Foxes (3 page)

Micky leans forward, smiling like we’re playing some sort of game, and asks conspiratorially, “What sort of sharks are you hunting?”

I don’t know what to say.

He sits back and folds his arms across his chest. “Like, uh, loan sharks or something?”

I snort out a laugh. I can’t help it. The loan shark hunter—here to save helpless old ladies from burly men with clipboards.

The laughter inside me fades as quickly as it comes, because I’ve no idea if the truth is any less ridiculous.

Outside, the snow is melting into dirty great puddles. I touch my fingers against the pad in my pocket. So far, what difference have I made with my pad and my notes?

I’m not much of a shark hunter. I’m not much of anything.

I stare at the checkered tablecloth and wait for Micky to leave. But again, he doesn’t.

This is not how these exchanges usually go. People usually can’t wait to leave.

“Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?” he asks.

I keep my head down and shake it. “I should go now.”

I get up. My chair scrapes noisily across the floor as I try to shove it back up against the table. I sense people turning to stare, and my skin heats even more.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Micky sticks his arm out so I can’t pass, and he waggles my phone under my nose until I look at him. “I don’t bite, just so you know. Well, not unless you ask me to.”

He smiles at me, incisors glinting, and I notice one corner of his mouth turns up slightly more than the other, making him about a thousand times more perfect for having this single stupid flaw. My heart thumps wildly. I can’t meet his eyes. I nod tightly and march quickly out of the café.

Two streets later I stop in the doorway of a long-empty shop. I crouch down and pull out my pad to write out the whole conversation I had with Micky, needing to remember it as well as I can, not wanting to forget a single word. Then I think about all the conversations I had with Dashiel and how I never wrote any of them down so I could remember them, and I scribble over the page I’ve just written so hard that the paper rips.

MILO IS
sitting at the edge of the swimming pool when I get back. His trousers are rolled up above his knees. He’s swinging his leg as though pretending he’s sitting at the edge of a stream on a summer’s day rather than freezing his arse off at the edge of an abandoned, empty pool. The space is huge, as hollow as a church, and when I step on a cracked tile, the gunshot sound of it echoes and echoes.

Milo looks around. His plastic leg is in his lap so he can “air his stump.” His plastic leg gives me the creeps. It makes me think of limbs detached from bodies. It makes me think of
his
limb detached from
his
body. He told me he was in Iraq and his friend stepped on a land mine. The guy was blown to pieces. Milo had been walking right next to him. He was the lucky one.

Lucky, lucky Milo. He has nightmares and yells the place down two nights out of three.

I’m not much of a sleeper anyway.

“Danny, Champion of the World,” he shouts. It’s better than Loki. I think. “Nice to see you’re out and about, kiddo.”

In winter, if I go across the river into London, I’m not usually back in daylight. It takes an hour to walk each way. But I’m going to rest up so I’m wide-awake for my second night of shark hunting later tonight. I’m going to think of something better to call it than shark hunting, though. I’m still embarrassed Micky saw my pad.

Dashiel used to tell me he thought I lived a totally different life in my head. Maybe he was right.

Careful not to step on any more cracked tiles, I walk round the edge of the pool and sink down next to Milo, dangling my legs over the edge like he is. He narrows his eyes at me until I hand him the plastic bag I’ve been carrying, watching how his face lights up when he sees the takeaway box of his favorite curried goat. It’s probably cold by now, but I know Milo won’t mind.

“What you been doing to earn money for takeaway, hmm?” He prizes the lid off and offers me the first taste. Gingerly, I pick out a roundish piece of goat meat.

Goat’s okay, a bit chewy. I’d wolfed my plantain curry down on the way home.

“Fixed Diana’s till,” I say with my mouth full.

Diana runs an Afro-Caribbean restaurant on the other side of the river. She’s nice. Sometimes, if it’s raining or snowing or just plain freezing cold, she takes leftovers and cups of tea to the underpass near the river where there’s always a lot of homeless people hanging around. If she has any problems with electronic stuff, I try to help.

I swing my legs next to Milo as he eats the rest. I’m sure he knows this is for yesterday—for not letting me wallow and making me get up out of my nest. I know we’ll never mention it again.

When he’s finished, Milo pats me on the back. “You’re a good kiddo. You make some stupid mistakes sometimes, but we all do…. It’ll get better for you. Trust me, it’ll get better.”

This is what Milo’s like most of the time—some wise old man full of helpful advice. But sometimes things get really fucked up in his head. I guess that’s why he understands so much. I trust him. He’s real, and he doesn’t ever try to pretend he’s okay. What happened to him fucked him up. He saw his friend get blown apart.

I’m not sure I believe him about it getting better, though.

I SPEND
the rest of the afternoon in my shell, wrapped up in my blankets.

Even with all the awful things that have happened recently, and even though I make myself think about Dashiel a lot—like a bruise I have to keep pressing, a scab I won’t let heal—I don’t feel so bad today. I don’t feel like I’m falling inside my heart or even stuck in there. There are things that still make me smile and things that make my heart beat faster…. Micky’s smile, the picture I found on his phone of him without makeup. In it he’s posing in front of a mirror in what looks like a hotel room, holding his phone in front of him and looking directly into the camera. He’s not smiling, but his expression is so honest somehow, and something about the picture makes me think that if I look hard enough, I’ll be able to see right inside him. I’ve never seen right inside anyone like that before. I know a picture is as close as I’ll get.

I’m so fucking happy that I’ve found it.

Even if that does make me wonder if it’s sort of creepy to want to look at him all day, if
I’m
sort of creepy, like I’m stealing into someone’s house to go through their photo albums. But how is he ever going to know? I need to find a way to keep this picture….

And that’s how I break Micky’s phone.

I don’t mean to. Obviously I don’t fucking mean to. It’s the last thing I mean to do.

I stare at the phone. It’s in my hand, the back all hot like something’s just been fried inside it. My other hand is covering my mouth. I wish I could rewind what I’ve just done.
Fuck.

I’m not usually so utterly and completely stupid. What the fuck was I thinking?

My hands shake as I shove the blankets off my back and get up, feeling hot and cold as I pace between the toilet cubicle and the sink, stepping over the mess of phones and batteries that lie strewn across the tiled floor.

What have I done?

I was trying to transfer some of the pictures off Micky’s phone to the hard drive of one of my other phones. The phone I was transferring to has a busted keypad, but I figured the hard drive would be okay as storage. I’d linked them up via this basic piece-of-shit computer I have, which has no memory or storage space, not even for temporary files. They seemed to be linked okay, and I was sure the files were copying over, but after about twenty seconds, Micky’s phone made this high-pitched
bleep
, got all hot, and shut down. No warning, nothing. And now it won’t turn on again.
Fried.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I don’t break people’s phones! I don’t break stuff. Ever. I fix stuff—I’m a fixer.

I don’t know what I’m going to do.

My hands are still shaking as I crouch down and put my supplies, my tools, all the spare bits of phones and batteries, back into my rucksack. I pull my pad out of my pocket and curl up in my nest of blankets.

To stop the thoughts whirling around my head, I write down the list of options I have.

Run away. Go live by the sea. In a cave. A cave that’s inaccessible except for when I need food.

Right now this is the one I wish I could do the most. But I can’t. For Dashiel, I can’t.

Lie. Never go to café. Pretend I’ve never met him. Never speak to him again.

Threaten him with a gun. Or a knife. Make him never speak of our deal again.

Writing this one makes me laugh out loud—it’s so ridiculous.

Tell the truth. The complete truth. About the photographs.

I don’t know why I write that, it’s never going to happen.

Tell the truth. Mostly. Just don’t mention the photographs. Get him another phone to say sorry.

Next to it I write down a list of ways Micky could react.

Angry. Hits me.

Angry. Hates me.

Ignores me. Doesn’t care.

Demands I fix it when I can’t. Even though I wish I could.

Pulls a gun on me. Or a knife.

I put this one in just because it makes me laugh out loud again. Micky isn’t a person who would pull out a weapon and threaten someone with it.

I barely know him, yet I know this.

Writing lists makes me feel better, helps me see things more clearly even if it doesn’t make anything right. Writing lists won’t fix Micky’s phone, just as noting down times and descriptions won’t catch Dashiel’s killer. I put the notepad on the floor and lie back, pulling my blankets up around me.

I don’t think I’ll sleep, but I do.

My dreams are empty.

IT’S DARK,
but it doesn’t feel late when I wake. I hunt for my phone to tell me the time but realize I gave it to Micky, and with a sinking heart, I remember what I’ve done. I’ve broken his phone. Squeezing my eyes shut tight, I roll onto my back. Somehow I’m going to have to get another phone for him. It’s going to have to be a decent one. His was decent. And it needs to be reliable too. Working the streets is dangerous.

I don’t want to think about him out there. I don’t want to get too attached. What would be the point?

Micky is not my friend like Dashiel was. We hardly know one another. But I can’t stop the way thoughts of him keep crashing into my head. There is no reason for me to think about him. I’ve fixed other people’s phones before. There’s something about him, though, something that makes me hope he’s warm and safe. I don’t like imagining him glittering brightly on the dark streets. It hurts when I think about him out there.

I draw my eyebrows together. If Dashiel was here, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about Micky at all. Dashiel was my friend. I loved him.

But Dashiel never made my heart beat faster.

I’m probably just pathetically lonely. I probably just need a friend. But I don’t have one anymore.

FOR HOURS
I lie staring out the window at the dark, revolving sky. It’s not worth leaving before eleven. The busiest hours on the streets are the ones before midnight, but the sharks I’m looking for wait until those hours are gone. There would be no point in hanging around, freezing my bones.

Deep inside the building, Milo dreams his bad dreams. His moans sound a little like the wind as it rushes through the big empty swimming pool, but they’re sadder. Much, much sadder. Sometimes he shouts out, but the words always sound as though they’re in another language.

The kids who hang out in the park whisper that this place is haunted. I think I might like to meet some ghosts. The dead aren’t scary. It’s the living who do the terrifying things.

TONIGHT I
don’t head toward the river. I don’t want to risk seeing Micky or Dieter because I’m not sure what I’m going to say if they ask about Micky’s phone. Instead I head down black street after black street toward the parks. The councils turn off nonessential lighting after midnight, and only the main thoroughfares are lit.

The rain is freezing, and by the time I reach the park, I’m soaked and my face is raw. Hail would be better, or even snow. Night-time rain is made of darkness, and out here the darkness clings to you.

Standing under the stone archway covering the back door to a posh block of flats opposite the park, I scan the street and unwrap my pad out of the plastic bag that’s keeping it dry.

Across the road a couple of girls crouch close together beneath one of the massive trees, shiny skirts tugged down almost over their knees. A boy wanders up and down the pavement, head down, looking like he doesn’t care that he’s soaked to the skin. He’s not dressed like the boys near the river dress. He doesn’t glitter. His clothes are too big for him, as though he’s just picked whatever they had at the clothing bank. I can see his shoes slipping off his feet even from here.

My gaze is glued to him as he wanders back and forth.

The longer I stare at him, the more I think maybe he doesn’t care about anything.

No cars stop. No one wanders past. There are no sharks.

“HEY, DASHIEL’S
friend, right?”

My head slams against the door behind me as I jump backward in shock.

A girl with a see-through umbrella is standing on my left. I didn’t hear her approach.

Wincing from the pain in my head, I stare at the wet ground and wrap my pad back up in the plastic bag.

“Sorry… I didn’t mean to scare you,” she says.

I recognize her, but I glance again to make sure.

Donna.

“S’okay,” I say, winding the plastic round and round and round my pad. I can make this take a long time. I wonder what she wants.

“Dashiel said you weren’t much of a talker. This is for you.” She holds out a grease-stained paper bag.

I put my pad in my pocket and take the bag from her. It’s warm. My mouth waters without my even thinking about it or looking inside. It smells really good, like a Cornish pasty or something. I glance up, swallow, my heart in my throat. “Thank you.” Sometimes words feel alien in my mouth but saying thank you is important.