But once there I came to a sudden halt, uncertain what to do. The boy was still standing in exactly the same place, about fifteen feet away from me, and in exactly the same posture. There was something unnatural about his stillness: anyone in that position, standing over a drop like that, would sway slightly as they unconsciously adjusted their balance. This kid was as rigid and immobile as a statue.
I took one step, not towards him but towards the parapet, thinking that if he looked like he was going to jump I might have a moment in which to tackle him from the side and push him back onto the walkway before he could fall. I kept my stare fixed on him the whole time, and that movement brought his face into profile so that I suddenly realised who it was: the blond boy who’d given me directions the first time I’d come here.
‘Bic,’ I called softly. He didn’t respond, didn’t seem to have heard. His eyes were wide and staring, and he didn’t blink.
I took another step, and then another, trying not to make a sound. If he was in some kind of a trance, waking him up was probably the last thing I wanted to do.
When I was almost close enough to touch him, he spoke. ‘Gonna get hurt,’ he murmured, his tone mild and contemplative.
I didn’t know if it was a warning or a complaint. I didn’t much care, either. If it was a warning then I was going to ignore it: if he was lamenting his own situation, then he’d probably thank me when he woke up. If he woke up.
As his knees flexed, I lunged. His feet were already off the ground when I caught him around the waist, but he weighed nothing and my momentum more than made up for his. We went sideways, not out and down, and I rolled as I fell so that I didn’t squash the breath out of the boy or slam him head-first into the concrete. As a result I landed awkwardly, my forearm and elbow making jarring contact with the ground so that for a moment I was focused only on my own pain. In that moment, Bic struggled free with a yell of surprise and alarm. He scrambled away from me on his arse and his elbows, his face making up for its earlier immobility by running through about a dozen expressions in as many seconds. Then he looked down at the cold concrete he was sitting on, at his hands and at the livid moon staring us down from over the shoulder of Weston Block. Something made a pat-pat-pat sound, very close, like soft applause, but there was nobody on the walkway except the two of us.
‘Shit,’ Bic said, in a tone of simple, stunned disbelief.
‘You’re okay,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘You were sleep-walking. ’ It wasn’t enough, but maybe it would cover the basics.
‘I’m–’ he began. ‘I’m — not — where am I? Who are you? You keep the fuck away from me or I’ll lamp you. What did you do to me?’
‘I stopped you from jumping,’ I said. It sounds a little brutal, put like that, but I’d just realised why Bic had looked at his hands — and where the muffled reports were coming from. He was bleeding: thick, sluggish liquid pooling in each palm, looking pure black in the leprous moonlight, before it overflowed and spattered down onto the concrete like oil from a leaky carburettor.
‘No way,’ Bic said, without conviction. ‘No — no way.’
I got to my feet and walked across to where he sat, his back against the parapet and his frightened eyes raised to stare into mine. I took hold of his hand and turned it so I could see the wrist. It was unmarked: no wounds there, old or new. The blood was welling up from the centre of each palm, and it was falling like sticky red rain. He still had the bandages wrapped around his hands but they were already saturated, not even slowing the flow now.
I unwrapped the bandage, since it was doing no good in any case. I figured that if I saw the wound I could maybe decide what ought to be done before the kid passed out from loss of blood. But mainly I was acting on instinct: the prickling in my own palms was a lot stronger now, as though I was holding a mobile phone, set to vibrate, in each hand.
There was no wound in Bic’s hand: there was just blood, welling up from under the skin of his palm and wrist and fingers like water soaking and spreading through the fibres of a paper towel. I saw this in a split second, in the light from the lamp directly overhead: then he snatched his hand away and scrambled back from me, glaring.
I swallowed hard, because the sight of the non-wound had shaken me. ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked Bic, as gently as I could. He didn’t answer.
‘I’m going home,’ he muttered, looking away along the walkway. But he didn’t move, and actually he was looking in the wrong direction. Weston Block was behind us.
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s right here. Come on.’
‘Okay,’ Bic said automatically. He was still looking off in the same direction. I followed his gaze and saw a group of people walking towards us, just coming out from under the shadow of the next tower along.
There were seven or eight of them: still kids, technically, but a lot older and a lot bigger than Bic. Old enough to think of themselves as men. They were walking in a ragged line, spread out across the full width of the walkway. The one at front and centre was almost as skinny as Bic, but he was bracketed between two serious bruisers who might as well have had lapel badges reading ENFORCER. The rest of the gang kept a pace or two behind these three as they marched, knowing their place: it seemed like not much had changed since the days when I ran with the Arthur Street posse. Maybe some things never do.
‘What are you up to?’ the alpha puppy demanded, giving me a stone-faced stare. Then his glance went to Bic and his eyes widened in surprise. He bent down and hauled the younger boy to his feet, roughly enough that Bic staggered and almost fell again.
‘I’ve fucking told you!’ the bigger kid said severely. ‘You don’t go out after it gets dark. Why the fuck can you never do what you’re told?’
So this was Mrs Daniels’s other son: her John, whom she’d described as an IOU. He reminded me more of one of the small bomblets from a cluster munition: they’re both promises, I suppose, but one’s more likely to be kept than the other.
He turned his attention back to me again, and we played at staring each other out. He was dressed in a Ben Sherman I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-leather jacket, black jeans and the obligatory DMs, and his fists were clenching and unclenching as though he was itching to take a swing at me. His eyes didn’t track together, which I took to be a bad sign. Whatever he was on, if it was taking nibbles out of his nervous system it was bound to be having an effect on his mood, too.
‘Was this fucker copping a feel or something?’ he demanded.
Bic shook his head emphatically, either in disagreement or just to clear it. ‘I was falling, Johnno,’ he said, ‘over–’ He finished the sentence with a graphic gesture, pointing out past the parapet wall. ‘He grabbed hold of me. Pulled me back. I think I was — walking in my sleep or something.’
‘In your sleep?’ The alpha puppy — Johnno — repeated, incredulous.
‘Yeah.’
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. One of the rank-and-filers pulled Bic away out of the line of fire as the others closed in on me, following their leader. There was something wrong with all their eyes, now that I was looking for it: they were too wide, and when the light from the lamp caught their faces at the right angle I could see that their pupils were hugely dilated. Methamphetamine? Special K? Or maybe they were just high on life.
That momentary lapse of attention took me past the point where I could have made a run for it. The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic snikt sound from waist height told me that at least one of these likely lads had a flick knife. That first insidious sound was followed by several more from the same stable, and I could see blades sliding into hands in glittering profusion. It was as if a switch had been pulled somewhere. This had just stopped being a general for-form’s-sake intimidation and become something else: something more ritualised and more inevitable. If I couldn’t talk these little sods down this was going to get really messy.