Foxes (30 page)

The ground is wet with melted snow, and it’s a little icy in places. Micky slips once or twice when he’s being nosy, staring into windows where people have neglected to shut their curtains. I catch him before he falls, enjoying the way he leans against me, heart beating fast in shock.

When we reach the river, I’m transfixed by all the lights glittering brightly in the dark water like stars. We stop and look down at them—at the dark I almost got lost in. Micky leans against me, and I breathe in his warmth, his scent, and wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder about Dieter too. I wonder if he now hates me more or less than before. Not that it matters. There are always going to be people out there who hate you, no matter what you do. What’s the point in wasting energy worrying about them?

Near the embankment Micky sees a few people he knows working, but he doesn’t stop to talk. I keep my head down as stark images play through my mind—Micky huddled on the pavement with them, waiting in the cold for someone to touch them in ways they don’t want to be touched.

“Don’t go back out here,” I plead suddenly. I feel awful for putting my worries and wants onto him like this, but it takes my breath away, like repeated kicks to the stomach, when I think of him being out here.

Micky squeezes my hand hard. “I won’t. I promise. Don’t know what I’m going to do for cash, but I don’t ever want to be out here again.”

“I’ll look after you.”

Without warning he pulls me into a shop doorway and kisses me. We’re not even in the shadows—there’s a streetlight about four meters away, shining on us like a spotlight. I don’t think he cares. And for a moment, neither do I.

“We’ll look after each other. Okay?” he murmurs, his lips still touching mine. “We’ll come up with a plan. We’ll find jobs, maybe get a flat somewhere—somewhere with its own bathroom and running hot water, where you can take a bath whenever you want. Somewhere warm enough your eyelashes don’t freeze together when you’re sleeping and your boyfriend doesn’t have to suck on your fingers to warm them.”

My body goes rigid. I’m sure Micky feels it, but he doesn’t say anything, and when I take his hand and pull him gently away from the shop doorway and start walking again, he remains quiet.

How am I supposed to explain to him that there can be no plan? This is it—I can’t be more than I am. What I’m offering is on display: I will keep him safe in my shell, feed him when he’s hungry, love him like he’s the most precious boy on this planet. I can’t give him anything more. Why didn’t I think about this? I feel so stupid.

I don’t want to be angry at myself, and I don’t want these thoughts whirring around my head, ruining the seconds I spend with Micky, because every single second with him feels so important. Instead, as a sort of punishment, I make myself sad thinking about everything Dashiel will never see.

IT TURNS
out Micky is good at spotting sharks. Like Dashiel, maybe it’s from experience. I struggle with that thought for a while as we wander around the park.

We don’t see Dollman, but I write down a few car registrations. Micky adds a little story-like description of why the guy was a predator and what the person who got in the car looked like. He draws little pictures of them too.

Around one o’clock we’re both exhausted. We hunker down next to a massive tree to keep out of the wind. The snow has turned into brown ice on top of the soil, all cold and dirty.

“There’s a night café near here. We could go and get a cup of tea?” Micky asks.

He told me once that Americans don’t drink tea like we do, but he’s grown to like it.

“I don’t have any money,” I say, my eyes on the ground.

Micky takes a few deep breaths. I can tell he’s thinking—he breathes like that when something is bothering him. I’m not sure why it’s making me apprehensive.

“What did you do before—” He hesitates and bites his lip. “—the shark-hunting thing?”

“Fixed stuff. Spent time with Dashiel,” I say emptily. What else is there?

“Danny, what I said before about wanting to be with you and make a home with you, I meant it,” he says out of nowhere. “If it’s too fast and it’s freaking you out, please tell me. Being out here like this, things become sort of live-or-die desperate, don’t they? I’m frightened, and you make me feel like everything’s okay, that I’m safe, but that’s not why I want to do this. I want this for keeps.”

He gives me that look, the one where his heart is laid out in his eyes and with one false move, I could break it. Vulnerable, that’s what the word is. He makes himself vulnerable to me.

I shake my head. Fast or not, I want him to be with me. I can’t bear thinking about things being any other way.

“I can’t even remember my life without you in it. You make me feel like anything is possible,” he whispers.

His words fill me with a prickly sensation I’m not sure is good or bad. How am I making him feel like anything is possible? Because the way I see it, there’s a definite limit, like a lid on the sky—some stars are unreachable, however hard you wish. The trick is in seeing what’s possible, isn’t it? What’s the point in striving for something you know is always going to be out of reach?

More importantly, I have a home. If Micky gets chucked out of his bedsit, I want him to know he has a home with me too. I’m scared to ask him. It seems like such a big thing to ask.

“You could live with me in my shell,” I say tentatively.

“Thank you,” he whispers, reaching for my hand. “What about somewhere more permanent, though?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Somewhere no one is going to come along and just move you on.”

“I’ve lived there for a year now, and no one official has noticed.”

“But what if they did?” he presses, and I wish he hadn’t.

“I’d find somewhere else.” I shrug. I know I got lucky with the swimming pool, and I don’t want to be moved on, but there are thousands of abandoned buildings in London—there must be others with running water and working toilets.

“Danny….” Micky touches my arm. I don’t really mean to, but I flinch away.

I know what he’s asking. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not enough for him; I
know
I’m not enough. And it
hurts
.

Maybe I should be ashamed I don’t have a more ordered life, that I can’t be anything more.

“I don’t do money or jobs or any of it!” I blurt out, my voice as loud as it ever gets.
I can’t do those things.

My heart trips over itself, a scarred, cracked thing so sure it had found its echoing beat.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly.

I’m scared he sounds a bit resigned. I’m scared he’s realizing something that he didn’t realize before about me—like if you found a computer when you most needed one, and it looks as though it does all the things you want it to, but when you start to use it, you discover all the useful bits are missing. “You do saving the world and surviving, I get it.”

When I look up, there is a whole galaxy of gentleness in his eyes, so I know he’s not making fun of me.

But it doesn’t stop me feeling awful that there is something, and it’s a massive something, that I can’t give him.

“Danny, listen to me. We’ve got stuff to figure out, but all I want is to be with you. That’s it. Everything else comes after. Everything else I can compromise on. Remember that. And if we have to live like foxes, then we’ll live like foxes. I only want to be with you.”

I run my hands across the ice and let the cold bite into me. Deep down, I still don’t really get it. I don’t get why he would want to give up so much. I know that what he’s saying means that he is prepared to give stuff up. And for what? For me? He’s right, I’m strong enough to survive, but that’s all I’ve got. I’m not good to look at… or… or…
anything
.

Glancing up, I think maybe Micky is doing that mind-reading thing again, as there are tears in his eyes, and they weren’t there a few seconds ago.

The last thing I want is for him to cry. I shift closer so I can put my arms around him, even though my shoulder protests mightily. It must be the cold.

He drags his sleeve across his eyes and gives me a sad smile.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about where you live or what you do. It’s just I didn’t have a plan when I got on that plane and everything went wrong. Like really fucking wrong. And now… I feel like I need some sort of plan, even if it’s only a little one. Security, I guess.”

“I want to be your security.”

“I know. I know. You are.”

Shakily he gets to his feet. It must be about half one now, and because we haven’t been moving, we’re both freezing. Micky’s fingers are as cold as the icy ground, and he’s shaking badly, even with all my jumpers on. After all that walking around, he can’t have any energy left to keep himself warm.

I pull the bag of bread out of my pocket, but he doesn’t want to eat it.

“I want to buy you a cup of tea and sit in a café for a while,” he says. “That’ll warm me up.”

I nod. It probably is a good idea.

The café isn’t far. It’s completely empty. A gray-haired woman sits behind the counter, reading a dog-eared magazine. Micky asks her for two cups of tea, while I sit down near the blank expanse of window and get my pad out.

“What are you writing? More shark-hunter stuff?” he asks, placing two large steaming mugs on the table and sitting down.

“A letter to you.” I put my pen down and empty a few sachets of sugar into my mug.

It’s hard getting used to not being able to hide behind my hair.

“Really? What sort of letter?” He frowns a bit as he takes a sip of hot tea, but he keeps looking at me.

I shrug.

I want to explain some stuff, and this is easier than trying to say it all.

I hope he understands why I’ve written it once he’s read it. It’s more a “no place left to hide, walking naked into the sun” sort of letter, so I’m a little apprehensive about it. Most of the time I tell myself it’s as though he’s in my head anyway, so why would him reading this make any difference?

I read it back, realizing it’s just getting longer and longer. Micky has finished his tea, and mine is probably cold by now.

I push the pad across the table to him.

He glances at me as if for confirmation that I want him to read, and I nod. This shuddery fear starts to build inside me, so I lean over the table and read the words with him to try and dispel it.

Micky, I want to tell you some stuff, but I can’t say it so I’m going to write it down. I feel really bad I can’t do things you want to do like live in a flat and get a job. I want to explain, and it’ll probably all come out in a jumbled mess even when I write it down, but if I try and sort out the words and get them exactly as I want them, it will take me ages, so I’ll just write it all down as it comes out and you can read it. Okay? You read my notes before, so I think you’ll be okay reading this.

I get obsessed with things. It’s like my brain has to have something to focus on. I’m aware of it, it’s not like I don’t know I’m doing it, and I mostly know when it’s okay and when it’s not. When we first met, I thought about you all the time and wanted to follow you around really badly, but I knew that was wrong, so I stopped myself. But like with Dollman—it’s not always wrong. At the schools I went to, they said that’s why I was so good at figuring out electronics stuff because I was so focused on it. Really though, I like fixing stuff because I discovered I could bring something broken back to life.

I don’t talk because I don’t always know the right thing to say, so I try to only say stuff I’m sure about or if it’s important. And I’m shy and feel uncomfortable with people, not because of how I look so much as other people’s reactions to me—and they’re sometimes bad. Dashiel used to have a lot to say about me hiding behind my hair, but you don’t, and now you’ve cut it off so I can’t anyway, but I like that you never told me to stop hiding all the time.

Sometimes I want to hide and I want that to be okay. I talk out loud more to you than I ever have to anyone, even Dashiel, because I don’t feel like I’m ever saying the wrong thing with you, or if I do, you won’t mind. Writing down is easier because you can see the words.

I can’t plan stuff. I can only do now. In Zen they have this concept called “living in the moment.” That’s what I do. I live here. And I’ve learned things like knowing I have to eat tomorrow and all the rest of the week, so it’s a good idea to have enough food in my shell so that I don’t have to go out and find some every day. It’s not because I don’t know what it means to plan, I do. And I like the feeling of forever. But most of the time, it’s just too much. The thought of using money or having a job overwhelms me. The only way I can describe it is that it feels too heavy. There is too much information. It’s like shops have too many things in them and I don’t know the right thing to choose. I buy tins of food off a guy in the underpass, and he can get me other stuff if I ask him to, like gas for my stove.

I know what’s wrong with me, but it’s not a thing that can be fixed.

It was difficult to know when to stop and I’d almost ended it there but I knew I wasn’t giving Micky the complete picture, so I’d added:

When I was fourteen I had a social worker who told me that when I grew up I probably wouldn’t be able to cope with things like the others did. She said when I reached sixteen, they’d move me to a halfway house with other people who needed a bit more help too, and they could teach me how to do basic stuff to help prepare me to cope with being independent. But when I was sixteen, there was no halfway house to go to. The council didn’t have the money to run them anymore. I got put in a room in a hostel with lots of other boys my age. My social worker had to hand me over to another social worker as the hostel was out of her area, but there was no other social worker, or not one that I ever saw.

The other kids targeted me because of how I look and they thought I was stupid because I found some stuff hard to do. They didn’t understand that I got overwhelmed. That was why I couldn’t fill out the forms I was supposed to or deal with the money I was supposed to live on. That place was hell. I didn’t want to be there, but there was nowhere else, so I ended up on the street. And I know lots of people think living like I do is bad, but it’s simple and I can deal with it. It’s better this way.