Ben Cheetham - The Society of Dirty Hearts

“You fuck her, did you?”

“No.”

Jake spat out the side of his mouth. “Bollocks you didn’t.” His hostile voice brought a growl from Henry. Julian shushed him.

“Believe what you like, but it’s true. I care about your sister as a friend, and that’s all.” But that wasn’t all there was to it. Julian knew it, and, from the glint of suspicion in his eyes, Jake knew it too.

“And what about my mum?”

“The thing is…well, it looks like…like…” Each word weighed like a rock on Julian’s tongue. It looks like your sister’s thrown herself off the same bridge as your mum did. He thought the words, but didn’t know how to say them.

“Well, fuckin’ spit it out then.”

“Maybe we’d better sit down,” Julian suggested, and not just out of concern for Jake. A great wave of tiredness had suddenly come crashing over him.

“What for?”

Without replying, Julian moved to sit on the mattress. Jake remained standing a moment, eyeing him uncertainly. Then, with the wariness of a cat, he approached the circle of ash and dropped down on his haunches. He dug at the ash with a stick, found some glowing embers amongst the grey wood and fed in several handfuls of leaves and twigs. As flames crackled into life, Julian looked at Jake’s intense, suspicious eyes, looked at his androgynous teenage face, and dragged the words out one by one. He told him about what he’d found at the bridge, about what Tom Benson had told him, and about the newspaper article. Except for maybe a slight thinning of his lips, Jake’s face gave no clue as to his emotions. “So she’s gone and done it,” he said, when Julian finished. His eyes shifted to the flames, taking on a familiar blankness. “She always said she would one day, but, fuck, I never believed she’d actually do it.”

“You mean she spoke about jumping off the bridge?”

“All the time. It used to do my head in. She said she wanted to feel what Mum felt, see what Mum saw when she hit the water. I told her, you won’t feel or see nothing ’cos you’ll be dead.” Jake gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, his gaze drifting further.

Doubts crowded in on Julian. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Mia really had killed herself. He pushed the doubts away. He had to keep telling himself there was more to it, because at least that way there was a chance, however slim, that she was alive. “I don’t believe she’d do it.”

Jake’s eyes blinked back to Julian. “Why not?” His eyebrows knitted together as Julian gave him the rest of the story, flicking apart when he heard the part about Mia’s change of image and the Mercedes. “Let me get this straight in my head. You reckon Mia’s either faking it, or this Mr Ugly dude — who might be my dad — did my mum in and made it look like suicide, and has now done the same thing to my sister.”

Julian nodded. “Don’t suppose you’ve any idea who Mr Ugly is?”

Jake looked at him as if to say, what the fuck do you think? “Whoever the fuck he is, he’d better pray I never find out. ’Cos I’ll cut his cock off and feed it to him.” There was a quiet menace in his voice that suggested the threat wasn’t empty bravado.

“Well is there any way Mia could’ve found out who your dad is?”

“If there is, she never told me about it. All I know is he’s supposed to be an older dude. Probably one of those pervs who can’t get their dick up unless they’re fucking little girls.”

“And what about the man and the woman in the Merc? Any ideas about them?”

Jake rocked back onto the mattress. He took out a cigarette, lit it with a stick from the fire, and ran his tongue over his wolfish canines. “You say the woman was a red-head, big tits, looked like she’d been around.” When Julian nodded, Jake’s face wrinkled into a thoughtful frown. “Could be Ginger. She works behind the bar at the H-Bomb.”

“The H-Bomb? Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s on the other side of town. It’s The Outlaws’ place.”

“Who are The Outlaws?”

“They’re bikers.” Jake squinted sideways at Julian. “How long you lived in this town?”

“All my life.”

Jake snuffed contemptuously, but for an instant a kind of bitter longing showed in his eyes. “Fuck, you must’ve led a sheltered life.”

“I suppose I have,” admitted Julian. “So what makes you think the woman I saw could be this Ginger?”

“She’s the only person I can think of who looks anything like you say. And Mia and Jo used to go to The H-Bomb with Weasel sometimes. There’s something else n’all.” Jake sucked uneasily on his cigarette, as though the something else disturbed him. “Ginger’s not just a barmaid, she’s also junkie whore.”

Julian frowned too now. “So if it was this Ginger I saw, does that mean Mia was…” He hesitated, loathe to suggest to Jake that his twin sister was prostituting herself.

“Pulling tricks,” said Jake, reading between the lines. “I can’t think of any other reason for Mia to get in a car with Ginger done up like some slutty little girl. Can you?”

Julian’s earlier doubts returned to haunt him. If Jake was right, Mia’s disappearance surely had nothing to do with her father. Like an extension of his nightmare in a waking state, an image rose in his mind of Mister Ugly leering at Mia, sniffing, licking. He shifted his gaze to the fire, clenching his teeth, suppressing a shudder. Another thought ran like a cold sickness through his brain. What if both me and Jake are right? What if Mia had been prostituting herself and somehow chanced to discover that her ‘trick’ was also her Julian abruptly checked the thought. No, that was too twisted, too nauseating to even contemplate. But what if? What if? He couldn’t hold the shudder in any longer. It passed convulsively over his frame.

“You okay?” asked Jake, an edge of suspicion back in his voice.

Julian nodded, uncomfortable under Jake’s searching eyes. “What about Joanne Butcher? Were the rumours about her true?”

“Yeah, probably. Junk’ll do that if you let it get on top of you. And she was using way, way too much.”

“When did you last see her?”

“A couple of days before she went missing. We got high together. She phoned me, said she had some good junk. Fuck knows where she scored it from, but it wasn’t the usual watered-down shit you get round here. One hit knocked me on my arse, and I only smoked it. Jo was shooting the stuff up. I tell you, I didn’t even blink when I heard she’d OD’d.”

“How do you think she ended up in the forest?”

Jake shrugged. “Maybe she was looking for me. She knew I used this place.”

“But you weren’t here.”

“Obviously not,” said Jake, a little rise of irritation in his voice. “I move around a lot. Keeps the coppers off my track.”

Perplexed, Julian wrinkled his brow. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t she phone and find out where you were before coming out here?”

“She was a junkie. Junkie’s don’t make no sense.” Jake eyed Julian with the look of a wary animal trying to work out the motives and strength of another. “You know what don’t make no sense to me. You, you don’t make no sense to me.”

A thin smile stretched Julian’s lips. “I don’t make much sense to myself most of the time, either.”

Jake made a low noise in his throat as though he didn’t buy that. “Weasel says you’re loaded.”

“Do I look loaded?”

“Oh yeah, you look it alright.” Jake flicked his cigarette into the fire. “Someday I’m gonna look it n’all. I dunno how, but I am. I’m gonna have money and a big house, plasma TV in every room, and all the rest of it.”

Julian remembered something he’d heard his Grandma Alice say to his dad once. “Being rich isn’t just about money. It’s about having enough.”