Jon Grimwood - redRobe

You couldn’t turn on a teen newsfeed without seeing some bug-eyed drone making a living recycling memes from StreetSemantics 101, but what Axl knew he’d learned direct on the streets of Alphabet by watching who survived and who got razzed.

And he learned fast from his mistakes.

Axl laughed as he wiped rain out of his hollow eye socket. At least he had learned fast back then. Back at the start when the Cardinal did occasional pro bono out of a small basement office in a block at the back of St Patrick’s and Axl was the street kid stood in front of some fancy desk that once belonged to a guy called Frick, or so Axl got told while he was protesting that he didn’t do all that Hail Mary shit.

God was that enamel baby the Spic gangs glued to their Uzi's. He didn’t know what the Nation called their god, only that he wasn’t allowed in pictures so they wore his name on gold pinkie lings or etched into the barrels of those tiny matt-black H&Ks they wore clipped to their belts like Sony Walkwears. Axl didn’t buy into any of that shit, like he didn’t punk for protection.

Mind you, he didn’t need to. Axl had learnt to get out of the way of the kids he couldn’t go through and to do it so no one noticed. He didn’t need protection and he didn’t need God.

Atheist wasn’t a word Axl learnt until later. At the time he got pulled in, he had a vocabulary of maybe 150 words and he didn’t use ninety percent of those. But then he was ten and si, no and chinga tu madre covered most situations. Still, the tall priest promised Axl that he didn’t have to believe in God to take his money so finally the boy did what he was paid to do, follow a fat man out cruising in Central Park.

Besides it was cold and he was hungry. He’d thought the marshmallow heat of his first summer on the streets was bad enough. That was before he reached the winters.

Mostly the man cruised a large courtyard of old paving stones used by the skate gangs. The courtyard was sunk into the ground like a small mall with no ceiling. Around the mall’s edge were blank-eyed statues and at one end stood an empty fountain. In the middle of that fountain—her wings spread wide—stood the Angel of the Waters erected in 1842 to celebrate the arrival of clean water to New York. Not that Axl knew any of that. He just followed the fat man, keeping hidden as the man stopped and talked to skateboys who mostly laughed or kept walking like he wasn’t there.

On the third night, while a shivering Axl was edging round the spread-winged angel, his target vanished. And, scared that he was about to blow it, Axl raced into an underpass that headed back towards Central Park South in search of his target. Which was how Axl found himself frozen in the dark with a blade to his neck.

Not a big junkie knife like the skatez carried but a tiny silver thing that grew its own blade. Axl knew it was sharp because one gentle brush of the blade had beaded his throat with little pearls of blood.

‘You’re not hurt,’ said the fat man as Axl examined the smudges of blood on his own fingers. ‘But you will be if you don’t tell the truth ...'

Axl held his breath. Even at ten he didn’t wriggle, whimper or panic; just looked slowly left and right for his escape route.

‘There isn’t one,’ said the man, ‘is there?’

Axl slowly shook his head.

‘I suggest you remember that ...'

And while the boy stood watching the man, all thought locked out of his face, the fat man who smelled of cologne brushed one thumb along the knife to send the metal blade flowing back into its handle.

Hard fingers gripped a wrist weak from calcium deficiency. ‘Why?’ The man said fiercely, his face pushed so close that Axl could see he had lines round his eyes and a saggy mouth. ‘And how long have you been following me?’

Now was the time to run if he was going to, Axl knew that. The man might have his fancy knife but Axl still knew tricks the fat man would never know. Like how to twist free from a grip without getting your own wrist broken for a start. All it took was pivoting hard against your enemy’s thumb and forefinger.

Worked everytime, at least it had so far.

Only that wasn’t what he was going to do. There was all that cash to collect from the tall priest if he played this right and did what he was told.

‘Saw you come into the Park,’ said Axl, his accent rougher than ever. ‘Thought you might help me…’

‘Why would I do that?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Cos I’m hungry, me. Haven’t eaten for days.’ There was a new whine in his voice, a softness that, had it been real, would have seen him dead long since. Kittens didn’t get cuddled in the Alphabets, they got stamped.

‘You know,’ said the man, his smile mocking, ‘you should force yourself.’

Axl’s rat-like face went ever more blank as he gazed up into the man’s watery eyes. He knew he was being mocked, he just didn’t know how.

‘You’ve got money,’ Axl said and before the fat man could deny it, he gently brushed a finger against the man’s open coat. It was soft and black, shimmering to itself. Silk was something else Axl didn’t know back then, not just smart silk, any silk at all. And if that man had told him little worms spun coats that machines unwound into sticky threads which were then dusted with colours smaller than the eye could see Axl wouldn’t have known what he was talking about anyway, or believed him if he had.

Just as Axl didn’t really believe the fat man was taking him to get a Big Mac as he was nudged back towards the terrace and then down wide stone steps towards dark water.

They walked a path that sucked glue-like at their shoes, the black lake always on their right as the fat man kept promising Axl there was a McDonald's round each corner, but there wasn’t. What there was finally was a wooden house with boarded-up windows and a kicked-in door. Around it winter-stripped trees were strung with broken bulbs. The doorway stank of piss, and inside Axl could hear rats scurrying across broken glass.

They kept scurrying.

What happened where the rats lived wasn’t something Axl thought about. In fact, he thought about it so little that a month or two later he forgot it entirely for five years, only remembering at fifteen, coming to in a jungle camp outside Baranquilla and vomiting up memories with the dregs of his previous night’s vodka. And even now, whenever he thought about that wooden shack—which he didn’t—Axl’s primary driving emotion was gratitude. That he was still alive when it was finally over. Standing more miles away across the cold black vacuum of space than, he could readily imagine, Axl pulled up his collar and shivered.

Later on, when the fat man was gone and the rats had come out of their corner to crawl over Axl’s small white body and chew occasionally to see if it was edible or not, Axl had driven himself to his feet and stumbled out into Central Park, heading for the obsidian water.

Frigid as melt and black like night, the lake had closed over him and crept into the crevices of his body, washing them clean. And for a moment as the cold rushed into him, Axl was filled with ice but then his muscles closed out the lake and Axl found himself swimming slowly towards a dish moon lodged in the skeletal branches of a winter tree on the other side of the lake.

He wouldn’t make it—couldn’t, even—no matter how near it looked. And yet Axl kept swimming towards the light until he felt his body disappear. There were no edges to it at all, no skin, no sense of fingers ending or water beginning. Only an unbelievable cold that was calling to him.

Frost filled Axl’s soul and he believed… no, he knew that when he looked through the sodium haze that arced above Central Park he saw not the heat but the coldness of the sharp white stars beyond.