The Ant Colony Read online

Max wasn’t wearing his.

  He hit the windscreen. He smashed through it with his face. He somersaulted over the front of the bonnet and hit the ground, surrounded by falling glass that blinked like diamonds in the headlights’ glare.

  It happened so fast, but I always remember it in slow motion. In my memory it is crammed with little details.

  My hands were shaking so much I couldn’t open the door. I climbed out of the hole Max had made. There was glass and blood all over my clothes.

  “Max?” I said. “Are you all right, mate?”

  He was quiet. He was curled up in a ball on the ground.

  That’s one of the things I remember, how quiet it was after all that noise, how the slam and judder and smash had left a hole in the noise behind them after they were gone.

  I could hear the engine still running and the oblivious call of a night bird.

  I remember thinking, None of this is really happening. Somewhere in the real world I’m getting out of Max’s car at the cattle grid and walking Ringo home, just like I said I would.

  I couldn’t get him to hear me.

  I was shouting then, “HELP!” and all kinds of stuff, and there was nobody around.

  Then I remembered my phone and I crouched by the headlights to try and see what I was dialling. I couldn’t understand how to make my own phone work.

  The front of the car was caved in and dark with blood.

  I couldn’t get any signal.

  I had to walk to Max’s house across the common. I had to leave him there, curled up in the black. I ran most of the way and then I couldn’t run any more.

  It wasn’t until I got there that I realised I was bleeding. Max’s mum opened the door and she put her hands over her eyes, just for a second. Then she took my hand and I saw it was wet with blood, blood dripping from the ends of my fingers like rich paint. I’d cut my wrist on the windscreen climbing out. There was a piece of glass in there, sticking out, one of Max’s diamonds. It wasn’t so bad.

  Max’s dad said I was lucky it wasn’t an artery. He called an ambulance.

  “What happened to you?” Max’s mum said. She had her arm around me and was taking me to a chair. She’d never been that nice to me before. I was thinking that and I knew I was about to put an end to it forever.

  “The ambulance has to go to the common,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “He’s still up there,” I said. “We have to go. He’s not saying anything.”

  That’s when she went white, in an instant. Her face changed shape entirely and she said, “Oh no. No.”

  “What have you done?” she said.

  Max’s dad drove. We could see the lights of Max’s car and we bumped and rattled along towards the dome of lesser dark they were making.

  “What have you done to him?” she asked me.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel like all of me was there.

  “I told you,” she said to Max’s dad. “I told you he was dangerous. I said this would happen.”

  “Is that enough now?” she turned and shouted at me in the car. “Have you finished?” I could see the curve of her eyes glinting in the dark.

  Max’s dad didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

  I thought about what I must look like to them, this boy sitting in the back of their car with a tea towel round his arm; this boy responsible for so much pain.

  Max was still curled up. I remember his mum making noises like a wild animal. I remember her touching him so timidly, like she was afraid of what she might find.

  He rolled open under her hand, limp and boneless. His face was a mask of blood.

  I thought he was dead.

  We all did.

  In the morning, while I was still at the hospital, my mum and dad went up to the common to see for themselves what had happened. The car was there, cratered and folded up all alone in the early mist. The engine and the lights were off. I don’t know if anyone did that – Max’s dad or the ambulance driver – or if they just ran out on their own, hours later, with nobody watching. There was a patch of flat bracken where Max had landed. His blood had soaked into the earth. If they’d looked hard enough they’d have found three of his teeth.

  What they found instead was Ringo, spread out on his side, tyre tracks either side of him. Some way behind the car, cold and open-eyed and lifeless, his dry tongue flung out against the wet ground.

  They said the impact of the car didn’t leave a mark on him.

  Twenty-one (Bohemia)

  I had it coming I suppose, cos I asked Max about his scars. I couldn’t help myself. They were the things I couldn’t stop looking at on his face. “What happened to you?” I said, and I pointed to my eye and chin so he’d know what I was asking.

  “Accident,” he said.

  “No it wasn’t,” his mum said.

  “Yes it was.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  He smiled at me for the first time when I said that. He said, “It doesn’t hurt any more.”

  “What sort of accident?” I said.

  “Sam Cassidy,” his mum said from where she was standing at the sink, cutting apples into quarters, peeling them in one long twirl.

  “Don’t, Mum,” he said.

  “What do you mean, Sam Cassidy?” I said.

  “I mean the accident of ever knowing him,” she said with her back to me. “I mean the accident of living near him, of ever being nice to him, of him, full stop.”

  Boy, she was an angry one. You could tell just by the way she was treating those apples. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  So she told me. About Sam stealing Max’s car with him in it. About crashing in the dark. About Max being in hospital for ages and never being the same again. About Ringo being dead and everything.

  Max said, “Mum, you don’t have to,” and “I don’t think she wants to hear this,” but once she started talking she wasn’t going to stop.

  She said, “He broke your neck, Max. You’re lucky to be alive. You’re lucky you can walk.”

  She said, “Max lost three pints of blood. Three pints.”

  She said, “The only decent thing Sam Cassidy ever did was disappear.” She pointed her knife at me while she was talking. “That boy nearly killed my son. He spent years tormenting him and then he nearly killed him.”

  It would have been better if I’d known before. I would have preferred it if Sam hadn’t lied to me, cos I felt a bit of a fool sitting there at his best friend’s biggest-kitchen-table-ever, finding out how much his best friend hated him.

  “He didn’t mean to,” I said afterwards. “He wouldn’t have meant to.”

  “Ha!” Max’s mum said, and her voice alone could have skinned the apples. “I suppose he didn’t mean to do all the other things either. He didn’t mean to throw Max’s camera in the river, or humiliate him at school, or tell lies about him, or make sure he never got one good friend.”

  I said, “I’m sorry. But your Sam isn’t the same as mine.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  I said that my Sam would never be mean or pick on someone or take their stuff and not look after it. She looked at me like I’d be funny if I wasn’t so stupid.

  I said, “My Sam rescued me when I was locked out in the dark and he looks after me, and he walks Isabel’s dog and fixes her cupboards, and he took me to the National Gallery just so I’d like my hair, and he stopped me from being a shoplifter and he wants to help my mum and …” I looked at Max. “He talks about you a lot,” I said. “I thought you were best friends.”

  “Why would he say that?” Max said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t talk much, cos he can’t get a word in edgeways, but when he does, he talks about you.”

  “Guilt,” Max’s mum said. “Shame.”

  “And he loves his dog,” I said. “He told me all about Ringo. He said he was big enough for me to ride.”

  “He was massive,” Max said, and the way he said it was
all lispy cos of the gaps in his teeth.

  It made me so sad to think about Sam, and nobody knowing where he was, and him pretending that his dead dog and this boy that he hurt were the things he loved best in the world.

  I just couldn’t understand it at all.

  I said, “Well, I don’t know what to do now. I came all this way by myself cos I thought you would help me.”

  Max said, “Help you do what?”

  And his mum said, “What do you mean, all by yourself?”

  So first I told her about walking to the coach station in the middle of the night. I told her about blending in with other people’s families and being really good at thinking up a lie on the spot when you have to, and about being invisible, and how it’s actually quite easy if you think about it hard enough.

  She said, “Doesn’t anybody know you’re here? Your mum or your dad?”

  I said my dad would be pretty surprised to find out where I was cos he last saw me when I was a tiny baby.

  “Well, your mum then.”

  “She won’t mind too much,” I said. “She’s probably out.”

  “So she knows?”

  “No, but it’s OK. I’ll be back by tomorrow.”

  Max’s mum didn’t get it. She said, “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I told her that was cos she wasn’t my mum.

  “Well, we have to phone her,” she said. “What’s her number?”

  “It’s not working. She didn’t pay her bill.”

  She said, “There must be somebody we can call.”

  I said that’s what I wanted help with.

  “Can we call Sam’s mum and dad?” I said. “I want to tell them he’s OK.”

  She didn’t want to do that, you could just tell by the way her shoulders went up and she stopped chopping apples.

  But Max said, “Good idea,” and dialled the number. He passed me the phone while it was still ringing.

  The room went very quiet apart from that ringing in my ear, and then a voice said, “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice, and she was quiet and trembly and sad.

  “Is that Sam’s mum?” I said, and she said it was and who was I?

  “My name’s Bo,” I said. “Bohemia Hoban. I’m a friend of Sam’s.”

  There wasn’t any noise at the other end, it was just nothing, and I thought the phone might’ve gone dead.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  I looked at Max’s mum’s back then, at the way she’d stopped moving, and at Max’s dark blue eyes. I said, “I called cos I wanted to tell you where he is.”

  Twenty-two (Sam)

  Cherry didn’t laugh when I finished telling her. She watched me drag my stupid, nasty, unforgivable self into my brand new life. She listened. And when I went quiet she said, “Shit, Sam, that’s unbelievable.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She asked me what happened next.

  “Max was in a coma for three days,” I said.

  “But he didn’t die though.”

  “No. He woke up. I was waiting in the corridor, but they wouldn’t let me see him.”

  “Not surprised,” Cherry said.

  “Me neither. He broke his neck.”

  An ambulance went past on the road, lights and sirens on. It shattered the quiet of the park.

  “Is he paralysed?’ she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I heard he was learning to walk with a stick. I heard all the damage was on one side of his body.”

  “Poor Max,” she said.

  That’s what my mum said when she found out the truth about everything. She was so relieved her son hadn’t been hurt, and so disgusted at the person her son had turned out to be.

  “Poor Max,” she said, sometimes out loud and sometimes without even having to speak. “I can’t believe we didn’t listen to him. I’m so ashamed you did this.”

  My dad didn’t speak at all. I think he kept out of my way. I don’t think he wanted to look at me.

  We buried Ringo. I couldn’t stop crying and they just glared at me over the grave from the other side, the mound of newly dug earth between us, their eyes like stones.

  I think they hated me. For taking their love all these years and not being who they thought I was. I’m sure they hated me.

  “What happened then?” Cherry asked.

  “Well, everyone knew straightaway. News like that travels fast in a small town.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Not much, not to me. Everyone kept away. It was something to talk about. It was something beginning with, ‘Oh my GOD, have you heard?’”

  “What about your friends?”

  “You know what? That’s the worst bit. Some of them thought it was funny. They said they’d miss the dog more than they’d miss Max and that he didn’t deserve a car anyway, stuff like that.”

  I remember listening to them and thinking, Are these the people I’ve been trying to impress? Am I like them?

  Truth was, I was worse.

  “Did you see Max again?” she asked me.

  “Yes. Once.”

  “What happened?”

  “I said sorry.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, I don’t forgive you.”

  “I bet he did. You can’t blame him. And then?”

  “And then I disappeared.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “I can see you,” she said.

  “OK, I came here.”

  “Because you thought your mum and dad were never going to forgive you, and Max was never going to forgive you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Because you couldn’t live with yourself any more, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jesus, Sam, what a mess.”

  I looked at the path between my feet, at the dead leaves and litter under the bench. I laughed, sort of quietly. “Yeah, because guess who was here when I arrived?”

  She shrugged. “Me and Mick and Steve and Isabel and Bohemia.”

  “And Doormat.”

  “God, OK, and Doormat.”

  “And me. I was here.”

  “Oh, I get it.”

  “I can’t run away,” I said. “I’m still responsible. It’s still my fault, wherever I am.”

  Cherry sighed and looked away from me at some random point in the sky. “When did you work that out?” she said.

  “Don’t know. Just now.”

  She said, “The only way not to live with yourself is to get so out of it you can’t remember your own name. Even that doesn’t last very long. Trust me, I know.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to give your method a miss if you don’t mind.”

  Cherry looked at me and smiled, and I could see she was thinking about Bohemia at the same time because it was the saddest smile I’d ever seen.

  “You’re a clever kid,” she said. “And I don’t mind at all. I’m thinking of doing the same thing myself. If she comes back, I’ll change, that’s a promise.”

  It was quiet for a minute and then she said, “Where the hell do you think she’s gone?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  She said, “I’ve done a runner so many times. I never thought about how it would feel to be the one left behind.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke and warm breath out into the cold air. “Is it anything like you imagined?”

  I said I tried not to imagine it.

  “I suppose when you run away and pretend to disappear,” she said, “you pretend that everything you left behind disappears too. But it doesn’t.”

  We looked at each other. Cherry was right. Bohemia was gone and nothing else had disappeared. It was all still there. We were still there, waiting on a park bench. The others were still trapped in Isabel’s kitchen, all of us watching the stopped clocks until Bohemia walked through the door and made th
em start again.

  I realised that what Isabel had been trying to tell me about running, Bohemia had shown me first hand. And that maybe the more we sat there and thought about it, the more Cherry and I saw that our new lives were exactly the same as our old ones, because we were still in them.

  “Come on,” she said, getting up. “I can’t sit here any more. We’ve got to do something.”

  Everyone was in the same place when we got back, in exactly the same position. Mick tried to give Cherry a hug, but she kind of slipped out of it, under his arm, and she said, “I can’t do that right now. Don’t comfort me, for God’s sake,”

  He said, “Sorry.”

  Cherry looked at Isabel and she said, “What are we going to say to them? To the police?”

  “I don’t know,” Isabel said.

  The room felt wretched and airless.

  Steve said, “The first thing they’ll do is search the park, and the wasteland between us and the canal, and other people’s houses.”

  “Wasteland?” Cherry said.

  Isabel scowled at him. “That’s a bit harsh,” she said. “You don’t pull any punches, do you.”

  “OK, maybe someone will remember selling her a ticket somewhere,” Steve said, “and then we can find out where she’s gone.”

  I couldn’t look at Cherry suddenly. It was like she couldn’t hold herself together much longer. She was making these little noises while she breathed and she had her hands over her mouth like she was trying to push the sounds back in.

  “Do you want us to phone them?” Isabel said.

  “I want her back,” Cherry said, and her voice was different.

  “I know, dear,” said Isabel, and she squeezed Cherry’s hand across the table.

  Cherry said, “I want her back so I can look after her.”

  “Yes.”

  Cherry looked at Mick and her eyes were so scared, so hollow with it, she looked like a different person. “I didn’t look after her,” she said.

  Mick looked at Isabel and then at Cherry. Isabel didn’t let go of her hand. “You did your best, baby,” he said.

  Cherry was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”