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They sound like four blokes hitting each other over the head with their instruments, but I’ll take his word for it. ‘Are they on Broken Records?’ I ask, hopefully plucking out a name that he’s told me before.

  ‘Nah. They’re on Accurate. They used to be on Squid, but that was only for the first EP.’

  Damien’s got a job now, incredibly, working in a record shop, and he’s become something of a catalogue trainspotter. Broken, Extensive and Accurate are his fave labels.

  The band he used to be in couldn’t actually play any instruments, but that didn’t seem to stop them. The problem was that whoever was in charge of choosing their name had this idea that they’d got a sense of humour, so their first name was Plus Support. That didn’t work, because people were turning up at all kinds of gigs expecting to see them, and being disappointed. Then they were called Gather No Moss for about a week, until someone got the joke and realized how crap it was. Finally, they called themselves Cancelled (oh, please, someone, fix my sides up with insulation tape) and played a gig in Canterbury to precisely five people, probably due to the big sign outside the pub that said ‘Live Music Tonight: CANCELLED’.

  Eventually, they settled on calling themselves Boxx, which had rather less stupidity – but at the same time, less style – and recorded a demo CD called ‘Life’s a Beach (And I Forgot the Sunblock Cream)’.

  The music pounds my skull. The light and the wind rush past me as we drive along the big coastal road. I think back to what we were saying in the kitchen.

  *

  ‘Tell me what to do, Damien.’

  ‘No idea.’ He sounds as if he doesn’t care.

  ‘Can I try and catch him in the act?’

  Damien makes a grunting noise, and picks at the grain in the table. It’s obviously not a good topic of conversation. He wanted to make a casual remark and not want me to elaborate on it. How can I help that? How can I help voicing the thoughts that are consuming me day and night?

  And Damien can’t know what I’m really panicking about – the thought that JJ might be whispering pillow talk, telling someone about Ashwell Heights and Birthmark.

  It occurs to me that I share a secret with Marcie, and I share a bigger secret with JJ, and I don’t yet share one with Damien. He’s just this guy I drink with, a bit of a lad – a bit of a tosser, frankly – who’s always been there.

  ‘Imelda’s having a party,’ he says, tapping his unlit cigarette against his teeth. ‘Maybe you’ll find out more there.’

  ‘Nah, get it right. Imelda is organizing a party – for me.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He sounds only slightly surprised. ‘Might be good.’ He grins. ‘That Imelda. Shame, innit? She is one fit, babetastic babe. What a waste.’

  ‘Not bad legs, either. Do you have anything to contribute today, or are you just here to drool on the table?’

  ‘All right. I can tell you what to do. About JJ. If you wanna hear. It’s pretty disgusting, though. You know how you get back at an ex’s new lover?’

  I get the feeling he’s going to tell me. ‘Go on,’ I say with weary resignation.

  ‘Hire a rapist.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Honestly, it was in this revenge manual I got from the library. Loads of fucking brilliant stuff in there. Translated from Japanese. It’s quite common over there, apparently.’

  ‘You – are – kidding.’

  ‘Nah. Even better.’ He leans forward, teeth looking suddenly even sharper. ‘What you do is to get her buggered with a vibrator. Or – this is the worst one, are you ready for it?’

  I open my mouth, crunching on nothing, still reeling from his suggestion. No words come out. It takes a hell of a lot to shock me, I can tell you. ‘All right. Go on.’

  ‘Get a bloody massive, randy dog to do it –’

  ‘– I do not want to hear –’

  ‘Some crazed creature on heat that’ll shag anything –’

  ‘– fuck yourself, Damien Ash, I do not –’

  ‘– and she’ll be so embarrassed, she’ll never go to the police!’

  There is a breathless silence. Our faces, reddened by shouting, are inches apart. Hot breath and pungent sweat. I’ve been repelled. Congrats. Someone’s finally done it.

  ‘I would never do that, Damien. Never fucking ever. It is just the most fucking gross thing I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘You should get out more,’ he says, leaning back with a lecherous grin.

  ‘It’s not a laughing matter, Damien.’

  He raises his eyebrows. His sleek face is full of an expression I haven’t seen before – something like the passion of knowledge. ‘You don’t like it,’ he says quietly. ‘You wouldn’t ever do it.’

  ‘No.’

  Damien breathes deeply, and his brash, laddish voice seems to wash away like the tide, revealing something softer. ‘Then whoever she is,’ says Damien with quiet smugness, ‘you don’t hate her as much as you think you do.’

  I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

  I blink, realizing what he has said. And I slump back in the chair, because it’s so close to a sensible remark that it’s totally thrown me.

  *

  Damien drops me off in town, my head ringing from Sic Transit.

  ‘Later, then,’ he says, raising his eyebrows at me.

  I lean on the car door, gazing at that sleek, reddish face. It’s got a wicked allure about it which I never noticed before, actually. Brick-red like a wall that you want to scrawl graffiti over.

  ‘JJ,’ he says, ‘thinks he’s a rebel. People like him aren’t rebels, Bel. He holds you back, yeah? Keeps you in the middle. Just scratching the social veneer.’

  Yeah, right. My stomach’s tight and I’m longing to tell him. But I can’t. I can never tell him.

  JJ and I are bound together by a night, a face, a truth darker and stronger than anything else we will ever experience. This is why I know it is not over yet.

  But I need Damien’s company. I need the sleek, angry entertainment he offers me.

  *

  I go to the road outside JJ’s house. Well, Imelda’s house, I mean. Under the leafy suburban trees, there’s a new, gleaming bus shelter. No graffiti here. It’s even got an intact timetable, neatly fixed on to the wall of the shelter in a perspex square.

  I sit in the shelter, slip my shades on and watch the house.

  History has forced me into the role of private detective.

  ‘Fancy a fuck, darling?’

  I turn to glower at the scum with the fullest and best contempt I can muster. It’s leather-jacketed, grinning broadly, under a reddish crew cut.

  I look him up and down. His skin seems to be the same rubbed and cracked texture as the old leather of his jacket. His hands are plunged deep into the stretched pockets and they’re rubbing against his grubby, denimed groin. Oh, please. Is it possible to be this much of a sad loser?

  I lean against the bus shelter. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do if I said yes, would you?’

  He opens his eyes wide, and his mouth slightly, looking exactly like someone who doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘A hundred quid.’ I throw that in his direction, just to see how he copes.

  He’s rubbing harder. With a sudden flurry of activity, and a triumphant yelp, he unzips his fly and pokes out a semi-tumescent cock.

  So I look down at it with my full disgust – and with a brief click and a smooth shine, the knife is out, gleaming in the afternoon light.

  I watch him running, as fast as his legs can carry him. I notice he didn’t have time to do his flies up first, so I rather hope he does himself a nasty injury.

  I snap the knife closed.

  After that little bit of excitement, I wait.

  Shadows grow longer, and the light starts to thicken around me. It’s only three-thirty in the afternoon, but I’ve got that feeling again, like the days are constricting me, like we’re heading towards something big just around the corner of the next year. Hell, that’s nothing new. Just perfectl
y normal autumnal paranoia. Season of mystery and mellow fruit fools. Conditioned by the academic calendar, I always see it as the beginning of something when all the leaves start to go crunchy and fill the pavements. So that’s all it is. Nostalgia, mixed with regret.

  Yeah, that’s all it is. It’s not as if I’ve got anything to be upset about, or anything like that, after all.

  There he is.

  The loose jacket, the floppy hair. I must admit, I feel a pang as he strolls down the gravel drive. Crunch, crunch, crunch, like he’s treading the carefree dreams we once had, not giving a damn.

  Still on the other side of the road, he turns and walks towards town. He checks his wallet. Puts it away again. He’s off to the shops, heading into a great untrodden tinsel-decked Christmas full of new life.

  We keep heading down, down towards the sea. The sky empties of detail, bit by bit, as the streets level out. The air becomes crisper, saltier, and seagulls shriek overhead.

  We’re joined by an invisible, taut string exactly a hundred paces long. I keep that far behind him, and he’s not all that difficult to follow. Once or twice I almost slip on the leaf-slicked avenues – but he doesn’t look round. I nearly get run over on the roundabout on the edge of town – but he doesn’t look round. A huge, muzzled mastiff pounds against a gate as I go past, scrabbling at the lacquered wood, tearing it, demanding to come and get me, growling like Cerberus on acid. (I shiver, recalling those dogs in Ashwell Heights.) But he still doesn’t look round.

  In the streets of the town, dodging the sad losers with their carrier bags and their chocolate-mouthed kids – faces stained in a permanent, slack-jawed O – I find it easier to keep myself hidden. I duck and weave, keeping him no more than fifty paces in front.

  He goes down Fisher Avenue – past the rank back sides of all the chip shops on the sea front – taking the short-cut to the shopping precinct.

  I follow him into the large chemist-cum-department-store, and hover by the rows of multi-coloured shampoos as I watch him select some toothpaste. And then he moves over to the pharmacy counter to pay.

  This is stupid. I sigh, toying with the bottle of penny-royal shampoo I’m pretending to be interested in. The lights are bright and angry. The place is full of disgusting, fish-coloured people with scabies, who seem to have brought their kids here for the afternoon in order to smack them. And he’s bound to turn round and see me in a moment.

  He scoops up a packet of condoms from the counter beside him and slips them into his pocket.

  I’m standing there open-mouthed for a good few seconds, so I must look like one of those fucking stupid kids. I suddenly feel ridiculous, as if morality has seized me. He’s paid for his toothpaste and now he’s walking out of the shop. No one’s making a move to stop him.

  He’s out of the door and absorbed by the shifting crowds on the street. I don’t get to the door in time even to see which way he goes, because of a barrier of hard-edged pushchairs and baskets that suddenly seems to move my way. I push past them, aware of a screech and a sudden flurry of movement on my right. There’s a cascade of crunchy cereal bars and low-fat crisps, crushed beneath a fat mother with obscene orange lipstick – this I see, flash-framed, in the briefest of glances backwards.

  I’m out on the street, looking up and down, whirling round, buffeted by sweaty, stinking shoppers on all sides. A light drizzle is starting to fall, tickling my hair and neck. Everything’s going grey and the seagulls are laughing overhead.

  Sudden fear grips me, and I want to run back into the shop. I look up and down the street, watching for movement in every shop doorway. But there’s no Dreads, no Birthmark.

  Christ. I’m losing it.

  Chapter Twenty-One – Down Payment

  Still nothing on the TV about Birthmark.

  It’s the day after, and today I have to pay Marcie her hundred.

  Luckily, I can. I’m on my way.

  I think back to last night.

  *

  My father sighs, as if he’s drunk too deeply of the air, and leans back.

  ‘Bel,’ he says, spreading his hands, ‘you’re almost of an age where I can’t really tell you what to do any more.’

  I’ve got my arms folded, doing that not-quite-looking-at-him trick by playing with my hair, twisting it in front of my eyes so that he’s sometimes in vision, sometimes not.

  ‘Almost?’ I mutter.

  Jon sighs, takes his glasses off and spins them around in that tutorish way of his. ‘I managed to save us all a great deal of embarrassment,’ he says. ‘I don’t suppose you know Jeff Ash plays golf with Derek from the Spindle?’

  ‘Who? The what?’

  ‘The Spindle. The public house where you and friend Damien, in your youthful exuberance, tipped a table into the water in front of several witnesses.’ He shrugs. ‘Derek’s the landlord there, and luckily he’s known Jeff for a few years, so we were able to come to an arrangement. But I hate to think what might have come of it if you’d picked somewhere else.’

  I shake my head. ‘Dad, you make me sick.’

  ‘Really?’ He sounds no more than faintly surprised.

  I’d expected him to shout at me, at the very least berate me for being a teenage hooligan and lock me in my room or something. I try to articulate this. ‘I mean, for f– for God’s sake, would you buy me out of anything?’

  ‘You’re my little girl,’ he says calmly. ‘I couldn’t do the tax without you, don’t forget.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right. I knew I was important.’

  ‘It’s my job to get you out of trouble. When you were younger, well, that was different. I had to stop you getting into it in the first place. But now, it’s your problem. You’re eighteen. What can I say? If you want to run away to a commune with the local drug dealer, all I can do is spell out the pros and cons to you and let you choose. And if you cause trouble, well, Jeff and I both agree that the best policy is damage limitation.’

  I’m quite disgusted with him, actually. Is this the way it’s done nowadays? Buying people off? ‘And that’s it? No fine, no grounding?’

  He sighs again. ‘We have a great life, Bel. We’re well-off, we’re warm and comfortable and I don’t want anything spoiling that.’

  My gaze is fixed on the way the velvet of the chair is like sand, a surface you can stroke and indent with patterns. Stupid, the way you fix on these little things when you’re trying not to look at someone.

  ‘How . . . far would you go?’ I ask him, and I realize my voice has come out smaller than I intend.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I hear the creak of his chair as he leans forward. The afternoon is still, suspended in greyness between day and night. A pre-winter afternoon, on the boundary. Rooks are cawing outside, and I shiver slightly.

  ‘Well, suppose – I’m not, right, definitely not, but – what if I was pregnant, say?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’d support you, whatever you wanted to do. Anyway, I know you too well. You wouldn’t get tied to a mewling and puking infant, not yet.’

  All right. What if I’d stolen a car, smashed up some Travvy girl and left her for dead, then destroyed the car . . .?

  Go on, Bel, you fucking coward. Say it.

  ‘What if I’d –’

  Time hangs like dust in the grey room. My father lifts a hand, inviting me to continue.

  ‘What if I’d –’

  I look at him for the first time, and see his pale, grey eyes, expectant, loving. I suddenly realize I am having unconditional love fired at me in hot, radioactive streams and I’m not protected. I can only absorb and not reflect. It cancers my cells and crisps my blood to black ash. I cannot live with this love. I cannot.

  I break my gaze. ‘No. Nothing. Nothing. Can I go now?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘If I want? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies.

  ‘I’m going to the beach. I have to think.’

  He nods, picks up his newspaper. ‘Take care. See you
later.’

  As I get to the door, I have a thought. ‘Jon?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Can I have a party here?’

  ‘Choose your date,’ he says, and turns the page.

  ‘What about Kate?’

  ‘I’ll sort it with Kate. All I ask from you is a guest list.’

  *

  The beach is almost deserted. My hair’s being whipped up into a sticky, salty tangle, as messy as the black ganglia of seaweed under my feet.

  I was right about JJ. As far as I can tell. I certainly don’t intend to go and peer through his grating to see exactly how he’s used his little purchase.

  I sit at the edge of the water and skim stones.

  There must be ghosts around me, whispering about the people I know – the people I can no longer trust?

  They all had their own reasons for being there, that night at Ashwell Heights. I went because it was fun, and moral considerations didn’t come into it. Damien, I think, veers more towards the immoral – he takes a sordid delight in smashing up the trappings of society. Marcie’s just too stupid to know whether what she’s doing is right or wrong. And JJ? He just came along for the ride, an innocent abroad. Because I was there. Or that’s what I thought at the time.

  And now, JJ and I are trapped together in the memory of a haunted night, a wasteland of rain and fire. Whether we like it or not, we are still joined by a secret which neither of us wants. I no longer see him every day. I no longer know how his mind is working from minute to minute, what he is likely to do. I wonder what he murmurs to her, whoever she is, in soft and warm moments.

  Damien and I are linked by mutual hedonism. We both take pleasure in the turning of tables, and such things. But I feel uneasy about the way I’m caught up with him. He’s like a drug, or the dark side of me. He’s like a beautifully detailed painting of a blood-soaked battlefield.

  And Marcie, too, is trapped with me. Caught in the mesh of the blame game, started as such a small thing all those weeks ago. It could go on, I realize in horror. If I give her this hundred, it has to end here. One way or another, it has to end.

  My life is being over-complicated by the people who were my friends. Each one of them has me snared as firmly as if my feet were in a rusty man-trap. I’m being controlled.