Jaymz had been missing for weeks. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. People hadn’t noticed, at least not to start with, but after a couple of days the void was unavoidable. It was then that people began to speculate.

Emily, with her spotty face, was the first to realise, because she was secretly in love with him, and thought that he might have taken up with a girl. Bradley, the boy who claimed to have the biggest dick, claimed that Jaymz had been arrested. Then there was sweet and innocent Olivia, who worried that he might be lying injured in a hospital bed. Dav, which was short for Davion, pulled himself away from his iPhone, and said that Jaymz was dead in a ditch. Conor reckoned that he was delirious with pneumonia.  I didn’t say anything.

It was a credit to Jaymz that people came up with such outlandish reasons for his disappearance.

The last time anybody saw him was on a freezing cold Wednesday night. He climbed the railings beside the Lagon and stared at the twinkly lights on the other side. Then he turned around and told us about the time he jumped fully clothed into the blackness of the river. There hadn’t been a reason to do so but had seemed like a good thing to do.

We got into the back of Conor’s old Bedford Dormobile and drove up to Belfast Castle with spectacular views over the city. We sat on a wall drinking cheap cider until it started to snow, and Conor worried that the camper van might not make it back down the winding slope. Jaymz laughed and said that anything would get to the bottom of the hill in snow. It might not get down in one piece, but it would certainly get there.

The snow got heavier and while Bradley and Dav made snowballs, we huddled in the cold. Emily told Jaymz that she loved the way he spelt his name, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. That’s me, cool by nature, he’d swaggered, forgetting that he’d once told me that his granda had chosen the name after an obscure disco singer. Emily, with her black greasy hair and spots, almost wet her knickers because Jaymz had spoken to her.

Jaymz was plastered, but always able to make everyone else seem drunker than he was. A casual observer might not notice the difference between the extrovert and the booze fighter, but at times like this he could be unpredictable. Like the time he was drunk and climbed a tall oak tree to swing from its branches before jumping twenty feet to the ground. He should have broken a leg or something, but he didn’t. And when he scaled tall scaffolding on Agincourt Avenue and hung upside down by the legs, he might easily have slipped to his death. But nothing bad ever happened to him.

Despite his background, Jaymz was an enigma, larger than life, happy, and oozing confidence. He was never one for words, had little knowledge about anything, but what he lacked from his pitiful upbringing, he made up with composure that gave him film star appeal. There were plenty who said it was arrogance, and the police hated him for it, but it wasn’t hard to see why we adored him, and as you’ve probably guessed, worshipped the ground that he walked on.

But on that chilly night, he did something quite extraordinary. To our astonishment, he took off all his clothes and stood bollock naked. There were no inhibitions, the embarrassment was ours, and then he slowly fell backwards into the snow, and stared at the sky. He turned milky white, whiter than the snow around him, goose pimples on his arms and legs, and shivered uncontrollably. With a defiant look on his face, Jaymz said nothing at all.

We laughed and cheered, not at him, because whatever he did was okay with us. And then, after laying in the snow for ten minutes, he stood up like he was rising from the dead, his body dripping wet. Bradley, who now had every right to claim the world’s biggest dick, collected Jaymz’ sodden clothes and helped him dress. Jaymz didn’t say a word, but smirked, and looked like he’d fallen into a trance. Maybe he did catch pneumonia that night, because after he slipped away into the darkness, none of us had seen him since.

Days turned into weeks and when Jaymz didn’t appear, Dav and Olivia went to his house at Cliftonville to find him. Dav looked worried when he reported back. His parents hadn’t seen Jaymz either, or weren’t the least bit concerned about his disappearance. The old man had swigged from a can of beer and cussed Jaymz for not looking after his XL Bully. His mother had shrugged her shoulders and carried on watching The Chase, something lost on Dav because she wasn’t the brightest, and he believed that Jaymz’ level of thickness came from her.

I remembered a note that Jaymz once wrote and was shocked to see that the scrawl belonged to that of a small child. “The soul has beem givem its owm ears to hear thigs the mimd does not umderstamd.”

His slip into obscurity wasn’t surprising to me. There were clues on social media that the others hadn’t noticed. While their own accounts contained dozens of photos of Jaymz and his misdemeanours, they failed to realise that he posted very little himself. His Facebook page only contained a couple of images. There was nothing on Instagram, X, or Tik Tok, and for somebody as extroverted as Jaymz this was strange.

I picked up on this anomaly during the summer and spent weeks looking for reasons why this might be. That was how I was. If I saw something that intrigued me then I’d go to great lengths to find out more. It was an obsession that made me think that I might have a form of OCD.

At first, I tried to find out whether Jaymz had secret accounts, but that got me nowhere. Then I set up fake accounts in case he was blocking people that knew him. I suspected that he’d cottoned on to my sleuthing because for a while he seemed overly friendly, as if he was testing me, but I put that down to my paranoia.

With no success, I started following Jaymz like a stalker. Except that I didn’t see myself as one. He had no idea, and it wasn’t my intention to make him feel uncomfortable. If I had, then Jaymz would have punched me hard in the face.

Whenever Jaymz said that he was going home, I made excuses and said that I was going home too. With this pretence I would walk in the opposite direction and double back after him. The first few times I lost him, and this was because he wasn’t going home at all. I discovered this after almost bumping into him as he walked back into the city.

He sloped along Wellington Place before disappearing in the streets. It was always the same story. I followed him several times, but he gave me the slip.

Sometimes I asked questions to find out what it was that he wasn’t telling us, and hoped that he might let something slip, but he never did. He would laugh and give the same cretinous responses. What do you want to know? I like Fontaines D.C. I have a tattoo on my arse. I once shagged a donkey. I piss the bed when I’m drunk. I’m a Catholic bastard. Haha! Always a joke.

This consuming passion stopped when I realised that I had become his stalker after all. What had I been hoping to achieve? If there was a hidden side to him then maybe it was because I had created it.  

After that night, Jaymz never reappeared and melted away with the snow. Emily often talked about him and couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him again. Conor told her to forget him. He’d shown everyone that he had a small dick and had always been a waste. She looked like she might cry.

Life was dull, as if a light had been switched off, but nobody reported him missing. Not his parents. Not his older brother who was in prison. Not his big sister with ten screaming kids. I thought about him occasionally, believing that if I did, then he would think about us too. But whether he thought about us or not, it didn’t matter, because nothing happened, he had gone.

Dav repeated his comment about Jaymz being dead in a ditch, and I thought it might be true. There were those who didn’t like his cockiness, a need to be centre of attention, and he might have rubbed them up the wrong way. Especially the kids around the Waterworks who weren’t afraid to inflict the severest form of punishment. Every time they pulled a body from the Lagon I waited to see if it was Jaymz, but it never was.

Eventually, we decided that Dav was right, that Jaymz was dead, and chose to remember him as we did that night, naked in the snow, never growing old. And then, in years to come, with bad eyes, poor hearing, and stumbling with walking sticks, we’d still be able to laugh about him.