Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

In fact, I got one out of two. The album started with baby photos of a chubby, wrinkled Winston Churchill-alike baby who progressed over the space of ten or twelve pages into a much less chubby toddler and then into an increasingly tall and gangly boy with riotously unruly brown hair and a sheepish grin that seemed to be his default option when facing a camera. I flicked a few more pages and watched him grow into an even more gangly, longer-haired teen. And in the process I found the first mutilated photo. After that there were many more.

It wasn’t the boy’s image that was being mutilated: it was that of a woman who was sometimes with him — holding him as a baby, cuddling him when he was older — sometimes alone and sometimes posing beside a man who was unmistakably Kenny. In every photo where she appeared, the woman’s head had been excised with angular slashes from a knife or razor blade — usually in situ , creating holes that went right through to the other side of the page and cut out irrelevant wedges from the photos that backed onto them. It was always and only the face that was taken: usually the thick, lustrous blonde hair remained untouched, along with a micrometer-thin stretch of forehead. Kenny and the ever-growing little boy smiled and smiled, standing beside and linking arms with this woman whose eyeless absence stared out at me like an unspoken reproach.

More and more uneasy, I put the album back on the shelf. Then I went back into the bedroom to clear away any traces of my presence there. I put the shoebox back on its high shelf, then started to stack the porn mags up in front of it as they’d been stacked before. The incongruity of this struck me as I was doing it. What needed hiding more than two years’ back issues of Barely Legal ? What do you keep behind your porn stash?

I took the shoebox down again and gave it another look. The sides of it were decorated with geological strata of stickers: characters from some manga cartoon, band logos, football players in identical head-and-shoulders poses. It had belonged to a kid at some point, and probably for a long time.

I carefully unpacked its contents onto the bed. Underneath the fourth layer of Waddington’s Number Ones there was a slender black box that was too long and thin to contain a deck of cards. It was made of plastic and bore the Lorus name and logo, so it seemed fair to assume that it was intended to hold a wristwatch. I clicked it open and found myself staring at a heterogeneous collection of objects.

The razor blades were what caught my attention first: a half-dozen or so of Wilkinson’s finest, still in their wrappings and held in place with a red elastic band. Next to them were some sticking plasters and a styptic pencil, a small vial of pale yellow liquid that turned out to be cologne, and the shiny steel business end of a dart with the flight removed. There was also a single razor blade that was out of its wrapper and embedded in a wine cork: the cork in turn had been neatly spiked on one of the plastic brackets inside the box that had once held the wristwatch in place.

Everything was clean, with no trace of blood and the only smell the very faint floral-alcohol whiff of the cologne. I knew what I was looking at, though, and I knew what it was for. I touched the bare blade gently and confirmed what I’d already guessed. It wasn’t the playing cards that were associated with that old and frequent feeling of joy and excitement: it was this little hurt-kit.

I closed it up again, put it back in the shoebox and the shoebox back where it belonged. I was piling up the porn barricade again when out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement from outside the window. Too late now to turn the light off, or to duck down out of sight: I’d just be advertising the fact that I didn’t have any right to be here. Instead I finished what I was doing, closed the wardrobe as slowly and casually as I could, and then turned to look out into the night.

I couldn’t see what had moved at first, because everything seemed still now. Then, as my gaze panned from left to right across the scene, I finally saw the small figure standing on the concrete balustrade of the walkway on the side furthest away from me. It looked like a boy, far from fully grown, with his shoulders hunched and his head down, staring at the ground sixty feet or so below. He was standing absolutely motionless, which was why he’d been so hard to spot: the movement that had alerted me at first must have been when he climbed up onto the balustrade.

Nothing in his posture suggested that he was about to jump: he might have been waiting for a friend, or for a bus, except for the insane place he’d chosen to do it. But somehow I could see in my mind’s eye how this was going to end: the shapeless, half-exploded blood-and-bone sack that had once been a human being, on the pavement below. I was seeing it as though I was remembering it, looking straight down from the spot where the kid was now standing.

Maybe that flash of false memory galvanised me. I don’t remember thinking it through or reaching any kind of rational decision. I was suddenly caroming out of the bedroom, across the lounge and up the stairs, taking them three at a time. I hauled Kenny’s front door open and let it slam against the wall, heedless of the noise: then I was out through the spavined swing doors and onto the walkway, in all maybe twenty seconds after I’d first sighted the kid standing there.

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.