Black Rabbit Summer (40 page)

‘If he doesn’t know what’s going on, he’s going to keep wondering. And if he keeps wondering, he’s going to end up talking. And I can’t have that. So either we tell him what’s going on, or we kill him.’ She glances at Pauly, smiling pleasantly, then she turns back to Eric. ‘It’s up to you,
darling.
What do you want to do?’

‘Bitch,’ Eric mutters. ‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’

Stella winks at Pauly. ‘He thinks I’m bitter. He thinks I’m only doing this because he humiliated me.’

‘I didn’t mean to
humiliate
you, for Christ’s sake,’ Eric snaps. ‘I was just a kid then… I was confused. I didn’t know what I was –’

‘Yeah,’ hisses Stella, ‘but as soon as I started getting hot with you, you suddenly knew what you were then, didn’t you?’

‘It wasn’t anything to do with you… how many more times do I have to tell you? I just happened to realize –’

‘Yeah, I know. I was there, remember? I was the nice little girl with her hand down your pants when you just
happened
to realize you were gay. You think I’m going to forget that? You think I’m going to forget how it felt when you stood up on that fucking stage and announced to everyone that Stella Ross had just turned you gay?’

‘I didn’t say that –’

‘That’s what everyone thought.’

‘No, they didn’t.’

Stella turns to Pauly, her eyes burning with some kind of madness. ‘How would you feel if someone did that to you?’

Pauly shrugs. ‘I don’t know…’

‘All right,’ she says, ‘how about this? Say you used to really like someone, OK? You really liked this guy, and you were happy to do stuff with him, you know, the kind of stuff you’d never done with anyone else before, but then this guy goes and does something really shitty, he makes you feel ugly and stupid and embarrassed. You with me?’

‘Yeah…’ Pauly says hesitantly.

‘All right. So then, one day, about a year after this guy has
ruined
your life, you see him doing something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know about.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Stella, glancing nastily at Wes, ‘let’s say you catch him in a storage room in the basement of the school theatre, him and this other guy. And they’re doing stuff you wouldn’t
believe
, and you just happen to have your mobile with you, and you just
have
to take a picture –’

‘All right, Stella,’ Eric says quietly. ‘He doesn’t need to know any more.’

‘And the thing is,’ Stella continues, ‘it’s not what he’s
doing
that this guy wants to keep secret… it’s who he’s doing it
with.
’ She stares at Wes now. ‘I mean, this other guy’s no
drama queen
, is he? He’s hard, he’s
street.
He’s inarticulate, thick as shit. He likes to hurt people –’

‘You got that right,’ says Wes.

‘He’s embarrassing.’ She looks at Eric. ‘You’re ashamed of him.’

‘I’m not
ashamed
of anything,’ says Eric. ‘It’s just –’

‘So, anyway,’ Stella says to Pauly, ‘how would you feel if you’re this guy, and you’ve been hiding this secret shame for years… and, by the way, this other guy doesn’t want anyone to know about it either, because he’s got his reputation to think of. So they’re both living this secret life, creeping around like a couple of dirty old men, and then suddenly one of them gets a phone call from that nice little girl from all those years ago, only she’s not so nice any more. And she’s not so little either. And she’s rich, and she’s famous, and she can do whatever she fucking wants. And she tells this guy that she wants him to do something for her. And he says – what? And she says – I want you to kidnap me.’

‘We’re here,’ says Eric.

Pauly looks out of the car window and sees that they’re driving
along Recreation Road, and now Wes is slowing the car, cutting the headlights, and they’re turning left down a potholed track that runs alongside the main entrance to the old factory.

‘Where’re we going?’ asks Pauly.

No one answers him.

He gazes through the window at the gloomy shapes of towers and chimneys and crumbling warehouses. Security lights are glowing in the main entrance car park, but that’s behind them now, and as they carry on down the narrow track, everything around them gradually merges into a dim and derelict darkness. The abandoned buildings, the pathways, the rusted hulks of ancient machinery… it all just lies there, silent and dead, like a vast black carcass of stone and metal.

‘Over there,’ Eric says to Wes, pointing through the window.

Wes bumps the car over a strip of grassy wasteground, and then they’re rolling across a concrete square towards a huddle of pale stone buildings with corrugated iron roofs. Beyond the buildings, the vague shapes of towering treetops are dimly visible against the black sky. Pauly has lost his bearings now, but he wonders if the trees are the trees that line the bank along Back Lane.

Wes steers the car round a heap of old tyres and slows to a stop. He turns off the engine.

The silence is complete.

Eric opens the door and steps outside.

Wes follows him.

Stella looks at Pauly. ‘I bet you wish you were somewhere else now, don’t you?’

Pauly grins at her.

There’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

∗

As they head through the darkness towards the buildings, Stella and Eric start arguing about something, their voices instinctively whispering, and Wes shakes his head and leaves them to it. Pauly moves up alongside him and offers him a drink from a bottle he takes from his pocket.

‘What is it?’ says Wes.

‘Vodka Kick.’

‘What kind of kick?’

Pauly grins. ‘It might have a bit of juice in it.’

Wes shakes his head. ‘Fucking idiot.’

Pauly says, ‘I got some blow if you want.’

Wes says nothing.

Pauly shrugs and takes a drink from the bottle. Up ahead, he can see Eric and Stella entering one of the buildings.

‘What’s going on?’ he asks Wes.

‘She’s out of her mind, that’s what’s going on.’

‘Is it true… all that stuff she was saying about you and Eric?’

Wes stops and stares at Pauly. ‘What if it is? What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing,’ says Pauly. ‘I mean, you know… it’s up to you what you do. It’s nothing to do with me –’

‘Fucking right. And it’s nothing to do with anyone else either. All right?’

‘Yeah… yeah, of course.’

Wes grabs Pauly by the hair and jerks his head to one side. ‘You know what I’ll do to you if you don’t keep your mouth shut, don’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Pauly winces, ‘I won’t say anything… I promise.’

Wes yanks Pauly’s head towards him, stares hard into his eyes, then suddenly lets go and slaps him across the face. Pauly takes the slap without a sound. He just stands there for a moment, rubbing his face, then he quietly follows Wes into the building.

Inside, Wes takes a small torch from his pocket and turns it on. The building is empty, the windows boarded up. There’s a rusted filing cabinet in the corner, its drawers buckled open and half-filled with rainwater. The floor is littered with empty beer cans, bottles, used condoms, needles, unidentifiable items of soiled clothing screwed up into wet rags. One wall is pocked with hammer marks, the others are smeared with graffiti.

At the far end of the building, Eric is pulling a metal shelf unit away from the wall. Stella is standing next to him. Behind the shelf unit, there’s a door-sized gap in the wall. Eric takes a torch from his pocket and shines it into the gap. Pauly sees stone steps leading down into a basement.

Stella looks over at Wes. ‘Stay there a minute,’ she tells him. ‘I want to talk to Eric about something.’

Wes stares at her for a moment, looks at Eric, then nods.

Eric and Stella squeeze past the shelf unit and go down the steps into the basement.

Pauly looks questioningly at Wes.

Wes shakes his head again. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘What did she mean about kidnapping?’

Wes says nothing for a moment, just stares into the darkness, then he breathes in deeply and lets out a sigh. ‘She called Eric a couple of weeks ago,’ he reluctantly tells Pauly. ‘She had this mad idea about faking her own kidnap and getting her parents to pay the ransom. She wanted Eric to arrange it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she hates his guts.’

‘No, I mean why did she want to fake her own kidnap? She must have loads of money.’

Wes shakes his head. ‘I don’t know… I think it’s got something to do with her parents. She’s got this thing about them…
you know, they were always stinking rich but they never gave her any money. They didn’t help her when she was trying to make it, they made her go to an ordinary school… all that kind of shit. I think she’s trying to pay them back.’ He shrugs. ‘Or maybe she just wants to get her name in the papers again… I don’t know.’

‘So why are you helping her?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know…’

Wes turns and stares at Pauly. ‘She’s got a picture of me and Eric, OK? She’s going to put it on the Internet if we don’t do what she wants. So we don’t have any
choice
, do we?’ He spits on the floor. ‘You got any
more
questions?’

‘No,’ says Pauly.

Wes glares over at the gap in the wall. ‘Hey!’ he shouts out. ‘What the fuck are you
doing
down there?’

Eric calls out from the basement, telling Wes to come down, and as Pauly follows him through the gap and down the stone steps, he can feel the juice-spiked vodka racing through his blood.

As far as Pauly can tell, the way it’s supposed to go down is that Eric will call Stella’s parents and make the kidnap demand. He’ll tell them to drive down to the factory before first light and leave the ransom money in the boot of the car outside, and that if they don’t do exactly as they’re told, their daughter will be sent back to them in shrink-wrapped chunks. Pauly doesn’t know how much the ransom is, but according to Stella, it won’t be a problem. Her father, she says, keeps a stash of ready money in a cast-iron safe in the attic.

So that’s how it’s supposed to happen.

But not just yet.

Pauly doesn’t know
why
they’re waiting, and he doesn’t care
either. He’s happy enough down here in the basement, down in the torch-lit dirt, sitting on a wooden crate, sipping his psycho-vodka, looking around at the industrial debris – the dilapidated machines, the rotten boards, the piles of rubbish, the heaps of rusting girders… he’s happy enough with all that. The air is cool, his head is buzzing, his skin is tingling… he’s in a basement with Stella Ross. What more could anyone want? I mean, look at her, standing over there by the wall, talking to Eric… pouting, posing, showing it all off. It’s even better than the picture Pauly knows so well, the one on the Internet, the one on his wall. That wonderful thing over there isn’t trapped inside a computer monitor or pinned to his wall – it’s right there. Moving, breathing, pulsing… every single bit of it. The flat belly, the skin, the lips, the legs, the eyes, the neck, the breasts, the flirty peep of her underwear…

Jesus
, thinks Pauly.

Christ.

The TCI is burning him up, pumping him up… he can feel every cell in his body bursting with blood.

‘What are you looking at?’ Stella says to him.

‘What?’

‘You got nothing better to do than stare at my tits?’

Pauly blinks, raising his eyes to her face. She’s staring at him, her hand on her hip, her body half-turned towards him.

‘I wasn’t…’ he mutters, standing up. ‘I wasn’t staring…’

‘Yeah, right,’ she says, turning to face him now. ‘I know what you’re thinking about.’

Pauly hopes it’s too dark for his blushes to show. ‘I’m not thinking about anything.’

‘No?’ Her eyes flick down at his crotch. ‘You could have fooled me.’

Pauly’s starting to hallucinate now, and as he looks at Stella he sees her flesh-and-blood head on a naked paper body, then his vision suddenly flips and he sees her pouting paper head on the barely clothed figure of her flesh-and-blood body.

He grins to himself.

‘Is dreaming about it all you can do?’ Stella says, moving towards him.

‘What?’

She licks her lips, puts her hands on her hips, posing, pouting, leading him on. ‘You want to try it for real?’ she says huskily.

‘Try what?’

‘Everything you’ve ever dreamed about…’ She winks at him. ‘You can try it if you want.’

Pauly’s breathing hard now, trying to control himself. But he knows he doesn’t want to control himself.

‘Come here,’ Stella says.

‘Me?’ Pauly says dumbly.

‘Yeah, you. Come here.’

He moves cautiously towards her, half-expecting her to start laughing at him. But she doesn’t. She just stands there, a pulsing vision in the underground darkness, gazing innocently into his eyes. Pauly moves closer, his mouth bone dry, his heart pounding, his belly burning.

‘It’s all right,’ Stella says babyishly. ‘I’m not going to bite you.’ Her face is a picture of virginal innocence now. She’s posing like a shy little child – her head held slightly to one side, her hands clasped demurely in front of her – and she knows that Pauly can’t resist it.

And he can’t.

He stops in front of her, his body trembling.

‘Closer,’ she whispers.

He edges forward until their faces are almost touching. He can feel the heat of her breath on his lips. He can feel her arms against his chest, the feathered touch of her passive hands… down there. He’s embarrassed, but he doesn’t care. This is it. He leans towards her, his lips trembling… and his heart stops beating as he feels her hands move. He freezes for a moment, waiting breathlessly for that impossible touch…

And then Stella puts her mouth to his ear and whispers, ‘Never in a million years.’

And an instant later a sickening pain explodes in his groin and he’s doubling over in agony, sinking to his knees, moaning and groaning, his eyes watering, his hands clutching desperately at his groin. Christ, it’s the worst pain in the
world
… it’s unbearable, it’s
unbelievable.
It hurts so
much
…