The Hunted, page 7
Yes, it was strange the way that money could purchase all the things that money couldn’t buy.
But this was only true if the child was very young. The older ones never forgot. There was always a residue of memory in them, an image of home, of a mother’s scent, a father’s voice. The older ones took more convincing and persuading. So the rich people told them that there had been an accident, that their natural parents had died, that they had taken them in as poor orphans, and that all those stories about Kiddernappers were just that – stories to frighten little children.
Some of the Kiddernappers just took who they could and then tried to find a buyer. Others worked to order. Maybe someone wanted a little girl, twins, a boy and a girl, a blonde girl, a boy with blue eyes – for the customer had blue eyes too, and that way it would all look right and natural and nobody would ask any questions.
Others just liked to snoop around, to go from town to town, keeping an ear to the ground and an eye on the horizon and a finger on the pulse. They got to hear of a kid here, a child there, maybe one allowed a little too much freedom and independence, maybe one with a parent or a guardian who had let security slide a little, who maybe thought that their child was safe now and that this was a secure, respectable neighbourhood. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
But the thing to realize was that it didn’t make you a bad person. That is, not necessarily. Just because you were a Kiddernapper, did that make you the scum of the earth? In some ways you could say you were performing a useful social service.
Sometimes there wasn’t even any abduction involved. Sometimes the Kiddernapper was just the agent, the go-between, the man carrying an offer of money, which the parents were only too willing to accept.
Some people, able to have children, only had them in order to sell them to the highest bidder. They were the scum of the earth, if you wanted Kinane’s opinion. Not the people who desperately wanted children and would give anything for them. No, it was the ones who would sell them, who would sell their own flesh and blood. They were the ones who should get a life behind prison bars, a nice, long one.
Kinane watched the television for a while, then decided that he would not go out again and that he may as well take his boots off, which he did. Then he undressed, washed, cleaned his teeth and got between the sheets of the bed.
It had been a satisfactory day, all things considered. He’d spotted a few marks, just one or two, but promising all the same, and it didn’t look as if anybody else had spotted them.
He had been the only one trailing, as far as he knew, and that was how he liked it. You didn’t want competition and two of you after the same kid. That was bad news for everybody and trouble all round. He’d just keep an eye out, that was all, and let things take their course for a day or so. He’d just keep watching, keep waiting, keep a low, discreet profile and a professional eye out.
He’d seen a girl that day, but it wasn’t a girl that was wanted. It was a boy. A particular kind of boy. One of the dark-haired, dark-eyed variety. And he’d seen one, yes, indeed he had. He’d seen one at last, and he’d keep watching him, and maybe he might turn out to be perfect.
*
There were no appointments that morning and Deet knew that it wasn’t healthy to keep Tarrin cooped up in the room all the time, so he took him out for some fresh air.
‘A good, long, healthy walk, kid, that’s what you need.’
If he was right in that, and if Tarrin needed a good, long, healthy walk, then Deet needed one more. He had a pallor about him, the result of a life spent out of the reach of the sun, in betting shops and bars, in clubs and motel rooms. Deet had the look of somebody who didn’t like the light. He always seemed a little startled by it, as if it was causing him offence. He kept his sunglasses in his shirt pocket, ever at the ready for the first sign of blue sky.
They walked past a swimming pool and Tarrin asked Deet if they could go in swimming. Deet was as averse to water as he was to sunlight, but he could see the benefits of it, so he took Tarrin into a sports shop and bought him a towel and a pair of goggles and swimming shorts.
It took the shopkeeper a while to find the stuff.
‘A boy!’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘I’ll need to look in the back, sir. A boy, my, my. We’ve not had one of those in for a long time. I’ll have to check the old stock. A boy. My, my. A boy.’
At length he found Tarrin a pair of swimming shorts that would more or less fit him. And length was the word. They hung round his waist and came down below his knees.
‘They’re the smallest we have, I’m afraid.’
‘They’ll do,’ Deet said. ‘They do, kid?’
Afraid that if he said no then he wouldn’t be taken swimming at all, Tarrin nodded.
‘They’ll be fine,’ he said, though he was worried that if he dived into the deep end, the shorts might shoot right off. Tarrin resolved not to dive at all. He’d just jump in and keep his shorts on.
‘Got any goggles?’ Deet asked. ‘We got an appointment later and I don’t want him red-eyed, like he’s been bleating or something.’
‘I’ll see what we’ve got, sir.’
The shop owner found some swimming goggles. There were adult-sized, but he tightened them up and said they would probably do. Tarrin felt they would let the water in, but again he said nothing.
Deet paid and they walked out and back along the road to the public pool. Deet stayed with Tarrin as he changed, standing guard outside his changing cubicle.
‘Damn Kiddernappers,’ Tarrin heard him mumble. ‘Can’t even take a boy swimming but you’re worried they’ll snatch him right out of the water.’
While Tarrin swam, Deet sat on one of the benches at the pool side, glancing up from his racing paper every few seconds, making sure that the boy was still there in the water.
Apart from Tarrin, the pool was nearly empty. Once upon a time it would have been full up at that time of morning with parties of schoolchildren learning to swim. But today there were only a few adult swimmers. They smiled indulgently at the sight of a child, and one of them, a woman in her thirties, called over to Deet as she got out of the pool.
‘Fine boy you have there. Fine boy.’
Deet smiled and nodded but he got pretty sick of it really, all the ‘Fine boy you have there’ stuff. It was like always hearing about the weather, over and over. There was nothing new about it that anyone could say to him and he was tired of hearing the old words endlessly repeated.
It was only when the swimmer had gone that Deet realized that he had failed to ask her if – as she was such an admirer – she might like to rent Tarrin’s company for an afternoon. He should have given her a business card. He’d missed an opportunity there, which wasn’t like him, not like him at all.
Maybe he was coming down with a cold, he thought. Good job he hadn’t gone in with the kid swimming. It would only have made his cold worse. Not that he was certain he had one. But it was best to walk on the safe side.
Tarrin swam lengths for a while, and then, when the temptation became too great, he practised diving after all – first tying his shorts on tight with the waist cord. But it was no real fun on his own. He wished he had a friend, one to run with, race with, splash with, have some kind of fun with. The other swimmers just swam on, up and down, up and down, up and down forever.
He tried to see how far he could swim underwater and easily managed two widths. He rested then, and as he did he glanced at Deet, reading his paper, and he wondered again about the DNA and how he could get the money for a test. Deet wasn’t mean, he bought him everything he needed, but he never gave him money of his own. And he was always with him too, except at night, when it was unsafe for Tarrin to be on the streets because of the Kiddernappers. That was the only time Deet would leave him, safely locked up in the motel room.
So Tarrin needed money and he would need to get away from Deet for a while. There had to be a way. But how could he do it?
The website he had looked at, the site of a nearby DNA tester, was asking for 500 International Currency Units. It wasn’t that much. But how could he get it? Little by little, maybe. Maybe if the people he visited offered him a gift he could ask for money. Or would that seem grasping and rude? They might not want to give him money when they were already paying money to Deet for the pleasure of Tarrin’s company.
He could tell them he was saving up for something . . . a present for someone . . . a present for Deet! For his birthday. No. Not Deet. Who in their right mind would ever want to give Deet a present?
For his mother. He could say for his mother. Flowers for his mother.
To put on her grave.
Surely any decent person would give him the money for that?
Then it occurred to him that it might be real, it might be true, his mother could be dead, his father as well. He might not see either of them ever again. Maybe they had died in an accident, or died of a new virus of some kind.
He might never find them, no matter how long he looked. Or perhaps he’d eventually only locate their memorials, the plaques recording their lives and their dates. Or not even that. Maybe they would have been cremated and their ashes scattered to the winds.
Tarrin wondered how long they had looked for him before they had given up. How long could anyone go on hoping? There had to come a time when you gave up hope, for the sake of your own sanity. Maybe they had given up a long, long time ago. Maybe they just thought of him as dead. Maybe that was easier.
‘Hey, kid!’
Deet was calling and pointing at his wristwatch. It was time to go. Tarrin got out of the pool and went to the changing room. Deet hurried in around the other way and stood guard while Tarrin showered and got dressed.
‘Bite of lunch then, kid, then off to the first appointment.’
‘How many today, Deet?’
‘Five today, kid. Busy, busy, busy.’
Five. Tarrin’s heart sank. It was too many. Each visit was only an hour, but it was still too many. Three Tarrin could manage without difficulty. But even four was hard. It was hard to smile, hard to be pleasant, hard to be, for sixty short minutes, the perfect child that somebody had never had, to fulfil the desires of a lifetime.
‘I’m only a kid, Deet,’ he had said to him once.
‘That’s why they want you,’ Deet had answered.
‘I mean, I’m bound to disappoint them. I can’t be perfect, Deet. I don’t know what they imagine kids are like, but I don’t think it can be me.’
‘You’ll be OK, kid.’
‘It’s having to make them happy, Deet. It’s so hard . . . to be what they want you to be all the time. I’m just a person, Deet. I get tired and fed up and ratty and . . . you know.’
‘Stick with it, kid. We’re making good money.’
Deet just didn’t understand. Didn’t know, and didn’t understand. And wasn’t really interested.
‘So what do you want for lunch, kid?’
Tarrin wanted a sandwich. A home-made sandwich, with cheese and crisp cucumber slices, and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
‘What say we get a burger?’
‘What say we don’t get a burger, Deet? Just for a change.’
Deet’s mouth dropped open. He had never heard Tarrin talk like that before. ‘Whadda you mean, kid? You mean pizza?’
‘I thought maybe we could have a sandwich, Deet. For a change.’
Deet gave it all of five seconds’ consideration, then shook his head. ‘Nah. We’ll get a burger. You know where you stand. Let’s get a burger and a cola, kid.’
So that was what they got.
The dog walkers were out in force in the park. Almost everyone had pets. Cats and dogs were the favourites – child substitutes. Small, baby-sized dogs were the most popular: pugs and terriers and Pekinese. People fussed over them and scolded them in an affectionate way when they barked too much or bothered someone.
Tarrin felt people’s eyes on him as he and Deet crossed by the ornamental lake. He had never got used to being stared at and there was no respite from it. He, like every other child, was an object of intense scrutiny and curiosity.
‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ he wanted to shout. But if he’d started that, he’d have been shouting all day.
They walked past a closed-up nursery school. The Red House Nursery, a faded board outside it read. There was some play equipment rusting and decaying on the overgrown lawn. Once the garden would have echoed with the sound of children’s voices, now it was silent. Once the walls inside the nursery would have been decorated from floor to ceiling with childish pictures of the sun and the sea, drawings of red houses and blue skies. Now the walls were bare. Now the place was as silent as a mausoleum.
The lack of children meant that thousands of people had been left without occupation. So many businesses had closed – factories making toys and children’s clothes, cartoon makers, film makers, publishers of educational works and books for children. Teachers were made redundant, schools and maternity units had closed down. Any children born now were born at home – with a midwife in attendance, who had possibly never even seen a birth before, except on video.
The sales of skateboards, Rollerblades and mountain bikes plummeted, as did demand for computer games, footballs, music downloads and a hundred different gadgets.
Zoos and theme parks were often empty of visitors for hours, even days, at a time. The roller coasters collected dust; the log flumes were dry; the animals stared out from behind the bars of their cages. Maybe a solitary soul came by to stare at the animals staring out, feeling sorry both for them and for himself. Eventually all but a handful of theme parks closed down. Many shops went out of business as sales of sweets, snacks and confectionery plunged. There was no school-run. No school buses. No school parties to take to museums and science centres and city farms.
There were no gangs either, running riot in the streets or hanging around the shopping centres, riding on the trolleys, chewing the fat and smoking what they weren’t supposed to. Nobody went to the beach to make sandcastles, to ride the dodgems or the donkeys, to play the arcade machines at the end of the pier, to beg for more ice cream and another stick of rock.
It was quiet. No shouting voices, no shrieks, no laughter, no fights, no bullying, no sounds of games, of balls bouncing, of people calling, just calm, sweet silence. Only it was not as sweet as it should have been. It was too silent, at too high a price. It was almost like the loss of birdsong – the vanished sound of children. Yet some people preferred it that way: calm, staid and orderly, and the world a grown-up place.
‘Where do we have to be, Deet?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
Tarrin hoped it would be a rich house. Maybe he’d be able to get the 500 units in one go. Then he could get his DNA tested, get a map of it from a blood sample, then get it matched up on the national database and . . .
Maybe he could find them, his family. Maybe they were still alive, his mum and his dad. Maybe they were still hoping, maybe they were even still looking for him. Maybe.
He could hope, anyway. He could do that much. Where there was life there was hope, and where life was long, hope was long too.
‘Ready, kid?’
‘I’m ready, Deet.’
‘You didn’t finish your burger.’
‘I wasn’t really hungry.’
‘After all that swimming?’
‘I swallowed some pool water and it filled me up.’
‘Not finished your fries either. Something wrong with your fries?’
‘To tell the truth, Deet – I’m sort of tired of fries.’
‘Tired of fries? I never heard of a kid before who was tired of fries.’
‘Well, I am, just a little bit.’
‘Maybe we can have a pizza tonight.’
‘OK.’
‘That be good?’
‘Yeah, that’ll be fine.’
‘See, I look after you, kid, don’t I? Eh?’
‘Yes, Deet.’
‘Don’t I look after you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t I, kid? Take you swimming and get you burgers and pizza?’
‘Sure.’
‘I look after you.’
‘Right.’
‘So what’s wrong, kid? Cat got your tongue?’
‘You look after me, Deet.’
‘That’s it, kid. That’s what I do. So come on now, let’s us get to work. Time we made us some money.’
It was the ‘us’ that puzzled Tarrin. It always had and it always would. The ‘us’ and the ‘we’. In what possible way were ‘we’ getting to work? What work did Deet do?
Tarrin didn’t wish to be rude about him, but surely, looked at in a cold, objective light, Deet was nothing but a parasite. He was nothing but a great big flea. Nothing but a giant bedbug who had made Tarrin his pillow and the world his bed.
Birthday Boy
Deet’s knocking on the door didn’t bring anybody to it, so, much as he didn’t care to, he had to press the bell. It probably rang somewhere, deep within the bowels of the house, but as far as Deet and Tarrin were concerned, where they stood by the white-painted front door, the chimes maintained a dignified – even indifferent – silence. They just had to stand and wait.
‘There’s money here, kid,’ Deet said, nodding sagaciously as he took in the porch, the flower beds, the trees, the lawn, the tennis court and a building which no doubt housed the swimming pool.
