“Still in your dressing gown, mum? Not like you,” Jak raises an eyebrow, “and glued to your phone. Are you turning into a teenager?”
“Just checking my Better Halves.”
“Your what?”
“It’s a dating app, babe. Just checking out some likely suitors.”
“Dating app?” Jak half-laughs, half-shrieks, “since when?”
“Since now,” Sylvie smiles to herself and strokes Itchycoo, “why shouldn’t I use a dating app?”
“No reason, none at all. I think it’s great,” enthuses Jak, “so when’s your first date?”
“Oh,” Sylvie attempts to be enigmatic, “maybe soon, maybe a little longer. See how it goes.”
“So have you connected with a real person yet?”
“I’ve ruled out some definite ainos.”
“Ay whats?”
“Ainos, you know, AI and it’s a big no.”
“Oh I see,” Jak’s brow furrows, “but any actual people?”
“I’m just going to take my time. Didn’t you try a dating app once?”
“Installed it. Didn’t really use it. It made me sick, remember? Too weird, too fake,” Jak pauses and laughs, “too many ainos and a-holes!”
Sylvie laughs too but then stops when she remembers the video of workers at the Magdalen Arch. She brings it up on her phone and shows it to Jak.
“Oh yeah, that is the site. Workstation two. It’s the worst one,” confirms Jak, “no wonder they’ve been taking our phones. Someone’s going to get into shit over this.”
“Is it always like that?” worries Sylvie.
“Yeah, pretty much. They tell you to do stupid things, two-people jobs for one person, and then shout at you when it takes longer than they thought.”
“Can’t you point out that they’re two-people jobs…”
“Dock pay for ‘insubordination’ or ‘disrupting the workflow’ or something.”
“So you have to work in dangerous…”
“Fucking hell!”
“What babe, what?”
“That skinny bloke with the wheelbarrow that nearly goes over… it’s Ped.”
“Your friend?”
“Yeah, he’s been sacked.”
“For this?”
“Guess so. For not following procedure.”
“Is he following procedure?”
“Procedure’s whatever they tell you to do,” Jak spits out the words, “but the bastards’ll have made something up to cover their arses. And justify sacking poor Ped. Bastards!”
“Bastards,” agrees Sylvie.
—
Robbo hoovers the kitchen floor. It already seems clean to him but Sticks was insistent it needs “a vac and a mop”. He fills a bucket with hot water and washing-up liquid, and works his way across the room. It’s not large, but when he gets to the other side he then has to walk back across the wet floor, leaving footprints. So he does it again, this time starting at the far side and stepping backwards with the mop out in front of him. This seems to work better.
He can hear the tapping of a keyboard in the living room.
“Clean in here?” asks Robbo.
“Wait until I’m done,” replies Sticks without looking up from his laptop screen, “do upstairs first. Do the bathroom – vac then shower, basin, toilet in that order then mop. Just a quick vac on the landing and stairs, leave the bedrooms unless you want to do your own.”
“So boring,” complains Robbo.
“Try to do it right though,” says Sticks sternly, “that’s the challenge, trying to make it perfect instead of half-hearted. Can you close this door behind you, thanks.”
—
Jak finishes her plate of pasta salad, “can I ask your advice mum?”
Sylvie is still eating but nods agreement.
“I need to visit Carly. What should I do?”
“Where have you looked for instructions?”
“Police website. It don’t really make sense. I have to apply at the police station in person.”
“Any station?”
“No, the one where Carly is. St Aldates.”
“So you have to go into Oxford just to apply to see her?”
“Yeah, so I’d have to pay to go all the way round to Botley Road Gate because Folly Bridge is city workers only, we don’t count, and through there. And then there’s no guarantees. They can take as long as they like to decide. Like days or weeks or whatever…”
“Do it babe, you’re earning enough to get a half-day pass. It might work. And if it doesn’t, at least you’ll have tried. You’ll end up hating yourself if you don’t at least try.”
“Yeah, I will. They’re saying they want the first person to go through Magdalen Gate, um, y’know Magdalen Arch, by the end of week after next. They’re planning some sort of ceremony. Although it’s not really ready. Once they’ve opened a gate, that might mean I can get through that way. Maybe by the time they’ve decided…”
“What will be, will be babe,” Sylvie starts singing softly, “que sera, sera…”
—
Robbo challenges Sticks, “why do you need a servant?”
“An old injury, from a secondary blast when I was serving. Needed a spine operation to sort me out. Didn’t work a hundred per cent. But at least I can drive. Anyway, doctor’s orders, no hoovering or mopping or anything that involves bending over for periods of time. No high impact activity either. Swimming is good though, just a shame there’s nowhere to go round here.”
“River at Dorchester.”
“I’m not swimming in the Thames. It’s full of shit.”
“Pool at Blackbird Leys.”
“Yeah, sometimes. But it’s full of kids. I don’t like kids. Do you?”
“Jak. Not other kids.”
“She’s not really a kid is she? She’s a young woman. A very bright young woman in some ways,” reflects Sticks, “still got a lotta learning to do though.”
“Yeah, so,” Robbo pauses, puts a hand to his stomach, which he can feel tensing up even more with the knot that’s been there since yesterday, and launches into his real reason for speaking, “where’s the money. One hundred pounds, you said. So where’s it?”
Sticks reaches into his pocket, pulls out a twenty pound note and hands it to Robbo, “okay twenty a day whilst you’re here. Then you can get lunch when you’re out and a few beers…”
“One hundred a day!” says Robbo firmly.
“Yes, yes, yes. So twenty a day…”
“One hundred!” shouts Robbo.
“Let me finish,” growls Sticks, “twenty a day whilst you’re here then what’s owed on your last day when you leave. So that’ll be the number of days you’re here in total timesed by eighty. So if you leave on Tuesday evening, you’ll get four hundred and eighty then, as well as the twenty each day you’ll have already had.”
“You said one hundred a day,” repeats Robbo.
“Yeah, that’s the rate of pay not the frequency,” Sticks speaks slowly and calmly, “you’ll get paid in full at the end of the job.”
“Okay,” says Robbo doubtfully, “when?”
“Look, Paul, I have some information for you. About you and for you,” Sticks gets the half full bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses from the sideboard, and pours a generous measure for Robbo, “a young man called James Booth has been found drowned in the River Cherwell, at the weir by University Parks. Witnesses say a ‘scruffy, unshaven, skinny vagrant’, their words not mine, was seen in the area around the time of the St John’s Day celebration. He is wanted for questioning as a person of interest, police seeking to eliminate him from their enquiries and all that jazz. Paul, he is you. You’re a wanted man.”
“Picture?”
Sticks shakes his head, “no picture as far as I know but you were there and you were seen. That’s all that matters.”
“Of the dead man.”
“Oh I see,” Sticks scrolls impatiently through pictures on his laptop, “yeah, here.”
Robbo looks at the photograph of James Booth. He is wearing a half unbuttoned flowery shirt, salmon pink trousers and a sun hat. He is smiling. The face is instantly recognisable to Robbo – the young man he seemed to befriend, who then imprisoned him. His stomach tightens further at the memory of the young man throwing up and the bowl of thick red liquid.
“You recognise him, don’t you,” observes Sticks, “if they find any of your DNA on him or his boat, you’re in big trouble. You need to keep your head down here for a while so we can work something out. Do you understand?”
Robbo nods, “what about Monday?”
“Your appointment?”
“Yeah, every Monday. Tests. Pay.”
“It can’t do any harm to miss one appointment.”
“Yes it can,” Robbo asserts, “they’ll cancel. Tests and pay. Have to reapply, start again. Fill out forms. See a real doctor. Takes ages.”
“Ha ha,” Sticks laughs wryly, “it certainly takes ages to see a real doctor these days. If there are any left. I haven’t seen one for years and I have to take medication for my injury. Okay, Paul, I tell you what. I’m going to hire a car, in your name because you’re going to drive it, for a job on Sunday. I’ll extend the hire til Monday afternoon so you can use it to get to the JR on Monday. What time is your appointment?”
“Eleven.”
“Okay so if you drive there, I might have a job for you afterwards, just the other side of Oxford. I’ll let you know. You can use the hire car for that as well. After that I’ll pay you in full and we’ll be square.”
“Okay.”
“Deal.”
—
“So, you think this Sticks fellow is not all he seems?”
“He just changed. Just like that. Especially when talking to dad, like he was making a special effort to be nice, not to me, he was being shitty to me, but to dad like he was grooming him, talking to him a bit like dad talks, like he’s a bit, you know, simple…”
Sylvie hugs her daughter, “babe, sometimes you really need to lighten up a bit. You worry too much. It’s your father we’re talking about, he’s a survivor. He talks like a child because he wishes he still was one. But he’s not, you know that, babe. He can look after himself.”
“Okay mum, thanks,” Jak pours a final cuppa of the day from the teapot and takes it up to her room.
Jak Churchwell: Just checking on you dad. You ok?
After sending the message, she sees Carly’s name and profile picture halfway down her recent chat list.
‘How long already? But I’ve still no idea what’s going on with you, Tabs. Sometimes I nearly message you then remember. You can’t have phones when you’re in prison or police cells. Can you? You can’t coz you’d message me. You would wouldn’t you?
‘God, I wish I had more pictures.’
Jak scrolls through her gallery for photos of Carly: drinking a pint in the Moonshine; her with a group of others, she recognises Donny but no one else; someone else’s social media post of Carly with a glum looking woman she doesn’t recognise at all.
And a selfie of them together, probably in the Moonshine as it’s quite dark. A sort of dim yellow light infuses the image, making it look old. Almost everything’s slightly out of focus so their eyes look a bit glazed. They have half-smoked but unlit cigarettes hanging from their mouths. A mole on Carly’s neck, just above her collar, is the one thing that is crystal sharp.
‘Hi Tabs,’ Jak stares at the cigarette between Carly’s lips rather than her out-of-focus eyes, ‘dunno if I can write to you neither now so I’ll try sending messages telepathically… I’m joking, well partly but I don’t think I can carry on writing. Sorry. God, I look a bit weird in that picture don’t I.’
“Crop Jak out,” she says into the phone.
The picture blurs, reshapes and resizes. The background is filled in with shadowy figures hunched over tables. And brown wallpaper. Carly is by herself, leaning strangely into space, with a glazed look in her eyes.
“Oh God, undo. Actually, yeah undo, but then replace my face and hair with Chappell Roan’s face and hair.”
The picture blurs again for a second, the background changes again to show multi-coloured stage lights above a cavernous space. One luminaire is out of shot but its white beam perfectly picks out a ghostly pale woman’s face, with dark blue eye shadow, blushed cheeks and dark red lips slightly parted in a wistful smile, framed by a cascade of deep ginger hair. Her heavy lidded gaze is fixed on Carly. But Carly, who appears slightly stoned, looks straight past her and out of the picture.
‘That’s better. Tabs, this is my friend Chappell. Chappell, this is Tabs – I bet you’ll get on well. I mean they might, mightn’t they. Well they will. Be assertive Jak, this is your head, your Tabs, no one can take her from you.
‘So anyway, Tabs I think your uncle is a bit controlling. Maybe quite a lot controlling. I’m feeling pretty uneasy round him. God knows how dad is going to get on actually living there. I bet he won’t last. No idea what your uncle is up to. But there’s defo something going on. I mean I know he’s political and you getting arrested and kept in by the cops has probably shaken him. I mean I don’t know, I’d never met him until a week or two ago. I mean, maybe he’s just trying to be mysterious to, y’know, impress people. But the thing about the phones… that was real and kinda weird. There’s something going on.
‘Anyway, anyway… for fuck’s sake Jak, why are you going on about her uncle.
‘Tabs, sorry, I really need to see you Tabs. No more letters, actually see you. I had this mad plan to rescue you and you could punt down the river to Donny Bridge. But I have no idea how to get you out of jail. Maybe if I see you… no, the only reason for seeing you is to see you. I need to do that. Have a conversation, a chat.
‘Also then I’ll be able to think about you all the time. At the moment whoever I last saw is kinda jostling you aside in my mind. Like I have to push through a crowd that’s getting in the way of reaching you.
‘And it’s getting harder. It’s been, how long’s it been? Do you know it rained the other night, really bucketed down? At last. That should’ve been a good thing, right?
‘But, Tabs, when I stood and looked at those big red clouds, I just felt… I dunno, it’s ridiculous but I felt really clear in my head for a moment. Like I could see everything there was to see. But then it never really helped. Those great big clouds and I didn’t know what to do.
‘Anyway, don’t matter. I need to see you. I don’t know how but there must be a way. They can’t just lock you up and not let anyone see you. Well, maybe they can, I dunno but I still gotta try.
‘Yeah, so anyway good luck babe. Good luck Tabs, see you soon.’