Innocence (9 page)

I get the feeling he doesn’t have much, but what he does have is important to him.

Deep gold fields stretch away from the road all the way to the hills. The color hurts my eyes, but I keep on looking for any sign of Jay.

My hand trails out the window, the wind rushing over my skin like shallow waves against a beach. I’d enjoy the sensation if I wasn’t so hungover. Malachi keeps the radio off, and I don’t feel like talking, I just feel small and worried and a million miles from anything I know.

But my worry is for nothing.

As soon as we pull up outside the Tavern, I see the back of Jay’s head as he sits on the ground by the wall, talking with Lorne. All the tension gripping my body lets me go, and I lean back, feeling as though I have walked a hundred miles.

Malachi glances at me. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” I breathe. I don’t want to get out of the car yet. I just want to sit here with my relief. “Jay’s okay. He’s over there.”

I point out the window without sitting up. I should go see him, tell him he was a dick for going off and not telling me, and then hug him until he can’t breathe.

I close my eyes.

“But…?” Malachi says.

Opening my eyes, I get the feeling Malachi is studying me, trying to figure me out.

“I just need a minute.”

Maybe if I sit here for a minute I will finally muster up the courage to ask him the thing that’s been skulking around the corners of my mind for a week—how he knew my mother. But, with a flash of inspiration, something else occurs to me, and my heart bumps as though someone has slapped me on the back.

“Will you teach me to drive?” I say quickly, not even considering he might not want to.

If he teaches me to drive, it means I have a reason to see him again.

Malachi’s expression darkens like a storm rolling in from the sea, and immediately I regret asking him.

“I shouldn’t have done that the other night. It was stupid,” he says.

“No…. Dad’s never patient with me like that. You—”

“I was drunk. It’s not a good idea.”

“But you’re not
always
drunk. You’re not drunk now.” I wish I could keep my mouth shut and stop talking because I can see he wants me to, but his reason seems so
stupid
.

“I’m an alcoholic, Christopher,” he says, as if it’s set in stone, and drags his hand through his hair, looking everywhere but at me, his body radiating tension.

“And that’s it? You don’t want to
not
be one? I like you when you’re not drunk.” I add the last bit quietly, though it makes me a little seasick that I actually say it and it’s not entirely true—I like him when he’s drunk too. But it irritates me that he seems to have surrendered himself to being that way. I don’t understand why anyone can’t just stop if they want to badly enough.

He chokes back a bitter laugh. The change in him is so sudden, it shocks me as if the solid ground has been whipped away and I’m falling into deep, deep water, completely out of my depth.

“Oh, to be so fucking naive!” he barks. “You’re a kid, you know nothing! Go back to your simple little life, Christopher, where everything works itself out in the end. You’re better off not knowing me.”

The car is too hot. There is no air. The conversation is spiraling and I don’t know how to stop it.

“But I want to know you.”

For a fraction of second, he looks torn, but then his expression clouds again.

“I’ll give your clothes to Shane to give to you.”

Numbly, I realize he’s telling me he doesn’t want to see me again. I can’t get my head around it.

“What did I do?” I whisper, hating that I even ask that question, but hating not knowing the answer more.

He sighs, rolling his shoulders back, trying to relieve some of the tension. “Nothing,” he says more gently. “Go see your brother.”

But I can’t. I can’t leave it like this.

“You carried me back to your van last night when you could have just left me in the field.”

“Sometimes people don’t have a reason for all the stupid things they do. If it’s any consolation, I’m beginning to regret it now.”

“Why are you being like this?”

“Because you need to drop it. You’re a kid, Christopher, a fucking kid.” His hand hits the steering wheel. There’s not much force behind it, but I still cringe away. “You need to forget about me.” My heartbeat is thumping in my ears, making me light-headed. “And stop looking at me with those damn puppy dog eyes like you’ll follow me to the ends of the earth. I’m not worth it.”

Nausea rises like a tidal wave, I can’t bear that he sees right through me.

My hands curl into fists, the knuckles white, dirty nails pressing into my palm until it hurts. Without making a sound, I get out of the car. The raw heat of the sun makes everything spin sickly off-kilter, makes everything inside me feel so exposed.

I thought Jay was the only person who could bring me to my knees. Now I know he’s not.

“Jay,” I call, fake and bright, ignoring the way Lorne looks at me and smiles. I just can’t deal with anyone else right now.

Surprised, Jay grabs the wall and scrambles up just as I throw my arms around him, holding him so tightly. If I let myself, I would cry right now, but instead I bite the inside of my cheek and concentrate on the feel of the warm, skinny boy in my arms, needing him right now far more than he needs me.

“You’re a dick,” I mumble into his soft hair.

“I know. I’m sorry,” he mumbles back.

A
STARLESS
dark calls to me beyond the small lozenge of our cabin window. I’m trying to close my eyes and drift off, but I can’t ignore the near irresistible urge to get up and run barefoot through the night, away from this boat, this town, all the bruised spaces of my heart.

I can’t ignore that lying here thinking about Malachi is killing me.

Water laps slow and heavy against the side of the boat, regular as the rise and fall of Jay’s chest beneath my arm.

I wish I could sleep, at least then I could forget for a while. Instead I lie here, turning myself inside out, wishing I knew what to do, wishing I knew what I felt.

I think about the promise I made to Jay, that we’d try to find Mum. He misses her more than I do. He needs her, yet all he has is me and Dad. If she was here, maybe he would have more confidence to go out into the world, to make friends and talk to people. I don’t know. But she abandoned us—walked away and never looked back, wanting never to be found. For the first time I let myself admit how hopeless our search would be.

Instead I fantasize about starting over someplace no one would know us, just Jay and me. But would it be any different for him wherever we went? I think about what I want for him—I want him to have friends, I want him to fall in love, be happy. He deserves something beautiful, something pure and bright. He deserves someone who can see past his face to that beauty inside him. Someone who’ll look at him as if they
know
him. Someone who looks at him how Malachi looked at me—or how I imagined he did.

Restlessly I roll onto my back. The cabin is stuffy and warm, my T-shirt sticking to my back.

Malachi.

I don’t want to think about him. I want to forget. He hurt me, and I can’t escape it. The memory of what happened is painful and tender as a body-sized bruise. It’s funny that you can measure how much someone means to you by how badly they can hurt you. And I don’t know why his face is there when I close my eyes, why being with him fills the spaces inside me.

I never want to see him again. And at the same time, I want to pin him to the floor and force him to swallow back every fucking horrible word he said to me in the car. I want him to choke on them. I want to know how hard his muscles are beneath his T-shirt. I want to know the taste of his skin. I want to chase the tattoo across his chest with my tongue. I want to feel the shape of him as he grows hard pressed against my hand… and then I want him inside me or me inside him, hard and desperate, like he’s overcome by how much he wants me.

With the stealth of a sack of potatoes, I drop out of Jay’s bunk and land on the floor. I stop still, holding my breath, hoping I’ve not woken Dad. I need urgently to get out of here, need to release some of this tension inside me.

I creep up onto the deck. The night is warm, the air heavy with the cloying sweetness of spoiled fruit. Scores of sour black elderberries and tiny crab apples lie strewn across the path, wasted in this heat wave.

Over on the estate, kids are yelling, cars hooting horns, alarms going off. It could be trouble, I guess, or it might just be how things are. I’ve not really been around here long enough to tell how the land lies, and nights are never really silent wherever you go.

I pull on a pair of worn-out trainers from the cabinet by the door. Usually I stay pretty close to the boat, but tonight I take off at a run down the towpath past the Tavern, needing to get rid of this tension.

And as the sweat pours off me, I vow to never let myself be ruined by something I can take control of. Be it alcohol or a bad relationship. I vow never to be as weak as Malachi.

T
HE
NEXT
morning, Shane picks me up at eight, and I sit in the back of his car between Finn and Rowan. Finn’s lip looks swollen as hell, and he gives me several rueful looks I don’t feel ready to return, but I’m not pissed at him anymore either.

“Need you to stay the full day today and probably all this week. Your dad said Jay is going to be getting a lift back with some girl who lives at the Tavern,” Shane says, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

This is news to me. I was surprised to see Jay talking to Lorne yesterday. The thought of him with a friend other than me is at once strange and comforting. But it is definitely a good thing.

Pixie was right. The site is a block of flats on a rundown estate next to the football ground. It all has to be cleared before demolition at the end of next week. Not by us this time, although I think, from Friday’s display at the wheel of the wrecker, that Shane would probably like a hand in it.

The block is an eyesore, even on this estate. At first glance it looks like fire damage. Every window is gone, leaving sinister dark holes all the way up to the top floor. The lower floors were boarded up with metal plates to stop vandals and squatters, but they’ve been ripped off and now lie scattered on the ground. Deep gouges in the stonework expose the building’s crumbling metal skeleton, and I can see why the place has been condemned and not just renovated. It won’t leave a scar, unlike the once-beautiful Victorian mansion we tore down last week.

A group of local kids with bikes hang round the entrance, watching silently as we get out of the car, until Shane tells them to fuck off and runs at them as if he means business.

The site was supposed to be cordoned off, but it’s not, and Shane is pissed as hell at those already here and working.

He sends me up to the top floor to start bringing all the fittings down. Like scavengers attacking a carcass, we take whatever is salvageable. All day I work hard, carting everything from sinks to mattresses down the spiraling concrete stairwell. My muscles burn with a fiery ache, and I concentrate on the pain, liking it more than the thoughts that crowd my head.

When Pixie comes with sandwiches at lunchtime, I slip away to hang around on the top floor until I’m sure she’s gone.

At the end of the day, I ask Shane about my money, if there is any way he can pay me instead of it all going to Dad. But Shane just shakes his head and tells me he’s sorry, but Liam sorts out all the money.

The whole week is pretty much the same. Jay is the warm pillow I hold on to every night, too exhausted to do more than mumble at him before I sleep. And every night I mean to ask him about Lorne, if she’s become his friend, if he’s okay at school, if any creeps are bothering him, but I’m just too tired for any sort of coherent conversation. I don’t know how people do it, how they have a life after being at work all day.

I start taking sandwiches in with me, otherwise I end up feeling like I’m going to collapse come five o’clock. I know Finn’s noticed I don’t go down at lunchtime, but he doesn’t say anything.

Friday, he comes over as I’m stacking the cupboard doors from about twenty kitchens into uniform piles out on the grass under the hot sun. Irritation crawls all over me like summer flies. Mostly it’s from pain, from the raw sunburn prickling my back. Tentatively, he tells me they’ve still got a job on tonight if I’m interested. I ask him if it’s the same deal as before, and he nods.

Later the weather looks like it’s finally going to break as I sit on the curb waiting for Finn to show. Dad is out with Liam, and Jay is home alone. I can tell he wasn’t happy about it, but I think he wants me to do the job and get the money more than I do, and he’s happy to lie about my whereabouts if Dad comes home sober enough to check, which is doubtful.

“Job’s off if it rains,” Chase warns me as I climb into the van.

I squeeze in next to Finn, noting how much better his lip looks. Both he and Logan are smoking a fat cigarette that smells pungent and greener than grass after rain. I take a toke, but only the one, because I choke and cough for a good ten minutes after. Finn, in his current state, finds this hilarious. I’m about to elbow him in the ribs but then think better of it.

It’s much farther away this time. A couple of hours pass before Chase pulls in to a deep cutting by the railway tracks. We have no cover. There are no trees or anything to disguise the conspicuous white van as it sits just off the road.

I feel a little giddy as they all get out—a mixture of the smoke inside the van and crushing tiredness.

Finn waits until the other two are halfway up the bank, unable to hide the longing in his eyes as he repeats the instructions from last time, and I have to swallow down a bubble of laughter at the surreal déjà vu slant the situation has taken on.