Numbers

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

We unwrapped the parcels of food. Anne had brought us sandwiches, homemade cake, potato chips. Karen made us both a cup of tea, and we sat on either side of the table.

I was waiting for the probing questions, the time Karen would want it all explained to her, but for a while she was happy to chatter away about the twins and the media fuss – there’d been reporters camped outside their front door, apparently. I thought she was going to ask about the numbers, all the rumors flying around, but, of course, she asked the question a mum would ask.

“So what’s going on with you and Terry – Spider – then? More than friends now, is it?”

I didn’t want to talk about him, not with her, but I realized that I did want her on my side. Maybe she could help me see him again. So I didn’t tell her to mind her own business, which is what I wanted to do.

“Just friends,” I mumbled, “good friends.” A hateful warmth was spreading into my cheeks. God, it’s hideous when your body betrays you. She saw it, and started smiling.

“But you like him,” she said coyly.

I was bursting inside. Yeah, I liked him. I thought about him every minute of every day. I ached without him. I loved him. All those things I could never say out loud – except, maybe, to him.

“Yeah, I really like him,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, willing the hot skin on my face to cool down and get back to normal. “And I really need to see him again. It’s important, Karen. I need to see him.”

She smiled at me, a twinkling, sympathetic smile. “I know what that feels like. I was young once, too, you know.” How many more middle-aged clichés was she going to roll out today? “You will see him again, Jem. The police are holding him at the moment, but nobody thinks either of you planted that bomb. They want to talk to you as witnesses. And then there’s stealing cars and whatever else you’ve been up to in the last few days. And we still haven’t heard what they want to do about you taking that knife to school…” She sighed. “I’m not saying it isn’t a mess, Jem, because it is, but we can sort it all out. You just need to cooperate with the police, and then, eventually, they’ll let you see Spider again.”

“Eventually’s no good,” I blurted out.

“You’ve got to learn to be patient. I know it’s difficult…”

“We haven’t got the time to wait. It has to be before the fifteenth!”

“Don’t be silly. You’re both fifteen. You’ve got all the time in the world.”

“No, we haven’t. You don’t understand.”

“Then you’d better tell me.”

Faced with no alternative, I did. I told her about the numbers, like I’d told Spider, the day the London Eye was blown to bits.

She looked uneasy all the way through, fiddling with the foil food wrappers, and when I finished, she laughed, a really nervous little whinny.

“Come on, Jem. You don’t believe that, do you?”

“It’s not what I believe or not. It just is.”

She snorted and looked down at her fingers, restlessly squeezing and shaping the tinfoil.

“That’s not real, Jem. That’s not real life.”

“It is, Karen. It’s been my life for fifteen years.”

“Jem, sometimes things get muddled up. I know how tough it’s been for you. You’ve been through so much unhappiness and change. I knew that when I agreed to take you on. Sometimes, when things are confusing, anyway, we try and make sense of it our own way, we find ways of coping…”

She still didn’t understand. “I didn’t make it up! Do you think I want to live like this?”

“Alright. Calm down. You didn’t make it up on purpose, I know. I’m just saying that sometimes the mind plays tricks on you.”

“So I need a psychiatrist?”

“No, you need a proper home. There is nothing wrong with you that some stability – love, even – wouldn’t cure. All things I’m trying to give you.” Her eyes flicked up to me nervously. She was used to me throwing things like this back in her face.

The thing was, even as I was almost screaming with frustration, I could see where she was coming from. If someone else had told me my story, I’d have thought they were pulling a prank or were schizo or something. I wouldn’t have believed them. Karen’s world was one of routines and rules. She had her size-seven feet firmly on the ground. Of course this didn’t make any sense to her. She was looking at me now, just waiting to be kicked, and I would have just a few days ago, but what would be the point now?

“I know you are, Karen,” I said. “I know.”

And she pressed her lips together in a tight little smile, a grateful acknowledgment of the effort it had cost me to say that.

“’Nother cup of tea, love?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’ll just stretch my legs while the kettle’s on.”

“OK.”

I got up and walked out into the abbey, surprised again at its sheer size, the space above me. All over the floor were stones with writing carved into them. I was standing on one: the marker for someone, dead for two hundred and thirty years. The walls, too, were a patchwork. Words that had lasted for hundreds of years – describing people nobody remembered anymore. I was surrounded by bones and ghosts.

I looked around the abbey, stopping here and there to read the stones. It should have creeped me out. It didn’t. I liked it – I liked the honesty of seeing people’s numbers. The stones told the facts: birth date, death date. The numbers were fine – it was the words that were more troubling. DEPARTED; LAID TO REST; TAKEN BY HER MAKER; GONE TO A BETTER PLACE. I stopped in front of this last one. Was it wishful thinking, belief, or even certainty? If I’d written that memorial, I would have rubbed out the last four words. Just GONE.

That’s all there was, as far as I could see. How could anyone possibly know any different?

It made me wonder where my mum was now, or where what was left of her was. What had happened to her after they’d taken me away in that car? Had she been buried somewhere, or cremated? Had there been a funeral, and had anyone gone? Or do junkies, dossers, and slags just get chucked in a ditch? All of a sudden, I really wanted there to be a grave somewhere for her. I wanted her messy, messed-up life to have ended properly.

Then a chill ran through me. What would they do for Spider? It seemed impossible that just over twenty-four hours from now, he’d be needing a gravestone. How could someone so alive, so fizzing with energy, just stop?

I felt a tide of panic rising up inside me. Despite what Karen thought, Spider’s life could be measured out in hours now – minutes, even. I’d seen his number so many times. It didn’t change. It was real. He would die in jail, or some police cell. Beaten up, probably. Unless he was ill. Perhaps he was ill right now, already in the grip of something that seemed trivial, that nobody knew would be fatal. I couldn’t possibly wait out these next hours until someone came to me, told me the news. I needed to step up the pressure, somehow get them to release him.

“Tea’s ready.” Karen’s voice echoed into the church.

I wandered back into the vestry, determined to find a way to see him again. I’d been like a cork at sea all my life, tossed around from home to home, no say in what happened to me. I had to take control.

We had our tea and got ready for bed. Karen went on chatting away, trying to make it fun. By then I was so tired, I was nearly falling over. I let her tuck me in and then listened as, huffing and puffing, she got into her bed.

“It’s quite comfy, isn’t it?” she said, in a cheery, making-the-best-of-things kind of voice.

“Uh…no. But it’s better than sleeping under a hedge.”

“That what you’ve been doing?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, you get some kip now, and tomorrow we’ll talk more about you coming home and having a proper night’s sleep in a real bed.” Her duvet rustled as she shifted about. “Honestly, Jem, you’re quite right, I don’t think I could sleep more than one night here – the floor’s so hard…” But no more than five minutes after that, she was gently snoring. She was well out of it.

Perhaps I would have slept on my own, but the steady noise of her rumbling breaths in and out seemed to fill the room. It was irritating beyond belief. I was jealous, too. How could this woman just drift off so quickly like that? My head was full of the last few days, racing ahead to the next few days. After half an hour or so, I knew I’d have to get up or kill her where she lay. Even to me, the murder option seemed a bit extreme, so slowly I peeled down my duvet and stood up.

I remembered Simon’s whispered words to Karen before he left, and tiptoed over to the table, quietly easing out one of drawers. The keys were in there sure enough, a big, thick bunch. As I went to pick them up, they moved against each other, a metallic, oily noise. I stretched the bottom of my hoodie out and wrapped them up, smothering their telltale sound. Then I padded out of the vestry, into the dark cavern of the abbey.