I don’t know how many people Mac told, or if other people worked it out at the same time, but that night, the first yachts that could still float started to leave the harbour in Ramsgate. The people taking them weren’t the people who owned them.
‘A boat’s a fucking boat, but take it where?’ Davey said, feet up on our sofa. ‘Where they gonna go? Bet they headed straight for Calais, the chumps.’
‘That won’t be good,’ Ma said. ‘Not after what we did to them.’
‘You and me, Jas, we’d head to a deserted beach,’ he said. He made the beach with his hand, fingers spread to be the sand. ‘Hawaii, somewhere. Not that I’m leaving. Leave all this?’ He looked at me. Then he put his arm around me, but it didn’t land in the right places. ‘No chance. No, Chance, right? This is home.’
And if I remember right, despite the packed bags under the sofa, I nodded.
It’s the only way I understand it now. I thought the situation would end at any moment. Sometimes it grew inside me like a plant. This feeling of hope, the thought of you coming back, Blue in your arms. I slipped off to secret passages in my head. I’ll come back for you. Wasn’t that what you’d said?
But then a week passed, two. I tried to imagine instead what might be stopping you. I imagined you arguing with people. Arms blocking you. Doors being locked. And then, within the same second, I’d see you sitting back, playing with Blue, or worse, him nowhere near, and you not thinking about him, either. His teeth. I kept on thinking about how small they were, how he would get new ones. His head. Pushing my nose or my eye into his forehead. How he would hold things, the grip of all his fingers around one of mine.
Where were you now? What were you doing? Because the only scene I could play was you coming back. When I tried to imagine where you were, if that was London, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make up a room or a window or a day where you were, because I had no idea what they would be like there.
Davey and I started working in a mathematical way to get as many tins and cans as we could from the houses that were left. But it wasn’t just us now. Everyone was doing it. Still, we’d had practice; we did it better, faster, more. All across my shoulders I had these tiny dots of blood, skin-prints from heavy bags.
‘Stockpile,’ Davey said, halfway up the stairs of the building one day. ‘Stock market. We’ll start a stock exchange. Oi, didn’t you used to live in this one?’ He nudged his foot against a front door.
‘That one,’ I said. I pointed across the way. ‘Kole’s HQ. Kem shop. Move, though. My fingers will drop off if I have to hold these any longer.’
I jogged the next few stairs so the pain would be over faster, and Davey stared at the door as we curved past it, so hard he nearly tripped on a step.
‘Where is he?’ Davey said then.
For a second I was certain he was talking about Blue. ‘Who?’
‘Kole. For real. It’s been a while now. People been asking. And I heard a bunch of different stuff. That he was living in that castle on North Foreland. That some plane came for him. Jokers. Serious, though, do you know if he’s dead or what?’
‘I don’t care if he’s dead.’
‘I know you don’t care but it’s shady, Cha. You’re like a fucking lampshade sometimes.’
‘Just leave it, I said.’
‘Fucking dark, man.’
‘Just stop for once. When I ask you sometimes.’
‘I mean, it’s a lot of things. Like where’s Blue at?’
‘Stop, Davey.’
‘Why you looking like that? You don’t have to make it weird. Just tell me where he is.’
‘Shut up, Davey.’ It broke in my throat. I sat down on the stairs.
‘Chance,’ he said. ‘Get up.’
The bag with the cans tipped over. The metal clattered down the stairs. My heart felt like it did the same.
‘Stop messing about,’ he said. ‘Say it, Chance, whatever it is. Scaring me now.’
How do you tell someone? How do you tell someone something like that? I said it quietly, made even quieter by it having to pass through the wall I’d made with my arms around my face.
‘He isn’t here,’ I said.
‘What do you mean he isn’t here?’
‘Someone took him.’ That was how I said it.
‘What?’
‘Someone took him,’ I said again. Davey was trying to peel my arms away so he could see me.
‘What do you mean, someone? Who, Chance? Who, for fuck’s sake?’
‘It was night. It was the middle of the night.’
‘What difference does that make!’
‘They said they were saving him.’
‘You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.’
‘It was when the fighting was starting. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean, you didn’t know what to do. Who? Who? Saving him how? Where were they going?’
‘To someone in the thing,’ I said. ‘Someone who’d be safe.’
‘The girl?’ he said. ‘The fucking girl?’
‘She’s going to come back.’
‘You don’t just let… You don’t just let. Fuck’s sake, Cha. Why would you do that?’ The light changed. He’d walked away from me.
When I did look up, all the blood had left his face. Then he walked away further and punched a wall. Raised a fist and brought it down like a hammer. I’d never seen him like that. Both hands were up against the wall and he roared at it. He came back with a bleeding hand, then he put it to his mouth, and bit a small bit of flesh around it, to distract himself from the first pain.
He sat down next to me, this heavy body. He was silent for a long time, then he said sorry. Sorry he’d done that. Sorry for everything. His forehead found my arm. It’s not your fault, he said, which was the thing that made it worse. We’ll fix it, he said. We can fix it. Together we can fix anything.