Nowhere Child (7 page)

Andy
.

The man looks around a bit, but he looks like he’s getting worried about the attention, so he clears off, trying to look as if he hasn’t got a care in the world. I wait just seconds. I need to get to Andy.

I leap up from behind the car and set off at a run, back down the alley. I can’t see him anywhere. Perhaps he’s escaped.

Then I see a foot sticking out from the back doorway of an old building. I don’t have to guess twice as I sprint up the alley.

‘Andy!’ I scream, falling to my knees by his side. His hands are holding his stomach, and he’s bleeding – the warm, sticky blood oozing between his fingers. He’s been stabbed. I touch his belly, feeling the hot, sticky fluid, and whisper his name, stroking his hair, getting blood on his face.

He can’t hear me. I kiss his cheeks, his forehead, his lips, and I cry, my tears mingling with the blood.

His eyes flutter open, and he tries to smile. He’s not dead, but I know he soon will be.

‘Stay there,’ I say foolishly. ‘I’m going to get help.’

I rush out onto the main road, shouting for help.

‘Please – somebody help me. There’s a boy injured down here. Call an ambulance.’

One or two people look at me, but most hurry by, giving me a wide berth. A filthy kid, now covered in blood, asking for help? Not on your life, I can hear them thinking.

I need to act quickly.

A man and his wife are walking towards me, arms linked, laughing about something. They’re having a great time, and I’m about to ruin their evening. She’s swinging an expensive-looking handbag from one hand. I wait for them to get close, and then I charge the woman, ripping the handbag from her arm.

She screams, and the man shouts. I’m sure he will chase me – he has to, or it will have been for nothing – but just to make sure, I turn and wave the handbag backwards and forwards, taunting him, whispering under my breath, ‘
Follow me. Follow me
.’

He sets off towards me, and I run. Fast enough to keep ahead, but slow enough that he won’t give up the chase. At least, not yet. He mustn’t give up.

I draw level with the doorway where Andy is lying, and I chuck the handbag in. It lands right by Andy’s head.

The man will go to get the bag. He’s bound to. Then please God he’ll do the right thing.

‘Call an ambulance,’ I yell at the man, turning round to sprint for my life.

11

The past twelve hours have been a nightmare. I don’t know what’s happened to Andy, and it’s tearing me in pieces. I can only think he must have died, because there was so much blood. He didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve
any
of it.

I keep thinking back to the moment I threw the bag in the doorway. Andy didn’t move, but he must have felt it land. I didn’t have time to check, though, because the man was nearly on me. I stopped when I got to the corner. He had given up chasing me by then, and others were gathering. His wife had called for help, and people had obviously decided that she was a more likely person in need than I had been, although I’d asked for exactly the same thing.

I had intended to wait, to see if an ambulance would come. But one of the helpers saw me, and he started to run down the alley towards me. They probably thought I did it – that I had stabbed Andy.

He saved my life, and I don’t even know if he’s dead. He didn’t need to do that for me. He should have run.

Once I knew I was safe, I pulled the envelope out of my pocket. More than ever, I wished I had pushed Andy to tell me why he was
doing
all this for me. Nobody had ever looked after me like he had – at least, not since my mum died.

The instructions Andy had written for me were incredible. He said I should get the train from Piccadilly to Stockport. There are trains all the time, he had written, but he’d also put the time of the last train, so I walked there as quickly as I could, keeping to main roads this time. If anybody was looking for me, they wouldn’t attack me on a busy street and even if they followed me I was only going to the station and not to our pitch, where I would be easy meat. I was never going back there. There wasn’t anything to take anyway. I didn’t exactly have a wardrobe full of clothes.

I went into the toilet at the station and managed to get most of the blood off my hands and my cheeks from when I’d kissed Andy. I stared at my lips in the mirror, and saw the bottom one start to turn down. My nose was burning and my eyes stinging. I didn’t have time to cry, though. If I did, everything that Andy had done would be wasted. I whipped my top off and put it on back to front. My hoody kept the blood-spattered back covered.

I bought a ticket from the machine and took the last train.

By the time I got to Stockport it was too late to get a bus to Emma’s house – so I was going to have to wait for the first one in the morning. I knew where there were some dense bushes and I could hide under those until morning – they would keep the frost off, at least.

I didn’t sleep. I kept seeing Andy, lying in that doorway, not moving. I was doing what he wanted, but I ached inside at losing him.

The bus left on time, but I didn’t catch it. I watched it pull out of the bus station and waited for the next. I didn’t catch that one either.
What if he was wrong
?

I looked down at Andy’s notes and realised that I owed it to him at least to try. I had to trust him.

There was another bus just before noon, so I forced my reluctant legs forwards, paid for my ticket and sat down at the back of the bus, my hands clasped tightly between my knees.

The bus dropped me about a mile from the house. I felt a strange fluttering inside. All this time, me and Andy had been focusing on the fact that Emma says she wants me back. But what if she’s been lying? What if she wants to beat the shit out of me for stealing her baby and getting her mixed up in all that crap last year – forcing her to steal to save her baby’s life? And what about him – my dad?

I’m still not sure. I keep repeating over and over, ‘Andy wanted me to do this. I’m doing it for him.’

But there’s another reason why I have to see Emma. I need to know whether Andy is still alive, and the only chance I have of finding that out is to ask Emma if Tom can check the hospitals.

So here I am, about twenty minutes’ walk from home – if that’s what you’d call it – and shaking so much it’s hard to put one foot in front of the other. The shops in the small town where the bus dropped me are full of things for Christmas, and I remember coming here with my mum when I was little. She loved these shops – said they were far better than the big department stores in Manchester because everything they sold was specially chosen by the people who work here. They were chosen with love, and we had to buy them with love.

We had bought presents for everybody who went to the party on the last day – the party we were coming home from when she died. The party my dad didn’t come to because he was too busy planning our kidnap.

I remember the party at Granddad’s. Mummy was sad because my dad didn’t come with us, but she smiled at everybody and said how hard he worked all the time. She kept looking at her watch, though, and I knew she wanted to go home. She didn’t like driving at night and she wasn’t looking forward to the journey. I had heard her trying to persuade my dad to come with us.

‘What happens if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere?’ she had asked.

‘It’s not going to, Caroline. It’s a new car.’

‘I might have a flat tyre, and I might not get a signal on my phone.’

‘Call me when you leave your father’s house. If you’re not home when I expect you, I’ll come and find you. You’ll be fine, darling. Just remember to call me when you set off.’

Of course he had needed that information. He had needed to tell the men who were going to ambush us what time we would be driving along that dark, icy stretch of road. It was all part of his plan. And it worked – but not in the way he thought.

When Mummy had seen a car blocking the road, she was going to stop. But then she got a call on her phone and she put her foot down. She had to go up on the grass verge to get round it and she was going really fast. I remember being terrified. I could see her eyes in the mirror, glancing at me to make sure I was all right – and then it happened. The car started to go all over the road, the back end where I was sitting was swinging from side to side. Then it started to turn over, and she screamed. I was strapped in my car seat, upside down. I banged my head, but that was all. I shouted for her, but she didn’t answer. All I could hear was the radio, playing Christmas music.

I was crying. I wanted my mummy, and she wasn’t saying anything. Her head was half out of the window and I could see her eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know what that meant, back then.

Suddenly there was a lot of shouting; I could see strange-looking people coming towards the car. I know now that they looked weird because the car was upside down and they looked like they were walking on their heads, but back then it was so scary I could hardly breathe. Somebody leaned into the car and undid my car seat. I fell out and bumped my head again. I heard somebody say, ‘What are we going to do with the fucking kid?’ and then I was shoved at a man who grabbed me roughly under the arms.

Even after all this time I can remember his smell. It didn’t mean much to me then – only that I didn’t like it. But now I recognise it as Rory’s smell – a horrible mixture of old sweat, too many fags and stale beer. He chucked me into the back of a car, and all the time I was crying because I wanted my mummy. I soon learned to stop doing that, though. They told me she was dead, but it was a long time before I really understood what that meant. For ages I woke up every morning thinking, ‘Today’s the day Mummy will come for me.’

My dad hadn’t planned that my mum would die. I know that now. It was supposed to be a fake kidnap so he could pretend to the police that he was forced to rob his own company. He thought we would just be locked up for a couple of hours, and that no harm would be done while he got the money he needed.

Remembering that day and what my dad did makes me angry again. How am I going to cope with seeing him? I brush the thought aside and set off walking, knowing that I have to pass the exact spot where the accident happened – where she was killed.

Another memory leaps into my head. Just before she turned the car over, Mummy was shouting into the phone. She was shouting ‘
Jack’
at the top of her voice, and when I told Emma it had seemed to mean something to her – and to the policeman, Tom. But I didn’t know what. All I know is that, whoever Jack is, I hate him almost as much as I hate my dad. If Jack hadn’t spoken to her, maybe she would still be alive today.

I trudge along the road, glad it’s not raining. I don’t want to arrive soaking wet through. It was raining last time I arrived here, but that time Rory had brought me – delivered me like some sort of parcel.

We had arrived on the back of his motorbike. He was so proud of that bike, but I hated it. I always leaned the wrong way, and he got mad. That day, though, he was less angry with me than usual because I had a job to do. I wasn’t nervous. I was sure what I was doing was the right thing – all I had to do was refuse to tell my dad or the police about my life for the previous six years and where I had been living, and then as soon as I could I had to find the opportunity to take Ollie from the house. It was no big deal – I owed my dad nothing.

When Rory dropped me off down the lane from the house I had taken off the big waterproof and my helmet and handed them to him.

‘Get in there, girl,’ he had said. ‘You can come home as soon as you’ve done your job.’

It’s hard to believe now, but I had ached to go to the place that had been home to me for more than six years – back to Rory’s house with the filthy sheets and the smell of stale food;
back to clouts around the head and demands to nick more stuff from the supermarket; back to being thrown in the Pit when I did something wrong.

I suddenly remember that I never did tell Andy about the Pit. I’m glad. He didn’t need to know that.

I can see the house now, up ahead. It looks just the same, the old red brick giving the house a snug, secure feel to it that almost makes me smile when I think about the bad stuff that went on in there. I didn’t live there for long, but I look at the windows and know exactly which room lies behind each of them. Of course, we spent most of our time in the massive extension at the back of the house. Emma always called it the kitchen, but it had a huge dining table and a couple of comfy sofas too, with toys for Ollie and a flat-screen television on the wall. I can’t see it from here; just the window of the rarely used sitting room – the room in which I faced my dad with everything I knew about him.

My dad’s Range Rover isn’t in the drive. Perhaps he sold it after that night. Perhaps the police took it away. There’s only one car and that’s Emma’s. He must be at work.

I dart into the bushes, suddenly scared that I might be seen from the window – and then I realise how stupid I’m being. They are going to have to see me some time. But I’m not ready yet.

Will I ever be?

I pull my black hood up over my head, scared the sun will catch my white face. I want to be sure Emma is on her own before anybody sees me.

Instead of going up to the front door, I make my way down the muddy lane that runs along the side of the house. Not that it’s muddy today. It’s in the shade from the overhanging trees, so there is still frost on the ground, forming ice on top of the puddles and turning the mud hard.

I stop still and catch my breath. Emma is outside in the garden, hanging some washing out in the sunshine. I can see her through the thick hedge – just make out the red of her jumper.

I’m not making a sound, but suddenly Emma stops – her hands reaching up to the line. She freezes for a moment, and if I move slightly I can just make out her face. She seems to be listening, as if she’s heard something. But it’s not me. I am as silent as a mouse.

I see her shake her head, obviously deciding whatever she thought she heard, or perhaps sensed, she was wrong.