Joyride

by Patrick Ness

  ‘He’s not answering,’ she admits. There’s a pause and she hears him sigh down the phone.

  ‘I’ll cancel the rest of my appointments today and see if I can find him,’ he says before hanging up.

  ‘You do that,’ Quill tells the dead line, and hangs up herself.

  Varun gives the busy waiting room a half glance and then offers a guilty smile at the receptionist. ‘You’re not going to like this . . .’

  Charlie, April, and Tanya are walking towards the playing field, doing their very best to make it appear as if they have every right to be doing so.

  ‘Anything could be happening to him,’ says Tanya, ‘or his mum or dad!’ She suddenly panics as this thought occurs to her. ‘What if they make him kill his parents?’

  ‘Why would they?’ says April, then thinks of the Collins family and realises she has no useful argument to offer.

  ‘Quill’s calling them,’ says Charlie. ‘She’ll find out if they’re OK.’

  ‘I’m going to try Ram again.’ Tanya takes out her phone and dials. After a few seconds she hangs up again.

  ‘Still no answer,’ she says, to the surprise of none of them.

  April sighs. ‘What Quill said, about us not really being his friends, that’s kind of true, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ says Charlie, ‘I’ve been nice. And he’s knocked my schoolbooks out of my hand.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ says April. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Charlie replies. ‘He doesn’t like me. That’s OK, I don’t need him to.’

  ‘I’m his friend,’ says Tanya. ‘Well, a bit, I help him with his homework occasionally.’ She realises she’s probably not supposed to tell them that so she tries to dismiss it. ‘Very occasionally.’

  ‘There you go then,’ says April. ‘Quill was right.’

  ‘She often is,’ says Tanya.

  ‘Which shows you don’t know her like I do,’ Charlie replies.

  As they turn to glance behind them, something catches his eye. ‘Is that . . .’ He squints. ‘Is someone on the roof of the school?’

  April and Tanya turn to look.

  ‘Oh God,’ says April, ‘what now?’

  Arriving back home, Varun still hasn’t decided when he’s supposed to call his wife. He knows that it’s not his place to tell her what’s been happening to Ram, but he also knows that Ram doesn’t understand quite how difficult that is. To Ram it’s a shared confidence, with no question that his dad should tell anybody else, but he can only see his parents as just that: parents. Ever since Varun has known about what happened at the prom, what happened to his son’s leg, he’s been forced to keep that secret from his wife, the woman he loves. He knows that if—probably when—she finds out, Janeeta will find it hard to understand how he could have done that.

  Ram has insisted that it’s all done with—a weird, impossible moment that he’s now getting over and moving on from. But if that’s true, then where is he now? Has something else happened? Something else that Varun cannot even begin to get his head round? And if that possible thing that might (or, please, please might not) have happened has harmed their son further, will Janeeta ever forgive him for keeping the truth from her?

  He goes inside the house and calls for his son. Of course, there is no answer. He goes upstairs anyway, foolishly convincing himself that Ram is just wearing his headphones and hasn’t heard him. When he opens the bedroom door he’ll be lying there on the bed, safe and sound. He probably felt ill today, or maybe just couldn’t face going to school (how that would have made Varun angry only a few hours ago, what a great relief it would be now).

  He opens the bedroom door. It’s empty. So when does he call his wife?

  Access to the school roof is supposed to be locked, with keys only granted to the caretaker and necessary maintenance staff. When Charlie, April, and Tanya arrive at the top of the stairs, they find the door has been forced and is hanging open, the slight breeze rattling it in its frame.

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell someone?’ asks Tanya. ‘We’ll get in trouble for going out there.’

  Charlie looks at her, his eyebrows raised. He can look so old sometimes, she thinks.

  ‘We should check what’s happening first,’ says April. ‘It could just be someone messing about.’

  ‘No,’ says Charlie, ‘it isn’t.’ And neither of them can disagree.

  They step outside and the breeze that had seemed gentle on the ground is twice as forceful up here.

  Moving past the access door, they see a figure in school uniform over to their left. Tanya recognises him.

  ‘That’s Amar,’ she says. ‘I used to be in the same year as him. He’s nice.’

  ‘Great,’ says April, ‘then why don’t you go and ask the nice boy what he’s doing up here?’

  ‘OK,’ says Tanya, now entirely full of confidence as she strolls out across the roof to the boy who is staring over the low railing and looking down on the road beneath. ‘Amar!’ she shouts. ‘What are you doing up here?’

  He turns slowly and she’s relieved to see he’s smiling.

  If he’s that happy, she thinks, this can’t be that serious.

  ‘What did you call me?’ he asks.

  ‘Amar,’ she replies. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it?’ she asks, though she’d be lying if she said the question hasn’t thrown her. ‘Amar Sai, I used to be in your class, remember?’

  ‘Amar,’ he says, still smiling. ‘Nice name. Not mine though.’

  ‘OK, what is your name then?’ Tanya can hear Charlie and April coming up behind her and she’s glad of the fact. Amar’s clearly not himself and, given everything that’s happened, she’s suddenly not feeling as confident anymore.

  ‘Viola,’ Amar says, ‘Viola Cummings, what’s yours?’

  ‘Viola?’ asks April. ‘But that’s a girl’s name.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Amar, ‘it is, isn’t it?’

  Charlie decides that maybe it’s best to play along. ‘So what are you doing up here, Viola?’

  ‘I was thinking about jumping off, actually.’

  ‘Jumping off!’ Tanya is close enough to the edge to get a sense of how high up they are and the thought makes her sick. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘I thought it might be useful.’

  ‘Nothing useful about killing yourself,’ says April and there’s a weight to her voice that shows this is something she knows a little about.

  ‘Oh, but it wouldn’t kill me,’ says the boy who looks like Amar. ‘Not this time anyway. I was looking at it as a trial run. Just to see how it felt. To see if it was something I could do.’

  ‘If you jump off there,’ says Charlie, ‘you won’t get a second chance to try it.’

  Amar shrugs. ‘Shows what you know, my dear.’

  My dear? What kid speaks like that?

  ‘Are you sure it’s tall enough?’ asks Tanya, and both Charlie and April can’t quite believe that’s what she’s choosing to bring to the conversation.

  ‘Of course it’s tall enough,’ says Amar. ‘This body wouldn’t survive that.’

  This body?

  ‘Probably not,’ Tanya admits, ‘but you’d certainly feel it, and it wouldn’t be nice. You speed up as you fall, faster and faster until you reach terminal velocity, which, by the way, for a human body is usually around fifty-four metres per second.’

  ‘That’s very fast,’ says Amar.

  ‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t get anywhere near that at this height,’ say Tanya. ‘Not even close, there’s just not enough room to accelerate.’

  ‘You’re very strange,’ says Amar, turning to look over the small railing again, which is when Charlie grabs him and tries to yank him back. It’s a brave thing to do but also a bit stupid. Amar is too close to the edge and Charlie’s feet slip slightly on the gravel. He just hasn’t got the force to pull him back. They both end up falling towards the edge.

  ‘Charlie!’ April tries to grab hold, but Charlie is
moving too fast, her fingers catch at his shirt and nothing else as he falls forward.

  Amar hits the rail and momentum carries him over, pulling Charlie with him. Charlie manages to wedge himself against the rail, rolling over so he’s straddling it. He’s still holding Amar tightly by the arm. Charlie cries out as the weight of the kid’s body threatens to dislocate his shoulder.

  ‘Oh,’ says Amar, scrabbling at the corner of the roof, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking and sliding on the glass surface of the side of the building. The boy calling himself Viola Cummings, so calm up until now, looks panicked. ‘Maybe not,’ he says. ‘No, maybe not.’

  He fights to get a grip on the low railing as both April and Tanya tug at Charlie, trying to pull him back.

  ‘Grab hold of him!’ Charlie shouts. ‘He’s breaking my arm!’ April, lying flat over Charlie, manages to do just that, yanking at Amar’s uniform jacket and getting a grip on his arm.

  ‘I don’t like it!’ Amar shouts. ‘I don’t like it!’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’ Tanya screams, holding on to Charlie and pressing her feet against the railing to use her legs as leverage.

  Slowly, painfully, they manage to pull the boy back over the edge of the roof, all falling back onto the gravel in pained exhaustion.

  ‘No,’ says Amar, ‘I don’t think that’s how I want it to end.’

  And then he bursts into tears.

  FOURTEEN

  THE JOY OF BEING GARRY FLETCHER

  There is nothing Garry Fletcher likes more in life than being Garry Fletcher. It is, by any worthwhile standard, an amazing thing to be. The fact that he’s really good at it is the icing on the cake.

  ‘Keep the change,’ he tells the girl behind the café counter, not because he’s generous, but because he thinks she’s hot. He turns away just in time to miss her false smile turn into a slight sneer as she eyes the seventy pence he has graced her with. It’s easy to remain confident if you don’t pay attention to other people.

  He takes his coffee to a table in front of the window and looks out at the panoramic view of his city. That’s how he thinks of it, his city, because his ego is even taller than the building he’s drinking in. If you wanted to clock the view from the summit of Garry Fletcher’s ego, you would need oxygen equipment.

  It had been an early start today, trying to fit in his ever-expanding client list, but he’d done the meet and greet and Steve can handle the rest. Steve has been an absolute godsend for business. He’s solid and dependable and, best of all, seems to have zero interest in what Fletcher and Joyriders actually does. Obviously, he has a vague idea of the basics but seems to think it’s just some ‘VR thing,’ and Fletcher has been happy to leave it at that. He still doesn’t like employing staff, not after that business with Mike, but he can’t handle everything on his own. Besides, he has to trust his clients, so what does one more person matter? He’s made Steve fully aware of the contractual elements of working for him (‘Breathe a word and it’ll be the last breath you take’) and beyond that, he secures his loyalty with cold hard cash. The sort of money he’s paying Steve is the sort of money you don’t want to lose. Fear and greed—you can run a country by encouraging that attitude, so why not a business?

  Fletcher takes a sip of his coffee and removes from his pocket the small black notebook he’s taken to carrying. He’s become far too paranoid to keep any information about the business on his computer and has decided old-school pen and ink is the way to go. The fact that someone could steal the notebook has never occurred to him. Fletcher is inconsistent with his paranoia.

  He scans through the list of clients booked in for the next few weeks. There’s the investment banker with all the enthusiasm for kink but none of the nerve. The movie producer who just ‘wants to feel something, you know?’ The journalist who, if previous experience is anything to go by, will spend three hours with a new body, new underwear, and a full-length mirror. The importer who likes nothing more than taking out his week’s stress on someone else’s face with someone else’s knuckles. The ambassador for . . . well, Fletcher can never quite remember . . . who will scoff his way through enough drugs to make a rhinoceros smile briefly, before slipping into a coma . . .

  It’s one hell of a list of clients and it goes on and on and on.

  Fletcher is surprised by some of the requests. He imagined most people would just want to sleep around for a bit on someone else’s conscience, but maybe that says more about him than anything else. Lots of his clients don’t even do anything that illegal, they just want to feel what it’s like to wear a younger body again. To be able to run as fast and as far as only eighteen-year-old lungs can.

  He has one client who will spend her entire allotted time just trying on clothes she can no longer fit into herself. It’s kind of sad really.

  But then he has the serious cases. He knows he really needs to start limiting those, not for any moral reason (Fletcher couldn’t care less about some teenager he doesn’t know), but because people will really start to talk. He doesn’t for one minute think anyone could trace what’s going on back to him. Who would believe it? But the equipment has its limitations. The further afield you search, the younger the transplants need to be and, even then, it struggles to pick anything up once you’re outside a mile or two. God knows why, add it to the list of ‘Things I Should Have Asked That Alien Before I Kicked It to Death.’ It’s a narrow playing field and if he’s not careful, it’ll get to the point when the area is in such panic and under such close scrutiny, nobody will want to play.

  But those serious clients do know how to pay big.

  To begin with, he made a point of total anonymity. He didn’t want to know what people got up to; it was boring, like someone else’s holiday photos. He also assumed clients wouldn’t want to tell him. Surely the whole idea of this was to be able to get away with murder (literally, if you so wished)? To do things that you’d always dreamed of doing, to act out your deepest fantasies. That was the sort of personal stuff Fletcher wouldn’t dream of telling anybody. But most of his clients had surprised him; they couldn’t wait to relive it all. Fletcher finally realised it was because of his own rules. He’d made it clear that clients weren’t allowed to disclose anything about his business or what he got up to. Obviously. But that meant they had nobody to share it with, and people loved to share. He’d started to factor in an extra hour after all sessions, just because he knew that most of them would want to tell him about every punch they’d thrown, every person they’d slept with (and how, and for how long), every item they’d nicked, smashed, or eaten. He was their father confessor and best friend all rolled into one.

  He’d hated it to start with but, after a few days, it all became the same old drone. He’d smile and make the right noises, let them think they’d shocked him (because so many wanted that, wanted to think they’d acted completely beyond the pale).

  Sometimes it had been useful, though, and given him an idea what people really wanted. He’d held one client while he’d sobbed about slashing his wrists in the bath.

  ‘If only I had the guts to do it for real,’ he’d said, dousing the shoulder of his suit jacket in tears and snot. ‘Why can’t I just be a real man and kill myself?’ It hadn’t taken Fletcher more than a few seconds to see the opportunity there. If this guy wanted someone to kill him he was sure, for a fee, he could arrange it. After all, he had another client that was clearly muscling up to kill someone, so he’d just organised accordingly. He’d been able to charge the assassin and the victim for the privilege—easy money!

  One client who always kept his mouth shut was old O’Donnell, the man booked in that very morning. In fact he paid extra for the privilege, at his own insistence. He’d turn up, pay his money, and then go off ‘fishing’ as he called it. Three hours later he’d be back in his own body and would walk out without saying a word. Fletcher assumed he must be up to something really nasty, but being a regular who paid over the odds, he wouldn’t dream of pushing it. Let O’Do
nnell do whatever he wanted; as long as it didn’t come back to bite Fletcher on the arse, he couldn’t care less.

  Garry Fletcher finishes his coffee, puts his notebook away, and heads back to the office.

  He’s just stepping inside the building when he comes face-to-face with O’Donnell. He shouldn’t be up and about for at least a couple of hours.

  ‘Oh,’ Fletcher says, surprised, ‘is there a problem?’

  ‘I told him he wasn’t allowed outside, Mr Fletcher,’ says Steve. Which is true; he doesn’t want people hanging around outside for one thing, and for another, he doesn’t want people to figure out where he is. Never trust a client, that’s what he thinks—they could come back here mob-handed and try to take all this away from him. All the clients are picked up, blindfolded, and driven straight to the courtyard outside. They’re then led in here, where all the windows are painted out. Then, and only then, do they have the blindfolds taken off.

  ‘Yeah,’ says O’Donnell, ‘but I want some fresh air and I’m the paying customer here, so if you don’t mind getting out of my way?’

  There’s something wrong about O’Donnell, Fletcher decides. The way he’s carrying himself and the way he speaks. It’s O’Donnell’s body and O’Donnell’s voice but it doesn’t seem like O’Donnell. Steve’s talking but Fletcher’s not listening—he’s trying to decide if his gut instinct about this is right.

  ‘Now!’ shouts O’Donnell, and this is definitely not like him. O’Donnell is quiet. O’Donnell hasn’t raised his voice once in the time Fletcher’s known him. ‘First I want to get some fresh air!’

  ‘If fresh air is what you want, Mr Spencer,’ says Fletcher, having made a decision, ‘then fresh air is what you shall have.’ He stands out of the way, intrigued to see how this plays out and, right enough, ‘O’Donnell’ doesn’t bat an eyelid at Fletcher getting his name wrong. He just nods and heads for the door. But maybe he wasn’t paying full attention. Fletcher has to be completely sure—this client alone is en route to making him a millionaire, he doesn’t want to lose him.