Charlie Mann was alone in the world.
Once upon a time that simple statement hurt—like being doused in petrol and set alight pain—but in the six years since he’d lost everything, the hurt had dulled. Now, whenever he thought about it, the pain was less visceral, more like the tip of a blade pressing up against his cheek. While he may never heal, he could at least hope that in a few years’ time he’d barely register it. There would always be days like today though that brought it back.
He walked the damp streets back to the group home, the rain on his face serving as tears.
Today was always going to be a bad day. Every birthday was. But this one started the countdown on his last year in Herla House. He had twelve months to find a job—any job, it didn’t matter how shitty, and get some money behind him so he could move out on his eighteenth. It was all about twelve months from now. The long game. The escape.
He kicked a stone along the street. It bounced off the metal base of a lamppost and rolled away into the road.
Being told he wasn’t good enough to answer the phones for a free newspaper was just the icing on the cake he didn’t have.
The test call had been absolute bollocks. He’d gone through the canned response written on the sheet, introducing himself, asking how he could help, and the guy on the other end of the line had said, “I’ve got a punch bag to sell.” He’d sounded completely normal. “Hardly used.” Charlie dutifully wrote down the description, not really listening to what he was being told. “Five five, a little chubby, really fucking grating personality, never shuts up, always moaning, and can’t cook for shit, but she can take a hell of a beating.” He laughed. What else was he supposed to do? It couldn’t be real. It was stupid. So he’d laughed. And they’d said they didn’t think he was suited for the job. They’d been nice enough about it, but that was that. They’d suggested he think about going back to college, maybe try and get some practical skills, maybe plumbing or building or something. There was no point arguing with them. He thanked them for their time and left, feeling like shit.
The familiar iron gates were closed. He could see the silhouette of the old house between the iron bars. There were lights on in more than half of the windows, leaving the dark windows looking like some gap-toothed smile. It was a huge Regency place; the kind of building developers stripped and turned into half a dozen flats to turn a tidy profit. There was a buzzer on the side and a security camera mounted on the brickwork above it. Climbing plants dug into the layers of cement, covering more than half the perimeter wall. There was a smaller wooden door set into the wall like the entrance to some secret garden that the residents used to come and go. They all had keys, but the door was never locked.
He crunched his way across the loop of gravel driveway, and down the short flight of six steps to the basement door. He never used the main door. That meant walking past the office and having to make small talk with whoever was on duty. He wasn’t into small talk. He wasn’t that much of a fan of big talk, either.
Penny was in the kitchen, blitzing a witch’s brew of fruit, yogurt, and multigrains and God alone knew what else into a purple smoothie. It didn’t look delicious. It looked purple; that was about the best he could say for it. “Evening, Birthday Boy,” she said, seeing him with the eyes she obviously had in the back of her head. She didn’t look up or turn around. She was the sportiest of the kids who called Herla House home, more at peace in the gym or on the track running herself into the ground with her dreams of Olympic glory. She was good. Better than good. She was special. She had what it took to go all the way; everyone knew it. It was all down to how much she wanted it, and Penny Grainger wanted it. Fresh out of the shower, her hair scraped back in its usual ponytail, she wore her sweats and a plain white Nike T-shirt. She was three months older than Charlie, meaning three months closer to leaving Herla House for the big wide world. She was comfortably a decade more grown up and street smart than he was though, in that way girls have of just knowing more about life and leaving you feeling insecure about everything you want to say or do.
He wasn’t looking forward to those three months without her around. She’d always said they’d go together, maybe share a flat in Camden, by the lock, and hit the clubs every weekend dancing until the sun came up. It was a good dream. Penny had been here the day he arrived, along with Zoe Fenn, who made up the third corner of their triangle. There were plenty of nights Zoe had put up with his tears and anger at being dumped on by the world while Penny always offered more practical solutions that involved getting drunk or getting laid. That was always her answer. They were his best friends. The sisters he’d inherited. He couldn’t imagine his life without them. It went beyond blood; he was hopelessly in love with the pair of them.
“It is,” he agreed.
“Funny boy. Bracken’s on the warpath.”
Bracken, mein kommondant to the group home’s Auschwitz, ran the place with a bitter, bald fist. It wasn’t exactly iron, but there was no getting around the fact he could be a right bastard if he set his mind to it. Charlie had heard all sorts of rumors when he first moved in, including one about Bracken’s hand straying a little too close to a couple of the kids in his care up in the pool room in the attic. Little jokes like teaching them how to handle their balls, that kind of thing. He didn’t know if it was true: the kids in question, Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke, had left a couple of months before Charlie arrived, but there was no denying there was something a bit creepy about the guy at the best of times. And then there were the vague memories of kindnesses that, looking back on them, might just have been more, Bracken trying to groom him for whatever he had in mind, and his unhealthy interest in Charlie’s sex life, telling him how he should get in there with Penny, how that kind of girl was pure filth. That kind of fake-matey talk made Charlie deeply uncomfortable, so more often than not he just stayed out of the old paedo’s way.
“What am I supposed to have done now?” Charlie asked, but then answered the question himself before Penny could. “‘It’s your fault, boy, it’s always your fault, haven’t we established that already?’” he said, doing a passable impression of the bitter Scotsman.
She laughed.
He liked making her laugh.
It was a good feeling.
“Well, I’m going sit in my room and listen to suicide-inducing music for a while to get in the mood for the party later.”
“You do that,” Penny said. “And maybe think about a shower,” she said sweetly. “You don’t smell so good.”
He did just that, enjoying the ten minutes under the piping hot water before he changed into his armor of ripped jeans and a faded Joy Division T-shirt, then he sat on the bed with his headphones on listening to Closer as loudly as the tiny cans would take without distorting. The music was rich with someone else’s pain, and knowing Ian Curtis’s story only made that aching sadness all the more real. His lyrics were all about coldness, pressure, darkness, crisis, failure, collapse, the loss of control, all of the things that echoed in the turmoil of Charlie’s life. People didn’t understand the importance of music when it came to knowing yourself. People might wear different T-shirts with different band names or clever logos in their uniforms of nonconformity, but the reality was they all wore them just the same, transforming them into a teenage army of fashion-driven drones. Different fashions, different darknesses and lights, but they all echoed the same basic desire to belong somewhere, to be part of something. He wasn’t the only seventeen-year-old kid to find comfort in Joy Division. He was as big a cliché as the girls who fawned over One Direction and Justins Bieber and Timberlake.
He put a black shirt on over the top of his T-shirt to hide the cuts on his left arm. They were his life carved out on his flesh. He was a cutter. One scar for every problem as it reached the point where it became overwhelming, like some crazy old physician bleeding his patient to get the demons out. Four of those cuts had arrived on other birthdays. It was always a bad day. It was one of two days you were supposed to spend with your family, and all these particular anniversaries did was underscore the fact that he was and always would be alone.
As he was fastening his cuffs the door opened. It was Penny carrying a cupcake with a single candle in its frosting and singing “Happy Birthday.” He pushed his headphones down so they hung around his neck and grinning, took the cake off her. He blew the candle out. “I’m not telling you what I wished for.”
“Good. I don’t want to know,” she said. “Now come on, I’m taking you out for a milkshake. Every Birthday Boy needs a bit of brain freeze.”
He took the candle out of the frosting then took a bite that was half the size of the cake and made a show of scoffing it down while she shook her head.
“You’re such a pig.”
“And you love me for it,” Charlie said, pushing the last bite of cake into his mouth and licking his fingers as he hopped off the bed. “Okay, I’m in. Anything to piss off Bracken,” he said with a grin, and then the two of them crept down the stairs to the back door and out into the yard without closing it behind them.
It was never about milkshake.
They walked around the fringes of the Rothery into the more affluent streets around the shithole they called home, looking for a suitable birthday mobile, something smooth enough to turn a few jealous heads but not so desirable as to be locked down by some high-tech incapacitating alarm. “This one’s too hot,” Penny said, looking at a Porsche 911 Cabriolet. “And this one’s too cold,” she said, her eyes moving on to a battered Ford Mondeo.
“But this one’s just right,” Charlie finished for her, smiling at the sight of a flame red sports car parked up in the driveway that was just begging to go for a joyride.
It took Penny less than ten seconds to pop the lock and open the door.
Another thirty seconds had the ignition overridden and the engine purring.
Charlie clambered into the passenger seat and then they were off, tearing through the night streets toward the ring road.
Penny wound the windows down, putting her foot to the floor and weaving in and out of slow-moving traffic as she raced from main street to side street to backstreet and back again, the still-light shop windows becoming a blur as they tore through the city. The rain intensified as she drove, lending a surreal aspect to the scene. They didn’t talk much. Most of the ride was taken up with laughing and shouts of “Left!” and “Right!” as corners came up almost too quickly to take.
They crossed the river.
Seen like this, the lights of the city were all the birthday present he could have ever asked for.
He sank back into the seat enjoying the spectacle of his windswept, rain-drenched city through the windscreen as Penny turned the radio on, then drove one handed whilst fiddling with the dial until she found a tune she liked. The tune was backed by the dopplering siren of a police car behind them.
“About time,” she said. This was what the game was all about, cat and mouse. She slowed enough to let the flashing light close the gap between them, then put her foot down, somehow finding more speed under the bonnet. The city lights looked like dying stars tonight, torn apart by the driving rain sluicing beneath the windscreen wipers. A red double-decker with its sign promising a destination that sounded almost exotic cut across the two lanes of traffic on the bridge, kicking up a spray. Their headlights did the dance of the streets.
Penny focused intensely on the road ahead, changing through the gears and manipulating the pedals with unerring skill. Street racing wasn’t exactly a talent that went on a CV, but it was part of what growing up on the Rothery meant. She cut up the Rover between them and the bus, then broke every traffic law on the books, overtaking the bus on the inside in a maneuver that had the passenger side door scraping up against the safety rails before they emerged on the other side of the suicidal charge amid a blare of horns.
She was still laughing when a red light on the far side of the bridge nearly killed them both, but managed to throw the car into a series of evasive twists and turns that put four lanes of cross-traffic between them and the police. She gave the chasing cops the finger through the rearview mirror, doubled down, and whipped the car through a series of ridiculously right turns and double-backs before reaching the arches down beside the river. The husk of a burned-out car was abandoned beneath the railway bridge. There wasn’t a single flake of paint left on the warped metal, and all of the upholstery and soft fittings had fused into an amorphous mess of plastic and faux leather. Broken bricks lay scattered across the hard-packed earth around the car, an inner-city re-creation of Stonehenge’s pagan altar. The wall inside the arch of the railway bridge had been daubed with a stylized rendition of the horned forest god, only he had no forests to watch over, only tower blocks with names like sycamore, oak, and elm.
They abandoned the car and ran away whooping and hollering as the siren haunted the near distance, still searching hopelessly for them. They split up; both taking a different route back toward the Rothery, guaranteeing that even if the law did spot them, there was no chance both of them would be hauled in. As it was, the sirens rolled on for another five minutes or so, going in circles, and then gave up.
Charlie made it back to the green in the heart of the Rothery first, and spent a good ten minutes sitting with his back up against the lightning-split tree in front of the burned-out shell of The Hunter’s Horns waiting for Penny to catch up. A flicker of movement caught his eye—a majestic beast utterly out of place in this shithole—a huge white stag with a crown of antlers walked across the green, seeming to bow to the lightning-struck tree before it walked on. It was utterly mesmerizing. He watched it until it walked away up Cane Hill and disappeared from sight.
When Penny finally appeared, she was dancing in the street, arms flung out wide as she spun round and around, and tossed her head back, howling with laughter between butchered song lyrics, making him smile and forget about the stag as he enjoyed watching her dance and loving her just a little bit more.
Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
“You what?” Penny called out as she reached the grass.
“I didn’t say anything,” Charlie said.
“Well, it wasn’t me,” Penny said. There was no one else out on the green, no one in the streets around them. “It sounded like it came from here. A man’s voice. You sure it wasn’t you, Birthday Boy? You trying to freak me out?”
Charlie shook his head as he pushed himself to his feet.
“Weird.”
Penny reached out to steady herself against the tree and as her hand came into contact with the bark everything changed. She understood what she had to do. What they had to do.
“Time to go back and face Bracken and death by seventeen candles,” Charlie offered a lopsided smile. “And cake. Cake is good.”
“Not yet,” Penny told him. “There’s somewhere we need to be. Can’t you feel it?”
He shook his head again.
Penny held out her hand for Charlie to take.
This time he could feel it through her, the ancient tree providing the connection back to the land. His mind filled with images of what had once been a green and pleasant place. The landmarks—the natural ones—were all the same, all familiar, but they had been built on and bled dry over and over until all that remained was the lifeless brick and tile of the Rothery. He was seeing a glimpse of what this place had been like before, and it was beautiful. Unrecognizable, but undeniably beautiful.
He saw the white stag again as a voice filled his head.
Þes sy eorðcyning …
This is my land …
I am her king …
Charlie pulled his hand free from Penny’s. With the contact broken, the voice fell silent. Penny looked as though she was in the throes of some intense religious experience, all thoughts of cake banished.