The Disappearances (11 page)

Yeah, he knew what he was doing. He knew how to work it better than anyone else.

And Devil knew, too – had figured out within a day of being in this place that he was going to have to change, that if he was going to survive he was going to have to lead. He’d looked at himself in the mirror and brought about a transformation. Gone was the middle-class kid to whom black was just the colour of his skin, who hunched his shoulders so that his large frame didn’t intimidate people. And instead, Devil was born: tall, broad, insolent, swaggering, angry. Someone people would be afraid of. Someone people wouldn’t dare to cross.

Devil walked down through the tunnel that went between the two high rises, the tunnel that no one wanted to be anywhere near after dark except for the junkies, the slags, people who didn’t care any more, who had no respect for themselves whatsoever. Devil had no respect for them either. Devil didn’t have any respect for anyone, except himself. Even his crew were just sheep, following him. They didn’t have the courage to do anything for themselves.

Not like him. He winced at the smell of urine, of excrement, of stale alcohol, dirty clothes. The first time he’d walked through the tunnel he’d nearly pissed himself. He’d never been anywhere like it in his life; never been outside his leafy suburban town in Hertfordshire, where everyone lived in nice new houses with gardens and cars parked out front, where everyone knew who he was, where everyone smiled and gave him presents when they came to call on his dad. Where he used to listen to Leona practising the piano and tried to put her off by pulling silly faces.

But life, Devil had learnt, changed. Nothing could be depended on except yourself. Nothing.

A ray of early autumn sunshine hit him as he came out of the tunnel and he smiled, enjoying the warmth on his skin. Things were on the up. The Green Lanes Massive had been told, had got what was coming to them. The boy had done his job. Got caught, the stupid prick, but that was his own fault. He’d frozen apparently, stood there afterwards just looking at the boy on the ground, holding the knife like some kind of idiot. But that was okay. Those who needed to know knew that Devil was behind it; the police had the boy banged up and nothing to link him to the Dalston Crew, so it was all clean, all sorted.

Of course the Green Lanes Massive would retaliate, but Devil was ready for them. His boys were tougher, hungrier; they would go further. That’s what it was all about, Devil had realised a long time ago. It was a game of chicken. You had to be prepared to go further than anyone else. You had to have no fear. No fear meant no weakness, meant no one had anything on you. And no one having anything on you gave you power. No one having anything on you made you invincible.

He took the long way round, through the deserted scrubland at the back of the estate. There’d been plans once to turn it into a play area for kids, with a five-a-side football pitch and a youth club; the foundations had even been dug. But the day they delivered the wood to build it, the place was torched; soon after that all the plans were dropped.

He was on the road now, ambling down towards the arcade, hands in his pockets. He didn’t usually leave the estate alone; safety in numbers and all that. But today he was feeling confident. And he didn’t want to hang with his boys all the time. They talked a load of shit, laughed at stupid things. They were boring. Infantile. That had been one of his words, couple of weeks ago now. In-fan-tile. Like an infant. Like a baby. It was now his favourite put down. People didn’t like it. They didn’t like it because it was a long word and it showed up how stupid they were. They didn’t have to be stupid. They could get a dictionary app just like he did. But people didn’t think like that. They were happy in the gutter. His father had been right about that: other people deserved what they got. They brought it on themselves. They were lucky he even noticed they were alive.

A girl was outside the newsagent, holding onto a bike, looking into the shop hesitantly, looking down at the bike. It was pink. It was new. Cheap shit; soon enough it would fall apart, the pink would chip. But right now it looked all right. She was wearing a matching helmet, pale pink. The bike had a basket on the front. She had a lock in her left hand; she was looking for somewhere to lock it up.

Devil walked over; something in him needed to separate her from the bike, needed to show her that he was the boss, that everything on the estate was his for the taking, even a crappy kid’s bike.

‘You can leave your bike with me.’

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. She was six, too young to know not to look him in the eye, but old enough to be hesitant. He remembered when she was a toddler. Her mother used to be fine-looking. Not any more. ‘Mum says I got to lock it up.’

‘Your mum wants your bike safe. It’s safe with me.’ He smiled, his whole face softening. He’d learnt that from his father. Soft then hard; hard then soft.

She looked torn.

‘You want to go in the shop, you gotta leave the bike here. I’ll look after it for you.’

He smiled again. Reluctantly, she started to move towards the shop, turning every few seconds to check the bike was still there.

‘Helmet,’ Devil said. The girl frowned. ‘I’ll need your helmet.’

The girl opened her mouth to say something, then she caught Devil’s expression. The smile was gone. He was sitting on her bike, his knees pressed up against his chest. She didn’t move.

‘You give me the helmet,’ he said, his tone now threatening. ‘I’m just going to take your bike for a ride. Keep it safe for you.’

She edged backwards into the shop. Devil pounced, grabbing her, pulling the helmet from her head before dragging her back to where her bike lay on the pavement. He pressed her nose against the bike, holding her by the neck. ‘Now you tell your mamma that Devil has your bike. You tell her if she wants you to have it again, she’s going to have to pay me for looking after it for you? You get me? You hear what I say?’

The girl was crying. For a second Devil looked at her; he had an urge to wipe away her tears just as he’d done with Leona, holding her to him, rocking her in his arms, telling her that monsters didn’t exist, that he’d protect her, that he’d always be there for her. But this girl wasn’t Leona. And this girl’s slapper mother hadn’t helped them one bit when they’d arrived here; hadn’t once given Leona even a smile. Suddenly filled with anger and hate, he pushed the girl roughly onto the pavement. ‘You tell her. You tell her what I told you.’

He didn’t look back as he cycled away. Didn’t care whether she was crying or not. Leona didn’t have a bike. Leona didn’t have nothing. What right did this girl have? The bike had been bought with money that should have come to the Dalston Crew. Twenty per cent of earnings, that’s all he asked of her mother. Not much for protection, not much for her family’s safety. But he knew she was robbing him, seeing clients on the sly. He knew she was fiddling, lying, cheating him. And now she’d know he knew.

The bike was too small, far too small, but he rode it anyway. It reminded him of the BMX he used to have when he was younger. He’d loved that bike. He used to go everywhere on it. Sometimes he’d cycle with Leona on his knee and she’d giggle as they rode, clinging onto the handlebars, squealing when he did wheelies.

He got off the bike, threw it down in disgust, forcing the images of his little sister out of his head. Leona wasn’t there any more. That’s how things were. Things had changed.

He walked quickly, past the arcade, past the sprawling mess of small two-up-two-down houses that surrounded the estate, gardens full of washing lines and broken-down cars, the paths strewn with broken bottles and cigarette butts. Cheap cigarettes.

Devil smoked Silk Cut, his father’s brand. Just to be different. Classy. You wouldn’t catch him with one of those cheap brands that tasted like shit.

Then he stopped, looked around. A couple of boys looked at him cautiously, then dropped their heads and walked away. He was on safe territory here. A mile further and he’d need his crew. Just in case. But here, no one would dare mess with him. No other gang would think about trespassing.

He started to walk again, past the houses, around the corner, sneering as he saw people going about their daily business: fighting, doing the washing, shouting at their kids. It was a shit place to live. Sink estate, they called it in the newspapers. Not that anyone around here read a newspaper. They might look at the pictures sometimes, peer at the tits, but nothing else. That’s what made it a sink estate, Devil had realised a month or so after moving here. It wasn’t the flats and houses, even though they had walls so thin you could piss up them and the damp would show through on the other side; it was the people inside them. Lazy, stupid, ignorant people. His dad would have cleaned up, he’d thought to himself. And then he’d remembered that his dad had run away, that he wasn’t coming back. And that’s when he’d decided that he would clean up instead. That he would own this place, just like his dad had owned his town.

First time he’d seen his dad on television he’d thought it was a game, thought it was something clever his dad was doing with the camera, like when he put images of Devil riding his bike with Leona on his computer for them to watch. But it wasn’t a game. It was real. His dad, speaking to millions of people.

‘They love me,’ his dad had smiled proudly. ‘They love me so much they send me their money. All the way from America, from Africa. We’ll go to America one day, son. We’ll have them eating out of my palms.’

Devil had a different name back then. But a lot of things were different back then.

‘Devil? Fancy finding you here.’

Devil stopped, abruptly, cursing himself for getting lost in thought, not noticing the pigs creeping up on him.

‘Yeah? It’s a free country last I heard,’ he said, looking the copper right in the eye. There was a policewoman with him. Quite fit, if you liked that kind of thing. She had dark brown hair; the policeman was a ginger.

‘What I heard,’ the woman said, ‘is that you were behind the stabbing last week. You got anything to say about that?’

Devil shrugged. ‘I ain’t behind no stabbing. Not my style. My crew’s all about peace, officer.’

He smiled, broadly, confidently. They had nothing on him. Could have nothing on him. The boy wouldn’t squeal, not if he cared about his family.

‘Peace.’ The male copper’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a little shit, you know that? You know your little gofer’s sister is in hospital, don’t you? A revenge attack for the murder you made him commit. The Green Lanes Massive have threatened to kill her next time. That boy thought he had your protection. But you don’t give a shit, do you? Think he’s going to keep quiet now? Think he’s going to think twice about telling us exactly what you told him to do?’

Devil’s eyes widened. His sister? Shit. He didn’t know. ‘Yeah?’ he said, folding his arms insouciantly. ‘Well good luck trying, ’cos I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.’

Devil turned quickly and walked back the way he had come. He had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. What if the boy snitched? What then?

‘Don’t go too far, Devil,’ the policeman called after him, but Devil didn’t turn around. He just shoved his hands in his pockets and made his way back towards the estate.

The sewing rooms, as they were known, were situated towards the northern end of the settlement and were made up of two rooms, one for sorting and machining and one for more delicate work. It was in the second of these rooms that Evie worked, sometimes hand-stitching special garments but mostly mending and darning to eke out more use from clothes that had seen better days. Most of the clothes were hewn from wool, but new fabric was expensive to produce so reusing what already existed was the bulk of their work, clothing the farmers who worked all hours to put food on the table for the whole community. In the Settlement, after teachers it was farmers who were revered the most; the majority of men between the ages of sixteen and forty toiled the fields or looked after the animals because, as Benjamin explained, food gives you the energy to do everything else; without it, everything would fail.

In the City, by contrast, farmers were rarely seen, except when they brought their goods to market; agriculture had been taken for granted but never celebrated, never seen as a worthy career. And it wasn’t until Evie had gone outside the City that she’d learnt why: the City wasn’t self-sufficient, and farming wasn’t celebrated because it was carried out elsewhere, a dirty little secret that the Brother liked to keep that way.

Evie still got angry when she thought about what Linus had told her, about the Evils working outside the City to produce food for its citizens under terrible conditions. She would compare their treatment with the farmers of the Settlement and it would send a shiver down her spine, but mostly she tried not to think about the City, tried only to think about the here and the now, about the Settlement, about her future.

Trouble was, sometimes that sent a shiver down her spine, too.

Evie enjoyed her work here. In the City she had hated sewing, had done everything she could to escape from it. But that had been because it was her mother’s work. The mother who wasn’t her mother. The mother who had stolen her from her real parents and had failed to even love her in return. Now Evie relished the camaraderie as the women worked together – and it was all women in the sewing rooms. ‘Not because men can’t sew,’ Benjamin had told her, a twinkle in his eye. ‘I just haven’t yet found a man brave enough to join in the conversation.’

And the conversation had been a revelation to Evie. The women talked as they worked, sharing confidences, telling each other stories from their pasts, discussing their dreams for the future, teasing each other, supporting each other. It was so unlike the City where people worked in silence, where sharing a confidence was to put in jeopardy your standing in society, your label.

Here, the women gossiped about others, but mostly kindly; people in the Settlement, Evie had learnt, did not seek to judge or despise or fear. They looked for things that they had in common with others; they looked for shared values, for shared hopes. And all because of Benjamin. Because Benjamin had taught them that love always trumps fear, that peace was far stronger than violence. And Evie loved it, loved the gentle rhythm of this place with the whirr of the machines audible through the thin walls, the delightful eruption of laughter every so often punctuating their conversation.