Innocence (8 page)

After pulling most of the clothes out of his chest of drawers, I end up in a pair of oil-stained gray sweatpants and a ratty black T-shirt. Everything else is too big, because although we’re just about the same height, I’m quite a bit skinnier. But I don’t care what the clothes look like when the smell of them is part engine oil, part Malachi.

“We’ll go talk to Shane first,” Malachi says, opening the front door.

It’s much later than I thought, the sun is high over our heads, and it’s starting to get hard to hold my anxiety in check. Anything could have happened to Jay.

Malachi clicks his fingers at Maisie as she lies in the shade by the side of the van. She comes at once, tail wagging. I rub my knuckle across her head, wondering for the first time exactly what happened last night and how I ended up in Malachi’s van.

Shane’s caravan is opposite. Shane sits outside on the front step, his skin reddening in the hot sun.

“I didn’t see any kid, but everyone was smoking in Finn’s van last night as far as I know,” Shane says, yawning and stretching his massive chest. I know I should look away, but I can’t.

Some wordless communication seems to pass between him and Malachi before Shane pulls on a pair of flip-flops and stands up.

The once-lush grass is dying in the heat of the sun. Shane walks across it in front of me and hammers on Finn’s door. The sound of his fist thuds dully against the hot plastic. Scraping the toe of my knackered Converse across the hard, dusty earth, I tell myself I don’t even care about seeing Finn anymore. I just want to know where Jay is. Malachi hangs back with Maisie.

Obviously hungover, Finn squints at us in the too bright light.

“Yeah…?” he says, looking from Shane to me.

If Finn’s surprised to see me, he doesn’t show it. He even gives me the ghost of a smile, but I don’t return it.

“Chris’s brother Jay in there with you?” Shane asks much louder than he needs to, causing Finn to wince a little. I’m beginning to really like Shane.

“Um… don’t think so. Pixie… Jay with you?” Finn calls into the van, looking round for anyone crashed out on the floor.

Pixie emerges from the van’s only bedroom with Logan, his arm slung round her shoulder. The both of them are half-undressed. Finn doesn’t seem bothered or surprised. “Nah, he’s not here…. What’s going on?”

“Just trying to find out where he is,” Shane says in the most nonchalant tone possible before walking off towards the next van.

“Hey,” Finn reaches out before I can step away, his fingers closing round my arm. “Everything alright, Chris?”

I force myself to nod, but I’m brittle and tense, and he can see I’m not all right. His eyes search my face, his expression genuinely concerned.

“Is your brother missing? What happened?”

I suddenly feel like I’m going to throw up again.

“Get off me,” I say through gritted teeth, pushing his hand off my arm.

Malachi is leaning against the door of his van, arms folded across his chest, watching the little exchange between Finn and I.

“Chris….” Finn hisses, grabbing a pair of worn-out trainers just outside his door, shoving them on his feet and following me across the grass.

I catch Malachi’s eye, and for a second he holds my gaze, but it’s like staring into the sun.

“Chris!” Finn grabs my arm again and spins me round. “Just stop, will you!”

The sun bears down fiercely. The heat of it seeps inside me like poison, burning through my veins.

“Just fuck off and leave me alone!” I snap.

Of all things, Finn looks hurt. As if
I
have wounded
him
. His expression only serves to make me angrier. He has no fucking right to look hurt, and he has no fucking right to touch me.

Pixie watches, clueless, from the doorway to Finn’s van, a cardigan now pulled over her T-shirt and briefs, and her arms wrapped tightly around herself. The sight of her pushes me over the edge. It’s all too much, I don’t know what to do with everything I’m feeling. I clench my fist, and for a second everything goes glaringly, brightly white before I hit him.

It happens so fast, I don’t even feel my fist connect, but it does because he doesn’t block me. My arm jars with the force of it. Finn staggers back, holding his jaw. When he bends over, he spits out blood. My ears are ringing. I stare at my aching hand, at the imprint of a tooth on my knuckle. I must have hit him quite hard.

Pixie rushes over, shouting if he’s okay, and I back away, unable to work out why I just struck out like that. I wasn’t even thinking.

“Nice right hook,” Malachi’s deep voice says next to my ear. “But if you stand there looking like you’re going to faint afterwards, you’ll get fed to the wolves. Come on.”

Shakily I follow him, staring at the ground as curtains draw back and faces crowd at the windows, eyes following me like sharks scenting blood.

Shane walks with me like a shield.

Once the three of us are inside, Malachi closes the door. After the blinding sunlight, this gloom is near impenetrable. I feel my way towards the nearest seat and collapse down onto it, my head in my hands. I don’t feel bad about hitting Finn, but I still wish I hadn’t done it. All I want is to know where Jay has gone.

Someone puts an arm around my back. I want it to be Malachi, but I don’t look in case it’s not. It’s only there for a few seconds.

“I’ll deal with this,” I hear Malachi say quietly to Shane somewhere above my head. “You go deal with the drama queen out there.”

“Why does everything involving either you or him always turn into some sort of fucking drama?”

“Yeah, well, you need to go stop anything getting out of hand. Finn is not going to listen to a word
I
say.”

Someone sighs. The van door opens, then closes.

“Want to talk about it?”

The seat shifts as Malachi sits down. I shake my head.

A bottle of something cold touches my fingertips. I push it back to him, irritated that he would offer me alcohol after how sick I was. “I’m never drinking again,” I mumble.

“Well, as a flat rule that’s got an obvious flaw—if you don’t drink,
never
might only be three or four days.”

I move my hands to cup my face, my elbows pushed into my knees. My eyes slowly adjust to the darkness again. “Being drunk just fucks everything up.”

“Or smoothes out everything you fuck up, depending on how you look at it.” He gives me a wry smile and takes a deep draught from the cold bottle.

“It’s water,” he says, holding it out to me again.

I take a sip from the bottle, feel the cool water run down my throat.

“You argue about something with Jay last night?”

I look at him, rubbing my aching knuckle before just shaking my head and staring at my hands. “He was just upset and drunk.”

When I look up again, Malachi is staring at me, and like two pieces fitting perfectly together, our gazes lock. I wish I knew exactly what it was with him, and why, but all I know is I’ve never been drawn to anyone like this. And even though he looks at me and watches me all the time, I feel so certain he’s straight. But how can all this tension be just one-sided?

A heavy thump on the door breaks the silence. Cautiously Malachi opens it and peers out.

Shane stands on the step with a pale-looking Finn holding a bloody tissue to his mouth.

“He wants to have a word with Chris,” Shane says tiredly.

I wouldn’t blame Finn if he wanted to deck me—I’d actually prefer it to talking to him.

Turning slightly, Malachi mouths, “Want me to tell him to fuck off?”

“No, it’s okay,” I reply, because if Malachi stays with me, I somehow know it will be.

“C
OME
OUT
here,” Finn mouths, lifting the tissue away from his bloody mouth for a second and gesturing for me to come out of the caravan. “
Please
.”

I think about it for a moment, then get up, staring distractedly over his head to the fields beyond the camp, at everything becoming brown and overblown, the pollen heavy in the too warm air.

It’s four miles, as the crow flies, back into town. Another two from there to our boat. Farther if you follow the winding country roads.

Jay’s not the one who goes for walks to see the shape of the world every time we stop the boat, curious how the land lies, or slips off into the countryside to sort his head out when everything gets too much—that’s me. But if I put myself in his position—heart hurt maybe, drunk definitely, somewhere I didn’t want to be—I know I would have walked home. Or at least tried to. The question is, would Jay?

I follow Finn into the shade down the side of Malachi’s van, just wanting to get this over with. I don’t know why he’s not angry with me.

Absently, Malachi plucks a few discordant strings on his guitar as he settles on the caravan step just out of sight.

“It was because of Pixie, wasn’t it?” Finn says, running a hand through his long hair. The way it falls in front of his face gives him the kind of wolfish look I know I’m attracted to, but it’s not a deep feeling, and it’s easy to ignore.

I shrug, kicking at the tufts of grass, greener here in the shadows.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Isn’t that what
I’m
supposed to say?” I mutter, even though I’m not sorry, I’m just surprised he said it.

“I really like you,” he says, dipping his head to look at me. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

No one has ever said anything like that to me. And after what Jay said last night about having no one else to care about, it makes me want to fold up Finn’s words and hand them back to him. I don’t want them. I don’t want the weird flutter they give me in the pit of my stomach. I just want my brother and everything back how it was before we came here.

“Does Pixie know you fuck around?”

He breathes heavily as though he’s under great stress. “Our relationship is kind of open.”

“Oh.”

I don’t really know what that means. If you go round fucking everyone you fancy, what’s the point of being in a relationship? But then I’ve never been in a relationship. Maybe people get bored of each other. Maybe the sex becomes even worse. Maybe it’s what everyone does in the end.

“But I don’t want to just fuck around with you, Chris.”

I can’t hold his gaze.

“Look, go find your brother.” He sighs shakily, licking his swollen lip and looking momentarily pained. “We’ll talk about this another time, alright? I just wanted you to know I understand.”

I don’t really want to, but I nod and leave him standing in the shadows, his words echoing round my head like a taunt—
I can’t stop thinking about you
—and even though I don’t want them to, maybe they mean something to me. I’m just not sure whether I trust him.

Malachi watches me carefully when I step round the corner, still softly strumming his guitar. I watch him play for a moment. I get the sense he likes me watching him, or maybe he just likes being watched when he plays.

“I think Jay might have walked home,” I say softly.

Still playing, Malachi nods. It’s a winding, whispering map of sound, and the way his fingers move across the strings is fluid and complex. I understand the music so perfectly, yet the way he draws it out might as well be magic.

“It’s a twelve-string,” he says as he lifts the strap from round his neck and holds out the guitar to me. For perhaps a second, he smiles, so genuine and easy, nothing held back. It’s as though I understand
him
, not the music, but the feeling is so fleeting, it falls away and leaves me drowning in his gaze, certain he will be my downfall.

“Hold it the other way,” he says, helping me spin the instrument round. “I’ll just get some car keys.”

And he disappears inside, leaving me staring at the guitar in my arms with not a clue what to do. Tentatively I press my fingers against the strings. I have a weird déjà vu as I do it, or maybe it’s a memory—something when I was very small, when Mum was still around—of sitting on someone’s knee and concentrating on holding down the strings as they plucked out a tune.

“It won’t bite,” Malachi says, amused, as he locks up his van.

I jerk my head up.

“I don’t want to break it.” I swallow, embarrassed at the way I’ve suddenly frozen up.

“You won’t,” he says, pulling a large bin bag out the narrow van door, his ruined bedsheets inside it.

“I should sort that out for you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll stop at the launderette in town.” His fingers brush my arm, sending tremors all the way through my body. “Jay will be okay, you know.”

I want to believe him, but there is no way he can be sure. I know they all think I’m blowing this out of proportion.

“Stay,” he says firmly to Maisie, who, with her tail wagging furiously, thinks she’s coming with us. Obediently, she sinks back down to the ground, her head lying on her paws, her eyes pleading.

We walk round behind the vans to where the cars are lined up, all metal bright and shimmery in the heat, the ground bare and dusty around them.

Calling out over his shoulder, Malachi tells Shane we’re going to see if Jay’s walked home. Shane nods, but he seems deep in thought. When he looks at me, it’s as though he doesn’t know what to make of me anymore after this morning’s incident with Finn. But I understand that. I no longer know what to make of myself.

“What about my clothes?” I say as Malachi unlocks a dusty old blue Mini. Dad’s going to ask where I got these clothes from and where my clothes are. I’m going to have to come up with some lie to explain.

“I’ll just shove everything in the wash together. That alright?” He raises his eyebrows like I’m finding problems where there are none and should get in the car already. “Put the guitar on the backseat.”

Carefully, I push the front seat down and lay the guitar along the ripped back cushion.

“This is your car,” I say, seeing the way he checks it over before he gets in.

“Yeah,” he says, flicking his eyes over me as he sits down. “It is.”