living somewhere different. Recently, after the shock of Joe’s father’s departure, Barry had been able to talk about his restlessness to him.

  Although neither of them had referred to that loss, it loomed large in their constant discussions about the roads to freedom they might take – but had never, so far, taken. Their fantasy talk was safe but intriguing.

  Sitting in Barry’s bedroom, they would pore over an old school atlas together, planning their escape routes, making them as exotic and as impossible as they could – Zanzibar, the Orinoco, the Sahara, Fiji, Bolivia and the Galapagos Islands were only a few of the distant lands they mentally explored. Thankfully, they came to no conclusion.

  It hadn’t always been like that though. Barry remembered another, more positive challenge Joe had made when they were younger. They could only have been eleven when Joe had wanted him to take the risk.

  “How long do you think you could breathe with your head in a plastic bag?” Joe had asked him one afternoon when they were sitting in the park over the Easter holidays, bored out of their minds.