Heart (7 page)

“Choose careful, lad. You don’t want to sit in a truck o’ pig shite all the way to Ballymaloe.”

Pig shit aside, Dex was wary of the drivers. What if they checked their loads before they set off? And what if they took him right back into town? He wouldn’t last a day on the streets of Hatfield. His own kind would turn him back to Braden in a heartbeat. And the gorjers? He’d only ever known one he could trust.

A broad-shouldered man with tattoos and a bandana emerged from the service station. He walked toward one of the trucks. It was the truck nearest to where Dex crouched. The shabbiest truck, the one with the flapping tarpaulin. He couldn’t believe his luck. That lorry would be the easiest to get into. He had his hunting knife in his pocket. All it would take was a little cut to the already frayed securing ropes, and he could slip right in.

He tensed, ready to spring, and watched the driver carefully. If he checked his load now, chances were he’d check it again. It was a risk, a big one, but it turned out not to matter. The driver walked straight to the cab and hauled himself up into his seat without sparing a glance for his cargo.

Dex sprang from the bush and sprinted across the floodlit car park. His footsteps were deafening on the spongy, fresh tarmac, and he waited for a hand on his shoulder, a shout, anything to signal he’d been seen, but none came.

He reached the back of the lorry and ducked around the side, feeling for the loose tarpaulin. He found it, flicked open his knife, and sliced through the ropes. The whole exercise took only seconds, but to Dex, it seemed like a lifetime.

He chanced a glance over his shoulder and, seeing no one, shimmied up the side of the lorry and slipped into the drafty trailer. The lorry was full of cardboard boxes. He wove his way through them to the very middle of the trailer. Once there, he stopped and counted the frantic beat of his heart until it slowed to a dull roar. There was no sound from the outside. He’d made it. He was safe, for now, at least.

Exhausted, he hunkered down behind a giant cardboard box. Blood on his shoes caught his eye, and though he knew it wasn’t hers, he thought of Cora lying dead in the woods. Thought of the horses he’d left behind. Tauna, Carric, and their stable mates. Without him, most of them would surely starve.

The gravity of what he’d done hit him like a kick to the chest. He shook and tears streamed in hot tracks down his face. The lorry rumbled to life, and only his fist in his mouth muffled his scream.

Nine

T
HE
LORRY
stopped around dawn. The driver got out, but Dex stayed huddled in the back, holding his breath and wound so tight every nerve in his body felt like it would snap, until he felt safe enough to shuffle to the side of the trailer.

Cautiously, he peered through the tarpaulin and scanned the car park. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so he took a chance, slithered out of the trailer, and crept around the cab of the lorry. He hadn’t heard the driver lock up, and sure enough, when he tried the door, it opened right up. After another furtive glance around, he swiped a jacket, a can of Coke, and a wallet from the passenger seat.

There wasn’t much in the wallet—twenty quid—but it served its purpose. He used it to pay a foreign truck driver to buy him a sandwich and take him the rest of the way to London. The Polish driver didn’t speak much English, but when he let Dex out of the cab in the capital, he told him he was in Regent’s Park.

Dex watched the lorry disappear into the heavy traffic, and then, lacking any better ideas, he shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking. He walked all day, and by nightfall, he found himself in a busy shopping district bustling with commuters and tourists. Alarmed, he trailed to a stop. He’d never seen such crowded streets. Living out on the site, he didn’t mix much with the outside world, at least not like this. People jostled and shoved him, taking no notice of him at all. Instinctively, he shrank back, edging away from the pavement until he found the blocked-up entrance of a disused alleyway.

He crouched down, hugging his knees to his chest. His heart pounded. He’d escaped, he was free. But what the fuck did he do now? He had no money, no food, and no place to sleep.

Not even a rusty bloody caravan.

Despair swept over him. He pushed his face into his knees and wrapped his arms over his head. He’d run for his life, only to confirm what he already knew: there was nothing else out there.

Not for him.

D
EX
SPENT
the night huddled behind a rubbish skip, and the pattern continued in the week or so that followed. By day, he walked the streets with no care of where he was going, and when night fell, he followed the lead of the other vagrants and lay down in the shiny shop doorways, absorbing the heat from the steam grates.

Eventually his aimless wandering took him away from the affluent shopping and tourist district and in the direction the stars told him was northeast.

From time to time, he managed to steal food from the market stalls, but most days, he went hungry, so hungry he felt like his stomach was trying to eat itself. Hunger was a way of life for him, but this was different. Before, he’d had things to distract him. Chores. Hooking. Violence. A world of fear, but alone on the streets now, all he felt was the destructive pain of his empty belly.

When the weather turned too wet to sleep outside, Dex took shelter in the Underground stations, particularly the tunnels that took commuters to the escalators that led belowground. The tunnels were light and warm, and the station security guards didn’t venture far from the platforms.

One night he sat, half-dozing, with his back to the wall and his head in his hands. People passed him by. Some even left handfuls of pocket change at his feet, but he didn’t look up until a man nudged him with his foot.

“Working boy? How much?”

Dex blinked under the harsh fluorescent lights of the tunnel. It took a moment to comprehend what the man meant. Then it was all too easy to nod and follow the man into the public toilets. At this time of night, they were deserted, and Dex found himself alone with the man.

“How much for head?”

“Thirty.”

The man shook his head. “For that much, I fuck you. I have protection.”

Dex thought quickly. He’d never negotiated a price for himself before. “Forty for both.”

“Done.”

It didn’t take long, less than ten minutes, and the man wasn’t the last to sense Dex could be more than a simple beggar. Dex turned two more tricks that night, and more in the days that followed before the police finally moved him on.

He tried again at the next station, but this time, he picked up a bad john, the kind of john who got off on blood and pain. The john slammed him face-first into a tiled wall and wrapped his hand around his throat, choking him until he passed out. He woke up on the filthy toilet floor, bleeding and with every crumpled note he’d earned robbed from the back pocket of his tatty jeans.

He gave up hooking after that. The experience was nothing he hadn’t been through before, but without Mikey and Braden scooping him up and shoving him back out there, he lost his nerve. He left the area and moved on, his head clearer than it had been since he’d escaped the woods of Hertfordshire. It had felt normal to turn a few tricks, for a while, at least. Reminded him who he was. What he deserved. And when the change in his pocket finally ran out, the hunger in his belly became easier to bear.

He’d been in London a month when he drifted into a borough a fellow tramp told him was Stoke Newington. The borough was brightly colored and bohemian, with a heady sense of danger. Though Dex lived in the shadows, snatching sleep by day and lurking at night, he felt oddly at home.

To survive, he returned to his roots, to foraging, but this time, the urban kind, skulking in alleyways and restaurant bin yards. He was passing aimlessly through a dimly lit backstreet one night when his daze was broken by the sight of a man not much older than him being slung onto the pavement from the open back doors of a restaurant kitchen.

Startled, Dex took a step back, flattening himself against a wall. The man on the ground scrambled to his feet as his assailant burst out on to the street.

“Bugger off,” the new man on the scene growled. “Thieving arsehole. Get the fuck out of here before I kick some decency into you.”

From his place in the shadows, Dex watched the thief slink away. The scent of cigarette smoke reached his nose, telling him the second man had sat down on the back steps and lit a fag, leaving him two choices: stay right where he was until the man went inside, or step out of the shadows and slip past in the hope the man wouldn’t see where he’d come from.

The rumble of thunder made up his mind. Getting his clothes wet was a pain in the arse. He’d take suspicion and a few harsh words over that any day.

He hoped to pass right by the man unseen, but, of course, nothing was ever that easy. The man called out as soon as he saw him.

“Hey, kid. You looking for work?”

Dex glanced behind him, unsure if the civil question was meant for him. “Um, pardon?”

His voice was scratchy and hoarse. It was the first time he’d spoken in days, and he still had the cough he’d picked up from his night spent naked in the back of Mikey’s van.

The man appraised him through a cloud of smoke. “You look like you need a job, and I’m down a pot washer. Interested? It’s hard bloody work, but I’ll pay you.”

Dumbly, Dex nodded. He’d never had a real job before, but he knew hard work, and he knew how to wash a pot.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Sure about that? Don’t want the council giving me grief.”

“I’m sure,” Dex hedged. For once, he was telling the truth, but he had no way of proving it. He’d never had the documents that proved who he was, how old he was, and where he came from. Braden had all that, if they’d ever existed at all.

It seemed an age before the man flicked his cigarette into the gutter and got to his feet. “Come on, then.”

Dex followed him into the kitchen. A wall of heat hit him. A thick wave of air, heavy with the scent of cooking food. Steaming pots on the stove. Meat on the flaming chargrill. He was sure he could even see chips in the fryer. A painful growl of hunger gripped his gut. He stumbled but kept walking, all the way through the kitchen until they came to a small, carpeted staircase.

The man stopped and gestured for him to go ahead. Dex hesitated. How many times had he preceded Braden or Mikey like a lamb to the slaughter?

“You’re going to need some whites,” the man said.

Dex stared at him, trying to read his slightly bored expression. The man was big and heavyset, with a beer belly hanging over his checked trousers. His face was young, but his gut gave him away as being at least thirty years older than Dex.

The man sighed. “Suit yerself. I’ll bring ’em down. You can change in the bogs. Wait here.”

Dex waited, and the man soon reappeared with a pair of patterned trousers, a white T-Shirt, and a short-sleeved white jacket that looked
huge
. With his other hand, the man offered him a pair of black rubber shoes.

“Crocs,” he said. “Stop you slipping by the dishwasher.”

Dex took the pile of clothes and changed in the small cloakroom by the kitchen. The jacket and trousers were far too big for him, and the man—
Rick
—let out a deep guffaw when he emerged.

“Bloody hell. You look like a refugee. Come here.”

Dex stood awkward and tense as Rick rolled his sleeves up and folded the waistband of his trousers down over a rudimentary belt made from knotted cling film, and then he followed him back through the kitchen area to a sink full of dirty pots and pans.

“Get through that lot before service ends, and you’ve got yourself a gig.”

Rick said it like a challenge, but Dex knew it wouldn’t take long to wash up the pans. Some of them had burned-on grease, but with plenty of hot water at his disposal, it would come away easily enough.

He got started, and as the evening progressed, he kept his head down and cleaned anything that came his way. At some point, a chef brought him a cup of coffee and a bowl of chips, and later, when all the work was done for the night, Rick reappeared with his clothes. Clothes that looked and smelled suspiciously clean.

“There’s a machine and a dryer upstairs, lad. The missus was washing the lunchtime linens anyway.”

Dex took his clothes and wrapped his arms around them. They were all he had in the world, and he didn’t know whether to be grateful or annoyed. Or bloody embarrassed. “Thanks.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dex.”

“Here you go, Dex.” Rick slapped a twenty-pound note in his hand. “Good work today. Come back tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. Show up clean, on time, and ready to work, and I’ll start paying you properly.”

Ten