Candy by Kevin Brooks

quivering as she dragged me away, and the ground was an alien surface ten miles beneath me.
    Except for one little hiccup, the rest of the day was a nice downhill ride. Candy bought me a Coke—and a bottle of water for herself—and then we just strolled around in the paling light, ambling slowly along the pathways, arm in arm, not really caring where we were going, just walking. The zoo was gradually emptying out, the schoolkids and tourists heading back home, and as the skies began to dim and the afternoon made way for the evening, the atmosphere took on that nice quiet feeling you get at the end of the day—animals slumbering, shops getting ready to close, zookeepers with wheelbarrows preparing for the night.
    It felt good to be part of it.
    Tired and happy, wandering quietly in a cooling breeze, birds whistling and animals grumbling, growling, shuffling, yawning…
    We were on the far side of the zoo now, the quiet side. All zoos have their far sides: those places farthest away from the restaurants and the souvenir shops, where the less popular animals are housed, the animals that are hardto see, or don’t do very much—wolves, deer, small brown things that live in burrows, birds that are not quite ostriches. They’re lonely places, these quiet sides—the kinds of places where secrets can be shared. Secrets or truths.
    Or nothings.
    With us, it was nothings.
    I told Candy about my parents; she listened. I told her about Gina and Mike; she said she’d like to meet them. I told her about school and exams, and she drifted away, strangely saddened, or maybe just bored. But when I told her about writing songs and playing music and being onstage with The Katies, she perked up again. “It must be fantastic,” she said, “doing something you really like.”
    “Yeah,” I told her. “It’s pretty good.”
    “What’s it like onstage, you know, with all those people watching you? Don’t you get scared?”
    “Not really. I mean, we don’t get that many people watching us, and when the lights are down you can’t see most of them, anyway. Besides, I’m usually too busy trying to remember the songs to think of anything else.” I looked at her. “What about you? Do you get scared?”
    “When?”
    “When you’re onstage—when you’re dancing.”
    “Oh, right,” she said quickly, lowering her eyes. “Yeah…I don’t know…I don’t really think about it, I suppose. I just…” She raised her head and stared emptily into the distance, her face strangely sad again. When she spoke, her voice was cold. “I just pretend I’m not there. It’s the only way…” She sighed into silence, but only for a moment. With a self-dismissive shake of her head, she turned back to me with her smile restored and said, “Maybe I could come and see you play sometime?”
    “Yeah.”
    She grinned. “I could stand at the front and scream your name and throw my knickers at you. What do you reckon? Would you like that?”
    “As long as you washed them first.”
    She laughed.
    “Actually,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “I just happen to have a poster here…” I unfolded the poster for our London gig and showed it to her. “It’s this Friday,” I said as she took the poster from me and looked it over. “I mean, I don’t know if you can get there…”
    “The Black Room,” she said, reading the poster.
    “It’s a club in Hammersmith.”
    “Yeah, I know it.” She looked up at me. “You’re playing there?”
    “Nine o’clock,” I said. “This Friday.”
    She nodded, smiling. “I’m impressed.”
    “I can put you on the guest list if you want.”
    “Access all areas?”
    “I don’t see why not. Can you make it?”
    She chewed her lip, thinking hard. “I think so…I’ll have to see. It’s just a bit…”
    “What?”
    “Nothing…it’s all right. It’s just a bit complicated, that’s all. I might have to sort a few things out…” Her eyes went back to the poster, and I could see her weighing