Runaway (41 page)

Somehow, control of anything seemed to have slipped from my grasp. Everything was happening quickly and slowly at the same time. As if we were all starring in our own movie spooling in slow motion. I saw Maurie standing at the end of the hall, half in silhouette, half lit in outline by the lamp in Dr Robert’s study. He seemed transfixed, and turned towards us, his face a veil of confusion. Luke ran down the hall towards him, and Dave and I followed.

The door to Dr Robert’s study stood wide. Dr Robert himself was on the near side of his desk now, and standing over Andy’s body. Rachel’s one-time boyfriend lay in a twisted heap on the floor, blood pooling around his head. One side of it was split open, and I could see the grey-white of his brain marbled by the red that oozed through it. A large brass paperweight in the shape of an Oscar stood incongruously upright on the floor beside him, like a witness to murder, and yet clearly the murder weapon itself, blood trickling down the contours of the body from its bloody head.

Dr Robert stared down at the dead man at his feet, before looking up to see us standing in the hall.

His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Simon . . . killed him.’ His voice rising in pitch now. ‘He’s killed him!’ He gazed down on Andy again. ‘I don’t even know who this man is.’ Then his head snapped up, accusation in his voice. ‘What did he want with you?’

And in his moment of helpless confusion, I very nearly felt sorry for him.

It took Luke’s cool head to wrest control of the situation. He grabbed Maurie by the arm, and Maurie turned, stupefied, to look at him.

‘We have to go!’ Luke said. And when Maurie didn’t respond, he yelled in his face. ‘Now, Maurie, now!’

And he virtually dragged him along the hall as we ran back towards the stairs.

It took hardly any time for us to get out of the house. People were escaping it like rats from a sewer, and we were simply carried along by the flow. Through the hall, out of the door, down the steps and into the street. All the time to the incongruous accompaniment of the Rolling Stones song ‘Pain in My Heart’.

It was almost fully dark now, street lamps casting pools of illumination broken by the flitting shadows of demented moths. Partygoers from the house spilled from the pavement into the road, forming a semicircle around the railing on which Jeff had fallen. We couldn’t see beyond them to where his body was skewered on the spikes. But I could hear sobbing, someone screaming, a girl staggering free of the crowd to double over on her knees in the warm night and empty the contents of her stomach all over the tarmac. And I realized it was the girl who had propositioned me in the hall just half an hour before.

Maurie seemed dazed, as though he were concussed.

I took him by the shoulders and shoved my face in his. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘Rachel. Maurie, where is she?’

He simply shook his head. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone? What do you mean? Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ he said. Then, almost as if realizing where he was for the first time, he found focus and glared back at me. ‘Where’s Jeff?’ And when I couldn’t meet his eye, it was he who grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Jack, where’s Jeff?’ Sudden fear in his voice. ‘Jack?’

He let me go, then, looking around with wild eyes, as if only now aware of the mayhem in the street. I heard the distant sound of a police siren.

Luke said, ‘Maurie, we need to go.’

But Maurie wasn’t listening. He pushed past us and cleaved his way through the crowd on the pavement with such violence that he knocked one man over, and pushed a girl to her knees. The not so beautiful people parted in the face of his fury to let him through. And we saw, at the same moment he did, the prone form of poor Jeff impaled on the railings, blood dripping to form pools on the wall beneath him. His mouth was gaping and filled by the curl of his tongue, his eyes wide and staring as if in shock.

The most feral and frightening human sound I have ever heard issued from between Maurie’s lips, and raised goosebumps all over my arms and shoulders. It was followed by the strangest hush as the anguish in his voice communicated itself to everyone on the street. I shoved my way through to him, turning him by the shoulders to lead him away. He offered no resistance, his face a mask of misery and disbelief.

‘He thought he could fly,’ I said.

And Maurie’s head turned slowly. He looked at me with such incomprehension.

The police siren was very close now. And the Stones were singing something about being afraid of what they’d find
.

Luke said, ‘Nothing we can do for him, Maurie. We should go. We really should go.’

‘What about our stuff?’ Dave said.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Luke’s eyes were open so wide with stress, I could see the whites of them all around his irises. ‘If we don’t want to get caught up in all this, we have to go.’

I nodded, and we almost dragged Maurie away along the street out of the light of the street lamps. Dave tried the gate to the gardens and it opened into darkness. A darkness that swallowed us as we ran off across cut grass that felt soft beneath our feet, through the shadows of trees towards the distant light and the sounds of traffic in Old Brompton Road.

Behind us I heard the wail of the siren as the first police car arrived, its blue light strobing in the night.

_II

At this time of night the waiting room at Euston was all but deserted. Out on the concourse passengers stood in desultory groups of twos and threes, smoking, watching the arrivals and departures boards, times and platforms, names of places only ever seen on railway timetables, destinations known only to those who lived there.

Maurie sat between Luke and me in the far corner, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands. He had wept inconsolably on the tube, and now seemed overtaken by inertia. Almost catatonic, like JP’s naked lady in Ohio. Luke had his arm around Maurie’s shoulder. He leaned forward and spoke so softly that I could barely hear what he said.

‘What happened, Maurie? In Dr Robert’s study.’

Whatever he had seen, he was a witness to murder. But he wasn’t saying anything. Neither then, nor in all the years since. He gave the slightest shake of his head, before straightening up, to stare straight ahead into the smoky gloom of the waiting room. His face was still shiny wet with tears, but his eyes were dry now. Red and puffy.

‘Poor Jeff,’ he said. ‘Poor Jobby Jeff.’

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Maurie, you have to tell me what happened to Rachel.’

His head swung slowly round and the pain in his eyes was almost too great for me to bear. I struggled to maintain eye contact.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. ‘Where is she?’

‘I told you, she’s gone.’

I sighed my exasperation. ‘Gone where?’

‘Just gone, Jack. Away from you. Away from all of us. Just gone. Forget her.’

The door swung open, and Dave came in, breathing smoke from his final cigarette. ‘We’ve missed the last train tae Glasgow. Next one’s no’ till the morning. We’re gonnae have tae spend the night here.’

‘Shit.’ I banged my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.

Dave sat down opposite and sucked on his cigarette. And I heard Luke’s voice, quiet but filled with determination.

‘I’m not going back.’

I opened my eyes wide and turned to look at him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘In London?’

He nodded. ‘We left nothing behind at Onslow Gardens to identify us. Some dirty linen, a couple of guitars and a melodica. Those goons in the Lake District ripped up Jeff’s driver’s licence, so they won’t even know who he is. You can go back home and just pick up your lives where you left off.’ He paused. ‘Not me. I’m not going back to
them
. To my parents. To the Kingdom Hall and tramping the streets in all weathers. For better or worse, this is where I’m going to make my life.’

‘You’ve no’ got any dosh,’ Dave said.

Luke shrugged. ‘I’ve got a few quid. As much as I’ll save on my train fare, anyway. I’ll survive.’

I looked at him with his wide green, innocent eyes and remembered all the good times we’d had. The laughs. The madness. And I thought about Jeff, and his Veronica. Five of us had run away that fateful night more than a month ago. Only three of us would be going back. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again.

_III

And so we spent that night in the waiting room at Euston Station, knowing that we wouldn’t sleep, and yet drifting off in moments of overwhelming fatigue to dreams of Jeff, and his poor broken body impaled on the railings in Onslow Gardens. I don’t know how often I replayed the moment when he launched himself into space, believing he could fly, and searched for something I might have done to stop it. But it always ended in the same, tragic conclusion.

Again, and again, and again.

In moments of waking misery, I saw Rachel’s black, black eyes gazing at me out of the darkness, the light in them conveying, in turn, love, hurt and betrayal. And I cursed my cowardice.

Morning brought no relief from the torment. Luke went and bought our tickets for us, and we gathered on the concourse as the station came to life around us. A new day. The first without Jeff. Or Rachel. The sounds of trains revving on their platforms. The hiss of brakes. The monotonous announcement of arrivals and departures reverberating around the rafters.

Luke handed over our tickets and each of us in turn solemnly shook his hand. Because boys, especially boys from big macho Rain Town, didn’t hug. At the last, I took his right hand in my left, and pressed a bunch of folded notes into his palm.

‘What the hell’s this?’ He withdrew his hand as if I had burned him, and he looked in confusion at the notes he was holding.

‘That’s everything we’ve got among the three of us,’ I said.

‘I can’t take this!’

‘Of course you can. What bloody use do we have for it? Can’t spend it on the train, and won’t need it at the other end.’

He was touched and embarrassed. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. Then, very quickly, as if he didn’t trust himself to say more, ‘See you sometime, then.’

And I saw his eyes filling up just before he turned away to walk briskly across the concourse, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.

2015

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

_I

‘And I never saw him again until we stepped off the bus today at Victoria Coach Station.’ Jack’s voice died in the dark, to be replaced by a very long silence. And he began to think that Ricky had fallen asleep. ‘Rick?’

‘I’m here, Grampa. Just . . .’ His voice was hushed. ‘Poor Jeff.’

‘Yes. Poor Jeff.’

‘You never hugged Luke back then, but you did today.’

Jack couldn’t resist a smile that no one would see. ‘I did. Times have changed, Rick. Not sure how, or why. Seems we have permission to show our emotions, these days.’

‘You could have stayed. I mean, fifty years ago. When Luke did.’

‘I could. And maybe if I had, things would have been different. But, you see, I didn’t have Luke’s courage, Rick. I was afraid. I wanted to go back. I wanted the safety of the womb. The security of the family.’

Ricky could hear the bitterness in his grandfather’s voice.

‘So I went back to a life shaped by fear.’ He turned his head on the pillow, trying to see his grandson in the dark. ‘And that’s the biggest crime you can commit in life, Rick. To be afraid of living it. It’s the only one we’ve got, and you’ve got most of yours still ahead of you. So don’t waste it, son. Trust me. You don’t want to be looking back on it fifty years from now and wishing you’d done things differently. There’s nothing more corrosive than regret.’

A further silence settled between them, but neither of them was ready for sleep.

Ricky said, ‘What happened when you got home?’

‘It was a long five-hour train ride, Rick. Maybe the longest five hours of my life. I’m not sure there was a single word passed between any of us all the way up through England and back into Scotland. It was as if anything we said might be an acknowledgement that Jeff was gone, and that Luke was no longer among us. I think we felt, all of us, diminished. Like we’d lost limbs. It’s hard to explain.’