Batteries Not Included Read online

  I ground up the beans fresh, because if you’ve woken up starkers in a strange bed with a strange man, and there are signs your mother’s in on the plot, the last thing you need is a cup of insipid dishwater laughably known as instant coffee. Trust me. I found that one out on my eighteenth birthday. And yes, before you ask, Lilith was involved in that little fiasco, too. “There you go,” I said, passing Cain a richly scented mugful of Columbian and pulling out a chair. After a moment’s hesitation, Cain joined me at the kitchen table. Which was also the dining table—like I said, small house. “There’s no drugs in it, and anyway I don’t think they could survive in an environment that caffeinated.” I took a hefty swallow, and sighed as I felt the healing properties of the magic beans spreading through my body like a chromatography experiment.

  Cain took a cautious sip, and his kohl-rimmed eyes widened. I wondered how he managed to sleep in the stuff without it smudging all over his face like a note for the milkman left out in the rain. Maybe it was tattooed on? “That’s good coffee,” he said, sounding surprised.

  I smiled, pleased. “I used to work in a coffee shop. One of the old-fashioned family sort, not a bloody Starbucks. Taught me a lot, that place did.” Chiefly to get a job that didn’t involve so much contact with people, and on no account to wear those jeans Lilith bought me in public unless I was ready to fend blokes off with a pitchfork. Girls, too—although half the time they just wanted to know where I’d bought them.

  “Hmm.” Apparently Cain was the one bloke in the world immune to the power of the jeans. His eyes narrowed. “Did it teach you I take my coffee black, with two sugars? Because you didn’t ask, you just went ahead and made it.”

  Oops. “I, er, I might have read that in a magazine, okay?”

  Still glaring at me, Cain got up. He took his coffee with him, and headed for the lounge, which was all of two feet away. “Was it this magazine?” he asked, holding up one of the half-dozen Lilith had given me, which I realized with a sinking feeling were still strewn all over the sofa. “Or was it in the tour DVD?” He held up the empty case.

  “Look, I’m not some crazed stalker!” I said weakly. “I just, you know, like your stuff.”

  “My stuff?” Cain raised an eyebrow.

  “Your music! Not, you know, your package, or anything, although I’m sure that’s great, too, in fact I know it is, ‘cause I caught a glimpse when we were in bed earlier, not that I was really looking, it just sort of caught my eye…” I trailed off, wincing a bit.

  Weirdly, Cain wasn’t looking as pissed off as I’d thought he’d be. “You know, you’re really different to what you look like, aren’t you?” he said.

  I sighed, and flopped down on the sofa. “Yeah, I get that a lot from guys. It usually comes just after “We can still be friends” and just before “Goodbye.” I keep thinking I should get a t-shirt made up with “My other face is an ugly dork” or something. Sorry about all this stuff. Lilith gave it to me last night—she’s more into Solstice than Christmas, don’t know why.”

  “Lilith?” He sat down next to me and sipped some more of his coffee, closing his eyes briefly with a blissful expression on his face. My coffee has that effect on a lot of people. I often think it’s the only reason I ever get second dates.

  “She’s my, um, mother. Not that you’d believe it if you saw her. Most people just assume she’s my sister. My younger sister. We look a lot alike. And before you ask, yes, she buys my clothes. And cuts my hair. And fixes me up with unsuitable men.”

  “Does she also go around kidnapping singers and ripping their clothes off?” Cain said, his eyes actually looking amused over the top of his mug. Like I said: my coffee’s good.

  “Um. I’d be a bit upset if my mother went to jail, so obviously I’m going to have to answer “no” to that, aren’t I?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, shopping your mum’s not exactly the act of a dutiful son, is it? “Guess what I got you for Christmas, Mum! It’s a jail sentence!”“ He smiled at me for a moment, then it seemed to falter. “I’d better ring my mum.”

  “Yeah, of course.” I hopped up and got him the phone. “Here you go.”

  He dialled quickly, not looking at me. “Hello, Mum? It’s me.” He paused. “Me—Cain!” All trace of a smile vanished from his face. “Mum, this isn’t—Mum?” He looked up slowly, his eyes wide with confusion and filled with hurt. “She hung up on me. She bloody hung up on me!”

  “Didn’t she recognize your voice?”

  “She said…” He swallowed, looking like a puppy that’d just been kicked in the bollocks. By its mother. “She said she was sitting looking right at her son, and if I called her or Neil again with my stupid hoax they’d have the police on me.” He put the phone down carefully on the table, and rested his head in his hands. I stared at the rounded shape of his back, wondering if he’d deck me if I tried to put my arm around him.

  Then he looked up, his face suddenly hard. “Right. Get your car keys—we’re going over there now.”

  * * * *

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t bloody believe it,” Cain muttered for the seven hundredth time as we trundled up the A1M towards Stevenage, ancestral home of the Shepney clan. Or at least, the branch of it currently slumped in the passenger seat of my knackered old Transit van, the purchase of which had been a lone rebellion against the forces of Cool, otherwise known as my mother. “How could my own mother do this to me?”

  I didn’t say that in my experience, there’s very little some mothers won’t do to humiliate their sons. All while firmly believing it’s somehow for their own good. “Maybe there’s a lookalike who’s managed to convince her he’s you?”

  “What, and the same guy arranged for me to get kidnapped from her house, stripped naked and left in your bed like one of those teddy bears you mentioned earlier? Though without the novelty condoms, thank fuck. And while we’re on the subject, what was that about, anyway—you’re not into all that furry shit are you? Blokes dressing up in animal skins to shag each other?”

  “No!” I could feel my cheeks getting red, and I tried to concentrate extra hard on the road ahead. “It’s just…I had a bit of an unconventional upbringing, and sometimes it comes out in dreams and stuff.”

  “Lilith.” Cain tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the van door. “You know, I think I’d like to meet your mother.”

  I nodded fatalistically. “You’d like her. Everyone likes her. She’s sort of…WYSIWIG.”

  “Whizzy what?”

  “What You See Is What You Get. It’s a computer term.”

  “Oh.” Cain nodded. “Nerd,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Yeah, ‘fraid so. Is this the turn off?”

  “Yep.” I could feel him looking at me sideways. “You found that suspiciously easily.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve got a knack for finding turn-offs. Ask any of my exes.”

  As Cain laughed, we pulled up into a fairly nice-looking, ordinary street—semi-detached houses, most of them with the front gardens converted into parking places. Everyone seemed to have at least two cars, which was two more than the architect had planned for when designing the place. Either Cain’s rise to fame had been so meteoric he hadn’t had time to buy his mum a house in a posher area yet, or she’d refused to move. Or he was a selfish git who hadn’t bothered to spread his money around his family, but I couldn’t see that, somehow. After all, there he was, staying with her for Christmas, instead of living it up in Hollywood or wherever.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said again as we got to number eleven. “That’s Neil’s car.”

  “That’s your manager, right?”

  “Yeah, and he’s supposed to be in London. Managing. What’s he doing out here?” Cain was drumming his fingers on the dashboard, not making any move to get out of the van.

  “Well, your mum probably called him. No, wait—he called her, didn’t he?” I shrugged. “Maybe all that stuff on the phone was some kind of, I dunno, security thing? Maybe they didn�
��t want anyone to find out you were missing?”

  “Yeah, but if Neil had picked me up when I asked him to, I wouldn’t have sodding well been missing, would I? You think maybe they’ve had ransom demands from whoever snatched me…? Fuck it. I’m going in.” He got out of the van, and I followed suit. He paused. “Look—shit, what was your name again?”

  “Sam,” I reminded him, wondering where this was going.

  “Right. Sam. Look, I still haven’t got a bloody clue what’s been going on, and for all I know you’re a date-raping kidnapper, but, well…” He paused. “What I mean to say is, no harm, no foul—I’m back home now, and you brought me, so you don’t have to get involved in any shit storm. You can drive off now, and I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

  “You really know how to make a bloke feel special,” I joked weakly.

  “Oh, for—” With his hands on his hips, he looked like someone’s mum. Someone else’s, that is. Not mine, obviously. “Do you want to spend Christmas in jail?”

  “No, but…” I sighed. “Let’s just say I’m not going to be one hundred per cent happy until I see for certain things have worked out all right. Tell them I’m just some bloke who gave you a lift, if it’ll make you feel better. But I’m not leaving you until I know for sure you’re back where you belong.”

  “Why wouldn’t—fine. Come on, then.” Without looking to see if I was following, Cain marched up to the front door and rang the bell.

  It was opened abruptly.

  By someone who looked very familiar, because I’d just spent the whole morning and an unspecified portion of the night with him.

  Cain Shepney.

  “You bastard!” he snarled, and punched my Cain on the nose. “Leave my mum alone, all right!”

  My Cain reeled, hands clutched to his nose. Suddenly furious, I was about to step in, but my Cain rallied and retaliated, getting in a nice right to the other Cain’s jaw. “She’s my mum, you fucker!”

  “Language!” came a harried-sounding female voice. “And stop all this fighting! This isn’t a council estate!”

  “Sorry, mum,” two identical voices chorused, swiftly followed by the formation of two identical scowls directed at one another.

  “Um, Mrs Shepney?” I asked the comfortably mumsy woman with greying hair who was now looking from one Cain to the other as if she was watching a tennis match between Elvis and Shergar. “Can we take this inside?”

  * * * *

  “So what the bleedin’ ‘ell do we do now?” Neil-the-manager asked, his pudgy fingers continually straying to his inside jacket pocket where I guessed he kept his cigarettes. I hoped it was his cigarettes. If it was a gun we were in more trouble than I’d thought. “No offence to whichever of you’s the real Cain, and by the way my money’s on the one who actually woke up where he was supposed to this morning, but one of you is quite enough for anyone. Two of you ain’t going to sell twice as many records, that’s for bleedin’ sure. So how are we going to find out which is which?”

  “DNA testing?” bloody-nose Cain—my Cain—suggested.

  Neil looked like he wanted to spit, but didn’t reckon that’d go down any better than smoking in Mrs Shepney’s house. “Press’d have a bleedin’ field day. You want them calling your mum a tart?”

  “Nobody’s calling my mum a tart!” bruised-jaw Cain snapped. “Just ask us stuff. Anything only I’d know.”

  “Fine!” Bloody-nose Cain folded his arms. “Ask away.”

  “Yeah, right.” Neil’s tone was dripping with sarcasm. “You ‘ad my number and your—Mrs Shepney’s, so we know you’ve done your bleedin’ ‘omework. I’m not staying here till New Year’s Eve playing twenty bleedin’ questions.”

  “How about tattoos?” Cain’s drummer Jon asked. I wasn’t sure why he was here, but I was glad he was. He’d been the one who’d calmed everyone down when we got in, and got Cain’s mum to make us all cups of tea so we could be civilized about wanting to kill each other.

  Neil sneered at him. “All the pictures ‘e’s ‘ad in the papers? That’d be a piece of piss to copy!”

  Jon gave him a smug look. “They haven’t seen all of his tattoos, though, have they? What about that one he got done when Paradise went platinum? No one’s seen that, have they?”

  Bruised-jaw Cain looked a bit shifty. “Well, one or two people. Maybe half a dozen.”

  Jon’s eyes widened. “Cain, you tart! You only had it done three weeks ago! How many people have you been showing it to?”

  “Well, it’s a start, innit?” Neil broke in. “So where is this new tattoo? Let’s see if you both got it, and then we can argue about ‘ow many bastards have seen it.”

  Jon sniggered. “It’s on his arse. So come on, lads, trousers down!”

  Well, once they’d stripped off, it was clear to even the most casual observer that the two Cains weren’t, in fact, identical. Bloody-nose Cain—my Cain—would definitely win a wet-briefs contest, put it that way. “Christ!” Jon breathed. “Right, that’s it. That one.” He pointed to bruised-jaw Cain. “I’d know that tackle anywhere.” He sounded a bit disappointed, actually.

  I dragged my gaze away from my Cain’s rather more impressive package. “What about the tattoo?”

  “Sod the tattoo! I’m telling you, that’s the real thing! I mean, come on, why would I lie?” Oh, yes, that was definitely disappointment, there. And Jon was clearly having trouble keeping his eyes off my Cain’s package.

  “Stop wastin’ time, it ain’t like I’m enjoying the view, and if I don’t get a smoke soon I’m just going to kill one of you and ‘ave done with it.” Neil folded his arms impatiently. “Bend over, boys, and show us what you got.”

  Glaring identically, the Cains turned round and bent over, displaying two very similar arses to the company. “Here it is—see?” Jon jabbed a finger in the direction of bruised-jaw Cain. We all peered at a tattoo about the size and shape of a pound coin, with the title of the song, “Paradise,” above it and the word “Platinum” underneath in tiny letters.

  “So what’s the other bloke got?” Neil asked.

  We stared at my Cain’s arse. I frowned. “It’s not a disc. It’s writing. It says—”

  “Bloody hell!” Jon cackled. “It says “Made in China!” It’s just like those dolls of you they made for the kids!”

  You know how sometimes you look at a drawing, and it doesn’t make sense, because you’re not sure what it’s supposed to be, and then someone gives you a clue, and then, because your brain knows what to look for, suddenly it’s blindingly obvious what the picture is? “Cain?” I said, grabbing hold of his arm, barely letting him finish pulling up his trousers first. “We’ve got to go. Right now. We need to talk to Lilith.”

  Cain was looking a bit dazed by how things had turned out, and he let me drag him out to the van without a protest. Neil helped out with a snarl of “Now, piss off, you bloody poseur, or we’ll ‘ave the law on you!”

  “Made in China. Made in China,” Cain—or rather, not-Cain—kept muttering to himself as we drove away. “What the bloody hell am I, a blow-up doll?”

  “Something like that,” I said grimly, swinging the van out onto the motorway. “Any idea what the penalty for matricide is these days?”

  “I’m a sex toy,” Cain mumbled. “A sodding sex toy. No wonder my dick’s so much bigger than his.” He sounded a bit more cheerful about the last part.

  “Look, just hold it together until we get back to mine, okay?” I said, trying to simultaneously sound soothing and avoid getting cut up by some wanker in a Porsche who was probably on his way back from shagging my mother. “I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee when we get there, and then we’ll go and kill Lilith.”

  “What the hell’s your mum got to do with this?”

  “Everything,” I told him in tones of doom.

  “What, is she chief inventor for Ann Summers or something? Everything I thought I remembered is a lie!” Not-Cain’s voice was a despairing howl. “And he’s shagging Jon
?” he added helplessly.

  I risked a pat on his arm. “Um, I’m really sorry about that. It must be horrible to find out your boyfriend is, well, not your boyfriend.”

  “He’s never been my boyfriend! Jon’s straight!” Cain shuddered. “And anyway, really not my type!”

  “You know, that’s just what I’ve always thought!” I frowned. “Funny, that.” I felt pretty smug, though, until I remembered that “not my type” was exactly what he’d said about me.

  “So, er, what is your type?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “None of your business,” he muttered, not looking at me.

  * * * *

  “How far is it from here to your mum’s?” not-Cain asked me abruptly as we got to my street.

  “Oh, five minutes, tops,” I said, slowing. “Or half an hour if we go via St Peter’s Street, but don’t worry, I’m not that daft. Why, would you rather go straight round there?”

  He nodded. “I want to find out what’s going on. What I am. For all I know I’m going to turn into a bloody pumpkin at midnight!”

  “Well, more likely you’d just turn back into a six-inch plastic doll…Sorry,” I said, cringing a bit at my extreme lack of tact. “I’m sure that’s not going to happen.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I’d like to find out for certain, instead of just waiting around until my bloody batteries run out!”

  I looked at him, hunched over in his seat, a spiky-haired picture of misery, and I put my foot down. Sod the bloody speed limit. “We’ll be there in five,” I promised him, swinging the van away from my house.

  We made it in four minutes seventeen seconds, and I pulled up in her sweeping drive, scattering gravel like confetti. Lilith’s house is a lot bigger than mine. She needs the space to keep all her boyfriends in. Of course, when I killed her, I supposed I’d inherit it and it’d be mine. I wondered if the boyfriends would hang around. “Do they still have laws to stop you benefiting from murder?” I wondered aloud as we crunched our way up to the front door.