T
here wasn’t anyone outside the house. I paused on the steps and looked up and down the street, just to make sure, but everything was quiet. Just parked cars, streetlights, empty roads. The cold night air was misted with the smells of the city—traffic fumes, concrete, dust—but it felt good to be outside again.
Out of that house.
Out of that room.
I shut the front door and we scurried down the steps.
The little park across the street looked a lot darker now—the darkness shifting in the rustle of shadows—and I had to squint to see the spot where I’d hidden in the bushes…the shoulder-high thicket of shrubs…the smell of the earth…damp and dark…litter…sap…thorns…
It seemed like a long time ago.
Just for a moment I thought I could see myself there—crouching down, looking out through the iron bars,
watching the house…the windows, the steps, the front door.
These
steps.
This
front door.
Watching myself.
In the shadows.
“What are you doing?” asked Candy.
“Nothing,” I said.
We left the house behind and hurried away into the night.
There was something between us then, something that hadn’t been there before and wouldn’t be there again. I’m not sure what it was, but I think it had something to do with the balance of things. We were both changing, each of us in different ways, and neither of us could know what those changes meant or what they might mean to us in the future. I suppose we were still trying to work out how that made us feel—about ourselves, about each other, about everything.
I don’t know…
It’s a difficult thing to think about.
It wasn’t simply that we were changing, either, but that the changes themselves kept changing, too. It was like being on a seesaw: One minute I was this and Candy was that; the next minute
she
was this and
I
was that.
Up, down.
Down, up.
Scared, calm.
Calm, scared.
In control, out of control…
It was pretty weird.
But strangely exciting, too—like we were starting all over again.
When Candy hailed a black cab at the end of the street, I went from
up
to
down
in an instant. There I was, Joe the Hero, Joe the Savior, Joe the
Man,
and I hadn’t even
thought
of getting a taxi. I’d just thought…Well, I hadn’t actually thought of anything. We had to hurry, that’s all I knew, and hurrying—to me—meant either walking quickly or running. The idea of getting a taxi never even occurred to me. I mean, where was the taxi rank? Where were the rows of Mondeos with
H
EYSTONE
C
ARS
written on the side?
Yep, that made me feel
highly
sophisticated.
And then, to make things worse, when the taxi pulled up at the side of the road, I couldn’t work out how to open the door. I just stood there, fumbling stupidly with the handle, yanking uselessly at the door…and suddenly I was the slack-jawed yokel again—the little boy lost, dazed and confused, blinking at the big-city lights…
It was pathetic, I know. I shouldn’t have cared about anything except getting away from Iggy as quickly as possible. It was pathetic to even
consider
feeling pathetic. It was like combing your hair just before the end of the world—utterly pointless. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself, can you? You just can’t help feeling what you feel.
“You getting in or what?” the taxi driver said.
I tugged unsuccessfully at the door again, then Candy leaned over and thumbed the latch on the handle. The door swung open and we both clambered in and sat down next to each other.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
“What?” I said.
“Where to?”
I looked at Candy. She looked at me. And then a funny thing happened. As we sat there looking at each other, silently wondering where we were going, I felt the seesaw moving again. Candy started moving down, taking the yokel with her, and as they went down, the balance shifted, and up came Joe the Man again.
“Liverpool Street station,” he told the driver, almost adding,
And step on it.
The taxi pulled out into a stream of traffic and we headed off into the bustling chaos of the night.
The farther we got from the house, the better it felt, and after a while we both began to relax a little. I think we both knew there was a lot more to come, but just for the moment it was enough to sit back in silence and watch the streets pass by, just breathing and resting and soaking up some reality. We’d both been somewhere else for a while, a place where ordinary things didn’t exist, and now was the time to start bringing them home. The ordinary things: other people, time, distance, reason, hunger, thirst, the need to pee…
I crossed my legs.
I thought about things.
I looked at my watch.
Candy turned to me and whispered, “What’s the time?”
“Six-thirty.”
She nodded. Then whispered, “Where are we going?”
“Liverpool Street,” I whispered back.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why are we going to Liverpool Street?”
“Why are you whispering?”
She smiled and whispered, “I don’t know.” Then, speaking in a normal voice, she said, “Where are we going
after
we get to Liverpool Street?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it
matters
—”
“No—to
you,
I mean. Does it matter to you? Is there anywhere you particularly
want
to go?”
“Like where?”
“I don’t know…friends or something…your parents’ place—”
“I’m not going home,” she snapped. “I’m not…I
can’t…
”
“All right…what about friends? Someone you can stay with for a while…”
“You’ve just met my friends—back at the house.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah—that’s it. What do you expect? You think I go out to dinner parties every night? Dinner parties, wine bars, charity functions—”
“Yeah, all right. I’m sorry. I was only asking…”
She turned away and stared out the window. I looked at her…in her little black hat and her scruffy old coat—she looked as if she ought to look older or younger, but she didn’t. She just looked different. Different enough to say what I wanted to say? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know…I didn’t really know if I wanted to say it or not myself.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s this place…”
She looked at me. “What?”
“It’s just an idea…” My voice was shaking. I cleared my throat and started again. “We’ve got this place in Suffolk…my family, I mean. Well, it’s my dad’s, really…you know…”
“Not really.”
“It’s a bungalow…a holiday cottage…on the Suffolk coast. It’s empty at the moment. No one’s there. It’s right out in the middle of nowhere…”
“So?”
“Well, I just thought it might be a good place to go. It’s safe, for one thing. Iggy’ll never find us there. And it’s nice and quiet, really peaceful…” I looked at her to see if she knew what I meant.
“A cottage?” she said.
“Yeah…”
“Just you and me?”
“Yeah…I mean, there’s plenty of room. Three bedrooms. We wouldn’t have to—”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
“It’s half term.”
“What about your dad? What will you tell him?”
“He’s away for a week. He doesn’t have to know.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. I could see her thinking about it, picturing things, weighing up the consequences of leaving everything behind—her life, her people, her drugs. It was a struggle for her, I could tell. I had no way of knowing how
much
of a struggle, but if the look in her eyes was anything to go by, it was a bigger struggle than I could even imagine. It was as if there were two separate people inside her head, fighting each other for what they wanted…
Fighting to the death.
“Is this all right?” the taxi driver said over his shoulder.
I glanced out the window. We’d stopped on the bend of a busy little street in a crowded maze of office buildings. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was towering walls…
marble and brick…shimmering sheets of smoked-glass windows. I was lost for a moment, completely disoriented, but then I spotted the familiar angles of a rusted metal sculpture, and everything suddenly clicked into place.
Broadgate,
I thought.
This is the Broadgate entrance to Liverpool Street station.
“All right?” the driver asked again.
“Yeah,” I said, glancing at Candy. “This is fine, thanks.”
The driver said, “That’s eleven-fifty, then.”
I started patting my pockets, looking for some money, but I realized I didn’t have any on me. I looked at Candy. She stretched out her leg and dug into her pocket and pulled out a roll of notes. She peeled off a couple of tens and passed them through to the driver.
“Keep the change,” she said.
Without looking at me, she picked up her bag and opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement. The seesaw was moving again. Going up…going down. I followed her out, almost stumbling on the curb, and shut the door. The taxi pulled away, leaving the two of us—together on our stupid seesaw—in a streaming tide of pedestrians.
“All right?” I asked Candy.
She nodded, still not looking at me.
I said, “What do you want to do, then?”
She looked up. “He’ll find us, you know. Wherever we go, he’ll find us.”
“How?”
“I don’t know—he just will. He always does.”
“Not this time.”
“You wanna bet?”
“50p says you’re wrong.”
She smiled. “50p?”
“All right,” I said. “Make it a quid.”
“You’re on.”
She held out her hand. I looked at her for a moment, feeling a wonderful floating sensation all through my body, then I reached out and shook her hand.
My fingers tingled.
It was still there—the touch of her fingertips. It was still there—hot, cold, electric, eternal, intoxicating…
It still didn’t make any sense.
But I was beginning to realize that it didn’t
have
to make any sense. Like Gina had said, this kind of stuff, it just happens. There’s not much you can do about it, so why bother worrying? Just let it happen. You might not always get what you want, but sometimes that’s just how it goes.
“You know I won’t pay up if I lose?” Candy said. “I never do.”
“Me neither. D’you want to get something to eat?”
She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We ate at McDonald’s, used the station toilets, then just had time to catch the seven-thirty train. It wasn’t too crowded—too late for commuters, too early for people going home after a night on the town—and we managed to find an empty table in the smoking compartment. It smelled disgusting, but Candy said she was going to smoke wherever we sat, so I thought it was best to put up with the smell rather than risk drawing attention to ourselves. Candy’s black eye was conspicuous enough, and bearing in mind that she’d come out of the toilets with her eyes rolling all over the place, and that her pockets were crammed with the stuff she’d taken from Iggy, the
last thing we needed was a bolshy ticket inspector throwing us off the train and calling the police just for the sake of a cigarette.
So, smoking compartment it was.
I wanted to talk about things, but I wasn’t sure where to start. There was so much to talk about…and so much I didn’t know—about heroin, addiction, withdrawal…I didn’t even know if Candy
wanted
to stop using heroin. It seemed a pretty simple decision to me—if she stopped taking heroin, she wouldn’t need Iggy, and if she didn’t need Iggy, then she wouldn’t have to live the life she was living. What could be simpler than that? But then, what did I know? I’d never been addicted to anything. I didn’t have a clue how it felt. Of course, I knew how it felt to
want
something. But wanting something so much you’d give up everything else to get it…?
That was beyond me.
I knew I had to try to understand it, though—which was why I wanted to talk about it. But, like I said, I didn’t know where to start. And, besides, Candy was starting to nod off—her heavy eyes were beginning to close, her shoulders were slumping, her head was resting against the window…
I waited until she was asleep, then I got out my cell phone, turned it back on, and called Gina.
“You’re doing
what?
” she said.
“Don’t shout—”
“I’m not
shouting
—”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Yeah, well…what do you expect? I’ve been worried
sick
about you. I don’t know where you are, you don’t answer your phone, and when you
do
finally get around to calling me, you tell me you’re coming home with this girl and then taking her off to Suffolk. I think that calls for a little bit of shouting, don’t you?”
“You sound just like Dad.”
“Christ, Joe…” she sighed. “What’s got into you? You can’t just…”
“Just what?”
“You can’t do it. You can’t go to the cottage—”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“Well, you hardly
know
this girl, for one thing—”
“Candy.”
“What?”
“You keep calling her ‘this girl.’ Her name’s Candy.”
“All right…Candy. But—”
“And I
do
know her, anyway,” I said, lowering my voice and glancing at Candy’s sleeping head. “I know her better than you think.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s not a stranger, Gina. She’s not just someone I found on the street—”
“Yes, she is.”
“All right…but you know what I mean. We’ve been through a lot together. And anyway, I couldn’t just leave her where she was, could I? She needs somewhere to stay.”
“And what about this guy she was with, this Iggy? I suppose he’s all right with the two of you waltzing off together, is he?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say he’s
all right
with it…”
“No? What
would
you say he is, then? A bit miffed? Mildly annoyed?”
“Possibly…”