longer any walls or partitions inside, just a series of concrete columns separating one floor from the next. Even if you could get over the barbed wire why would you shelter here? I’ve spent months wondering where I’d go if I was sleeping rough. I’d want to squirrel myself away from the world so I wouldn’t worry about being robbed or attacked as I slept. I’d go to a women’s shelter if I could or, if I didn’t want to be found, I’d settle down for the night in a shed in the allotments off Talbot Road and take my belongings with me each morning to avoid discovery. We’ve already checked the allotments, and posted up signs in BS4 and BS3 asking people to check their sheds. We’ve searched everywhere and anywhere we could think of – the river-bank near Marks & Spencer at Avonmeads, the local parks, the Downs. Everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. Or we’d have found him.
I look down at the notebook in my hands and Billy’s thick, black scrawl:
– Bristol T M (train?)
– The Arches
– Avonmouth
The Arches. I’ll go there next. It’s a railway viaduct – ripe for tagging – on the edge of Gloucester Road. It’s on the other side of Bristol but that never stopped Billy, not if he wanted to see his friends. He’d set off on his bike and cycle the eight and a half miles it takes to get there from our house. Billy was always secretive about who he was going to see. ‘Just mates, Mum,’ he’d say. When the kids were little and went to a local primary school I knew who all their friends were. We seemed to spend half our lives going to birthday parties and playdates and ferrying the kids to and from sleepovers. But when the boys started secondary school on the other side of town their friends, scattered all over Bristol, became a mystery to me. Jake told us that Billy’s Gloucester Road friends weren’t from school at all. He said they were older guys, in their late teens and early twenties, who lived in a squat. I was horrified. I imagined drugs and squalor and crime and I told Billy I didn’t want him to have anything to do with them. He told me I was narrow-minded and brainwashed by Mark. His friends weren’t down-and-outs, they were artists who refused to become wage monkeys to line some capitalist landlord’s pocket. Why shouldn’t they live in an abandoned building? They weren’t doing any harm to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t keep him locked in the house all weekend. The alternative was to ferry him into town in the car if he was going to the cinema with friends and then pick him up afterwards but what was to stop him from getting a bus to Gloucester Road the second we dropped him off? Mark said we should take Billy’s bike off him for a bit, until he learned some responsibility. I suggested that Billy take me to the squat to meet his new friends but my son said he’d rather die than do that.
‘Did you introduce your parents to all your friends when you were fifteen?’ he asked me and I had to admit, to myself anyway, that I hadn’t. There were countless boyfriends who I met at night after sneaking out of the house. Lots of older brothers and sisters of my mates who’d go into the Co-op to buy us bottles of White Lightning and Thunderbird to drink in the park. One of my male friends had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped after we got stupidly drunk and he was someone I’d known since childhood. I didn’t end up in A&E. I’d already puked into a flower bed.
I was torn. Billy was fifteen years old. He was stretching his wings. He was a good boy. He was sensible at heart and I trusted him not to do anything stupid. And then he got into trouble at school for graffitiing the science block and Mark said that was that, he was grounded for two months and he was going to take away Billy’s bike. Only we couldn’t find it. And Billy refused to say where it was.
Now I jump as the gate clangs open and a man and woman in neon yellow vests with lanyards around their necks step through the gap.
‘Excuse me,’ I say as the man closes the padlock. ‘My name is Claire Wilkinson. My son is missing. He’s called Billy, he’s fifteen. I’m worried that he might be sleeping rough and—’
‘Not here he’s not,’ the woman says. She’s mid-forties with a half-inch of grey roots showing through her curly red hair. ‘Bristol Council.’ She gestures towards her lanyard. ‘We’re redeveloping the place. Waterside offices and homes. There’s twenty-four-hour security in place.’
‘You’re quite sure there’s no one sleeping rough inside?’
The man pulls on the padlock. ‘Not unless he’s a pigeon. And we’ll be getting them out ASAP too.’
I glance through the gates and try to imagine the building coming back to life – with glass in the windows and families sitting on sofas in front of their tellies and office workers wheeling back and forth in front of computer screens – but I can’t see it.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you know of any squats in Gloucester Road, do you?’
But they’ve already wandered off.
I am a couple of hundred feet away from the Arches and stuck in traffic when I see him, a heavyset man with a bushy beard. He’s riding a yellow-and-black BMX bike with distinctive blue-and-white tyres. He slips into the bus lane and undertakes me, his white trainers pumping the pedals as he speeds down Cheltenham Road. He looks almost comical with his large body balanced on top of the small bike and his thick knees spread wide. I remember how Jake laughed and said Billy looked like a circus monkey when he rode his Mafia BMX. It was a kid’s bike, he said. And he looked like an idiot.
Just like the man in the hoody.
It’s Billy’s bike. It has to be. I’ve never seen one like it, not with the same combination of colours.
I don’t think twice. I indicate left and pull into the bus lane. A horn sounds behind me and the driver of the 3A bus shakes his head at me in my rear-view mirror. Startled by the sound, the man on the bike glances back. I wave frantically but he either doesn’t see me or he doesn’t want to stop because his head drops and he begins to pedal even faster. He turns left onto Zetland Road just as the lights change and I’m forced to stop.
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as he zips across the road and jumps off the bike outside a kitchen-and-bathroom shop and then hammers on the panelled wooden door of the building next to it, on the corner of the street. There are curtains at the window and a large piece of white card or wood – at least twelve feet by six feet – propped up inside, obscuring the view. As the traffic light turns green the door opens and the man disappears inside, taking the bike with him. It has to be the squat Jake told me about.
There’s a space outside a tile shop on the opposite side of the road so I park quickly, half mounting the pavement in my desperation to get out of the car.
I have to wait for one, two, three cars to go past before there’s a gap in the traffic and I can sprint across the road.
‘Hello!’ I knock on the door and then wait.
A young mother walks past, pushing a red-faced, squalling baby in a pram. Her eyes are fixed on a spot in the distance, as though she’s willing herself to … just … get … home. She doesn’t so much as glance at me.
I knock again and walk around the corner and tap on the window.
Nothing happens. No one comes to the door and the curtains don’t twitch.
‘Hello?’ I lift the letterbox and peer inside but it’s lined with nylon bristles and I can’t see a thing. ‘Hello! I know you’re in there. I just saw you go in with the bike.’
‘They’re all drug addicts, you know.’ An elderly man, with a walking stick in one hand and a blue plastic bag in the other, pauses beside me. ‘If they’ve stolen something of yours you need to call the police.’
I instinctively touch my handbag, slung across my body. I should call the police. Or at least Mark. But adrenalin’s coursing through me and I can’t stop myself from shouting through the letterbox again as the man continues his amble up the road.
‘My name’s Claire Wilkinson. My son Billy is missing. I think you might know