Rae

My childhood home was some next level weirdness. Most of the rooms were practically empty, and then there were random corners of chaos. Riots of emotions that were, in every sense, largely ignored. As a child, my basement bedroom had been my sanctuary.

It still was.

After an awkward dinner with my parents, I retreated there, curled up, surrounded by a life I barely remembered, and tried not to think about the fact that Cash was a ten minute tube ride away, a task made easier by the reason I’d come to London in the first place: to make enough money to pay a housing lawyer to look into our case. I had a journalism degree and contacts in good places, but after a day of trying to convince editors I could run my mouth professionally, I was fucking knackered. My brain was mush. No thought was coherent and I just wanted to sleep.

I listened to my parents moving around upstairs, bumbling through routines that hadn’t changed since I was a boy. Dinner cleared away, dishwasher set. An hour of evening news before retiring at exactly ten o’clock. My mum filling water glasses, my dad taking his second shower of the day. Picturing his face when I told him my home barely had running water made me smile, but my mirth was fleeting. My parents were pleasant people, but we had nothing in common. The path I’d chosen for myself mystified them, and the distance I’d grown up with had only widened in adulthood. I had no interest in their rice importing business, and nothing I did made any sense to them. They preferred my sister, and most days, I was okay with that.

My mind returned to the second day of meetings I had set up for tomorrow. Buzzfeed, the Observer, and the Metro. I was holding out for a gig at the Observer, but at this point I’d take anything. In a world where knobheads like the Huffington Post expected journalists to write for free, I was lucky to have paid leads. I just needed some fucker to call me back before it was time to ditch another phone.

Time slipped away at my parent’s house, meaningless and moot as it had always been. Their activity ceased, and the night grew as silent as London ever did. Unable to find rest, I got up and ventured to the kitchen for water. The tiles were cold beneath my socked feet, and the glass felt alien in my hand. The water tasted wrong. As ever when I spent time in this house, the mantra played over and over in my head. What the fuck am I doing here? And even though on this occasion I categorically knew the answer, it still seemed wrong.

Everything did.

I retreated downstairs. My room was cool and dark, illuminated only by my phone screen, lit up by a new message. Disquiet forgotten, I lunged for it and sat down on the bed as I swiped it open.

Cash: u prob know already, but i went by ur camp today with Dom. he might buy the land if it works out. sorry u weren’t there. felt weird.

It was the longest message he’d ever sent me, and it came with a grenade of a dozen emotions. Relief, excitement, and crushing disappointment that I’d missed him.

And then there was the tiny glimmer of hope that perhaps he’d missed me too, but before my heart could get to that, I needed to know more about a millionaire sport star potentially buying Fletch’s land.

Rae: Where are you?

Cash: home. y?

Rae: Stay there.

Thirty minutes later, Cash opened his side door to me with a bemusement that might’ve been funny if my brain hadn’t been spinning so fast.

I slipped past him, heading for the kitchen without invitation. It was as empty and dark as my mother’s, but somehow felt like the arms of an old friend. “Start from the beginning,” I demanded. “Tell me how Dom ended up on my camp.”

Cash leaned on the kitchen counter, his hair a riotous mess. “Are you pissed off? You seem a little wired.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act like my best mate when we need to talk business.”

Cash flinched. It was infinitesimal, but I saw it all the same. “Dom’s looking for land to develop rural social housing. We were close by yesterday when I thought of your site, so I took him there to have a look and talk to Fletch. I figured you’d be there.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Clearly, as you’re on my doorstep at midnight. How about you tell me how that works?”

“Why? You don’t want to be involved, remember?”

“I don’t have much choice when you’re in my house, do I?”

“But it’s okay for you to show up at mine without warning?”

Conflict marred Cash’s lovely face. He slid farther forward on the counter so he was almost bent double and groaned. “Fuck’s sake. Why are we so bad at this?”

“At what?”

“At making everything fit together,” he said as though it were that simple.

Frustration burned bright in my veins, but there was a helplessness to him that broke through any desire to fight him.

I ran a hand through my own disastrous hair and joined him at the counter. “My parents live in Hampstead. I was kipping there while I tried to raise some money to pay for a housing lawyer. That’s why I’m in your yard. I can’t explain the rest of it.”

Cash sighed. “I can, and it’s probably time I did, but I need a smoke. Come outside?”

We decamped to the back garden. It was cold, and the air was damp, but I was used to that, and there was something about Cash wearing the hat he’d worn to come sabbing with me that really got me going. I wanted to push him up against his garden wall and fumble with his belt, kissing him until the hat slipped sideways on his head, so I could tug on his glorious blond hair.

I settled for sitting on a crate and rolling a fag from a tobacco pouch that apparently belonged to Lucky. “So I take it Dom knows about the sabbing now?”

Cash nodded. “Lucky told him because he was worried about me.”

“Worried? Why?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been an introspective weirdo these last few months, grumpy too. It’s not the boring mechanic he signed up to living with.”

“If he’s worried about you, it probably isn’t because you’re grumpy, mate.”

“Uh-huh.” Cash lit his smoke and drew deeply on it, like an ex-smoker who’d never truly wanted to quit. “Dom’s interested in the land, by the way, in case you were wondering. I don’t know how it all works, but I told him about the hunt. He’s a tough bastard, man. Goon won’t get on his land if this all plays out.”

Knowing what little I did about Dom as a defensive football player, I could believe it, but right now, the land deal was about as far from my mind as it was ever going to get. I stuck my rollie in my mouth and took a chance on squeezing Cash’s tense arm. “Tell me why I upset you so much.”

“It’s not you.”

You self-absorbed brat. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. My conscience did the scolding for him. I squeezed harder and tried again. “Okay, tell me what it is…what sabbing does to you.”

A long silence stretched out. As the minutes ticked by, I began to fear that Cash would shut me out again. That I’d have to leave him here, like this, and go back to my soulless family home, and then back to a life—to my real family, in many ways—that had somehow come to feel empty when Cash wasn’t there.

Then Cash sighed again, and something in him seemed to give. “I was like you,” he said, voice so low I had to lean closer to hear him. “For a long time, everything I did was what you are doing now, but it was different in one way.”

“What was it?”

“I wasn’t alone. Everything I did, every cold, wet night I slept outside, I had someone with me…at my side, at my back. Wherever I needed them to be.”

I swallowed hard. The thought of Cash with someone else turned my stomach, but it had no right to. He was so fucking special. Of course there’d been others before me. And what even was I to him? The couple of nights we’d tumbled into his bed were outnumbered by the angst that seemed to haunt us. There was no contest. I was nothing. “You had a partner?”

He nodded. “Zander. He was my boyfriend…more than that, I suppose. We were together for three years, totally immersed in sabbing. We did everything together, the good and the bad.”

“So what changed?”

Cash flicked the end of his smoke into the fire pit with perfect, detached accuracy. “He was a rat.”

My heart punched my ribcage. “A rat? An informant?”

Cash shook his head. “Worse. He was a fucking copper.”

***

Cash

It was the first time I’d said it out loud without puking. Time really did heal all wounds. Or maybe it didn’t, because keeping my dinner down meant nothing while Rae was staring at me like I was an unpinned grenade.

Fuck this.

I started to stand, but movement at the bottom of the garden stilled me. Shula. And she wasn’t alone.

My fiery vixen visitor brought me to life in ways I couldn’t describe, but her mate’s presence in my dilapidated garden had always soothed me. He was a nervous boy, but solid and wise. And he only came on my worst days.

Beside me, Rae snatched a breath and nudged me in the ribs. I turned to him and pressed a finger to his lips. “Just watch.”

Rae’s hand closed around my elbow, then he stilled, and it seemed as though his heart beat in sync with mine as we watched Shula and her mate go about their business. Dom and I hadn’t got home till late, but Lucky had brought some sunshine to my day when he’d greeted us with the Google-researched fox picnic he’d prepared in my absence. Peanuts, leftover cooked potatoes, and the tiniest scraps of raw chicken. I usually let the foxes find their own meat to save me having it in my fridge, but I’d let Lucky have this one.

Shula ate like a queen while her mate nibbled and scurried to and from the bushes, stashing food for later. He was so resourceful he made me feel lazy watching him, and I was almost relieved when they’d had their fill and crept away.

When they were gone, Rae turned to me, his eyes so bright I forgot why he was here. “That was amazing. I haven’t seen a safe fox up close in years.”

Of course he hadn’t. Sab life had often meant the only time I saw wildlife was when it was being hunted. My memories of these wonderful creatures confined to photographs someone else had taken. I smiled and gestured for him to sit down again. “Shula and Po have been coming to the garden for a while now. I don’t feed them every day, but Shula comes pretty close sometimes when I’m not outside. One night she came right up to the patio door.”

“Shula…that means fire, right?”

“It does. How do you know that?”

“I grew up with a nanny obsessed with The Archers.”

“You had a nanny?”

Rae rolled his eyes and reached for the tobacco pouch. “I lived in Hampstead. Of course I did. What does the male’s name mean?”

“River.” I brought my mind back to the present, fighting a thousand questions about Rae’s childhood. “He’s a complex character, though. I thought he was nervous at first, but he’s logical, you know? A thinker.”

Rae lit up his smoke. “You reckon he’d get more to eat if he didn’t think so much?”

“Maybe, but perhaps that would just get them both killed.”

We weren’t talking about foxes anymore. Or maybe we were and I was the terminal overthinker.

I claimed the tobacco pouch and lost myself the ritual of rolling the smooth paper between my fingers, of burning my lungs with carcinogenic tar. I’d smoked more in the last few months than I had in years. Rae was bad for my health. It all was.

Rae touched my face, his thumb smoothing the skin beneath my eye, palm brushing the healed cut on my cheekbone. “How did you find out?”

Fuck. We were back to that. I closed my eyes to Rae’s touch. “In court. I got done for aggravated trespass, vandalism, grievous bodily harm, all kinds of crap they trumped up with his help. He testified against me…against the whole gang, and I had no idea until he stepped into the witness box.”

Rae made a noise low in his throat. “That’s insane.”

“Yeah.”

“Was he the only one?”

“Only what…mole? Fuck, I don’t know. We had close ties to an anti-fracking crew in the same town, Greenpeace and all that. I swear, if you’d been in court you’d have thought I was Pablo Escobar or some shit, not some bloke who’d rather sit in an icy river all day than let the toff cunts kill foxes.”

“And now you fix cars for rich people?”

I winced. “Don’t do me with irony…not today. I needed a job—criminal records don’t do well for jobs in environmental science—and I’ve been elbow deep in cars since I was a kid. It made sense, and when my uncle offered me a lifeline on this place, it seemed like fate—a reason, like I needed another one, to get out of sabbing for good.”

“What happened in court? I mean, apart from your life imploding. Were you convicted?”

“On some counts.” I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth. “They couldn’t swing the GBH, but they had me on camera squaring up to a red coat, so they did me for assault instead, as well as the trespassing bullshit.”

Rae nodded, his dark gaze thoughtful. “I have a few of those on my record, but I’m sorry about your boyfriend. It’s the worst betrayal, and I can’t imagine how it felt to find out like that. I’m assuming you never saw him again?”

I snorted. “Not for lack of trying on his part. He pretty much stalked me for a while—phone calls, emails, texts, all anonymous, of course, but I knew it was him. And I thought I loved that fucker…before I knew, but after I realised what a sneaky bastard he was. Like, he’d have a separate phone he said was for his mum to get hold of him without worrying he’d ditched the number, but it was always off. And he disappeared sometimes. Say he was running the citronella trails, but then I’d find out someone else had already done it. I didn’t think—” I stopped, breathless, and taken aback at how much had spewed out of my mouth when I’d kept it buried deep for so long. “Fuck.”

Rae leaned closer. “What?”

I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Gazed at him, but didn’t really see him. My eyes hurt, and my throat stung, but there was something else. Something about Rae I couldn’t quite decipher. I’d been talking and talking and talking, as though a dam had broken somewhere in my soul, and Rae had simply…listened. I had that privilege with Lucky—and Dom—if I’d ever chosen to use it, but Rae was different. He’d lived the life, was still living it. He got me like no one else ever could. “Away from all that, when it was just me and him, it felt like he’d…raped me, you know? Because he wasn’t real. It took me a while to get over that.”

“I’m sorry,” Rae whispered.

I blinked. “What for?”

“For trying to force you back in. If I’d known—”

“What? You’d have left me the fuck alone? Or sent me packing when I offered you the stingers? Piss off. I know you, Rae…as a sab, at least. You’ll give it all until you’ve got nothing left, just like I did, and collateral damage is part of the game.”

“Cash—”

“No.” I stood up. “We’re having this conversation, and I hate you for putting me here, but no foxes died that day. And that’s all we need, right?”