Dream Guy (15 page)

“Promise me you have nothing to do with this.”

“I promise. I don’t know where he got it from. I don’t know who he’s selling it to and I don’t want to know. We hardly talk anymore.”

Liesel was irrepressible. “So what was he doing hanging around you the other day? He came home to look at the Lamborghini, then Joe took him up to his room. It was Thursday night, wasn’t it?”

“He came to look at the Lamborghini. That’s all. He didn’t say anything about drugs. He just talked about wanting to fly in a Learjet. That’s all.”

None of the children had ever seen their mother look so forbidding. Her eyes were chill, her mouth a harsh line in a hard face, so different from the warmth they were used to. Joe glanced at Ben. Even he was frightened by her expression.

“If I find you have lied to me, Joe, there will be consequences. You understand.”

“I understand.”

In a way, it was a relief when Liesel blabbed. It was an even greater relief when Sue Knightley absolutely forbade Joe from inviting Smokey around to the house. She tried calling his house again after supper, but there was no answer. Joe went upstairs and rang Nell on his mobile. Either she would already know what was going on, or he would be preparing her for a storm the following day. That was how he justified it to himself, but he knew that he was really phoning so that she could tell him what to do.

She was in, and he gave a succinct explanation of what Liesel had seen. Nell swore. She hadn’t heard anything about this, having spent the day visiting relatives.

Joe didn’t think much of her advice. She wanted him to dream Smokey into a safe zone where he could neither sell drugs nor get caught. When pressed, she thought a safe zone would be like a bubble or a space capsule, something totally cut off from all other human contact. She warned Joe against going anywhere near Smokey.

“Let him sweat it out on his own. Don’t talk to him, just isolate him. Try to control his environment.”

Joe didn’t know whether this was possible. He thought back with fond regret of his first dream when he’d had no constraints. His mind had been totally free, inspired by Crosbie’s pictures—which gave him his next idea. He said goodbye to Nell and went down to his mother. He put the phone back in its cradle and asked if he could take a look at her art books.

“Why do you want to look at those?” she asked, bemused. She’d studied history of art at university. She’d built up quite a collection of catalogues and reference books, but she’d hardly ever looked at them, not since she’d taken her solicitor’s exams just after Ben had been born. “God, it’s over fifteen years since I looked at any of those seriously.”

“It’s a project. Art, you know. Books are easier than the Internet sometimes. You can look at each picture for longer somehow.”

She led him to the master bedroom where all the big books were tucked away in a bookcase on her side of the bed. He took three and asked if it was okay for him to take them to his room.

“Sure. You can hang on to them if you really want them. Ben’s not interested, and we can always dig them out from your pit if Liesel needs them.”

Joe searched. He was looking for a picture in which Smokey would be unobtrusive but alone. He might need food. He would need shelter. Then Joe smiled and settled down to his drawing board. He started sketching, creating a set of triangles across the page. Then he drew in some curves and there was an arcade on the top half of the paper with four arches. Shelter.

In the bottom half of the drawing, he outlined bananas, around twenty in bunches, sitting so that they would not bruise. To the left, he drew a cascade, a man-made fountain. Finally, in the center, he drew a plinth. On the plinth he lay Smokey down in a deep sleep, wearing his baseball cap as normal and a jacket over a T-shirt. But he made Smokey’s legs those of a goat, hairy and tipped with dainty cloven hooves. Curled in his hand was a long tail, thin as a whip and tipped with a small dark flap of flesh shaped like a spade from a deck of cards.

Joe got out his watercolors and gave the painting a series of washes. The sky was a murky pond green, the land was drab olive, the arcade a musty yellow color, the bananas vibrant and Smokey black from head to toe, more like a shadow than a breathing boy. He sat back and looked at the painting. Something was missing. So on the horizon, he painted in a steam-train, a great smoke trail billowing into the sky.

Now it felt finished.

When Joe woke up, he half expected to be in that strange courtyard, but he was in his own bed. When he checked the picture, it looked exactly as it had when he finished it. Then he looked harder at the statue of Smokey. It was almost imperceptible, but Joe was convinced he could see the chest of the statue rising and falling with the regular breathing of a person in a deep sleep. And he thought—but he wasn’t absolutely sure—that he could make out the distinctive white wires running from earpieces to a pocket inside the sleeper’s jacket which indicated the presence of an iPod. Weirdly, lying beside the plinth where Smokey was sleeping, there was a head that Joe knew he had not drawn. It was the sightless head of a woman with what appeared to be a stone fruit bowl instead of hair. She looked like some sort of Greek goddess.

He flipped his sketchbook shut. The picture was dry now, and Joe wanted it with him, just to check that things were okay in Smokeyville. And he could also show it to Nell and see if she thought it was a safe enough place for the moment.

* * * *

Joe did not have another chance to check up on the picture until break time. The figure on the plinth had turned its back on the table full of bananas. Joe counted up the number of bananas. There were now fewer in each bunch, and he could see the traces of at least two banana skins tossed aside in the arcade. Smokey was absent from English. No one had seen him that day, but this concerned no one particularly, least of all Thomas, who was clearly delighted to be minus a pupil who made the presence of a wasp in the classroom seem like a minor diversion, even when all the girls stood on their chairs shrieking and batting their arms about.

At lunch, Nell found Joe. Although she was in school uniform, he could not quite dispel the image of her in that little black dress. Her hair was down and fell across her face as she flicked through the sketchbook to Joe’s picture. What they saw gave both of them a shock.

Smokey’s torso was pressed up against the front of the painting, his arms outstretched above his head, banging furiously against the surface, as though he were behind glass. They watched then as Smokey ran around the edges of the painting, disappearing between the arches of the arcade, bouncing back into the center, then up to the edge of the sky, pushing as if he could lift a lid off the top of the picture to escape from it. They could see that all the bananas had now been eaten, and most of the skins were lying around the ground or on the tabletop, smushed and browning, with the clear imprint of dainty little hooves squelched into them.

Nell kept her mouth clamped tightly shut, but her shoulders shook as she watched Smokey racing around the picture, teetering on his hooves. She started snorting and holding her stomach when he turned his back on the front of the picture, did a handstand and tried kicking at the surface. Joe half expected the picture to smash like a pane of glass hit by a stone, but it held, shuddering a little as the solid little goat’s feet struck over and over again at the enclosing air. But they both sobered up when Smokey’s arms gave way and he fell. He landed in a heap on the ground, and his baseball cap rolled away. Then he cradled his head in his arms and started to sob. Joe was glad he could not hear him.

“You have to keep him there until we’ve found the drugs.” Nell closed up the sketchbook and handed it back to Joe. He slipped it into his bag.

“There’s no chance of getting them. Liesel saw him dealing in the park yesterday and my mum will have phoned his mum by now.”

“Do you think they know he’s missing?” Nell folded her arms and gnawed at her lips. Joe felt bad about causing her anxiety—again. He shrugged and ran his fingers through his already-ragged hair.

Neither Nell nor Joe could concentrate for the rest of the afternoon. Ms. McKechnie made it abundantly clear how little she thought of their distraction during her lesson, a distraction which caused Nell to slip up on delivering an answer to a fairly simple equation in class. Her false step inspired McKechnie to announce an extra algebra test, raising a groan of mingled disbelief and fury from the other students in the class.

Then it was Crosbie’s lesson. Joe made his way there, half hoping that Smokey would be there, but he wasn’t. Nor was Crosbie, and Elphick was doing cover, so there was no chance of doing anything other than filling in worksheets on citizenship. It was dark by the time the class finished. Joe caught the bus home and let himself into the empty house. He had the place to himself for another couple of hours.

First he checked on the picture of Smokey. He was back on his plinth, asleep. Joe wanted to give him some fresh food. He thought about rubbing out the banana skins and drawing in some more food, but it would probably wreck the page. But Joe remembered a lesson in symmetry. He dug around in his portfolio chest and found a simple mirrored pane of glass. He positioned it so that it reflected his sketch then drew the reflection on the opposite page so that now the arcades were on the left of the picture, the statue remained in the center but now faced backward and the cascade tumbled down the right hand side of the page. He sketched in pizza, some chocolate fudge cake and a big bottle of mineral water. He’d thought about Coke, but the red was going to be too virulent. He colored it and left the picture to dry. When Smokey woke up, everything would be different, reversed, but at least he’d have a decent meal. Joe felt bad about messing with Smokey, but then he remembered Liesel’s account of what had been happening in the park. He ripped the old picture out of the book, scrunched it into a ball and chucked it through the mini-hoop over his bin.

Joe then turned his attention to his homework, working his way through McKechnie’s batch of sums first. She’d be the least forgiving of his teachers if he failed to do his homework. It took nearly an hour, and he hadn’t quite finished when he heard the front door opening. He looked at the Smokey picture and put it away, just as he heard his mother summoning him downstairs.

Mrs. Knightley was in the front room, looking unusually disheveled. She was wearing her office clothes, a grey tweed suit and black silk shirt. She had her usual silver chain on with the pendant Dad had given her when Ben had been born, but her dark hair was wild and her eyeliner was a little smudged. Joe’s uncles were always saying that Joe looked like her, but he couldn’t see it. This evening, suddenly, he could.

“What’s up, Mum?”

“You haven’t heard, then?” She stopped pacing and leaned back on the arm of the sofa, her arms folded.

“About what?”

“Silas. Smokey. He’s in the hospital. He went wild this morning. Maria had to get him sedated and into the psychiatric ward of the Royal this afternoon, so that’s where he is.”

Nausea swept over Joe. He doubled over, his hand over his mouth, but the wave passed and he sat down in the armchair, curled up like a hedgehog.

“There’s more,” said his mother, less harshly. “The police have been called in. Maria found over half a kilo of cocaine in his room.”

Joe looked up at his mother, his face suddenly haggard with evident shock. “You know I don’t know anything about all this.”

“I hope you don’t, Joe, and I hope that’s what you’ll be able to tell the police. They’re coming over to question you about all this sometime this evening. The sergeant who rang me up said about eight p.m. Maria had to provide a list of all of Smokey’s friends, and you’re on it. So I really hope you were telling me the truth, and I also hope you’ll have the wit to tell them the whole truth.”

Then she hauled Joe through to the kitchen to help her get supper ready, and he spent the next hour and a half watching the clock inexorably tick toward eight, too distracted to pay any heed to the rest of the family’s speculations about where Smokey had got the drugs and what was going to happen to him.

Chapter Thirteen

Dr. Dolon

Two police officers came to interview Joe, and they behaved nothing like his expectations. They were plainclothes detectives from the drug squad, in their early thirties, dressed as if they were about to go clubbing—the man wearing a T-shirt and Levi’s with Camper shoes and the woman in red tights and a swirly, patterned mini-dress. They didn’t try any right-on talk. They just got on with the interview in a rather clinical fashion. They seemed to accept Joe’s tale of a disintegrating friendship and his rather lame explanation of bringing Smokey back to the house on Thursday evening to catch up on GCSE coursework. He didn’t exactly
plan
to conceal the Lamborghini’s existence, but he saw that it would arouse all sorts of suspicion, and if his mother had said nothing about it to them, there was no reason why he should.

Mrs. Knightley came up to his room that night. He was ready for her. The police interrogation had sharpened him, and he was still feeling refreshed from his weekend’s uneventful sleep. She quizzed him about the Lamborghini, about Silas, about drugs, about his cartoons, about every aspect of his life, gnawing at inconsistencies, tugging at the loose threads in the responses he gave.

When she had gone, Joe shook out the carpet and lay down, still dressed. He closed his eyes and the first thing that came to mind was Nell’s face. He did not know how she would feel about seeing him now, but he was beyond merely
wanting
to see her. He ached for her.

When he opened his eyes, he was still on the carpet. Nell was sitting there too, legs crossed, arms propped on her knees, deep in a book, her hair hooked behind her ears and swinging forward against her cheek. She was wearing a maroon fleece top, striped green and maroon pajama bottoms and sheepskin moccasins. He raised his head and she gave him a thoroughly unimpressed look.