Innocence (12 page)

“Fuck.” He brings trembling hands up to cover his face. “Oh God, it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Sometimes a little bit of pain can make it more intense when you come…. I wanted it to be good for you. Not like that. It wasn’t supposed to really hurt. Do you remember anything after?”

Again, I shake my head. There is no after that.

I glance around the gloomy interior of the Tavern. Although subdued, the place is never empty. An old guy looks our way as he stands at the bar, pint in hand, but I doubt he sees us. A piece of string holds up his trousers and his expression is vacant. One day, if he carries on drinking, that could be Malachi.

I’m not going to ask Finn what happened, what it is I can’t remember. Guilt is etched across his face as it is. It makes him look old and haggard. It makes me wonder what I was ever attracted to. My anger is gone. All I feel is overwhelmingly tired.

The rain hits the window in tiny sprays, and the world beyond is gray and uninviting.

Finn sighs heavily, and I turn back to him.

“Chase has called the job off tonight because of the weather. Should be on tomorrow, same time as usual.”

“Okay.” I shrug. Having no other means of earning the money I need, I’ll do the job whenever.

“I could do with the money tonight, though,” he mutters.

I get up. I’ve had enough. I don’t feel like talking.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

Back to Jay, away from Finn.

He reaches out and grabs my arm. “Baby, I’ll make it up to you, I swear. You have to believe I’d never intentionally hurt you. You’ve no idea how sorry I am,” he says, pleadingly.

Thing is, I do know how sorry he is. It doesn’t take any of it away, though.

I head back to the boat, but only to get Jay. Even though I’m exhausted beyond belief, I want to walk, to clear my head, to banish the darkness festering in it.

“Jay,” I call from the deck.

Reluctantly he comes into the galley and looks up at me, eyes puffy from crying.

“Go get dressed and come for a walk with me,” I say softly.

He makes a tiny movement of his head, which I take as a nod, and I sit down cross-legged on the wet concrete of the towpath to wait for him. I could watch the way the rain hits the water for hours. It’s better than thinking about why I have been such a fucking idiot. I feel like I’ve betrayed Jay by not trusting him with what’s been going on in my life. He’s my best friend as well as my brother.

“Where are we going?” Jay asks in a subdued voice as he climbs out and shuts the hatch down.

“Don’t know yet. Just want to go for a walk with you.”

He smiles tentatively at that, and the darkness recedes a little.

We’re in no hurry even though it’s raining. Jay wears the bandanna I bought him. He pulls it up so it covers half his face. Whenever we go out now he wears it, but part of me wishes he wouldn’t. It’s just another thing for him to hide behind.

We make our way slowly through the town, and I buy him a can of Coke from the vending machine in the shopping center.

“I want to show you something,” I say as we continue to walk farther across the town.

I want to show him the places I’ve been, the things I’ve done. I want him to feel he has a part in my life even though he’s not with me every day.

“The house here was beautiful,” I tell him as we stand on the pavement outside the first site I worked on. “Watched them tear it down the first week we were here.”

I push apart the security barriers so that we can squeeze through.

The house may be gone, but the yard is still littered with scraps of metal and splinters of lath. I hold his hand as we walk around the hole where the cellar was, guiding him towards a huge sprawling oak at the end of the garden. The ground beneath it is quite dry. I lie down, stretching out on my side. Jay sits down next to me, arms hugging his knees. It’s really private—no houses overlook the garden, no one can see us through the fence. For a while we’re quiet. But then I get bored of just looking at him and shove him over onto his side, smiling when he scowls at me.

“Better,” I say.

His expression suddenly brightens. “Want to fight?” he asks.

It’s been ages since he’s asked me that. We used to wrestle each other all the time.

“My back still hurts,” I admit reluctantly. I wish it didn’t.

“Oh. Yeah. Is it bad? Do you want to go back?”

“If I wanted to go back, we’d be going back,” I half tease, even though it’s true.

Dodging the piece of bark he flings at me, I grab at his arms, pulling him over into the dirt. He doesn’t struggle too much. I think he’s afraid of hurting me. And I’m not fighting, really. I just want to connect with him, with someone else struggling through this life. I let him get comfortable against my side, the both of us staring up at the green canopy above us, relaxed and listening to the slow
pit-pit-pit
of the rain.

I don’t really mean to drift off. But when I do, I have a strange dream.

I dream of the dark-haired boy that stayed with us for a while when I was five or six. He was probably only fifteen or sixteen, but he seemed full grown to me then, and I had an innocent sort of crush on him. I just liked being with him, sharing with him things I’d found out in the fields, anything. I was probably annoyingly obvious with my affections, but it felt like he liked the attention. It felt like we had a bond. He had a guitar and—the memory hits me clearly—he was the one who tried to teach me to play as I sat on his lap, strumming gently as I pressed down the chords. I wish I could remember more about him, but as with Mum, I can’t even visualize what he looked like anymore.

In my dream the boy is singing. It’s the saddest song I’ve ever heard, and his voice rolls like the hills. It’s a song about lost souls, like the man in the Tavern, about how they never find their way back home.

I wake up with a need to confess everything. Jay is awake too, watching me… so awake, I’m not sure he went to sleep.

“Listen, I know I’ve kept stuff from you, but—” I take a deep breath. “—you can ask me anything, and I promise I’ll tell you.”

The sky looks like it’s falling down, slowly pressing around us as we lie beneath this tree.

“It’s okay,” Jay says, sitting up, folding his arms round his legs and making himself as small and insular as possible. “I know you don’t want to. You don’t have to.”

“Jay, I want to.” I let him hear the plea in my voice, suddenly scared I’ll lose him if I keep these things inside myself.

He rests his chin on his knees, thinking.

“Is Finn your boyfriend?” he asks.

“No,” I shake my head. “I let him kiss me and stuff, though.”

“Stuff?” he asks tentatively.

“Sex. It’s been going on for a few weeks. Last night everything got a bit carried away,” I swallow uncomfortably, digging at the ground with a sharp stone. “Finn has a fiancée, and she was there too.”

I can’t look at Jay. I feel so ashamed of everything that happened. I get up, standing on the edge of the canopy.

I sense him come and stand behind me. Blindly I reach out for his hand.

I
SLEEP
a whole gray Sunday away in my hammock.

Every time I wake up, I find tea or toast waiting for me. Sometimes I sense Jay watching me as I sleep. I sense his worry, constant as the air I breathe but stifling as the summer heat. He shouldn’t be the one to worry about me.

Around 4:00 p.m. I get up and go for a swim in the rainy river. Jay watches me leave, but he doesn’t come after me. I think he knows I need some time alone.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the air seems to vibrate around me as I stretch out in the black water. Above me, storm clouds stain the sky a sulfuric yellow gray.

After, I jerk off on the riverbank, thinking about anything but sex and coming only when I imagine someone watching me from the field beyond the hedge.

I walk home—the rain petering out to a fine mist, thunder still rolling, the air full of the metallic taste of distant lightning.

I fully expect the job to be called off tonight and the van not to turn up—and I would be happy with that. I’ve not recovered from Friday or yesterday, my heart low and hollow in my chest, and the thought of seeing Finn again so soon depresses me a little. But I wait on the curb anyway.

Dad sees me leave this time, but I don’t think he cares anymore.

Eleven o’clock comes and goes. I don’t know why, but I give it ten more minutes, and just as I’m about to go back home, the van appears out the dark and skids to a halt in front of me.

Finn and Chase are arguing. To my surprise, Chase jumps out of the van as soon as it stops and storms off.

“Chase!” Finn shouts after him. But Chase is gone, disappeared into the housing estate opposite.

“Fuck, it’s not even raining heavily. It’s just a few spots.” Finn hits the steering wheel with his fist.

Cautiously I climb in next to Logan, wondering if either of them is going to tell me what’s going on.

“Hey,” Finn says wearily. He tries to hold my gaze, but I glance away, not interested in how guilty he feels. “Chris, I’ll need you to come up and help us tonight. You okay with that?”

And if I’m not?
I wonder darkly.

I nod, shifting against the seat. My back is still sore, though not as bad as yesterday.

Shoving in an untitled CD of dance tracks, Finn turns up the volume and drives as though he has something to prove.

B
Y
THE
time we pull over next to a row of small cottages, the rain is steady. Lightning flashes in the distance, and the thunder that follows rocks heavily across the sky.

Finn hides the van down a narrow alley behind the houses. “We’ll have to walk a little way. The signal box is about half a mile down the track, but at least it’ll be out of sight,” he says.

We walk along the cutting next to the tracks. The wind is picking up, and I pull the collar of my cheap raincoat up around my face.

Logan hangs back. “Finn, Chase is right. We shouldn’t do this when it’s pissing it down.”

“Fuck off, then, alright!” Finn snaps, not even looking round. “Find your own fucking way home.”

But Logan doesn’t go.

We carry on, no one talking, our feet slipping on the ballast between the tracks. A seasick fear is growing in my gut. I’ve wired enough electrics on the boat to know why Chase didn’t come. I don’t really know why I stayed. I thought maybe Finn had more common sense than this.

“Finn,” I mutter when the signal box comes into view round a darkly foliaged bend.

“Not you too.” He sounds disgusted.

It pisses me off. “It’s dangerous. We could get electrocuted.”

“They’ve got cutoffs, safety switches. The electricity cuts out in the water. Anyway, I’m cutting. If anyone gets electrocuted, it’ll be me,” he says dismissively.

Logan stands next to me with the equipment, looking grim as Finn sets up the ladder and shears off the wires to the alarm outside the signal box.

“Should it still be flashing like that when you’ve cut the wires?” I ask.

“What? Yeah, it’s just the residual current, it’ll go off in a minute,” Finn says, climbing down.

It doesn’t look like a residual current to me, but I stand where he tells me and help him put another ladder in place.

My chest is tight with fear, and I’m half blinded by the rain as Finn climbs up and uses the cutters. Something shorts and sparks, and I think I’m going to have a fucking heart attack, but Finn smiles down at us, smugly holding the wire away from himself as if to say,
See, it’s all okay.
But it’s not okay, not yet. It’ll only be okay when we’re all safely back in the van on the way to the wrecker’s yard.

“Listen, I can hear something,” Logan shouts suddenly, holding his hands up for us to be quiet, even though we’re hardly making any noise.

“What?” Finn shouts back, me echoing him. My heart is hammering.

“I’m not sure, just… listen.”

Staring into the darkness, I listen out until I’m certain I can hear something too, not just the stormy weather and the thundering beat of my heart.

It’s a train! A fucking train. Finn must have got the timetable mixed up.

“It’s a train,” I shout.

Finn’s eyes go wide. “We need to get off the track.”

“Finn, get down!”

“I can’t leave the wire like this,” he calls, panicked.

Around the bend the track lights up, the dark shapes of trees fill up the night.

“Come on, just drop the fucking wire!” Logan yells.

Finn drops the wire and jumps, slipping on the track and falling on the stones, his body jerking.

“Get up!” I shout.

The track should be shaking by now—the train is almost upon us. But it’s not.

“Finn!” I scream.

“It’s not a train! It’s the fucking police!” Logan calls out, and I know from the sound of his voice that he’s running. He leaps into the overgrowth by the side of the track, leaving me.

And he’s right. Rounding the corner there are torches lighting up the tracks, dogs barking. The torch in my hand falls from my grasp, glass shattering. Frantically I stumble across the rails to grab Finn, who is still not getting up, who—the realization hits me like a punch in the gut—is not moving at all anymore. The wire is hanging loosely above him, sparking every so often in the rain. My limbs turn to stone. Oh God, he must have touched it. I try and run towards him, but it takes forever. Voices are shouting, a loudspeaker, but the blood roaring in my ears is louder.

I sink down on the soft earth near where his ruined face is pressing and throw up. Blindly I reach for his hand.

I’m still holding it when the police pull me off him. I don’t know if he knew I was there or not.

Someone shakes me by the shoulders. My head snaps up. Some guy in a too yellow jacket with a radio attached. Three others kneel down next to Finn. A dog sniffs at my fingers.

“I’m PC Quinn. What’s your name?” he asks.

I stare off across the tracks as though I can’t hear him. I feel like holding my breath.