Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [19]
I take the phone from my pocket. Inside the maze of microchips and solder, there are names, numbers and hundreds of photos, mostly of Gemma. The wallpaper is a shot of her in Regent’s Park feeding the ducks. With her big green eyes and floppy blond curls, she can extract a chocolate bar from me at will.
I clip off the back cover, slide the memory stick out, and dump the phone in the nearest bin. Carefully I wrap the memory stick in an old receipt, and slip it into my wallet.
I tell myself I couldn’t have kept the phone, even switched off. The temptation to check for messages would defeat my lonelier moments. Feeling guilty for making those who love me worry, I keep walking, towards the shopping district, every step closer to him, Billy K.
And I think of Robbie Reynolds, a legend of the estate I grew up on. We estimate he nicked a thousand cars in less than five years. His secret? He said the first thing he did after starting up the engine was to rip off all the mirrors. No need to look backwards when he was going forwards. No time for glancing over his shoulder with a pedal pressed to the floor. And it worked, because he was never caught.
Until he was shot in the face, double-crossed by the thugs he was driving a getaway car for. Killed the only time he turned around.
So the tossed-away phone is the ripped-off mirror, no looking back now. Maybe to catch Billy K, to understand how and why he vanished, I have to disappear too.
It’s hardly the first time I’ve run.
In a large, bright, empty department store, I fill a basket with shirts, underwear, trousers, jeans, shorts, and a pair of dark trainers. The cashier watches me peel notes from the fat roll.
Outside I find the nearest public toilet, duck into a cubicle and change into my new outfit. I leave my stale clothes folded on the cistern, and step out on to the sunlit streets, flowing with the surge of late commuters and office workers.
I feel so light I could be blown to the sky.
After an hour drifting streets and parks, afraid to actually sit and think about Billy K, I walk round the Botanic Gardens mindlessly reading plant names: kangaroo paws, flannel flowers, paper daisies. Signs in the ‘Palm Grove’ date the trees from the 1820s, and I wonder if Nelson Babbage strolled these very same paths on his stop here in 1834.
We should have investigated Ms Draycott more thoroughly before flying out to Fiji. My mistake. It all sounded so promising, an Australian marine biologist, researching parrot fish in the South Pacific, seemed a woman possessing the scientific rigour necessary to state fact before fiction.
But she was also a founding member of the Oceania branch of the K Club, fan club of the Notorious.
Ms Draycott contacted the Met after a Fijian member of her research team recounted meeting a ukulele-playing Englishman ‘living and singing like a local’ on a visit to Tavu Na Sici, an island located several hundred miles from the mainland in the southern Lau group. What astounded Ms Draycott, and myself, was that when addressed in English, the young man either replied in pidgin Fijian, or simply quoted passages from Show Me the Sky – the book discovered in the glovebox of Billy K’s abandoned Lotus, minus the last page.
And I was desperate for a lead.
I knew she was president of the the K Club but avoided asking myself if she was just another nut making up fairy tales. She was adamant it was him, Billy K, castaway in the South Pacific. So I convinced the chief super this was our man.
Even though Ms Draycott had never met Billy K, I believe she was truly in love. She couldn’t bear the fact he was gone so resurrected him, washed up on Tavu Na Sici. And Billy K lived until we stepped ashore and Ms Draycott started wailing. Because by arriving on the island we actually killed the myth.
And I take the blame. Entirely. I was in charge. I’d become that much of a bear my colleagues