Read Dark Tides for Free Online

could afford to go. His mum had kicked him out and forced him to get a crappy place of his own as soon as he’d turned sixteen. He never mentioned his dad, though Rachel had told me that he’d left when Mark was young. The pain of a missing parent was a bond we shared.
    Just at the moment, he was working at one of the kipper smokehouses in Peel. We joked about it sometimes, but not often. There wasn’t a lot that was funny about Mark’s life. The time he’d served for burglary as a young offender meant that he wasn’t likely to catch a break any time soon. As for break- ins , we didn’t talk about those either, though I’d heard enough from the others to suspect that Mark hadn’t exactly reformed. I didn’t ask him about it and Mark didn’t tell. I figured it was better that way. I liked the side of him I knew.
    It had taken me a little while to understand how Mark fitted into the group. He didn’t hang out with us on a regular basis – partly because of his shift patterns, partly because he was a natural loner, like me. He always made it along for Hop-tu-naa. He caught up with us five or six times a year other than that. So how had a kid from the wrong side of the tracks become friends with three middle-class lads like David, Callum and Scott?
    ‘Hero complex,’ Rachel had told me once, and when I pressed her for more, she said that Mark had stood up for David when some older kids were bullying him at school. He ended up taking a beating on David’s behalf and getting into trouble for fighting so ferociously. The upshot was David felt like he owed Mark, but more than that, I got the feeling Mark had become a kind of project for David. He wanted to rehabilitate him. Wanted to help him lead a better life.
    Good luck, was all I could think. In my experience, people didn’t change all that much. I never had. I had friends now but I was still shy, still anxious. And one look at Mark was all you needed to sense the anger and bitterness that lurked inside, crackling under the surface. If Dad had been more engaged with my life, Mark was exactly the type of boy he should have forbidden me from hanging out with.
    The SUV lurched and I swung my head back around to see Scott sawing at the wheel. We’d veered out over the centre line in the middle of a corner.
    I stared at the side of Scott’s face, stained green by the electronic glow from the dash.
    ‘This fog’s pretty bad.’
    ‘Relax. There’s nobody up here, anyway.’
    Just as he said it, a pair of headlamps emerged from the gloom and a white van blitzed past.
    ‘Correction, hardly anyone.’
    ‘You could slow down a bit.’
    ‘I know what I’m doing.’
    Yeah, killing us, I thought. But I didn’t say anything more. He’d only tell me I was boring. I spent most of my life feeling as if I was boring and it seemed like it could only be a matter of time before everyone else reached the same verdict.
    I drew my feet back a little and checked the tension of my seatbelt. The fog through the windscreen was thicker than ever. It was a solid grey mass.
    The SUV’s big engine purred and hummed and vibrated. The note changed fractionally whenever Scott raised his foot from the accelerator or blipped the brake pedal. He didn’t do either very much. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the fog magically evaporate, I didn’t believe his speed would increase at all.
    The track on the stereo finished abruptly and a new song started playing. It sounded just the same as the one before, except maybe the rapper was swearing more.
    ‘Turn coming up,’ David yelled from the boot.
    So perhaps I wasn’t the only one who was worried.
    A raised footbridge materialised from the gloom and I glimpsed the unlit warning sign for the level crossing belonging to the mountain railway.
    Scott braked hard and heaved the steering wheel to the left. I grasped for the moulded handle in my door and felt the suspension go light. There was a moment of weightlessness before we