“That used to be Viktor’s room—Dr. Belinski—but it’s empty now. He left a few weeks ago.”
“Oh. Why?”
“No idea. One day he’s here, the next his office is cleared out and he’s gone.” She shakes her head. “A complete mystery. Come on, I need to lock up now.”
She flaps her arms at me, shooing me out so she can close and lock the door.
“Where did he go?”
“Like I said, it’s a mystery. No one knows. Even Admin were in the dark about it.”
A few weeks ago?
I want to know if he left the day I saw him. It seems important somehow. I pull my pad out of my pocket and flick through it, searching. The woman is walking off across the car park by the time I find what I’m looking for. I run after her.
“Was it the nineteenth? His last day.”
She stops. “Maybe. Yes, actually, I think it was.” She frowns, and at the same time gives me a small smile. “I do need to go now.”
I nod.
I only remember to say “Thank you” when it’s too late.
So Dollman’s gone. Was it because of me? Because I was following him? Or because I found him here? Did I defeat him? Perhaps I’ll never know. Perhaps I don’t need to. Perhaps this is another thing I’ve got to learn to do—
let things go
. It’s hard, though. A big part of me wants to head over to the warehouse flats I saw him go into that night weeks ago and wait there to see if he comes out. But for what, really?
I shake my head and slip my notepad back in my pocket.
Focus.
I look up to get my bearings. I have a swimming pool to get to and then another hospital where the boy I love is stuck in a bed waiting for me to return.
I know what matters most.
IT’S DARK
and I’m not sure what to expect when I reach the swimming pool. I’m half prepared for metal boards to be fixed in place, blocking the way in, but nothing looks different. The plywood covering the entrance is still liftable, and when I step inside, a familiar silence descends. I was hoping maybe Milo would be here. I haven’t seen him for days, but no light glows from beneath his door and it’s too quiet—I would hear him if he was sleeping. I’ll leave a note on his door before I go, explaining things.
Carefully I pick my way across the broken tiles to my room.
The door is still open. Everything so far is undisturbed, so I expect my shell to be exactly the way it was when we left with the paramedics yesterday. As my eyes adjust to the gloom, I can see that it’s not. My heart sinks. There are clothes scattered across the floor and a few of my jars of flower water are spilled and broken. No great destruction, but small ones here and there.
Thankfully Micky’s expensive-looking makeup case sits untouched on the floor near the bath, as is my backpack of phone spares.
But the cardboard surrounding my nest looks as though it’s been…
nibbled
.
I inch as quietly as I can into the room, keeping to the wall. Even my breathing is quiet, but it’s not quiet enough.
Three pairs of eyes follow my every move. As soon as I realize, I stop. With my hands splayed out on the tiles behind me, I sink down to a crouch.
Three foxes are curled in my nest of blankets. A mother and two cubs. I’m sure these must be the foxes I was leaving food out for, and I can see all the food I had left in this room has either been eaten or dragged into my nest with them.
After a minute the cubs decide I’m not much of a threat and put their heads down and close their eyes. Only their mother keeps watching me, and I keep watching her. Even in the gloom, her coat is so striking I can pick out her markings. I’m fascinated and transfixed, my heart thumping excitedly. Foxes have great hearing, and it’s a wonder I haven’t scared her off yet, but she doesn’t appear to be readying herself for flight and I don’t think she will attack me unless I threaten her cubs. Perhaps she knows I just want to have this moment and then I’m going to leave her to it.
It would be sort of poetic to leave my old life to the foxes, since the life I have now began that way.
Sort of.
I have no memory of what happened. When I was eleven or twelve, my social worker from one of the nicer homes showed me a newspaper clipping—just a few words. It didn’t even have a headline; it wasn’t that important.
Baby taken from local house by foxes, found by passerby two days later in nearby woods, badly bitten. Police still trying to get in contact with parents.
Me. I was about a year old when it happened. The house I was taken from was a local squat. The authorities never traced my parents after I was found, but I know someone had cared enough to report me missing in the first place.
Whoever they were, whoever I am, I’m never going to know, but it doesn’t matter—the past is a long way behind me now. I don’t think too much about it. The now is what’s important. Maybe the future too. And if I want Micky to be a part of it, I know that future can’t be here. It can’t be like this.
Slowly I push my way up to standing. I don’t blame the foxes—they do what they do to survive. We all do, and sometimes we hurt people, even when we don’t mean to. I’m going to hurt Micky, and it’s the last thing I want to do. I only hope he’s going to understand when I show him, for the first time in my life, I have a sort of plan.
Careful of my shoulder, I swing my backpack on my back, and then I pick up Micky’s case. I don’t want to look back, but I do, one last time. Then I close my eyes and breathe it in. I’ve never gotten too attached to places. As long as they’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.
Before I leave the swimming pool, I pin a note on Milo’s door telling him about the foxes, about Micky, and where it is I’ve gone. I tell him I hope I see him again. I miss him with his weird advice and funny-tasting tea.
I try and phone Donna again, and when I get no answer, I leave a message for her too. I have this weird idea that she and Vinny have taken off, maybe gone traveling, some place they can lose themselves in.
BY THE
time I reach the hospital, I am exhausted. My feet hurt, and all I want is to sleep and sleep and not think about everything yet, because everything I have to think about hurts.
Visiting time is almost over when I get to the ward. Both Benjamin and Micky look like they’re asleep. Micky curled up like a comma on the bed, Benjamin slumped on the uncomfortable chair next to him, his head dropped at an awkward angle to his shoulder, his mouth open.
Hawkeye smiles at me as I pass, and I ask her if I can put Micky’s case somewhere safe. As soon as Micky hears his name, he wakes up.
This time when I pull the curtain around to give us a bit of privacy, Hawkeye lets me. Her name is really Susan, but I like calling her Hawkeye. I told Micky this yesterday and he laughed and told me she’d probably like being a superhero.
I kick my shoes off and crawl up on the bed next to Micky, putting my arms around him and pulling him close. Benjamin remains asleep.
“You okay?” Micky whispers.
“Am now,” I whisper back, pressing my face to the warm skin of his neck, closing my eyes, and breathing him in. This is all I need. When everything gets too difficult, I know I’ll need to remember this and hold on.
“Me too…,” he breathes. “Did you do everything you needed to do?”
Just about.
I nod. “Did you?”
Micky shifts onto his side so he’s facing me. “Talk to me about why you can’t come with me.” I promised him earlier that we would talk about this. “I know I don’t have a lot of choice in what’s going to happen, but I told Benjamin I wasn’t going to agree to anything until I’d spoken to you. I know you don’t have a passport right now. But we could get that sorted somehow. Benjamin has money. Unless… you want this to be over. I mean, I’d get it. I’ve fucked up…. Don’t give me hope when there isn’t—”
I trace his lips with my fingertip. “Do you remember that letter?”
“The letter you wrote me that night in the café?”
I nod. “I think I was wrong.” I’m not sure how to put it into words. “About planning and not being able to do it. Sometimes I think I make my life small so I can deal with it better, but I do want to try for bigger. I want to try to be more. For you. For me. I want to be able to do the things you told me you wanted.”
His hands are so warm as he cups my face. “You don’t have to be more. You’re
everything
.”
I lay my fingers over his, locking our hands together. “And you’ve got to be Dominic. You can’t pretend about that. It’s not something you can cut away or make disappear.”
He nods, blinking back tears. “I know,” he says softly, though he looks like this is something he wishes he didn’t know. “But I don’t want to get on a plane knowing you’re not coming with me. I’m scared I’ll never see you again. I’d rather run away and be with you. I don’t care where.”
“Can’t go back to my shell. It’s been taken over by foxes.” I try to make light of it, but Micky is upset. “Wait for me?” I whisper.
From my pocket, I take out the letter Dytryk gave me, and we read it together.
“So, they want to give you a room in their house?” Micky asks.
“As soon as they have one. Until then, Diana sorted out a temporary place at a Centrepoint hostel.” My hands are shaking. “It’s not like the hostel I was in before. There are people there who want to help me.”
“I wish I could be the one to help you.”
“You have helped… you will. You took the lid off the sky for me… you gave me hope, and… I think I want to do that for other people too. Diana thinks I could have a job helping people.” Talking to people on the streets, helping them figure out where to go, what to do.
I didn’t know there were jobs like that until Diana told me and made it sound so simple. She told me there are charities that support the homeless. Places that would want people like me to work for them—people who understand how hard it is, who’ve been on the street, who have difficulties in dealing with the everyday things other people find easy. It’s not hunting sharks, but like Donna said once, I’m never going to find them all. And what good did it do? At least this way I might stop someone getting hurt, if only by letting them know they have a choice.
Life has teeth, all we can do is try not to get bitten.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whisper.
“Kiss me and make it a promise,” he whispers back before pressing his lips to mine.
BY THE
time my plane arrives in New York, I feel like I already know the place. The hours and hours Micky has spent video calling me and taking me on walks around the city seem to have paid off. Making my way from the terminal to AirTrain to subway station is still unfamiliar: terrifying but not overwhelmingly so. Micky has taken this journey with me as I sit on my bed back in England probably around twenty times now.
Micky has done all the legwork.
It’s one of the quirks of my brain that I didn’t want him to come and meet me off the plane. He would have brought a car to drive us. It could have been easier, but I didn’t want that because what I wanted was to find him, like he found me all those times in London. I wanted to be able to do it, to prove to Micky, and to prove to myself. I wanted to walk into a café and buy him a drink because I can. Not because I need to be
normal
, whatever that is, but just because I want to. Because I don’t want there to be any limits.
So, apart from the fact that Micky and I have talked maybe five or six times a day on the phone, video called sometimes for hours at a time, and watched films together like that (and done other stuff that makes my heart race faster than a rocket shooting into space and has caused Micky to break two phones so far—we discovered certain liquids
really
mess phones up if they land on them), it’s been eight months since he got on a plane and left.
Eight months since I’ve seen him face-to-face, held him, touched his skin. And right now as the overwarm subway train takes forever to get to the center of New York, I hate the quirks in my brain. I could be with Micky now, kissing him and holding him, and here I am sitting in some scratchy seat listening to some guy’s overloud music while I control my breathing and stare at my phone screen.
I wonder if I could get one of the phones out of my bag to see what needs fixing—Dytryk buys broken phones off eBay for me. It’s more of a hobby than an occupation now. Fixing things relaxes me and helps stop too many thoughts crowding my brain, but I don’t know exactly how much longer I’m going to be on the train.
Instead I pull out the little set of cards I have in my pocket. They’re there for when I start to lose confidence or things begin to feel too complicated. They tell me the plan. Mostly I memorize the plan, but sometimes it helps to see it all written down, and sometimes I write it down again in my pad.
It’s funny that having a plan is what’s it’s all about now.
When the train pulls into Fiftieth Street, I’m to get off. I have a set of pictures that map the route from the train all the way to the street. Micky is in each of them—just a hand, a foot, half a goofy smile. I picked the café last week after Micky gave me a tour of the street, walking in and out of every single café he saw. I chose a big one. “Valencia’s,” it’s called. It’s about one hundred steps from the subway exit. I’m terrified.
Finally we reach Fiftieth Street and I get off the train. My heart is beating so fast I feel dizzy. There are too many people and so much noise and I’m finding it hard to keep walking. All the things I’ve been scared of crowd my brain.
What if he’s not there? What if this isn’t real and I’ve been pretending this whole time? What if I can’t do it?
What if… what if… what if.
I know this is okay. It’s okay to stop and take a minute. It’s okay to be scared.
I step out of the flow of people and find a space where I’m not in the way. Leaning against the tiled wall near the bottom of the escalator, I close my eyes for a moment.
I worry less and less about what people think when they see my face. But at moments like this, I still want to bow my head and make myself small and less exposed. Less different. And I know it’s okay to feel like this too. It’s human to want to fit in and not stand out.