I stay away. I don’t go down to the seafront at all. I think Banks knows that Alec’s dangerous but he’s keeping quiet about it. I never did understand why someone would protect a person that way – not when they’re hurting people. Mum and Dad did that with Sam – and am I doing it too, with Alec? Not telling anyone because he’s Banks’ mate?
I think of Raven and hear myself saying: ‘Tell them what you like … ’ and I know I’m hoping she will so that I don’t have to.
I stay at home doing English coursework by the patio heater, under the awning Banks helped to build. Sometimes I go over to Ben and Matt’s and lie on their chaise longue while they try to improve my taste in music. I’m everyone’s project: music with Ben and Matt, homework with Mum and Dad, clothes with Raven, and God knows what with Joe. On my last visit to his house, his father let me up the stairs and we sat in Joe’s room, listening to the boards creak outside the door. I began to wonder why he’d asked me over. When I left, squeezing past his father at the front door, Joe’s face was scarlet. It was like he felt guilty or something.
Everyone has secrets. Banks about Alec, me about Sam, and Joe – I don’t know what. Sometimes he doesn’t answer his phone for days, just sends me odd messages at all hours of the day and night: ‘You’re the best. I know I can rely on you.’ ‘Do you ever wonder what it all means?’ ‘Do you really like me for who I am? Whatever that is?’
Sometimes I answer them, sometimes I don’t. When they wake me up in the cold, empty time of night, I lie there and worry about where he is, and why he’s thinking of me, but I can’t think of anything to say. He misses more school than I do too, though he’s clever enough to get by. He’s in the sixth form and makes sure he hands all his work in on time. He says no one and nothing is going to spoil his plans, and that the secret for keeping people off your back is simple: give them what they want and they leave you alone. I say it depends what they’re asking.
My resolve to avoid the seafront, and Banks, doesn’t last very long. By the end of the day I’ve decided I have to know if Banks is protecting the man who attacked my friend. I’m sick of silence. I go to find him, determined to make him listen, but he’s nowhere on the beach, and there’s no sign of him in the alcove. It’s only when I come out at the front of The Mansion that I see him. He’s with Alec – dancing! They’re out on the wide space of concrete where we held the Christmas party, hands locked together at head height, bodies braced and shuffling backwards and forwards. Dancing. Until I hear the madman screeching and realise how stupid that is.
‘Come here…’ he’s bellowing. ‘I’ll kill you … tear your heads off…’
His body twists, snake-like, as he tries to free himself from Banks’ grip. His head turns horribly, almost backwards, to where two boys stand halfway up the path, laughing at him. ‘Yeah? Come on then,’ they taunt. ‘Come on then you nutter, what you waiting for?’
Alec frees a hand and takes a swipe at Banks’ head, catching him above the eye, and then he’s lurching up the path after the stupid boys, who are now running like greyhounds. He’ll never catch them.
Banks stares after them, then turns and sees me. We stand eyeing each other for ages, but he doesn’t move. In the end I walk away, and when I look back he’s following me.
We walk like we have nothing to do with each other, further than we normally go, and then sit down at the bottom of the high bank of pebbles on the nudist beach, where Alec can’t see us.
Banks looks terrible – worse than when I first met him. His nails are black, his eyes are bloodshot and he’s wearing a strange shirt and jumper. He smells sour, like the end of a beer can the morning after a party. We stare at each other and then he runs a hand through his hair with dirty fingers. When it snags in a tangle, he keeps pulling until it rips from his head.
‘Don’t!’ I say. ‘Don’t do that, Banks.’ But when I go to take his hand he snatches it back and bends his head down. ‘Let it alone,’ he says. ‘Why you here anyway?’
‘I had to come – I wanted to know if you were okay.’
‘As you see. I’m all right.’
‘You’re not!’ I say. ‘You look like crap.’
‘People are scared of me,’ he says. ‘Like I’m some animal.’
I look at him – scruffy, dirty, smelly man that he is today – the cut over his eye congealing into a black blob. He looks dangerous. If I met him for the first time now, I’d never come back.
‘What happened?’ I say. ‘Why didn’t you stay with us? It could have been all right. I know it could. You just didn’t want it, did you?’
For a moment he looks at me, and then he starts to laugh. His head goes back and I see his Adam’s apple bob like a cork on the water, the curls on his neck rolling and how white his teeth still are – still nothing a good bath can’t fix.
‘Couldn’t do it, Coo,’ he says. ‘What do you know.’
He fishes out a cigarette and lights it, letting the acrid smoke burst away down the beach, holding some back in his lungs, then coughing and coughing. When he’s done, his eyes are streaming, and I remember the medication for his chest infection but I don’t want to be stupid and ask him about it. I guess it’s a bit like putting a plaster on someone whose head’s been cut off.
‘I let you down,’ he says. ‘Spent all the money your Dad gave me on booze an’ drank the lot. Didn’t know where I was, but Alec got me back. I slept it off. Hoped you wouldn’t come.’
‘You could have stayed,’ I insist. ‘How could you want to be with Alec, when you could have been with me?’
‘Ha,’ he says. ‘You got some booze then? You gonna listen to me swearing at you? Catch me when I fall down?’
‘Punch you in the face?’ I say. ‘Rant and rave at you about devils?’
‘I know he rants,’ Banks says, ‘but … ’
‘He’s a nutter, Banks. Really a nutter. How could you?’
‘I know – but listen. He goes on about this stone… He says that in Heaven, there’s a stone you get; a white stone. It makes you a new person. I’d like that.’
‘He’s not just mad!’ I say. ‘He’s dangerous. I think it’s him who’s been attacking people. You need to get away. We need to tell someone.’
Unbelievably, Banks is smiling. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, we don’t.’
I stare at him. ‘Does that mean you agree?’ I ask. ‘You can’t think it’s okay to let it go on. Do you know what happened last night? If something’s wrong you have to fix it, not wait to die and expect some supernatural Santa to pick up the pieces.’
Banks is looking at me very closely, but he’s not listening. I don’t think he wants to know. ‘Are you hearing me at all?’ I ask him.
He shakes his head then puts a finger on my arm – just a finger – and strokes the material of my coat. ‘Sometimes I get tired of being me,’ he says. ‘I get tired of this, but I dunno what to do about it.’
It’s quiet and his voice falls back into the bank of pebbles. Behind us, some little creature is treading, its tiny sounds magnified in the stillness. It’s trapped in being what it is, just as we are. I look at Banks, and he looks at me, like he’s waiting for the answer to a question I must have missed.