The Killer You Know Read online

  I tipped the final mouthful of wine down the sink, barely recognising the owner of such dark thoughts. Was I wishing Mum dead? This was what happened when you came home. You thought you’d built an adult identity for yourself, but two seconds after walking through the door you were a child again.

  Had I been this hateful as a kid? Probably, and, being fair, with some cause. I could almost taste the bitterness. I licked my lips. Perhaps it was just the hotel Merlot.

  From my bag I pulled out my tablet and lay with it on the bed, hoping to find a film to distract me. I opened my email account. Other than direct text messaging apps it was the only online communication tool I liked to use these days, the increase in misogynist abuse on social media having risen along with the podcast’s popularity. A new email from a dating site starting, “Hey babe,” greeted me. I deleted it.

  I still needed to reply to Xan, so went to find my phone. He’d been standing behind me when I opened Jen’s email last year suggesting a reunion the following Christmas. When he asked who Jen was and I told him about my old friends, and about my first real boyfriend, Steve, Xan was intrigued. Then he saw Steve’s picture on social media.

  “Have a type much?”

  It had occurred to me before that there were some physical similarities between Steve and my ex, Rich: long face, dark hair, built for an overcoat. But the additional confirmation of Xan’s comment bothered me. In other ways besides looks Rich had reminded me of Steve. His slightly laboured cool had the evocative power of a strong smell or a song, drawing me in despite now being old enough to know better.

  The clock on the bedside table read 10.30 p.m. Perhaps I’d get an early night, make the most of the day tomorrow. The reunion wasn’t until seven. I was actually looking forward to it now. Before it had been daunting, the likelihood being we’d have nothing in common any more. But after my drive through the villages earlier I couldn’t care less: they’d been my saviours once.

  We’d all kept in touch from a distance over the years, but I’d ignored one or two invites to actually meet up. Until the podcast I’d never done anything I’d been proud enough to want to show the people who used to know me. It would be exciting seeing them all again. Who were they now? What did they do?

  Before I’d left social media, I’d looked at Steve’s Facebook profile. The photographs were all sunsets and fields, none featured him. Did he have a partner? Was he married? Rupesh was, I’d seen pictures of both his secular and his traditional wedding ceremonies. He’d never been that religious so maybe he had gone through the motions to appease extended family. Or had his opinions, and his hard-headedness, softened over the years? I hoped not. I’d always liked that about him. Jen was a keen over-sharer on Facebook. I’d seen all her holiday photos and teaching updates, not to mention the dubiously attributed inspirational quotes about creativity that inevitably followed her failed auditions. Her dream had been to act back when we first knew her, and I admired her persistence despite only having managed to score a few bit parts on British TV dramas I’d never heard of. Part of me hoped she would still be trying, and another part, the part that had blocked her posts from appearing on my timeline, wanted her to have found another pursuit that wasn’t so demoralising.

  I messaged Xan, then lay on the bed with my eyes closed listening to the hum of the fridge.

  I’d once looked up Will but nothing about his adult life stuck in my mind. When I tried again recently I found nothing at all. He was a mystery to me. I hoped his life had worked out well, but my memories of him weren’t overly positive. To say he’d been awkward and strange was kind. Although, God, he had made us all laugh sometimes.

  Adeline, 1997

  Some kids around Adeline’s age are out in the field behind the back garden. She sees them from the hall window, an Asian boy in a white shirt and a girl with red hair in two plaits. Every so often they cup their hands around their mouths to yell something that drifts over to the house. Oh Bee, Oh Bee, Oh Bee Wanker, Oh Bee. They’re keen; Adeline is still in her dressing gown.

  The two kids in the field hang around the village a lot. They’re usually with another one, a boy with strawberry-blond hair who is as tall as an adult and sometimes wears a beanie. The week before, not long into the summer holidays and the Saturday they first moved to Blythe, she’d run into the girl and the blond-haired boy when exploring the surrounding fields. They’d been squashing coins on a train track a few miles from Elm Close, a proper fucking Hovis advert. They’d asked how old she was and when she said fifteen they said she looked seventeen. Adeline assumed they were taking the piss—she had lied: she wouldn’t be fifteen until the end of the August—so she’d been snarly with them, told them they’d derail the train.

  She should’ve tried harder. Already too much of this holiday has been spent in her room while the summer burned like touch-paper outside. Maybe in her big black boots, with her fishnets and eyeliner, she does look older. Especially out here in the countryside.

  Oh Bee, Wanker, Oh Bee.

  She dresses: Green Day T-shirt, short black skirt and tights. She grabs her Discman, puts in her earphones and locks up the house. Green Day fizzes in her ears, too: Insomniac, the sound of shopping in the Birmingham city centre with Alexa in Cult Clothing and The Oasis, of drinking alcopops down by the canal at Brindley Place. The album was a present from Alexa. Adeline misses Alexa, and her old house, and her old school. She knows she doesn’t belong in the countryside. She’d been right all along when she screamed and shouted at her parents when they broke the news that they were moving.

  Outside, she turns left from her drive, towards the end of the cul-de-sac. The neighbour’s dog startles her by jumping up at the fence and barking with machine-gun-like insistence. She steps back, forced to place one foot into the road. At the last second she raises her head; a silver van jerks to a stop with only half a metre to spare. She holds up an apologetic hand, and the driver, a scowling man with a moustache, shakes his head before indicating to turn into the very house where the dog lives.

  Her mouth drops open. Why is he shaking his head? It was his dog, his fault she had to step into the road in the first place. The dog runs over to the van but it’s tied to a pole in the centre of the front lawn and is yanked back. It turns to snap at the lead with its ugly little head. It’s the kind of dog with “bull” in the name, the sort that probably attacks small children. The lead is only two metres long—probably the reason it’s so aggressive. Before the man gets out of his van, Adeline sticks up her middle finger and extends her arm, then stomps on, hoping he didn’t see but pleased she’d done it. Cruel bastard.

  Not much further along is the entrance to an alley between two houses; a yellow arrow on a fencepost marks the public footpath. The alley smells like hell: dog faeces and compost from one of the nearby gardens. Once through she is in the field with the kids, and her nose fills with the aroma of manure. As shit goes, it’s an improvement. She follows the footpath until the girl with the plaits notices her and waves. She approaches Adeline, and so Adeline takes out her earphones.

  “Have you seen a dog?” plaits girl asks. She is in dungarees, and with her hair she’s a perfect match for the surroundings. She’s wearing a lot of foundation for a farm girl, though. So conventional. Probably a typical airhead, the sort that shops at chain stores like Mizzle and pretends to like music to impress boys. It might just be bad skin, though; she’ll give her a chance.

  “I just got attacked by one tied up in a garden,” Adeline says.

  “Not that one,” plaits girl says, wrinkling her nose.

  “Have you lost one, then?” Adeline says.

  “Our friend Steve has. We’ve been looking all afternoon.”

  The Asian kid wanders over and smiles at her, says hi. As well as his smart shirt, she notices the boy’s black hair is neatly combed into a side parting. “None of us even like it that much. I’m always saying he shouldn’t let it off his lead.”

  “What make is it?” Adeline says.

&
nbsp; Plaits girl laughs at this. “What make? I don’t know, it’s this high and shaggy and a bit grey.” She holds her palm flat just above her waist. “It’s a real mutant, to be fair. It walks funny because it has something wrong with its back, you’d know it if you saw it.”

  “It bites you when you stroke it,” the Asian kid says and frowns. “It’s really old.”

  “But you know, fuck it,” plaits girl says, “Steve loves it, and we have something to do today.”

  It’s the “fuck” popping out from that innocent-looking face that makes Adeline like this girl immediately. “I can help look if you want,” she says. “I honestly have nothing better to do.”

  “Join the club,” the Asian kid says.

  The dog’s name is Obi-Wan Kenobi, which Adeline doesn’t need to be told is a character from Star Wars, a film she watched once with Dad. Plaits girl’s name is Jen and the boy is Rupesh. By late afternoon, when the clouds cover the sun and the breeze turns cold, they have exhausted the two fields behind Adeline’s house, and the fields beyond that which belong to a pick-your-own fruit farm.

  In a field of what she reckons is corn directly behind Elm Close they run into the blond-haired kid, Will. His pale skin is sunburned; his belt is decorated with badges bearing the names of mostly U.S. grunge bands. Nirvana is the only one that she’s actually heard of, their smiley-face logo with the crossed-out eyes grinning from between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. He appears to accept Adeline’s presence without question, almost not noticing her at all. Adeline has grown used to attention from boys over the last year, particularly the way in which they now look at her. She mostly enjoys it, even if it makes her want to check herself in a mirror to make sure she doesn’t have a toothpaste stain on her lips or crusty sleep in the corners of her eyes. Will’s reaction is refreshing, and a bit annoying.

  “Anything?” Jen says to Will. There’s concern in her voice that wasn’t there earlier. He shakes his head.

  “It’ll be fine,” Rupesh says, then looks at Adeline. “He’s escaped before.”

  The fruitless search for Obi soon becomes a search for Steve, too. They head further away from the cul-de-sac, deeper into the fields, before coming out near a weird lake not far from the train tracks where she first met them. This is where Will last saw Steve.

  On the dirt road up to the lake’s edge, Jen asks Adeline where she lived before. She says Marlstone, and tells them about how easy it was to get to Birmingham from there. Then about how much she hates her parents, hates Mum, for moving her here.

  “I was thinking of trying to walk the footpath to Hampton,” Adeline says. Even though Hampton is small, Dad has told her there’s a train to Birmingham from the station there.

  “It’s too far,” Rupesh says. “You can’t cycle it either, and it’s such a big circle around on the roads it’d take you just as long.” His response is decisive, like the matter’s closed. None of the others contradict him. In his dark eyes she sees something every bit as grown up as the way he dresses. It’s irritating, and she’ll prove him wrong when she gets the chance.

  “My bike chain’s broken anyway,” she says.

  “I can fix it,” Jen says.

  Adeline’s not quite sure she wants Jen seeing her old bike—she’s not ridden it in years. “Is there actually anything to do around here?” she says, smiling her way past Jen’s offer.

  “You could probably get served in The Nag’s Head,” Will says.

  “We always go to Steve’s,” Jen says. “Do you like films?”

  “Yeah, I like films.”

  “Good,” Rupesh says, “because we watch a lot of them.”

  “Steve’s parents have this weird relationship where they never see each other,” Jen says. “They work abroad a lot, his mum is always in America, so he never sees her. And his dad’s barely around, which means we can just spend all day and night at his place if we want. They’ve got this farmhouse—don’t know what we’d do without it, to be honest. And he has all these pirated videos his dad gets from Thailand, stuff that hasn’t even come out in the cinemas here. Last summer he hypnotised Rupesh, too, which was fun.”

  “I wasn’t actually hypnotised,” Rupesh says, sounding sore.

  At the lake they split into two groups and agree to meet halfway. Adeline goes right around the lake with Rupesh. Will and Jen go left. It’s not like any lake Adeline’s seen before. It’s more like an oversized pond. Heaps of soil and lumps of concrete are strewn at the path’s side and in the overgrown foliage nearby, like a building project was abandoned in a hurry.

  The lakeside resounds with shouts of Obiiii, and ten minutes later they reach the far end. Will and Jen are already there.

  “We’ve found him,” Jen says. “He’s right the way down the tracks.” She doesn’t sound pleased. Will is frowning too.

  She follows them down another short footpath that comes out at the terminus of an unmarked road. Six concrete lumps, like stubby standing stones, mark the edge of what must be a turning circle. Feral bushes rule the rest of this place. Jen leads them over the road to a gap in the thicket.

  “I’m going to stay here,” Rupesh says. Now he looks about ten.

  Will and Jen share a glance, then Jen nods, touches Rupesh’s shoulder and says, “Of course, we’ll come straight back for you.”

  Adeline doesn’t ask what this is about. She plays it cool. The three of them reach a footbridge that rises up and over the railway tracks. Jen jumps over the fence at the bottom of the footbridge that separates the path from the two tracks. She walks down the right-hand side and Will hurdles the fence and goes off in the same direction. This can’t be safe. She’s seen railway safety videos before, but mentioning it would just make her sound like a dweeb. She climbs over, carefully, her short skirt making things difficult.

  She stays as far from the tracks as possible. The ballast crunches beneath her. Stray weeds scrape her face from the right embankment. An enormous pylon fills the sky over to her left up ahead. Soon they approach a red shape, the mysterious Steve perhaps? This person is clearly alive, thank fuck, because the way they had been talking made it feel like they were going to retrieve a dead body, like in that film with River Phoenix.

  Steve is sitting by the track’s edge at the foot of a stony embankment. Will and Jen are in front of Adeline, blocking her view, but she can make out the top of his head, his hair dark like hers. He is leaning forward over his knees.

  “Oh no,” Jen says.

  “It’s my fault,” Steve says. His voice is soft, composed. He sniffs like he might not long ago have been crying. “This is where we always come, isn’t it? He wasn’t scared of the trains enough.”

  Jen goes down on her knees and strokes his arm. “Shhh. It’s all of our fault then, or no one’s. Come on, let’s just go home now, Steve.”

  He gets to his feet and Will moves aside. Steve is tall, taller than Will who must be nearly six foot. Adeline notices his eyes first when they meet hers. They are amber. He’s wearing a red T-shirt with the tyrannosaurus-skeleton logo from Jurassic Park. He is holding the bottom half of a dog in his blood-smeared arms. The integrity of the legs—the mop-like grey fur and the black pads of its paws—makes it look like they could still kick if they wanted.

  He stops and stares at her, then smiles like nothing is unusual. His eyes are red and sad.

  “I couldn’t find the rest of him,” he says to her, sounding apologetic.

  “I’m… so sorry,” she says, her chest constricted and brain paralysed. “I… Jen’s right, you should go home. Maybe we can come back here. To look.”

  He smiles, grateful, then takes a step towards her without breaking eye contact. She doesn’t want to be any nearer to what he is carrying but doesn’t step back. His gaze moves from her face down to her chest.

  Is he checking out her tits? No, of course not, why would he?

  “I like your T-shirt,” he says.

  “Oh,” she says, looking down at the back-to-front Green Day logo. He mu
st be in shock. “I like yours too.” He walks by and his grinding footsteps fade. Jen chases him, sharing a concerned look with Adeline on the way past.

  Only Will remains, on his knees where Steve was sitting before. The grey and white stones there are stained red.

  “Was that where he found him?” Adeline says.

  Will ignores her.

  “Are you okay?” Adeline asks.

  “It’s mental, isn’t it,” Will says, “that this stuff is just inside us all?”

  Winter, 2015

  “I think all this reunion stuff can be a bit unhealthy, you know?” Rupesh said. He grinned at me from across the table and I smiled back. We were in the private function room of The George in the Tree, a pub at the Balsall Common–Blythe boundary, all oak beams and blazing fireplaces.

  “You think?” I said.

  He nodded and sipped his whisky. Expecting pre-drink awkwardness, I’d deliberately arrived fifteen minutes late in the hope of avoiding the worst of it. Obviously everyone else had thought the same thing—other than Rupesh. And he’d only had to travel from Blythe, from the same house he’d lived in when we were kids. Not much else about him had changed either. He still dressed smartly and parted his hair at the side, every inch the local GP. Any differences were soft and slight, a tightness of his skin and a confidence in his manner. He hadn’t drunk like this, though. Already he was halfway through his second tumbler.

  “Just look at the world right now,” he said. “Dangerous politicians promising to bring back the good old days. I mean, technically nostalgia is a medical condition, I’m sure you know that. The etymology, it’s like myalgia, neuralgia… Nostalgia. A pain caused by coming home. I’m convinced nostalgia’s an illness. The whole world seems worryingly obsessed with the past, don’t you reckon? Sometimes I just think, Get over it. What’s done is done.”