‘I mean, I saw
her friends taking shots at her every now and then, but I thought
nothing of it. I mean, one time when our Nan was babysitting she
tied me to my bed, and, my Nan being half-deaf, I was left up there
for three hours calling for help.
Don’t get mad,
I thought,
get even.
And I did. You’d think that, after the shit we did
to each other...’
He takes a
third deep breath.
‘I feel guilty
for the stuff I did to her. The dumb, tit-for-tat shit, like
swapping the sugar for the salt so she’d put it in her
porridge.’
‘The
salt-for-sugar gag never did anything worse than prove how fucking
dreary you are when it comes to practical jokes,’ I assure him. The
bleak, clawing desperation in his eyes tells me that the witticism
hasn’t landed.
‘Can you get
me another whiskey?’ he asks.
‘Maybe later,’
I reply. ‘So what happened to Penny?’
Charlie sighs,
from the tar-flooded bottoms of his lungs.
‘I don’t know,
man. First thing any of us noticed was this time she came back from
a night out with blood on her jeans. My dad spotted it and made her
show him her leg, right in front of all of us. She was about
sixteen; I must’ve been about twelve, thirteen, I guess. She had
this gash on her leg, only about an inch long, but it was the way
the skin had split apart that was worrying, y’know? Like a canoe.
Showed that whoever did it really wanted to inflict some
damage.
‘For the next
few days I kept overhearing my parents trying to work out who’d
done it to her: Angela; Pamela; Sandra; Rita; the only one they
never accused was Penny herself. It wasn’t long until it became
obvious who was doing it, though.
‘It was like
my parents opened the box, that night. After that, the secret was
out, so I guess she didn’t have to hold back anymore. It started
out being every month my parents would find a new scar, then every
week, then every fucking day. There was even this one time where
she poured boiling water over herself; she got away from it without
needing a skin graft, but the dry pus on the bandage stank the
house up for weeks. So my mum and dad did what any parents would
do; they stopped her going out, except to school, and when it
turned out that there was a three-month waiting list to get
counselling on the NHS, they spent all the money they didn’t have
on getting her in with someone private. They just wanted her
fixed
, y’know? And when she didn’t get fixed even I could
tell they were frustrated, maybe even angry, with her, so I’m
fucking certain that she felt it.’ Suddenly he snarls, as though
someone has just contradicted him. ‘And when she didn’t get better,
what, were they supposed to just set her loose, knowing that she’d
come home with more stubbed-out fags on her arms, and a stomach
full of painkillers? And what was she supposed to do with that
guilt; knowing that every bad thing she thought about herself only
served to make the people she loved feel like failures? Both sides
just got worse. Mum and Dad stopped her leaving the house for
anything other than college or counselling, and told her teachers
to keep an eye on her. Then, for her part, Penny did what any
teenage rebel would do when Big Brother’s got them under his thumb;
she just got smarter about it. Self-harm turned to starvation. For
a while, mum and dad thought she was making progress.’
Charlie plucks
a cigarette out of the pack with his teeth, wearing a pensive
expression.
‘Have you got
a condom on you?’ I ask him.
‘Um, yeah,
sure,’ he replies, the pensive expression giving way to a quizzical
one. He fumbles around in his back pocket, wrenches out his wallet
and removes a square, foil parcel from it. He hands it to me. I
pull it open with my teeth and spit the foil out onto the coffee
table. With a smirk, I say:
‘They’re going
to wonder what we’ve been up to down here.’
For the second
time, my joke doesn’t land. I roll my eyes and, as Charlie is
lighting his cigarette, peel the condom over the fire alarm.
Through a cloud of smoke and vapour, he continues his tale. I jump
down off the coffee table and flop back into my seat.
‘I think the
anorexia was always there, you know, but she was able to keep a lid
on it until the point where Mum and Dad had her under watch.
Looking back, it’s obvious to see that she didn’t like her body;
she’d always brush her teeth in front of the mirror, but her eyes
would never be looking at her face; she would always save her
dinner money at school instead of having lunch; she claimed she
didn’t have a sweet-tooth, but every now and then a whole pack of
biscuits would mysteriously go missing from the cupboard, then
she’d mysteriously start running the shower at three in the
afternoon. Until the self-harm came out, though, I guess it was
under control. Maybe the self-harming and the not eating kind-of
balanced each other out. Maybe I should’ve worked that out earlier.
Maybe that could’ve saved her.
‘I caught her
throwing up a few times, when my parents went out to the shop or
somewhere like that. She made me promise not to tell them about it,
so I didn’t. I couldn’t betray her like that, but I had to do
something, so I – being a dumb fourteen-year-old – told her I
thought she was cool.’
He laughs.
‘That’s
literally all I had to offer: “Hey, so I know you’re absolutely
dead-set on slowly killing yourself, but your little brother thinks
you’re cool.”’
He pulls the
cigarette out of his mouth to make room for the laughter, which has
now become slightly manic. It bursts out in billows of fag-smoke
and tar.
‘Not much, but
I kept trying it. Even with all the shit we pulled on each other,
even with all the arguments, I always felt as though me and Penny
could talk about things. Even if we had to add “you cunt” to the
end of every sentence - you know, to keep up appearances.
Eventually, though, she just took to telling me to fuck off
whenever I came near her room. It’s kind-of ironic, actually; right
around the time I started masturbating was the most impotent I’ve
ever felt in my life.’ He looks away from the ceiling and smirks at
me. ‘Well, up until this week, anyway.’
The smirk
finally dies. He leans forward, and runs his hands through his
hair.
‘She died in
the summer holiday before she was supposed to go to university.
Even with all the shit she was going through, she still got two A’s
and a B at A-level,’ he utters, as though reporting the football
scores. He doesn’t cry, but his fists clench at his scalp and he
pulls his hair forward.
‘Charlie?’ I
ask. ‘Do you want that whiskey now?’
Charlie nods.
After I get it, I put a shitty movie on, though I make sure it’s
not one with any gunfire in it. We don’t converse any further. I
can’t work out quite when it is that I fall asleep, and the hazy
image of the television screen turns into a hazy dream of being
told by Charlie to kill a girl who is, by turns, Liz and Phoebe. As
opposed to yesterday, it’s a relief to be woken up by the phone in
my back pocket vibrating. As I open my eyes, I find myself slumped
over the arm of the chair. My hand goes searching for the pocket of
my jeans, which by this point are somewhere around the back of my
knees, and pulls out Liz’ phone. She’s got a new text from Sophia,
one of those people I’ve never heard of who she mentioned going
travelling with. I key in her password, and open the message:
Peter, I don’t know
what it is you’ve done, and I don’t want to know. Never contact me
again.
I could’ve
worked that much out for myself. Whether it’s because I’m still a
bit pissed from last night or because I’m beyond the point of
giving a shit, I can’t resist the urge to send a response:
‘For the
record, I fucking like statistics and data management,’ I type. I
press ‘send’, then throw the phone in the general direction of the
corridor. It clatters against the bannister and I glance upwards to
check that this sudden noise hasn’t woken Charlie, but the glance
turns into a stare when I see that he’s not only awake, but that
he’s pointing a revolver at me. Stupidly, my hand scrabbles around
in the side of my coat, searching for my gun as though it’s not the
one in his hands.
‘There were
two bullets left in this when we were up on the moor,’ he says.
‘There’s one in it, now. Forgive me for prying, but where did the
other one go?’
My hand stops
scrabbling. I briefly debate pleading ignorance.
‘You know
where it went, Charlie,’ I say, eventually.
His eyes hint
at the answer his lips and mind don’t want to provide. I nod.
Charlie cocks
the revolver.
When we got back to
the house the other morning, knackered, wet and mud-covered,
Charlie and Freddy went straight to their rooms and passed out. I
didn’t. Instead, I put on the gloves, and hoody which I’d told the
other two I’d put into the plastic crate along with theirs, checked
the waistband of my jeans for the gun which I told them I’d buried
along with theirs, clambered out of my bedroom window and dropped
back down onto the street. I stacked the landing, but my body had
been so battered in the preceding hours that the extra pain in my
knees didn’t even cause me to yelp. After lurching back to my feet,
I made my way towards Byker, trying to infer the time from the
burgeoning light, since I had neither a watch nor a phone
anymore.
The lack of a
phone was particularly irritating, since I had no idea how to get
to Sid’s flat. With the sun threatening to poke its head over the
horizon, and without Google Maps to lead my way, I was on the
business end of a tantrum by the time I’d completed my third lap of
Byker. Then, all of a sudden, the view of a block of flats in the
distance aligned itself with a snapshot filed away somewhere in my
memory, and the frustration turned to fear. Sid was somewhere up
there.
I passed
someone on the stairs. I turned my head to the side, but he seemed
too pissed-off that he had to get up for work at such an hour to be
concerned about memorising my face. When I reached the third floor
I pulled back my hood and rapped thrice on Sid’s door. It took a
conspicuously short time for him to open it, almost as though he
was expecting company.
‘You coming
in?’ he asked.
‘Seeing as
I’ve walked all this way, I guess it would be rude not to,’ I
replied, pushing past him. By the time I’d finished my response I
was already slouched on his sofa. It had been such a long time
since I’d slept that I could’ve fallen asleep then and there. I
also could’ve sworn that there was a black cat wandering around in
his kitchen, but when I screwed-up my eyes it disappeared
again.
‘So, what can
I do for you?’ Sid asked. He remained standing, leaning against the
kitchen cupboards and the counter. He was being oddly polite, as if
he knew what was coming. Maybe I was just twitchy from the lack of
sleep, maybe I just didn’t want to take any chances, but by the
time I’d gotten halfway through this train of thought I’d already
pulled the gun on him. Weirdly enough, Sid smiled.
‘So, did
Charlie put you up to this?’ he asked.
‘You did this
to yourself, Sid,’ I replied.
‘How so?’
‘You brought a
phone. I told you not to bring a phone.’
‘Then it’s a
good thing you didn’t let me dial out,’ he replied. ‘So what’s the
deal? Tell you who I was going to call or I get my head blown
off?’
I cocked the
gun, even though I knew it doesn’t serve any real function.
‘Just the
second part.’
The
self-satisfied smirk fell off of Sid’s face. For a moment, the only
sounds I could hear were the tap, dripping, like a heartbeat, in
the sink, and the music playing softly in his bedroom.
‘What?’ he
said, finally.
I leaned
forward.
‘The fact that
you brought the phone is what matters.’ I screwed my face up again,
trying to keep a handle on what I was saying. The ends of each
sentence, like little wisps of smoke, kept trying to flit through
my tired fingers. ‘Who gives a fuck if you made a call? You didn’t
have to make a call. For something bad to happen, I mean. If you
had your phone on you, and your phone had signal, it was pinging
your location straight back to them. To your network provider. They
know you were there when the robbery was happening, and it’s only a
matter of time before they figure out you weren’t one of the
hostages. The police. When they pull the records.’
Sid looked at
me with his eyebrows bent.
‘How do you
know that?’
‘I think I
read it somewhere.’
‘And you’re
going to murder me over, “I think I read it somewhere”?’ he
exclaimed. ‘What if you’re wrong?’
‘Being wrong
in the other direction costs me a lot more,’ I replied.
‘So murder’s
no big deal, but the possibility of the police tracking me down,
and of me - the only one of us who isn’t a middle-class, student
pussy, by the way - being the one to spill everything to them, is a
risk you can’t afford to take? What are you, a fucking
psychopath?’
‘You were
about to phone someone,’ I told him, ‘which suggests that you went
into the job with a plan B in mind. And forgive me for not being
naïve, but I can’t imagine that your plan involved getting the rest
of us out with you. And, as you say, the rest of us student pussies
would probably spill your name to the police, unless you knew
someone who could take care of us first.’ I put my hand on my chin,
feigning contemplation. ‘Hmmm, who do you know who would murder
someone for a few hundred pounds?’
Again, the
dripping tap and the music provided a soundtrack to our shared
silence.
‘Well?’ I
demanded, getting more emotional than I’d planned to. ‘Am I right?’
I couldn’t quite recall what it was that I thought I was right
about.