Cash

“Why are you being weird?”

“Hmm?” I glanced up from my phone as Lucky flounced into the staffroom at the garage we both worked at, and flung himself dramatically onto the couch. “I’m not being weird.”

“Yes, you are. You’ve been hiding in your room all week and every time I see you you’re buried in your phone. What happened to unplugging from the matrix?”

I rolled my eyes. “I said I was ditching my iPhone for a Samsung, not going back to the Stone Age.”

Lucky opened the Tupperware pot of pasta Dom had left out for us that morning and gobbled up a mouthful bigger than his head. “Still, you never fuck about on your phone. You don’t even answer it when I call.”

“You don’t call.”

“Not the point. What’s going on?”

I had zero intention of explaining the clusterfuck in my head to anyone, but Lucky had become my best friend, and by the time we got home that evening, he’d worn me down.

“Fine. I’m freaking out because the dude I fucked a few months ago came back.” Lucky’s eyebrows rose and I realised I’d never got around to telling him about Rae in the first place. I’d just assumed he’d heard us getting busy and left it at that. “Um, yeah. I hooked up a while ago.”

“With a dude?”

“Yes, with a dude. Why’s that so surprising?”

“It’s not, I’d just figured you’d pull a bird when you got back on the horse after—”

I cut him off with a scowl. I tried not to drink too much around Lucky because he had substance…issues, but occasionally I ended up wasted in his company, and one such night I’d let slip about the fucking riot my last relationship had turned into. Too much booze had ensured I couldn’t much remember his reaction, or just how deep I’d gone, but judging by his frown right now? Huh. Maybe I’d said too much. “Anyway, I wasn’t planning on seeing him again, like, ever, as we didn’t swap numbers and shit, or surnames, but then he rocked up at the house the other night.”

“That’s who that was?”

“Uh-huh.”

Lucky opened a can of baked beans and tipped it into a saucepan. He was cooking tonight, which meant egg and chips. Not that I was complaining. I’d been too wired to eat much for the last few days and my stomach was starting to protest. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Whatever you’ve been sitting on since then. Come on, mate.”

I sighed and slumped forwards on the kitchen counter, ignoring Lucky’s increasingly concerned frown as his typically mellow housemate slipped further into a terminal sulk. I wasn’t as mean-mugged as Dom, but I got around that with blanket humour. Lucky wasn’t used to me angsting over shit. “He knows me.”

“Knows you?”

“Yeah, from before I came to London, though he doesn’t, like, actually know me.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Tell me about it.” I picked at the label on the bottle of water I’d been planning on having for dinner before Lucky had cornered me. “I was involved in something before I came to work for Jim. I walked away from it, but Rae’s in deep, and he came looking for me, not knowing I was the same person he’d screwed a few months back.”

“You were involved in something,” Lucky repeated slowly.

“Yeah.”

“Cash.”

“What?”

“Unless you’re Fred West reincarnated, there’s nothing you can tell me that I won’t one hundred per cent accept.”

Lucky had lived a life of his own, and was the least judgemental dude in the world, but a blood-sworn code of silence had conditioned me to be cagey about sabbing. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just…tell him. “It’s complicated.”

“Isn’t everything?” Lucky threw the frying pan onto the stove. “But I can’t understand whatever the fuck you’re talking about if you keep being so bloody vague.”

Another sigh escaped me, and I forced myself to sit up. “Okay, so you know I went to uni up north?”

“Cumbria. Some geography shit?”

“Geology. Whatever. I got into a bunch of stuff while I was up there. Socialism, activism…animal rights.”

“Shocker,” Lucky deadpanned. “You know you should be reducing my rent for all the iron and protein you’re depriving me of with your meat ban, right?”

“Fuck off. There’s plenty of iron and protein in vegetables. But you know that already, so if you want to pump me for info you’ve gotta stop talking shit.”

Lucky waved a hand for me to continue and cracked eggs into his pan.

“So,” I went on. “There was a hunt that rode through the village close to where I lived—a fox hunt. I didn’t pay it too much attention at first because it was supposed to be a trail hunt after the ban came into place. Then I met some local sabs in a boozer and they, uh, educated me.”

I didn’t add that I’d had a wild three-way with the dude and his wife and the experience had opened my eyes to the joys of bisexuality. Lucky and I could talk about sex all night at the best of times, we didn’t need an excuse.

“What the fuck is a sab?” he asked.

“Saboteur. Hunting with dogs was banned in 2004, but it’s a flimsy law with lots of loopholes. Most hunts fake a trail hunt, then flush foxes out anyway. In reality, nothing’s changed. And when you push something underground and don’t enforce it, shit gets real pretty fast.”

Cooking apparently forgotten, Lucky turned off the gas and abandoned his frying pan. He got me a beer from the few I kept in the fridge and came to sit beside me. “I’m lost. I knew about the ban and thought that was the end of it.”

“That’s the problem. So did everyone, and why not? If something is illegal, why not think it doesn’t go on anymore.”

Lucky snorted. “Drugs are illegal, and I smashed my fair share of them regardless. But I still don’t get what a saboteur whatsit is.”

“The clue is in the name, Luck. We sabotaged hunts, or tried to, at least. It was a tough game, and we lost a lot—foxes, and people. I got out in the end because I couldn’t handle it.”

And the rest, but I didn’t feel like connecting the dots between what Lucky already knew and what I was throwing at him now.

He rubbed my shoulder, then got up again and returned to his dinner prep. “So this…Rae, is from your activist background?”

“Kind of. Some veterans on his crew sent him to find me.”

“What for?”

“Dunno. We didn’t really get that far.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t really have an answer for that. There was no doubt in my mind I’d have sent Rae packing, but he hadn’t given me the chance. “It got a bit weird,” I said. “He didn’t know he was coming for me until I came to the door—I never told him my real name. And no one I ran with up north knew it apart from a couple of real close friends.”

“So it’s a friend who sent him?”

“Doubt it.”

Lucky said nothing for a while. Just fried eggs, filled plates with baked beans and oven chips, and set a giant bottle of ketchup between us. I watched him move around my kitchen like I’d built it for him and waited for the cloud to lift. For the relief of confiding in a real friend to actually mean something. But nothing happened. And why would it? Lucky knowing my shit didn’t change anything. Rae had still ripped open the wound in my heart and I was too tired to heal it.

“Cash.”

“Hmm?” I glanced up, startled. “What?”

Lucky scowled at me like I was a mutant, then his expression softened. “I asked you what you’re going to do. And don’t say nothing, because that clearly isn’t an option. I didn’t know about the sabbing shit, but it makes sense now. It fits with the bloke I thought I knew.”

“Vegetarian and lazy?”

“No…vegetarian and brooding over something me and Dom couldn’t figure out.”

Great. So him and Dom had been psychoanalysing me the whole damn time. “I’m not brooding.”

“Whatever. My point is you’re clearly torn. Sabbing meant the world to you, didn’t it?”

I shrugged. “It was my world, man.”

***

My conversation with Lucky went in circles, but it was always going to when I couldn’t talk about the true reason I’d turned my back on sabbing. My explanations were holey as fuck, and he was sharp enough to know it.

Eventually, he let me be, and I escaped upstairs to continue what I’d started the night Rae had brought perspective crashing back into my conscience. My laptop lay on my bed where I’d left it that morning. I opened it and the sab blog I’d tracked Rae to through the email address he’d left on my pillow filled my screen. Like everything linked to the cause, personal info was scant, but I’d written the book on this shit. From the very first post I’d read, I’d known the words were his.

Didn’t stop me reading every damn entry, though, following Rae from the moment he’d joined the Bedfordshire sab gang three years ago to his report of last weekend’s hunt—a post I’d been halfway through when Lucky had cornered me at work. Disabling vehicles, setting false trails, distracting the hounds, it was all so fucking familiar, but yet somehow seemed alien now. As though I was so removed from it now that Rae was from another world.

Right. That’s why you’re reading his blog like a fucking stalker?

Whatever. I found my place in the article and read on, picking up where I’d left off as the hunt swept past Rae’s hiding place, chasing down the scents he’d spent days trying to conceal. He threw himself in their path, blowing a whistle, shouting, screaming—anything to distract the baying hounds—and my pulse quickened. I knew how it felt to have a horse ride over you.

But he got lucky. The hounds surrounded him, protecting him from the angry riders. Precious minutes passed, and the fox got away.

I laid a hand over my thumping heart. My bedroom disappeared as Rae escaped into the woods, and my senses filled with earth and adrenaline. I ran each step with him and horror filled every facet of me when the quad bikes roared into the fray.

The rest of the blog post passed in a blur. I reached the end and was off my bed before I could take another shaky breath. The ladder was a pole as I slid down to the second floor. Dom was coming out of Lucky’s bedroom. He looked alarmed to see me descending from my attic lair so abruptly, but I ignored him and ran downstairs.

I had a car in the garage, an old Golf I’d been tinkering with in my spare time. It barely had an engine, let alone an MOT, but freedom rushed me as I burned onto Tottenham’s busy streets.

For the first time in forever, there was somewhere I needed to be.