I thought it was me. I thought that now he was a big-shot policeman he didn’t want anything more to do with me. He was going places whilst I was a receptionist at the Holiday Inn. He’d probably met some fit, ambitious policewoman during celebration drinks and didn’t have the guts to tell me we were over. I went to his house. Twice. The lights were on both times and I could see the TV flickering through the thin curtains but Mark didn’t come to the door, even when I kept my finger glued to the doorbell and screamed at him through the letterbox.
The truth came out three weeks later when I ran into one of his mates in a pub in town.
‘Mark not with you?’ I said, two large glasses of wine and the encouragement of a friend giving me the nerve to approach him. ‘Teetotal now he’s a copper, is he?’
‘Mark’s not a copper.’ He raised his hand and waved at a group of lads over by the bar.
‘What?’ I grabbed his arm as he turned to go. ‘What did you say?’
‘He didn’t get in, did he? He wouldn’t say why, secretive little bastard. I reckon it’s because his uncles have done time. Anyway, Mark’s at home sulking.’ He shrugged me off. ‘Why don’t you go and give him a blow job? Cheer him up a bit.’
I swore at him under my breath as he made his way through the crowded bar but relief flooded through me. Mark hadn’t dumped me for someone else. He was hiding and licking his wounds. All the plans he’d made, all the hopes he had. Gone. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him but I was angry too. How dare he cut off all contact with me just because he’d failed to get into the police? I deserved more than that.
Two weeks later I found a note on the doormat when I got home from work.
I’ve been a twat and I’m sorry. Meet me for a drink so I can explain. Please.
I didn’t reply. Six weeks he’d kept me hanging. Let’s see how he liked it.
I told Mum to tell Mark I was out if he rang, which he did – the next day. He didn’t leave a message.
Ignoring his calls was torture. I nearly caved in several times but I ripped up the letters I’d spent for ever composing before I could send them. Then he turned up at my door.
‘I thought about bringing flowers or wine or something but you’re worth more than that, Claire. Please,’ he added before I could respond, ‘just hear me out. You can tell me to fuck off after I’ve said what I need to say. Can we go to the pub? We can sit outside if you want.’
I listened for an hour as he explained how he’d struggled academically at school after his mum died, going in during the holidays for extra help with his coursework and scraping five low-grade GCSEs. He told me how his dad had said he’d never amount to anything and his best bet was to join him in the family’s building-supplies firm so he could learn about running a business. His dad had laughed when he’d told him he didn’t want to do that – he wanted to be a policeman – and had called him a grass. Two of Mark’s uncles were in prison, one for aggravated assault and one for fraud, and he knew his own dad wasn’t beyond taking a few backhanders and passing on stolen goods.
‘I wanted to better myself,’ Mark told me. ‘Everyone on our estate thinks my family is dodgy. People cross the street when they see me out with my uncle Simon. The family thinks it’s respect but it’s not, it’s fear, and I don’t want that kind of life for me and my kids. Because I want kids, you know, Claire. I want a family.’
Kids. His eyes shone as he said the word, just as they had when he’d talked to me about joining the police.
‘I want to be respected. I want people to look up to me because I’ve achieved something.’
And then he told me about what he called the ‘boxes’ in his head. It was his way of compartmentalizing his life. He couldn’t get in touch with me after he’d been rejected by the police because he was trapped in that box in his head. He had to process what had happened, then shut the box and get back on with his life. If he’d rung me he’d have taken a lot of his anger and resentment out on me and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want me to see him at his lowest.
‘If you’d seen me like that you’d have lost all respect for me. I’d have lost you.’
‘Maybe you already have?’
He hung his head then, chin tucked into his chest, as he swirled a small puddle of lager around the base of his glass. I said nothing.
‘Fuck it!’ He gripped his hair with his fingers and covered his face with the palms of his hands. ‘I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I?’
There are some decisions that alter the course of your future; pivotal moments in life where you find yourself standing at a crossroads. Go left and you’re off down that path and there’s no turning back. Same if you go right.
‘Bollocks.’ The wooden picnic table shook as Mark got to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Claire, you’re better off without me.’
He strode across the patio with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward.
‘Mark!’ My throat was too tight and his name came out as a whisper. ‘Mark!’
I had no choice but to go after him.
‘Mark!’ I grabbed hold of his arm. ‘Don’t you dare walk away from me. Don’t you dare!’
He stopped walking but said nothing.
‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘You tell me you had a shit childhood, then you walk away? You’re not the only one who had a rough time, you know, but you don’t see me feeling sorry for myself and—’
He grabbed me around the waist and pressed his lips so hard against mine that our teeth clashed and my neck cricked as he leaned his weight into me.
‘Give me another chance,’ he breathed as he pulled away. ‘Give me another chance and I swear I’ll never let you down again, Claire. I love you. I don’t want to lose you.’
I didn’t have to think twice. I was eighteen years old. I was in love.
Now the back door clicks open and I catch the briefest glimpse of a baseball cap before it ducks back outside and the door slams shut.
‘Wait!’ I jump up from my chair and sprint across the kitchen. ‘Come back!’
Chapter 13
‘Jake! Wait! We need to talk.’
My eldest son ignores me. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a key. He stoops to place it into the lock, wincing as he shifts his weight onto his bad foot, then turns the handle and yanks the garage door open.
He hobbles inside, swears at the pool of oil puddled around Mark’s lawnmower, then fiddles with the dusty stereo on the shelf at the back of the garage. Pounding rock music fills the room as he straddles the weights bench and shuffles onto his back. His fingers wrap around the silver bar and his biceps tense as he lifts the dumbbell off the bar.
‘Jake! Are you ignoring me?’
He doesn’t reply. Instead he grunts as he dips the bar down to his chest and then presses it into the air.
His interest in lifting weights began about six weeks after Billy disappeared. I welcomed it initially – Jake lifting weights was preferable to Jake spending every waking moment in the pub – but he became obsessed. An hour after work in the early evening became two hours and then he added another two hours in the morning. The bleep, bleep, bleep of his alarm at 5 a.m. drove Mark to distraction. Jake began spending less and less time with Kira and the family and more and more time in the garage. If he did deign to join us in the living room he’d be lost in the pages of Lifting or Power Grunt or whatever magazine he couldn’t get his nose out of. Kira would sit beside him, tap-tap-tapping into her phone, nodding politely as he’d explain how he was going to increase his deltoids by doing a certain combination of lifts.
Kira’s always been a quiet girl but she shrank into herself during the height of Jake’s obsession. The bigger he grew the smaller and more silent she became. Shortly after she first came to live with us she told me how our home was like a breath of fresh air. We weren’t the perfect family by any means but I could see why our living situation was preferable to the one she’d escaped. But then Billy disappeared and everything fell apart. We fell apart. Poor Kira. She’d swapped one screwed-up, dysfunctional family for another.
‘Jake.’ I take a step towards him. ‘You need to tell me what’s going on.’
‘I’d have thought –’ his face contorts as he presses the bar into the air – ‘that was obvious.’
I stride across the room and switch off the stereo.
A muscle twitches in my son’s cheek as he stares up at the corrugated roof. The barbell wobbles above him and for one horrible moment I imagine it slipping from his hands and pinning him to the bench but then he grunts and lowers it onto the rest.
‘Sorry.’ He sits up and runs a hand over his face.
‘You need to talk to me,’ I say softly as I crouch on the edge of the bench.
He reaches for the sports bottle on the floor and takes a swig, grimacing as he swallows. Jake is almost the spitting image of his dad. Whilst Billy inherited my dark hair, Jake is fair like Mark with the same small eyes, prominent nose and thin lips. His is a masculine face; strong and angular with a wide expanse of forehead. Billy’s features are more refined. He has my large brown eyes, a smaller nose and fuller lips. Dad always used to go on about what a pretty boy he was when he was little. ‘Angelic,’ Mum called him. I’ve always been careful never to comment on the way my boys look – they’re both beautiful in my eyes – but the world isn’t so circumspect. I lost track of the number of times old ladies would nod at Jake, then gaze at Billy in the buggy and announce, ‘He’s going to be a right heartbreaker that one.’ The comparison wasn’t lost on Jake. ‘Why don’t me and Billy look the same?’ he’d ask when he was nine and Billy was five. ‘Arrogant bastard,’ he growled when Billy was twelve and the letterbox rattled with cards for Valentine’s Day; only one of them was for Jake (and that was from me).
Jake replaces the sports bottle on the floor and his gaze flickers towards me. ‘I’m just stressed, that’s all.’
‘About what?’
His pale blue eyes are unreadable. ‘Everything. Work, Kira, Dad, this house, Bill.’
‘Is that why you’ve started drinking again?’
‘What do you mean, again?’ he says but he knows what I mean. After Billy left I lost track of the times he’d stumble into the house at night, crashing into the kitchen table, swearing at the coat hooks as his hoody hit the floor, stumbling up the stairs and into bed with Kira. I confronted him about it but he said he wasn’t doing anything that other nineteen-year-olds didn’t do and if he went to work every day and he paid me my rent then what right did I have to hassle him about it?
What could I do? It was obviously his way of dealing with the loss of his brother. But I can’t stick my head in the sand any more. I can’t stand idly by as he destroys himself. We need to talk.
‘Jake, we need to discuss what happened on the day of the appeal. I know everyone’s been worried about me, but I can’t just forget about the fact that you were drinking at seven o’clock in the morning.’
He takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair. ‘I just had a bit of a session, okay? We got back from the club at three and I kept drinking because I was pissed off.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Do you have to be such a control freak?’ He shifts position to stand up but the sudden movement is too much for his foot and he’s forced to sit back down again.
The accusation stings and it takes everything I’ve got not to retaliate. Instead I take a steadying breath.
‘Sorry. That was out of order.’ He puts a hand on mine, his palm sticky with sweat. ‘Look, if you really want to know, I was pissed off because some bloke started chatting up Kira while I was in the loo.’
‘He was probably just trying his luck.’
‘Yeah, I know. But she looked really happy. She was laughing and playing with her hair, like she did when we first got together.’ He shrugs. ‘And I was shitting myself about Billy’s appeal. So I kept drinking to try and block it all out. That’s all there is to it.’
I want to tell him that I understand, that it’s been longer than I can remember since his dad looked at me that way too, but this isn’t about me. And it certainly isn’t about Mark. This is about my son opening up to me for the first time in a long time.
‘Oh, Jake.’ I wrap my arms around his broad shoulders and pull him in to me. His body feels hard and unwieldy in my arms. ‘I understand. Really I do. She’ll look at you like that again. I promise. You and Kira have been to hell and back, we all have. When Billy comes home everything will go back to normal. I promise you.’
Jake stiffens and it’s as though I’m hugging rock.
Thursday 25th September 2014
Jackdaw44: I saw you in town today.
ICE9: Shouldn’t you be at school?
Jackdaw44: Skiving.
ICE9: I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.
Jackdaw44: Liv was stirring shit with her mates at lunchtime. I’ve fucking had it with girls. I left before I hit her.
ICE9: You can’t hit girls!
Jackdaw44: Duh! That’s why I left.
ICE9: Why do you keep texting me?
Jackdaw44: I like talking to you. You got a problem with that?
ICE9: Wow, so aggressive!
Jackdaw44: Fuck this shit. You’re a piss taker like everyone else.
ICE9: No, I’m not.
Jackdaw44: You look down on me. You think I’m a stupid kid.
ICE9: a) I don’t look down on you and b) You’re cleverer than you let on.
Jackdaw44: Fucking Stephen Hawkins, me.
ICE9: You know what I mean.
Jackdaw44: Yeah. Don’t tell anyone though.
ICE9: Your secret is safe with me.
Jackdaw44: If you ever need to share a secret you know where I am.
ICE9: I’ll bear that in mind.
Chapter 14
‘DS Forbes speaking.’ For a split second his clipped tones make me question my decision to call him. It’s Monday morning and he sounds stressed but I can’t ignore what I saw at the train station. Not if it takes us a step closer to finding Billy.
‘It’s Claire Wilkinson. Billy’s mum.’ I don’t know why I added that last bit. He knows perfectly well who I am but a lifetime of introducing myself at the school gates, talking to the kids’ teachers or ringing the doctor’s surgery has drummed it into me. Claire Wilkinson, Mark’s wife. Claire Wilkinson, the boy’s mum. I can’t remember the last time I introduced myself as Claire.
‘What can I do for you, Mrs Wilkinson?’
I can hear noises in the background, keyboards clacking and snatches of conversation.
‘I was at the train station on Friday,’ I say. ‘Temple Meads. I was on platform thirteen and I was …’ I falter. How do I explain the surety I felt that the ugly building I must have passed a thousand times holds a vital clue to my son’s disappearance? ‘I was wondering if you’ve searched the disused sorting office. There’s a lot of graffiti on it and Billy did say in his diary that he wanted to tag the station or one of the trains. Maybe he went there instead. Maybe he’s still there.’
DS Forbes doesn’t respond immediately. Someone in the same room shouts, ‘Yes!’ and there’s a smattering of applause.
‘DS Forbes?’ I say. ‘Did you—’
‘Yes, still here.’
‘Do you think it could be a lead? Do you think he might be squatting there? Sleeping rough.’
He makes a low humming sound. ‘I doubt it. That place is completely open to the elements. It’s basically a couple of floors on stilts. You’d be better off sleeping in a doorway.’
‘But he could be there?’
‘Billy could be anywhere, Claire. That’s the trouble. There are a thousand places in Bristol where he could be sleeping rough. Unfortunately we don’t have the time or resources to search them all. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get a lead as a result of the appeal. It’s still early days.’
‘But you’ll look? You’ll get someone to check it out.’
Another pause.
‘I’ll see what we can do.’
There is no way I can get into the old sorting office. Even if I was fifteen years old I still don’t think I’d be able to make it over the barbed-wire fence, even with a leg-up, and the double gates are securely padlocked. I wasn’t going to come here, not after I called DS Forbes this morning, but I wanted to get a glimpse inside, just to set my mind at rest. Cattle Market Road is a busy street, with cars whizzing backwards and forwards, but most of the shops are boarded up, long since abandoned. There is a red sign affixed to some railings just outside the gates warning the general public that it’s private property. The sorting office is clearly visible through the grey metal bars of the gates. It looks even bleaker from here than it did from the train station opposite. DS Forbes wasn’t joking about it being open to the elements. There are no longer any walls or partitions inside, just a series of concrete columns separating one floor from the next. Even if you could get over the barbed wire why would you shelter here? I’ve spent months wondering where I’d go if I was sleeping rough. I’d want to squirrel myself away from the world so I wouldn’t worry about being robbed or attacked as I slept. I’d go to a women’s shelter if I could or, if I didn’t want to be found, I’d settle down for the night in a shed in the allotments off Talbot Road and take my belongings with me each morning to avoid discovery. We’ve already checked the allotments, and posted up signs in BS4 and BS3 asking people to check their sheds. We’ve searched everywhere and anywhere we could think of – the river-bank near Marks & Spencer at Avonmeads, the local parks, the Downs. Everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. Or we’d have found him.
I look down at the notebook in my hands and Billy’s thick, black scrawl:
– Bristol T M (train?)
– The Arches
– Avonmouth
The Arches. I’ll go there next. It’s a railway viaduct – ripe for tagging – on the edge of Gloucester Road. It’s on the other side of Bristol but that never stopped Billy, not if he wanted to see his friends. He’d set off on his bike and cycle the eight and a half miles it takes to get there from our house. Billy was always secretive about who he was going to see. ‘Just mates, Mum,’ he’d say. When the kids were little and went to a local primary school I knew who all their friends were. We seemed to spend half our lives going to birthday parties and playdates and ferrying the kids to and from sleepovers. But when the boys started secondary school on the other side of town their friends, scattered all over Bristol, became a mystery to me. Jake told us that Billy’s Gloucester Road friends weren’t from school at all. He said they were older guys, in their late teens and early twenties, who lived in a squat. I was horrified. I imagined drugs and squalor and crime and I told Billy I didn’t want him to have anything to do with them. He told me I was narrow-minded and brainwashed by Mark. His friends weren’t down-and-outs, they were artists who refused to become wage monkeys to line some capitalist landlord’s pocket. Why shouldn’t they live in an abandoned building? They weren’t doing any harm to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t keep him locked in the house all weekend. The alternative was to ferry him into town in the car if he was going to the cinema with friends and then pick him up afterwards but what was to stop him from getting a bus to Gloucester Road the second we dropped him off? Mark said we should take Billy’s bike off him for a bit, until he learned some responsibility. I suggested that Billy take me to the squat to meet his new friends but my son said he’d rather die than do that.
‘Did you introduce your parents to all your friends when you were fifteen?’ he asked me and I had to admit, to myself anyway, that I hadn’t. There were countless boyfriends who I met at night after sneaking out of the house. Lots of older brothers and sisters of my mates who’d go into the Co-op to buy us bottles of White Lightning and Thunderbird to drink in the park. One of my male friends had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped after we got stupidly drunk and he was someone I’d known since childhood. I didn’t end up in A&E. I’d already puked into a flower bed.
I was torn. Billy was fifteen years old. He was stretching his wings. He was a good boy. He was sensible at heart and I trusted him not to do anything stupid. And then he got into trouble at school for graffitiing the science block and Mark said that was that, he was grounded for two months and he was going to take away Billy’s bike. Only we couldn’t find it. And Billy refused to say where it was.
Now I jump as the gate clangs open and a man and woman in neon yellow vests with lanyards around their necks step through the gap.
‘Excuse me,’ I say as the man closes the padlock. ‘My name is Claire Wilkinson. My son is missing. He’s called Billy, he’s fifteen. I’m worried that he might be sleeping rough and—’
‘Not here he’s not,’ the woman says. She’s mid-forties with a half-inch of grey roots showing through her curly red hair. ‘Bristol Council.’ She gestures towards her lanyard. ‘We’re redeveloping the place. Waterside offices and homes. There’s twenty-four-hour security in place.’
‘You’re quite sure there’s no one sleeping rough inside?’
The man pulls on the padlock. ‘Not unless he’s a pigeon. And we’ll be getting them out ASAP too.’
I glance through the gates and try to imagine the building coming back to life – with glass in the windows and families sitting on sofas in front of their tellies and office workers wheeling back and forth in front of computer screens – but I can’t see it.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you know of any squats in Gloucester Road, do you?’
But they’ve already wandered off.
I am a couple of hundred feet away from the Arches and stuck in traffic when I see him, a heavyset man with a bushy beard. He’s riding a yellow-and-black BMX bike with distinctive blue-and-white tyres. He slips into the bus lane and undertakes me, his white trainers pumping the pedals as he speeds down Cheltenham Road. He looks almost comical with his large body balanced on top of the small bike and his thick knees spread wide. I remember how Jake laughed and said Billy looked like a circus monkey when he rode his Mafia BMX. It was a kid’s bike, he said. And he looked like an idiot.
Just like the man in the hoody.
It’s Billy’s bike. It has to be. I’ve never seen one like it, not with the same combination of colours.
I don’t think twice. I indicate left and pull into the bus lane. A horn sounds behind me and the driver of the 3A bus shakes his head at me in my rear-view mirror. Startled by the sound, the man on the bike glances back. I wave frantically but he either doesn’t see me or he doesn’t want to stop because his head drops and he begins to pedal even faster. He turns left onto Zetland Road just as the lights change and I’m forced to stop.
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as he zips across the road and jumps off the bike outside a kitchen-and-bathroom shop and then hammers on the panelled wooden door of the building next to it, on the corner of the street. There are curtains at the window and a large piece of white card or wood – at least twelve feet by six feet – propped up inside, obscuring the view. As the traffic light turns green the door opens and the man disappears inside, taking the bike with him. It has to be the squat Jake told me about.
