Matilda Wren (13 page)

Maybe, she thought, it was because they had some sort of shared history between them. Maybe that explained the connection she felt to him. Something that reminded her of the old her; from before she made the choices that she was still paying for now.

She should have told him to go the previous night but she hadn’t. She had let him take her hand and lead her into the bedroom. She had let him undress her and make love to her. He had smelled of fastidious self-maintenance; that detergent fuelled haze that shrouds you sometimes, when you walk past a launderette. It was virtually edible. His hair; limp with freshness. The vanity of youth or perhaps the anxiety of it.

She had let herself fall asleep with him holding her, caressing her as she slept. She wasn’t sure if she had made love to him back. But she knew she definitely liked being held afterwards. That was a first for Rachel and she had enjoyed it. She felt safe and relaxed. Now though, she wasn’t so sure.

He opened his eyes to see her watching him, screwing his face up to the light he groaned.

“Good Morning. How long have you been awake?” He tried to stifle a yawn.

Rachel blew out the last lug of her joint and threw it into the ashtray. She put it on the dresser next to the bed and tried not to catch his gaze.

“You have to go. Adam will be awake soon and he can’t see you.” She pulled the sheet around herself and moved to get out of bed. “You should get dressed.”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back into his arms.

“Don’t do this. Don’t give up without even trying.”

She didn’t want to deal with the confrontation. She just wanted him to go; although she didn’t really. The confusion was immense. Being put on the spot made her feel like a giantess who had blundered into the wrong house.

The atmosphere became blinded by awkwardness and her discomfiture was so physically evident.

“Greg… I can’t…” She tried to push him away but he wasn’t having any of it.

“I know I am not him.” The words made her stop struggling against him. They pounded into her brain.

Nobody had ever said that to her. Nobody had ever acknowledged him; the elephant in the room.

“I don’t try to be, I won’t try to be. But I can make you forget him. I can show you there is more, than living half a life; because that’s what you are doing. Is that fair to Adam?”

He looked at her so intently and when she leant forward and kissed him in urgency, he finally managed to breathe out. Greg Carson had known Rachel for quite a while.

He knew her from when she was with Sean; that was a particular circumstance which he had never understood.

She had always seemed quiet, shy. Not at all like the other girls that threw themselves at him.

Greg had gone away to university and when he came back he had bumped into her again. They had chatted for a while and she had told him about Adam.

He had known Sean from school, although never as friends. Sean never seemed to hang around with the boys, only the girls. They both lived in Brentwood, although Greg’s parents lived in a much more affluent part than Mick and Maureen Fergus’ modest council estate. The distinctive, post sixties, end terrace house which Sean grew up in, was a far cry from the large detached dwelling of Greg’s childhood.

Rachel had not mentioned who the father was and Greg had automatically assumed that he was Sean’s. She had not mentioned Sean full stop and that just gave confirmation to what he already thought. It had been the 1990’s and the ‘raving scene’ had exploded across the country. Essex is a small place; inadvertently paths cross.

Greg had met Sean again through some of his friends, when they made purchases from him, so he had also met Rachel. She didn’t look twice at him though. She had been too blinkered by Sean and if he was honest with himself, he knew she still was.

Sean had taken Rachel with him everywhere he went.

She would always be sitting in the front of his little red Renault 5 GT Turbo whenever he was gallivanting across the county on one of his drug running assignments.

They would be at the same raves that Greg went to, where Sean would have her hanging off his arm. It always gave him the impression that she was worn as a trophy. He had no doubt that Sean had no respect for the new music and culture that was emerging around him; they were just platforms for him to step off from.

To Greg it was the beginning of a whole new world.

Raves were free parties; free from the restrictions of the legal club scene. Raves were autonomous, where all the revellers created and enforced the rules.

This meant that drugs were readily available, noise levels were illegally high and there would be no age limit. Clubs had a legally required age limit of either eighteen or twenty-one. The rave scene catered for the population under these brackets.

It was the lack of restrictions and law enforcement that initially attracted, but ultimately it was the music; a new age of music and experimentation. He thought it must have been what the swinging sixties would have been like. The country hadn’t had anything quite as dramatic.

It was a new sound and a new scene. Creative art, backdrops, sculptures, mobile visuals, graphics and lasers, such as had never been seen before. It became more than just a few flashing lights and machine generated smoke, as it was in the acid house parties of the 1980’s. There was more love, more determination and more loyalty on the side of the ravers.

They would have to travel miles to get to an event. Most of these parties were illegal. There would be no guarantee that it was even going to happen, as police would often get there before the masses and shut it down.

The location would be kept top secret right up until the last minute in order to try and prevent police intervention.

After the chaos that ensued during an Easter bank holiday rave in London, rave organisers were very much alerted to what could happen when the police got involved.

Greg was too young at the time to remember what took place that night, but his older brother Matthew had been there and had filled him in when he was older.

A thousand revellers had been at the rave. Police sealed off the building. There had been no trouble and no complaints, the party was free and open to all, there was no explanation from the police as to what their intentions were, nor indeed any justification for what had happened next.

The police prevented anyone entering or leaving the premises. Anyone who did attempt to was maliciously beaten to the ground. Riot police, wearing padded jackets and helmets, wielding shields and batons stormed the building.

No warning was given. Sledge hammers and a JCB digger were used, to collapse the walls in on people trapped inside. When they finally got into the building, they indiscriminately beat up men, women and children.

People were trying to escape the vicious onslaught from the police. There was panic as people tried to crush through one small exit. Instead of alleviating the crush, the police pushed up hard behind everyone, hitting out and forcing everyone face down onto the ground.

Some people were singled out and given further severe beatings. The police started on the equipment, which had been lent or donated, destroying it needlessly. The local hospital reported hundreds of casualties amongst the party goers; just one policeman injured. Arrests were made, for assaults on police officers and for breach of the peace.

By the time Greg, Rachel and Sean got involved with the scene four years later, raves were arranged on a need to know basis. This would entail a process of first the date and D.J’s being advertised on posters. These would be plastered around the county, on walls, bus stops, lamp posts, telegraph poles, on roundabouts, over road signs.

The location would not be advertised, just a mobile number to text. On the night, hundreds of cars would congregate together, up and down the major roads across the county, waiting for the message to be sent through, telling them where to go onto next. This would then be repeated and could go on for hours.

The destination would never be revealed until the early hours of the morning, but when you finally got there, you entered into a parallel universe of unadulterated escapism.

As he kissed her back, that all seemed a life time ago now. He heard Adam call out for his mum and felt Rachel pull away. He saw the reservation return to her eyes. He knew he was on shaky ground with her. She had no real idea of how she felt or what she wanted, but he knew he wanted her. He always had.

This was his chance, the small window of opportunity that wouldn’t come around very often. Not with girls like Rachel. He knew she had never looked at him in that way before, her mind and heart too preoccupied by a wasted drifter. But he also realised that she was ready to move on, that she desperately needed to and he was determined to make sure it was him that she moved on with.

“How about I make a cuppa tea and you tell Adam you have a guest for breakfast?”

The subtle insistence that he was not intending to go anywhere had the desired bamboozling effect.

He jumped out of bed and pulled his jeans on. He was out of the door in a flash, leaving her to contemplate what just occurred. As she put on her dressing gown she marvelled at how things can suddenly just change. She wondered at the possibility of this new decade; the new millennium might not be that bad after all.

Chapter 9

April 2001

The constant shrill of the telephone worked its way through to a semi-conscious Kenny. He opened his eyes slowly and tried to focus on the clock that sat on the bedside table.

Slowly, his eyes allowed the red numbers to blur out and the 04:17 fi nally registered in his mind. The phone was still ringing relentlessly and a sudden fear enveloped him; that it was trouble with one of the children. He reached out and grabbed the phone.

“Kenny… Ken… You there?”

“Who is this?”

“Ken, I need ya help… I… Ken?

“Sean?” Kenny rubbed his temples in a slow circular motion with his free hand. It was still dark outside. He was awake now.

“I fucked up Ken…”

He listened to Sean ramble on about something and nothing. It didn’t make much sense. He hadn’t known the kid for that long. But he was up and coming, he knew that.

He had met him a little while back through some mutual acquaintances. Kenny had heard of his reputation, so he employed Sean’s services, as an inhumane thug.

Kenny hated violence, but that did not mean that he couldn’t appreciate its effectiveness and understand the importance of it, especially in the world that they lived in.

Sean’s other enterprises, such as his sideline in prostitutes, had held Kenny’s attention. It wasn’t so much the girls that he was interested in, as the boys.

People like Sean and Kenny didn’t live by the rules that govern society. They didn’t pay taxes, or contribute to the running of the economy; not in the way that regular honest people did.

They lived by a different set of rules, where respect, honour and status were of greater magnitude than honesty, integrity and morality.

Kenny and Sean were entities on their own. Everybody gets a choice in how they will live their lives. Free will determines that for every human. For some people the choice is an easy one.

A nice homely upbringing, which is lavished with love and happiness, normally determines that the choices of that life will be of a similar nature. When that loving and happy childhood is not available though, it can be expected that the choices made in later life will be quite the opposite; a home that is loveless and full of neglect will usually be replicated by a next generation.

They had both made a choice as to how they would live their lives. For Sean, the choice was preordained; the monster that lived inside of him controlled his thoughts, his actions, even his motives. Kenny’s choice was different; he had made his out of loyalty and a sense of duty.

Even so, in his eyes, these choices were rarely choices and Kenny was a firm believer that everything was already laid out. There was something about Sean that intrigued him. He was a lost wild beast, but he had a vulnerability buried in the debauched version of himself that Sean had allowed to take form; free will. Kenny had seen it though, in fleeting moments, usually when the drugs had worn off.

He wondered what had happened to Sean for him to be like he was. It was a crazed and demented persona, which would take even the paramount psycho years to perfect. It would need shaping and forming to achieve the fanatical and extreme eminence that Sean portrayed. Yet he was only twenty-one.

Kenny hadn’t made any coherent sense from Sean’s frantic phone call. He had managed to get an address from him and was on his way to a block of flats, on a housing estate in Harold Wood. Kenny hated this particular suburb of Essex. It was run down, derelict in parts and overrun with Turkish kebab shops.

Even the people that lived there seemed to look run down, life taking its daily toll etched in the lines on their face. Harold Wood screamed out poverty to Kenny and he loathed every second of having to be there. It reminded him of when he had suddenly been thrust into becoming the main provider for his family; a time when there was no money, no food and no warmth.