Foxes (20 page)

“Do you like pain?” he asks, fixing his dead eyes on mine.

I don’t have time to think, let alone answer, before he’s in front of me. He moves so fast.

In less than a second, one of his hands grips my throat, fingers digging into the soft flesh below my ears, and the other slowly rotates my injured shoulder. I can’t breathe with how much it hurts. I can’t even struggle—it’s as though he’s somehow immobilized me.

The world darkens at the edges and I think I’m going to black out. He lets go and I sink to the floor. I can’t move. Deftly he pats me down and searches my pockets. When he finds my notepad, he pulls it out. I lift my good arm to try to stop him, but I just don’t have any strength.

He leans back against the desk again and unwraps the plastic that protects the little book from the rain and snow. I watch as he slowly flicks through my mess of thoughts.

“Sharks?” He laughs as he reads. Minutes pass. Minutes where I still feel I’m on the edge of the world. I don’t think enough blood is reaching my brain or something. “Danny. Your name is Danny…. Danny who doesn’t like pain.”

With a quiet
snap
, he closes my pad. He steps forward and crouches down. I try to back away, but all he does is carefully slip the pad back in my trouser pocket. He pokes me just above my shoulder—the good one—and grips my wrist while he stares at the watch on his own wrist. It takes a second for me to realize he’s taking my pulse.

“Pressure points,” he says, surprising me with an explanation. “You’ll feel a lot better in a minute.”

It seems like forever he’s crouched in front of me. His skin is waxy and he smells of something chemical, something that hurts my nostrils to breathe. I have weird thoughts about him not being human, of him really being a doll brought to life by some bitter magic.

“There you go. You’re feeling better now.” He smiles his cold smile, but he’s right. My eyes widen, my heart speeds up. I scramble backward away from him and crash into the door, causing pain to radiate through my shoulder. It’s excruciating. I don’t think I can stand up yet.

“No more following me, Danny. If I ever met Dashiel, I didn’t know it. Here.”

He holds out a small packet of something. Painkillers. I take them and haul myself up using the door handle.

I fall through the doorway and out into the empty corridor. Dollman watches me with absolutely no expression on his face.

“We’re all sharks, Danny. Every single one of us,” he says before he closes the door.

MY LEGS
won’t work properly, but I manage to make it out of the lab and into the car park. I get as far away from the building as I possibly can before I let myself collapse onto the gravel next to somebody’s car. I close my eyes and hug my knees to my chest until my breathing slows and my heart doesn’t feel like it’s going to give out.

The painkillers Dollman gave me are in a sealed packet, but I still worry they could be poison in disguise. Even as I pop a tablet out of its seal and into my mouth, I still worry.

But sometimes the promise of relief from pain is everything.

My mind is in some sort of numb shock about the last half hour. As if what just happened had happened to somebody else. I wish it could have been somebody who would have done something. Something other than letting himself be controlled and played with. Someone who wouldn’t let his best friend down over and over. I should have found out his name at least. I know where he works but not what he does there.

Everything replays again and again—Dollman grabbing me, dragging me, hurting me—until it’s all confused and out of sequence.

It’s too much. I can’t process it. I need to write my thoughts down, but they’re so crowded in my skull I can’t think coherently.

I don’t even realize I’m on my feet or that I’ve been staggering purposefully toward my nest until I’m in the park and the snowy green grass is soaking wetly through my shoes.

It’s so cold, and the world is blinding.

Memories of this morning, of Micky in my arms, carry me home. I can recall his scent, his warmth, as if he’s with me. But he’s not, and the cold, empty air
hurts
.

The swimming pool is quiet, Milo’s door all locked up. I find a small carrier bag of apples outside my door. Milo must have left them for me, and despite everything, this small thing makes me smile. Perhaps that’s all we need—small things to lift us above life’s ocean depths.

My room is freezing and full of cool blue light. Shivering hard, I pull off my clothes and crawl into my nest, covering myself with every single one of my blankets.

There is only one time I remember needing someone to hold me so badly I cried. It was after I’d been fostered by a family who really wanted a more talkative kid, a kid they could fall in love with. It hurt so bad that first night back in the kids’ home. Holding my arms around myself, I’d curled up and sobbed, making sure I didn’t make a sound.

I do this now, even though there is no one to hear me.

I sleep.

When I wake the light has faded. But the ache in my chest hasn’t. I don’t know what to do to make it stop and the not knowing makes me weak. I swallow, looking around at the bare, tiled walls.

So empty. It’s all so empty.

My shoulder throbs when I move, but I’ve got to get up. I can’t stay here. I can’t fall like I did after Dashiel died, so I search for some warm clothes to pull on.

When I’m dressed I hurry out into the main part of the swimming pool, hoping Milo is back, that someone is here. But there is no one.

I bite my lip and sit outside his room, rocking my body backward and forward.

Call someone.
Dashiel’s voice is in my head, louder than I’ve ever heard it before.
It’s okay to need someone sometimes.

But who would I call?
I think hopelessly.

Donna…. Micky.

Donna would want me to call her. She told me she’d be there for me. Micky has never said that, but as soon as I think of him, warmth rushes through me, making my blood sing.

I KEEP
a few coins for emergencies hidden in a jar in my room—I never let it get too low. Taking a handful, I head toward the pay phone at the edge of the park.

The sky is dark and glittering, the snow as hard as ice beneath my feet. I feel disconnected from the world around me, and I never usually feel like this.

My fingers shake as I dial Donna’s number. It rings twice before I put the phone down. I lean forward and rest my head against the cold metal of the payphone. I know Donna would want to help, but she’s not who I want to talk to. She’s not who I need.

I dial my old number.

Micky picks up after three rings. “Hello?” he says cautiously.

“Hi… it’s Danny.”

“Hey.” His breathing changes, becoming light and quick as though he’s happy or excited. “Did you make it home all right? I only woke up, like, five minutes ago, and I saw you’d left your jumper here. I was worried you’d freeze.”

“I made it home,” I say. I close my eyes, imagining him next to me. He’s so real to me—it’s not that hard.

“I was just thinking about you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. My whole body trembles like my stampeding heart. I want to speak, but I can’t.

“Are you calling from a pay phone?”

“Yeah,” I breathe as I post another coin into the slot.

“Are you okay?”

Maybe he can hear something in my voice. “I don’t know,” I whisper.

“Has something happened?”

“Yeah.” My mouth is dry, and it’s hard to swallow.

“Where are you?”

“The park… near where I live.”

“Are you hurt?” he asks hesitantly.

“No, I’m not hurt.” I don’t think. Could those painkillers have made me feel like this? I frown. No, tablets can’t make you need someone. If they could, the world would be a whole different place. I may be stupid about a lot of stuff, but I can recognize this hollow ache in my chest for what it is.

“I could come see you. I mean, if you just want to talk on the phone that’s okay, but… I’d like to see you, even if it’s just for a little while…. I mean, if you want me to?”

His voice is quiet and his words so tentative I wish I could translate myself into a sound wave and reach through the phone line to touch him.

Still, I almost say no. It’s late and dark, and Micky shouldn’t be wandering about for me. But every selfish cell in my body refuses to let me. I want to see him. God, I really want to see him. It’s only been a few hours, but so much crap has happened and messed with my head, and I just…. He’s offering… I would never have asked him, but he’s offering.

“Where are you?” he repeats.

IT’S AS
though just the thought of Micky coming here, to my shell, fills me with a crazy sort of euphoria. It’s like a magic spell—or a hidden superpower I never reckoned on possessing. It lights me up.

Flush with energy I hurry back to my shell to check it’s tidy, and—I spin around on the tiled floor. I have no idea what I’m doing. Of course it’s tidy. Tidy is just the way I am. It’s clean too, relatively. I mean, it’s as clean as a shower block in an abandoned swimming pool can possibly be with all its cracked tiles and dodgy plaster.

Yet I’m worried what he’ll think of it, what he’ll think of me living here. It’s the first time I’ve ever worried about something like that. I stop and look around, really look. The tiles shine. It smells good—to me, anyway. It’s airy, and it’s not cluttered or filled with rubbish, only the things I need. I don’t need so many
things
, I just need somewhere to feel safe. This place is the safest place I’ve known in so long. I’ve never shared it with anyone except Milo. Perhaps Micky will feel safe here too—I stop that delusional train of thought before it even gets going.

I head back outside to hang around on the pavement by the side of the park and wait for him. I lied and told him it was quicker to follow the road around the park rather than to cut through the middle. Even though the path through the middle is brightly lit, it’s still quiet—it’s still dark at the edges. Micky is as skinny as fuck and vulnerable. He has no barrier between him and the world. He has nothing to protect him.

Snow begins to fall again in fragile little flurries, and I think of Micky’s frozen feet this morning and hope he’s okay walking all this way. My body yearns to go and meet him halfway, but we could easily miss each other and I promised to meet him here, near the crooked, defaced sign that once pointed people down the little dead-end road to where the swimming pool is.

I keep the sign in sight as I walk back and forth along the pavement to warm up. Tiny snowflakes settle on my eyelashes and freeze, and I blink heavily as though I’m falling asleep. Perhaps this is all a dream. It’s strange enough, I think.

Time passes, though I’m not sure how much. I start to worry Micky’s gotten lost… or something. My shoulder throbs so badly, I can’t even remember what it was like not to deal with this pain. I take another painkiller—another of the little tablets Dollman gave me, anyway—swallowing it down with a handful of snow I scrape from the low branch of a tree.

I’ve got this far in life, and I still don’t know how to deal with worry. Part of me wants to take off, to run, search, and find, and the other part of me wants to stop, to be absolutely still and halt time, to hold my breath and curl up. These feelings twist and pull at one another inside me. Before Dashiel I never felt so deeply. Before I lost Dashiel, I didn’t know such a terrifying depth of feeling was there inside me.

I eat more snow. The intense cold of it stops me thinking.

My mouth is still filled with half-frozen slush when I see a figure walking quickly down the road. Swallowing, I brush the snow off my lashes and stare at his snowy halo of hair and his long skinny limbs. I won’t move until I can see his face, until there’s no doubt it’s Micky.

But the doubt is just in my mind. My heart is racing. It knows. Maybe that’s what hearts are for, and we just have to learn to trust them.

“Hey,” he says, holding up a hand. His other arm is wrapped tight around his chest. Even wearing the quilted coat we got from the clothing bank, he looks cold.

I tuck my hair behind my ears, and for a heartbeat or two, we sort of stare at each other. It’s not uncomfortable, and Micky’s smile gets wider and wider until I’m staring at his teeth and I can’t stop. I think he notices.

Didn’t I promise to stop being weird?
I think, looking away and taking a shuddery breath to try and calm the stampeding thudding in my chest.

“It’s a long walk out here,” he says.

He’s not out of breath, but he looks tired.

I nod. “I like walking,” I say. It’s mostly true.

“So is your place close by?” Micky looks up at the sign and then down the quiet road that’s been swallowed by the dark. His eyebrows draw together as though he’s puzzled by something. “Dieter said you lived in a derelict building.” I nod. “Where else would a supervillain live but in an abandoned swimming pool?”

Micky smiles and looks down at the snowy ground. I expect him to say something else, but he doesn’t.

It’s only now I notice how badly he’s shaking with cold. After last night I’m not surprised. I’m such an idiot.

“Come on, I’ll make you something hot to drink.”

And cover you with blankets and make you feel warm and welcome because you are exactly what I need.
My voice sounds like Dashiel’s ringing out in my head again. I’m uncomfortable with how right it is.

Micky hesitates. It’s the dark, I realize. I remember how he was with the alleyways even in the daylight. I remember how lost he was last night when I found him by the side of the park. It makes me realize how detached from himself he must have been to do that.

“It’s okay.” I promise. I know he trusts me.

I reach out my hand. All I mean to do is to touch his arm and reassure him, but I find my fingers suddenly locked together with his as he takes my hand and grips it tightly. For a second I’m so stunned I can’t move—overcome with the feel of his palm pressed hard against mine. It’s as though I’ve been plugged into the mains and my heart isn’t just beating faster, it’s crawled up into my throat to make room for the stars going supernova in my chest. My mouth is stuck halfway between
oh
! and
wow
! I quickly close it and press my lips together. God, Micky must think I’m all kinds of strange. I focus on breathing, and keeping my head down, I lead him slowly into the dark.