You Again Page 6

  As with all good murders, the truth was buried deeper than the bodies. This was common procedure: to prevent people from digging around and unearthing bones, lies and whatever else was supposed to be kept hidden.

  As mysterious and aloof as she likes to be, Angie is the easiest person in the world when it comes to working out her whereabouts. She chases solitude and then finds it within an exclusive crowd. She skateboards and she hangs out with her friend, Vivienne Lee. When I heard that skateboarder Rob Lee was going to be putting on a performance underneath the Hammersmith flyover, I decided to go along. I knew Angie wouldn’t want to miss out on the action.

  Cold, so cold. Free diving and Angie took on a whole new meaning – she was more than capable of freezing the water over my head leaving me trapped underneath ice.

  I gave her a playful nudge as we watched Rob and his team filming tricks but Angie didn’t even look round at me. I wasn’t quite sure what I had done to receive the cold-shoulder treatment but she sure knew how to shut me out. It had been totally different when we were at the cinema, she seemed way more relaxed. There was definitely a warmth, a connection. I didn’t imagine it. Then I began to wonder if maybe my mother had said something to scare her off.

  As these thoughts banged about inside my head Vivienne Lee took a phone call and I quickly seized the moment. “Angie,” I whispered. “Talk to me.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, there was an edge to her voice.

  “I’ve come to watch Rob Lee,” I replied, hoping to win her over with the signature grin. “Like you.”

  Then she turned to look at me. She tilted her head slightly to look out from under the peak of her baseball cap, a move that suggested arrogance, indifference, insolence, almost. Her eyes lifted to mine, cold eyes, they looked straight at me, almost looking straight through me.

  I stood there and this time a flashback hit without warning. I could see a pram. A road. Trees.

  I could hear Anastasia’s voiceover to the scene: Angie was a baby at the time, no more than four months old. She was in her pram. Can you believe?”

  I zoned out. I zoned in again. Angie was staring at me now, not looking through me.

  She didn’t speak; I could hear my own voice instead.

  “Who shot your parents?” I whispered.

  Vivienne was still talking on the phone, hand gestures, exclamations, none the wiser as to what was going on next to her.

  Angie stood her ground but it was obvious she had taken a blow. The colour was leaving her face, sand-timer trickle; I reckoned she had about two minutes before the blood left her head and she hit the ground, at my feet. Not quite how I imagined her falling for me.

  I was coming to terms with the question too. I hadn’t asked who had killed her parents or even who’d murdered them. The words were out before I had time to filter them: “Who shot your parents?”

  “What is this…” she hissed, leaning into me, the familiar sweetness on her breath lingering between us, “…a Lennox Jones interrogation? A joke?”

  The colour was starting to come back to her face in a furious, crimson flush.

  I pressed a finger against her lips to stem further questions. I needed time, I was the one who needed answers. She looked stunned and I wanted to pull her into me, protect her from my violent flashback. I was looking at Angie but all I could see was the pram, pin-sharp detail right down to a shopping bag hooked over the handles. I wanted to hold this image and search for more clues. I wanted to freeze the image and then break it down into pieces, pixel by pixel.

  She reached up and caught my hand; I didn’t resist and let the weight of her hand guide mine. I expected her to let go with immediate effect but she held on as though I was a connection to her past. She didn’t want to let go. I gripped her hand tighter to remind her that I wasn’t afraid of ghosts or guns. I wanted to tell her that I’d seen and heard it all before in my nightmares, even though I couldn’t sleep.

  “Who shot your parents?” I repeated, a louder whisper. If Viv had turned round she would have wondered what the hell was going on.

  “Who told you about the shooting?” asked Angie, neutral voice now.

  “I didn’t know about the shooting,” I replied truthfully. “I don’t have any of the facts, it’s just guesswork.”

  “You don’t need to know the facts.”

  I grabbed her other hand, for extra reassurance. “I need to know about you.”

  She looked down, breaking eye contact. “This is me,” she said shrugging, head nodding to the skateboard. “No more drama.”

  I faltered. How could I tell her that I needed to know everything about her? You are allowed to think this but no one wants to hear it – not too soon otherwise it comes across as obsessive and suffocating.

  She sensed I was holding back and looked up again, eyes narrowed in concentration as she attempted to work me out. We were still holding hands.

  “I live with an aunt. I go to school. I skateboard. Viv is my best friend. This is my life, how it is for me now. I keep moving. I don’t look back, I keep moving,” she said without a pause.

  This time she quickly pressed a finger to my lips, bitten fingernails and chipped, black polish. She stared at me, reading my mind so I didn’t have to voice the question.

  “He can’t hurt me any more,” she explained, determination in her voice, steel edges to the words. “He’s dead.”

  That night was filled with hallucinations, not so much flashbacks more phantom objects, floating in and out of view and faceless people talking to me through the darkness. I shouted and screamed over their voices. I sweated through my sheets, twisting them around me until I was tied up, trapped. I roared down the house, bringing my parents racing into the bedroom. It was like I was burning up, bleeding out and, as soon as someone saved me, I started dying all over again.

  I made it through the night. The 5am morning edged into the room through gaps in the curtains, early summer sunshine creating a daffodil-hued light. I wasn’t alone. My mother was slumped on the floor, her back against my bed, her eyes closed.

  “Mom,” I croaked.

  She snapped awake. “Lennox. How do you feel? Are you okay?”

  “Cold but I’m fine. I guess.”

  She hauled herself up, the weight of the world on her making it a challenge. “You had a high fever, honey. Night from hell. Let’s get you outta that bed for a second. I’ll need to change the sheets again.”

  I thought, my mother never changes bedsheets. It must be serious.

  Shivering, I gingerly swung my legs over the side of the bed and watched the ground rise up to meet me. High fever, low expectations.

  I decided to take a moment before I stood up. I didn’t think my mother could handle me in free fall right now.

  “I’m gonna take a shower,” I said. “Warm up before school.”

  “No school today. Rest,” she insisted.

  I wasn’t going to argue with her right there and then but I knew I was going to school. Hanging out at home with my own thoughts? Nightmare. No thanks.

  Shower, uniform, breakfast, bag. I was out the door before anyone could protest too much. It helped that I pulled off a stellar performance, light on my toes and the signature smile that covered up a thousand sins.

  I needed to go to school. Angie would be there, although now I was beginning to wonder was this a good thing or a bad thing? She had the powers to rescue me but when she backed off, the vacuum could kill me quick: shut me out.

  I also had a session with Mrs Martel before lunch that I didn’t want to miss. I suppose I hoped that she could help me decode the hallucinations – at least we had new material to work with now instead of going over the same old flashbacks.

  To her credit, however, she never seemed impatient to move on or push through to another level. Mrs Martel seemed unwaveringly focused on the flashbacks, like the answers were right in front of us but we didn’t know what we were looking for. Until now I had been cool about covering old gro
und because I didn’t want to know what else was out there. Now I did. Forewarned is forearmed.

  No Pokémon. No Warfare Nation this time. No hello Lennox either. I hadn’t even shut the door when Mrs Martel kicked off the session with a question.

  “Who is screaming?”

  “What? Oh.” I faltered. Gunshots. Screaming. Silence.

  I felt a flicker of irritation. We’d talked about this. I was keen to remind her that she had forgotten.

  “Like I said…” I deliberately paused to make sure she was aware that this question had been asked – and answered – before, “the person screaming is me.”

  8

  Lennox: forgiven

  “How can you be so sure?” questioned Mrs Martel. “You never mentioned the screams at first. It was all about the gunshots.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. She raised her eyebrows, waiting for the answer that had stalled on the tip of my tongue.

  “I just know, alright?” I guess I sounded petulant. “It’s me.”

  I owned the flashbacks; therefore, obviously, I knew what was going on. Or did I? Now that it had been questioned I wasn’t so sure. What if I had to speak as though my life depended on it?

  “I suppose what I’m getting at…” added Mrs Martel staring straight at me, “… is that you describe an atmosphere of heightened confusion and skewed perspective. There are gunshots. You hear screams. I sense panic whenever we talk about the flashbacks. Imagine if I were a lawyer, or as you’d say, an attorney: I would be asking the same question over and over again in an attempt to establish truth. Why would I do that?”

  “You think I’m a liar?” I said it carefully, softly, to tone down the aggression in my voice.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  “No, I don’t think you’re a liar,” replied Mrs Martel, picking up her pen to write in her notebook.

  “Then what?”

  “I think you’re an unreliable witness.”

  I realised I was gripping the underside of the chair, as though it was an ejector seat and I was seconds from being propelled into the atmosphere. I could feel the room spinning and realised that mothers know best: I should never have come to school today. I could feel the heat prickling under my skin, a residual trace of a fever that threatened to overpower the combined efforts of paracetamol and ibuprofen. Then my body’s natural defence system kicked in, bringing me out in a sweat – its best attempt to cool down my burning skin.

  Mrs Martel walked over to the water dispenser and poured me a drink. I drained it. She refilled. She paused behind me. “Why would I think you’re a liar, Lennox?” she asked lightly.

  I didn’t look round. I shrugged. “I dunno. Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because your story never changes,” she explained. “Liars have to remember their version of the events, which increases the margin for error; whereas you, all you appear to do is relive them.”

  “But I can’t relive them all, can I?” I responded furiously. “I can only relive fragments of a story, which is no good to me. These memories are broken into pieces and it’s driving me insane.” I tightened my grip on the chair.

  “Then we figure it out.”

  “Like a jigsaw?” I scoffed.

  “Like a computer game,” she corrected. “We code it. We build. We figure it out. Tag memories. Time and date.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “By asking the same questions over and over again.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who is screaming?”

  “I am.”

  “Who is screaming?” she persisted.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled, enough to see me to the bottom.

  “Who is screaming?”

  I held my breath. Down, down, down once again, deep into the memories.

  Same question.

  Different answer.

  “She is.”

  The silence in the room signalled the end of the questions. The clock confirmed that the session was over. The expression on Mrs Martel’s face confirmed what I already knew: we weren’t looking at flashbacks, we were looking at a crime scene.

  She is screaming. This seemed like a sizeable revelation to code and tag. Shame I had nothing to add to it. No voice-recognition technology.

  I left Mrs Martel’s office not freaked out but definitely wired – a buzz of adrenaline hitting my nervous system, still reeling from the night before. I did think that this could be considered a breakthrough, shovelling through top-soil memories to get to what is buried beneath. The flashback suggested that it wasn’t just me. There was someone else there.

  I dug into this fact but it didn’t open up to reveal more. I was already exhausted from the night full of terrors, which no doubt didn’t help.

  Another weird thing, the break in my nose had started to ache. I’d never had any trouble with it since it had healed and now, weirdly, I was aware of it as a source of heat and irritation. I’d mentioned it to Mrs Martel and she seemed convinced that it stemmed from the headaches, which made sense. She, of course, put some therapist spin on it too and said it was also a reminder that we are all breakable. No one is immune to fracture, especially second time round.

  I stood in the corridor for a second before moving on, my temperature around the right mark again. It wouldn’t take much to set me off again though – stuffy classrooms, thermal heating from other people and sunshine through glass. In the second-floor toilets I heaved up one of the windows only to hit resistance: safety lock activated. Just in case the temptation to leave the building, or the world, through an open window was too much. Only two floors up but a surprisingly long way down. Still, I was confident I’d survive the fall. No spontaneous perfection for me.

  Suddenly the bell signalled that lunch was over and reluctantly, noisily, the pupils started to stream inside, off to registration before heading to wherever next.

  I drifted out into the corridor, joining them, but separate, trying to shut out their sound so that I could dig deeper into buried memories. Noise usually worked for me; I’m the person who liked all the televisions, music, radios blaring even when I wasn’t in the room. Multi-media entertainment.

  Now it was like I needed noise-cancelling headphones. I needed to think straight. I wanted to concentrate; examine the crime scene and assess the damage.

  I didn’t see her coming.

  “Lennox,” she said.

  There she was. Brown eyes, unlit bonfire behind them. It wouldn’t take much to set them blazing. I soaked up the scene because she liked to keep them covered up behind sunglasses. Her favourite pair seemed to be those round, John Lennon ones. Fashionable then, not now. Yet she managed to own the look – while everyone else was in Aviators or oversized celeb sunnies, Angie went retro. Old-school cool. Not that she cared about that.

  She hesitated so I grabbed her arm, seized the moment. “I’m sorry. I was an idiot.”

  “Help me out here,” she replied without missing a beat. “I’m spoilt for choice; what ‘idiot’ time are we talking about this time.” She almost smiled.

  She reclaimed her arm, I shifted from foot to foot. “Whoa, message received. Full-time idiot.”

  “No, not all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t say you were in idiot mode at the cinema.”

  “You mean when I sat in silence, in the dark, for 123 minutes?” I pulled a joker’s face. “I say it best when I saying nothing at all?”

  She looked upwards, through the roof, as though searching for answers from the universe. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I suppose I’d better narrow it down then,” I volunteered, “to the specific moment of idiot-ness I was talking about.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It was when I … y’know… asked about your parents.”

  “You mean, when you asked me who shot my parents?”

  “Yeah. That.” I dropped the joker act.

  “You’re forgiven.”

  “I am?
” I stopped dancing about in front of her. “For real?”

  She nodded.

  I exhaled and grinned. “Damn, that was easier than I thought.”

  “You think too much, Lennox Jones,” she said. “That’s your problem.”

  I had thought this would be the start of a meaningful conversation but she was off, light on her toes, dancer’s grace, somewhere else to be, somewhere better to be.

  I shouted, “Hey, Angie. Wait up.”

  Then she surprised me. She pivoted gracefully and slowed to a halt. As much as I liked to admire her on four wheels, in situations like this, I preferred her without the skateboard – she couldn’t execute the perfect escape. We fell into step, her stride almost as long as mine.

  “Let me guess. More questions?” she asked dryly, glancing over at me. “Forensic autopsy information, fingerprint database, legal-guardian paperwork?”

  I smiled and shrugged. “You know me, always wanna know more.”

  She snorted. “That’s just it. I don’t know you.”

  “Good point. I don’t know me, not any more, well, not when I’m around you,” I confessed. Then I had to laugh because this mashable-heart status was definitely not me. I was totally hardened to the charms of a gorgeous girl. Somehow, London had derailed me.

  “I’m not surprised,” retorted Angie. “I can’t keep up either. Jones or Lennox or Mavericks, like who are you, which one are you?”

  “You can call me whatever,” I said as we came to a standstill outside the classroom.

  “Okay, whatever,” she responded cheekily.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Jones, street name, knockout punch?” She cuffed me lightly under the chin, dancing from foot to foot in front of me like a boxer, aping my style. “Nah, Jones is not for real. I know a cover-up when I see one. I see through the harder, tougher, edgier, reinforced exterior.” She shaped her hands into binoculars and held them up to her eyes.