lucky that he looked nothing like he had when he was younger. But his adult face had been leaked. Not a full-on clear shot, but even blurred, it was enough. Carter knew what he looked like, but the police had warned him to not publish Ink’s image. No journalist could publish his photo. Theoretically. Maybe they’d consider it worth getting sent to prison. Ink wasn’t sure.
Back in his room, he pushed all his dirty gear and his wet towel inside his sleeping bag, along with the clothes he’d just taken off and the hoodie he used to protect his guitar. He put on his last pair of clean shorts. Hopefully, there’d be no one else doing their washing who’d freak out at a guy in his underwear. Before he left the room, he plugged in his laptop. He could have done with charging his phone, but Tay might need help, so it would have to wait.
When he tiptoed past Tay’s room, carrying his sleeping bag, phone, book and key to the flat, Tay was asleep and Dog lay tucked up into the angle of his bent legs. Ink was glad Dog liked him. He intended to check out that bag of pills he’d seen Tay holding, because prescription pills came in blister packs or bottles, not Ziplock bags, but this wasn’t the moment.
Once he’d grabbed detergent from under the sink, he made his way to the laundry room. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t have to pay to wash his clothes. Everything went in together. He bought his stuff from charity shops, so they’d already lost any excess dye, and he never purchased anything light-coloured because he couldn’t wear it more than once. He’d learned to be practical.
He could have gone back inside the flat, but instead, he sat on the small bench and opened his book. The guy in the flat above had been in his mid-forties, with big shoulders and bulky biceps. His name was Juris. Ink had told him Tay was ill and trying to sleep and the guy had agreed to turn the TV down. Apparently, the couple in the flat on the top floor were from Libya and spoke no English.
Ink hadn’t figured Tay out yet, but he would. He didn’t even know if he was gay. He had a feeling he was. He did know Tay wasn’t homophobic because after Ink’s mistimed joke about gay porn, he’d pretty much outed himself, and neither Tay nor his parents seemed fazed.
London was a strange place to choose to come to live when you didn’t know anyone. Ink huffed a laugh. It was a place to merge, blend, disappear. To become an urban ghost. Maybe that’s what Tay wanted to do. Just like me, but for very different reasons. The only way to escape detection was to make no calls, have no fixed address, pay no bills, not use his bank card, walk everywhere he could, not get sick, and above all, never stay too long in one place. The mobile he had was pay-as-you-go, but it was still a risk. He never googled himself from his laptop. If he wanted to know if there was anything new about him, he used a public library and wiped his history.
Every town and city had people like him. They huddled in shop doorways, slept under bridges, sat slumped on benches. Unless they committed a crime, they were mostly left alone, ignored and avoided. He didn’t deserve this life. But he had no idea how to make a different one.
BY THE TIME HE’D DRIED everything and pulled on warm jeans and a t-shirt, he’d finished the book. Stalinist Russia had not been a good place to live. Innocence hadn’t mattered then either. He folded his clothes as neatly as he could, carried everything back to the flat, and repacked his backpack and guitar. The sleeping bag was laid out on the floor ready for that night. He supposed he could sleep on the couch, but the floor was fine. A room of his own was a luxury.
It was almost twelve and Tay was still asleep. Ink beckoned Dog from the bed and took him into the garden. Dog did a thorough inspection of the entire plot, sniffing every inch of it, finally choosing a spot to take a piss, before coming back to Ink.
Dog did like him; Tay’s mother had been right. Not love though. No one loved him. The sad thing was he couldn’t ever