The Hunted, page 20
‘What’s your name?’ Tarrin asked.
‘Davina,’ she said. ‘Miss Davina.’
Then he knew who she was and where he had seen her. The poster, outside the club.
Miss Davina ‘Bo-Bo’ Peep. The cutest thing on two legs. And there had been a photograph of the prettiest girl you had ever seen (even prettier than Miss Virginia Two Shoes), dressed up in ribbons and bows.
He remembered what Deet had said about her.
‘Forty if she’s a day, kid. Forty at least and then some.’
‘She’s had the PP, Deet?’
‘You betcha,’ he’d said. ‘And you think of the money she’s making. There’s one rich little girl.’
Miss Davina had taken her tinted glasses off now and set them beside her drink, on the bar. Tarrin stared at her, looking right into her eyes.
‘Why do you stare so, honey?’
He looked around again, at all the children there.
None of them were children at all. They were all PPs, their growth stopped forever.
Forty if she’s a day, kid.
Forty years old and then some.
He couldn’t stop himself from staring at her. She looked so pretty, so sweet, so nice.
Forty if she’s a day . . .
She sipped at her drink and then put it back on the bar. Whatever he had found absent in her eyes, she had seen in his.
‘Good lordy,’ she said. ‘You’re real. You’re real, aren’t you? You’re real?’
The room fell quiet. An uncomfortable silence ensued as the customers turned or swivelled in their chairs and looked at the boy at the bar, sitting next to Miss D.
‘Is he real?’
‘She say he was real?’
‘He real, is he? Isn’t he a PP?’
Tarrin looked back at them, a knot tightening in his stomach, feeling inexplicably afraid, not knowing if he was afraid more of them or of what they had become.
They were men and women; old men and old women in some cases. They were professional children, entertainers, people who sold an image of childhood to those who could have no families of their own. They were adults in children’s bodies.
For an awful moment Tarrin felt that they would rise from their chairs, rise as one person, advance on him, take him, lynch him, destroy him for being the reality of what they were only the appearance – avenge themselves on him for still having the opportunity which had been taken from them . . .
The opportunity to grow up.
But they didn’t seem resentful, they just seemed curious, and wistful, and maybe a little sad to see this reminder of who and what they had once been. Then, one by one, they turned away and resumed their games, their conversations and their drinks.
Miss Davina sipped at her whisky and ordered another.
‘Want one, honey?’
‘I’m OK – thanks.’
His juice was barely touched. He watched her drink. She was old enough to be his mother, maybe even his grandmother, yet she looked . . . she was . . . just a girl.
‘So what brings you here, honey?’
‘I just . . . found it.’
‘No one told you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re on the run, aren’t you? There’s someone after you.’
He nodded.
‘Someone own you?’
Tarrin hesitated. He wondered how much it was safe to tell her. But before he could answer, a voice rang out from a dark corner of the bar.
‘You cheated!’
‘I didn’t cheat!’
‘You cheated! I saw you! You did!’
An argument had broken out between two of the card players. They were sitting at their table, squabbling like any two children over a game of snap. Yet the game was poker, and there was money on the table, and the two boys playing the game were not boys at all, but men, maybe thirty or forty or fifty years old, and there were two or three thousand units at stake.
‘I’m telling you, that wasn’t your card!’
‘And I’m telling you it was!’
One of the two boys lurched to his feet, knocking against the table as he did so and overturning a bottle of beer. It rolled off and fell to the floor, clattering but not breaking, spilling brown liquid and foam.
‘Hey! You two! That’s enough!’
The barman hurried out from behind the bar to fetch the doorman to stop the trouble. Both of the card players were on their feet now, squaring up to each other. One pushed the other on the shoulder with the heel of his hand, the other retaliated in kind. Tarrin watched, fascinated and a little horrified. They stood fighting like two little boys, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee quarrelling over a rattle.
‘You do that again, I’ll kill you!’
They were both drunk and bleary and by the look of them had been drinking for most of the night.
It’s way past your bedtime, Tarrin couldn’t help but think. You ought to be tucked up and fast asleep by now.
The doorman hurried over to break up the trouble. His adult stature allowed him to tower over everybody in the room. He had to stoop slightly or his head would have touched the ceiling.
‘OK, gentlemen, OK. What seems to be the problem here?’
‘He started it.’
‘Did not!’
‘He was cheating.’
‘I was not! He was the one who was cheating. He was!’
‘OK, OK . . . I think you’ve both had enough, gents, let’s call it a night now, huh?’
Reluctantly, sulkily, the two boys gathered up their things, their money, their coats, and first one and then, after an interval, the other staggered out into the night.
As he left, the second boy swore at the doorman, letting fly with a great long stream of threats and expletives, telling him what he would do to him if he ever caught him in the dark.
The doorman ignored him.
‘Goodnight now, sir,’ he said.
The boy went out in the street, almost walked into a dustbin, then lurched on his way, looking like a drunken, bad-tempered child, who should never have been let near a glass of alcohol, but who had opened up the drinks cabinet while his parents had been out.
Miss Davina smiled. ‘They’re always quarrelling,’ she said. ‘They start off all right, but it always ends in a fight.’
‘Who are they?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘It’s Baby-Face Chester and Little Joe.’
‘What do they do though?’
‘Everybody’s favourite ragamuffins – the naughtiest boys on earth. The two little rascals you wish you’d had. They do a comedy act and work the clubs. Or people hire them for parties and they fall in the trifle and have food fights and things like that.’
‘Are they brothers?’ Tarrin asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
Tarrin sipped at his orange juice. He watched with fascination as a boy drinking alone at a table extracted an expensive-looking cigar from his pocket. It was in a small tin tube. He unscrewed the top, took the cigar out, smelt its aroma, clipped the end, put it into his mouth, then lit it with his lighter. The cigar seemed huge in his hand. Yet he seemed unaware of any incongruity, and he went on smoking, quite unselfconsciously, as he sipped his brandy and read his newspaper.
Further down along the bar two girls, who looked no more than ten or eleven years old, were perched on bar stools, drinking cocktails with cherries and little paper umbrellas in them. One seemed to be commiserating with the other, whose heavily made-up face was streaked with dried tears.
‘He said he loved me,’ she told her friend. ‘He told me he loved me and we could have a life together. And then he left me for her!’
She glared towards the far corner of the bar, where a boy and a girl sat together in the shadows, staring into each other’s eyes, holding each other’s hands.
‘Men!’ the girl at the bar complained to her friend. ‘You can’t trust them!’
A boy sitting along from them looked up from his glass of wine, turned his head in their direction and said, ‘Oh yeah? And you think women are any better? Because if you do, I could tell you stories . . .’
‘Leave us alone,’ the girl’s friend said. ‘We’re not talking to you. We don’t want to hear your stories. And mind your own business.’
Then she beckoned the bar-boy over.
‘Same again, Jim,’ she said. ‘Large ones.’
Tarrin couldn’t help but feel that the whole scene before his eyes was contrived, unreal, that at any moment the director would step from behind the scenery and shout, ‘Cut! OK! Stop the camera! Not bad, but let’s go again on that one, and little more pizzazz in it this time, boys and girls.’
But it was real.
‘A penny for them—’
Miss Davina had been watching his face all the while. She was smiling now. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘Oh, I don’t know . . . just how . . .’
‘You don’t want to be like us?’
‘It’s not that.’
‘You don’t like us?’
‘No, no, it’s just . . .’
‘You feel sorry for us. You pity us. And, in another way, you’re very afraid of us too?’
Tarrin didn’t answer her. He looked down and he toyed with his glass, moving it around the bar, watching the damp circles it made.
‘And you wouldn’t like to be like us . . .’
‘Nobody wants to die, I suppose,’ Tarrin said. ‘And nobody wants to grow old either. But maybe nobody really wants to be a child forever, either, though they maybe thought so once . . .’
‘So what does everyone want, honey?’
‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know if they know either. Why . . . that is . . . when . . . did you . . .?’
‘Have the PP? Long time ago, honey, when you were just a gleam in your daddy’s eye. My parents wanted me to have it. They didn’t want their little girl to grow up. I was always going to be my daddy’s little girl. They intended it for the best, I guess.’
‘Are they . . .?’
‘No. They’re dead now. You can only postpone it – maybe for a long time, but it still happens to everyone in the end. Come on.’
She finished her drink and got to her feet. Tarrin hesitated.
‘Where are you . . .?’
‘I’m going home. You want to come home with me?’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘Come on, honey. I’ll hide you. You’ll be safe there. Look, I’m old enough to be your mother,’ the little girl said, and her little girl’s eyes looked at him with compassion and some sadness.
‘Well, you see . . .’
‘Where else have you got to go, kid?’ she said.
Tarrin hesitated still, not knowing if he could trust her.
‘Come on, honey. Like I say, I’m old enough to be your mother. Come home with me. I get lonely sometimes. I always wanted a kid of my own. I’ll take care of you. You can be my boy. You can hide away there. You can grow up. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Then when you’re big and tall and starting shaving, you’ll be safe. You’ll be grown up. They’ll all leave you alone. And you can look after your poor, old ma. And that’ll be me!’
She giggled and Tarrin smiled too at the absurdity of this pretty little girl being the mother to some hulking and possibly moody adolescent.
‘What do you say, honey? Because I’m going now. I need my beauty sleep.’
Miss Davina gathered her coat about her. It was soft and expensive, with a fake fur collar, which perfectly framed her gorgeous curls and her pretty little face. She picked her tinted glasses up from the bar.
‘Well, honey?’
Still he hesitated. He wondered whether he could trust her promise of safety. Yet where else did he have to go. His only other choices were the hunters on the streets or a cat basket back at the Hartingers’ – prey or pet. He wanted to be neither.
Tarrin nodded and got to his feet. He was a little taller than her. Not by much, just a few centimetres.
‘Thank you. If I could stay for a while . . .’
‘Let’s go then, honey,’ Miss Davina said, and she called goodnight to the bar-boy.
‘Goodnight, Jimmy.’
‘Goodnight, Miss Davina.’
She led the way to the door. The doorman opened it for her and said goodnight to them both. Miss Davina took Tarrin’s arm as they walked on along the street.
It felt a little strange to have her arm linked in his and to feel the fur collar of her coat brush against him from time to time as they walked.
‘You can call me Davina, honey,’ she said. ‘Or, if you want to, you can call me Ma.’
How could he ever call her Ma?
She was only eleven years old.
He looked back once towards the bar they had come from. He saw the neon sign-board flash on and off – Dainty Town – then darkness – then Dainty Town again.
He couldn’t see inside it any more. And there was no way he could have seen Jimmy the bar-boy go to a quiet corner and pick up his mobe and make a call to the number he had been given and say, ‘That merchandise you were looking for? I may be able to give you a location on that. Of course, I’ll be needing the rest of the money first. That’s right. No dough, no info. OK. I’ll expect to see you then. OK. Gotta go. Got people wanting drinks here. OK.’
He killed the call and went to serve the children at the bar.
A small eight-year-old-boy had come in. He wanted a vodka and tomato juice for his companion, with a Scotch on the rocks for himself.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before,’ Jimmy said. ‘You’ve got to be over eighteen to buy alcohol in here. Let me see your ID.’
The two children took their ID cards out and placed them on the bar.
‘OK,’ Jimmy said. ‘That’ll do.’
He got them their drinks.
At first Tarrin wondered why a Kiddernapper didn’t come after them, or why Miss Davina had never been snatched from the street and bundled into a car, taken off to be sold to some rich, childless couple like the Hartingers, with a big, empty home. But he didn’t wonder for long. There was something about her, the look in her eyes, the way she walked and held herself. Anyone could see – who cared to look long enough – that she wasn’t a girl at all. She had none of the mannerisms. Sure, she could probably imitate them, as she must do in her stage act, but now she walked ahead, determined, confident, grown up.
A Kiddernapper would know from looking at her, though more amateur eyes might have been fooled. Tarrin felt that if she was safe, then he would be too. People would assume that he was a PP as well.
Just as long as he didn’t run into Deet.
When they got to a road junction she let go of his arm, positioned herself conspicuously on the kerb, put two fingers into her mouth and let out a shrill, piercing whistle to attract a passing cab.
The taxi did a U-turn in the street, but the night was busy, with bars and theatres closing, and there were plenty of other people looking for a ride home. A man jumped in front of them and put his hand on the taxi door.
‘Take me to—’
‘Get the hell away from my taxi!’ Miss Davina screamed.
The man turned and looked down at her, half shocked, half amused.
‘Yeah. It’s you I’m talking to!’ she said in her little girl’s voice. ‘That’s my cab. I whistled for it. Now get your hand off the door!’
The man glared at her. ‘Now look here, little girl, I don’t know what you’re doing out at this time of night—’
‘Don’t you little girl me, you great bozo!’ Miss Davina said. ‘I’m old enough to be your mother and if I was I’d drum some manners into you for taking other people’s taxis! So out of my way!’
The taxi driver watched, amused but otherwise indifferent to what was going on. The big man stood his ground, so Miss Davina ducked between his legs and pulled Tarrin through after her and, before they could be stopped, they were in the cab.
‘Where to, lady?’
‘I’ll tell you when we get there. It’s straight on for now.’
The taxi pulled away. Miss Davina glared out of the window at the man who had tried to take her taxi.
‘I hate that,’ she said. ‘They way they patronize you. They way they think you’ve got no rights and they always come first because they’ve got grown-up bodies. Well, I tell you, honey, a lot of adults may have grown-up bodies, but they’ve only got pea-sized minds. I just hate being small sometimes and never getting taken seriously. OK, left here, driver.’
The cab turned off the main road and stopped outside an apartment block. Miss Davina paid the driver and gave him a tip. She had to stand on tiptoe to hand the money in through the window.
‘Thank you, miss.’
‘Thank you.’
The taxi drove off to find another fare.
Her apartment was not large, but spacious enough. It was furnished the way she was dressed, in designer fabrics and fake furs. The carpets on the floor were deep and soft. Tarrin took his shoes off, afraid of making marks.
‘Nightcap?’ Miss Davina asked, heading straight for the collection of bottles on the shelf. But then she stopped and smiled.
‘I’m forgetting myself. Can I make you something to eat maybe?’
‘Well, I am a little hungry . . .’
‘Come in here. I’ll fix you something.’
She led the way to the kitchen and made him sit down while she cooked some pasta. He watched, impressed, as she diced vegetables and sliced tomatoes to make a sauce. This was better than a burger. The only cooking Deet had ever done was opening a sachet of ketchup.
Davina poured herself a glass of white wine from the bottle in the fridge and sipped as she cooked.
It just looked so strange, to see the pretty little girl in front of him cooking and drinking wine and occasionally humming a snatch of a song from a musical of long ago.
‘Here.’
She had poured him some milk.
‘To us.’
She clinked her wine glass against his milk-filled one.
‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ she said and then giggled, as if at some private joke.
She ruffled his hair with her hand, just the way adults had, when Deet had rented him out for the afternoon to be the child they had never had. It seemed wrong somehow that she should be doing this, that she – a child too – should be treating him as if, well . . .
