26

            I wondered what he expected me to do.  I wondered if he expected anything.  I wondered if it worried him at all, what I might do, or say, but the more I saw of him, the more it dawned on me that he did not worry about anything.  That nothing infiltrated his conscience.  So you might be wondering why I didn’t tell my mother right away.  I wonder that myself sometimes, especially now, when I look at what a fucking mess my life has become.  It was difficult though, for a number of reasons.  They were always together, for one thing.  Because he worked nights, they would be together whenever she was home from the supermarket where she worked.  She was addicted to him, I think. I mean, she craved him.  She would wrap herself around him like a scarf, and they would move themselves around the house like that, like one person instead of two.  He was always scooping her up in his big meaty arms and carrying her like a child.  Whenever I saw them in the lounge, they would be entwined, tangled together, and you could barely see where my mother ended and Howard begun.  So getting her on her own was not easy.

I was scared she would not believe me.  I had the conversation in my head over and over again.  I tortured myself with how to begin it.  Mum I need to talk to you.  Mum I need to tell you something.  Mum, look at this.  There were fingertip sized bruises on either side of my neck, well covered by my hair which was now shoulder length.  In my mind, I would show her, I would tell her what had happened. But then I would picture her face.  The narrow eyed gaze she offered me, the skeptical arch of her eyebrows, the doubting expression that furrowed her forehead whenever I said anything.  I started to believe that she wouldn’t believe me.  That she would think it was my latest ploy to try to chase Howard off.  She would be disgusted, that I should sink so low.

The other thing that stopped me saying anything to her was my own confusion.  I was confused about what had happened that night.  You might think it was pretty clear cut, pretty obvious, but I now know that your mind has ways of making you doubt and question things when something unexpected occurs.  Sometimes I lay in my bed and tried to remember what had happened.  Had he been joking, for instance?  Had he been messing about with me?  Had he been trying out some of his wrestling moves on me, to try to impress me?  Somehow, as stupid and unlikely a scenario as this was, it became more appealing to me than the actual truth.

And weirdly enough, after that night, he did start trying his wrestling moves out on me.  Even in front of mum, which she thought was hilarious, until I told them both to go fuck themselves.  “Just trying to get you interested in sport,” he called after me, his tone baffled as well as disappointed. “It’s good for you, you know.”

I knew what was good for me, and that was keeping as far away from him as possible.  Two days after the incident in the kitchen, Michael and I were watching MTV together at my house.  There was a loose plan of sorts, to call for Billy then head on down to the beach for some food and fooling about.  The beach had become the social hot spot for everyone that summer holiday.  I wasn’t much of a fan of it myself.  Endless sand, and kids running about screaming, and roasting under an impossibly hot sun.  Great.   I couldn’t get myself going somehow.  I just sat perched on the edge of Howard’s precious leather sofa, while Michael sat slumped beside me, as I flicked through the music channels, just desperate, without knowing why, just absolutely desperate to find some Nirvana, or something, anything good.  Anything with some soul, some guts.  Instead I was repulsed by a rolling puke fest of Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson hits.  I was shaking my head, rolling my eyes when I heard that bloody Gabrielle song, Dreams, or some such shit.  It was everywhere, all the fucking time.  My mother searched for it on the kitchen radio, and washed up singing to it.  “Look at this,” I finally growled over my shoulder at Michael, who was staring at the TV screen with a dazed and appalled expression on his face. “If it’s not bloody soppy love ballads, fucking Michael Bolton and Toni Braxton, then it’s awful fucking dance shit.”

“Shit,” Michael agreed, shaking his head slowly. “I can’t believe peoples listen to this crap.  God, not that one, turn it off, turn it over!”  I looked back at the screen.  It was Ace of Base singing Another Baby.

“Ugh,” I said in fury, and kept scrolling.  The next channel was playing Runaway Train by Soul Asylum.  I kind of liked it and had bought the single in Woolworths.  I breathed out slowly and let it play.  “Better than the rest of that awful shit.  Must be the worst year for music ever.”

Just then we heard the front door open and close with an exuberant bang.  I felt my stomach hit the floor, and I looked at Michael, and opened my mouth to say hey, forget this, let’s go to Billy’s, but there was Howard already barging into the room, and planting his giant arse right in front of the TV. “All right boys?” he called out, his voice booming back at us over his shoulder as he stared at the Soul Asylum video. “I recorded some wrestling last night, you mind if I put it on?”

I sighed ever so slightly and passed him the remote.  “C’mon,” I muttered to Michael.  He nodded and reared up from the sofa.  He had a demeanour which impressed me then; his eyes on Howard, bright and questioning, unflinching. Howard held the remote and caught my shoulder as I tried to slink past.

“Hey, you don’t have to go! I’m not chucking you out. Stay and watch it with me! You’ll love it!”

I should have wriggled free from his hand, but I felt trapped then, trapped in a potentially humiliating scene, with Michael staring at me as if he did not know me, and Howard sort of jumping about from one foot to the other, like a boxer in the ring gearing up for a fight. “C’mon don’t be a misery, don’t be a spoilsport,” he started saying in this really upbeat, jovial voice, turning me around to face him.  I seemed to transform into a statue then; I was as stiff and unyielding as a board.  I had nothing to say because my throat was choked up with fear and dread and confusion, and I was just thinking for fucks sake no, for fucks sake don’t. “I’ll teach you both some moves,” he went on, suddenly wrapping his arm around my neck. “I’ll teach you how to get out of them.  You know what a neckbreaker is?”

I couldn’t look at Michael then, partly because of Howard’s arm, and partly because it would probably have killed me to see the horror and the embarrassment etched on his face.  I could feel him staring daggers at Howard though.  All of a sudden then, I felt his hand around my arm, and he sort of firmly tugged me away from Howard. “Yeah, all right, we get it thanks,” he said, as Howard’s arm fell away from me. “We’re not really interested in wrestling.”

Howard’s eyes were full of glee and self-confidence.  He laughed at us and threw himself down on the sofa, which creaked and groaned beneath his weight. “Oh you don’t know what you’re missing!” he cried at us in good natured amusement. “Top class entertainment! You boys don’t even like football, do you?  Do you not play any sports, not any?”

We ignored him, and left the house.  Outside Billy’s I was faced with yet more humiliation.  They all wanted to know what the hell had happened to my bike.  I paused for a moment before replying.  I looked at their bemused faces and could see they were waiting for something hilarious. Billy’s mum had lumbered him with this huge picnic basket full of food, and he had it balanced precariously on the handlebars of his bike.  I kicked at the ground, my hands in my pockets, my headphones around my neck.  “Left it on the drive,” I mumbled at them. “Howard ran it over.”

Michael frowned at me in silence, while Billy and Jake just laughed. “You dick!” exclaimed Billy, climbing onto his.

“Totally dead?” Jake enquired.  I nodded regretfully. “What you gonna’ do now?”

“Birthday coming up,” I shrugged.

“We could try asking the rich folk to let us cut the grass again?” Michael said as a suggestion as we started to head towards the beach. “Save some money up that way?”

“Not worth it,” I replied. “They’ll just say no.”

“Oh wow, positive thinking!”

“My dad’s making me get a Saturday job,” Jake said then, pushing his bike slowly along beside Michael. “He already has an interview lined up for me at the shoe shop in town.”

“You’re gonna’ spend your spare time fetching shoes for people?” Billy smirked at him, obviously safe in the knowledge that his parents would never suggest such a thing to him.  “You fucking bell end Jake!”

Jake shrugged his bony shoulders. “He doesn’t want me bumming around all the time,” he explained to us with an extended yawn.  “He wants me to get experience, and start saving some money.”

“These years are meant to be for bumming around!” Billy complained loudly. “Ah fuck it Jake, just fuck up the interview, you have to!  You’re not old yet! This is our time!”

Michael laughed and nudged me then. “When’s your birthday?”

“Two weeks.”

“Well guess what? My brother will be back by then!” His grin was huge, his dark eyes sparkling under his mop of black hair. “We’ll have the biggest fucking party this town has ever seen!”

I watched the others swapping amazed looks, as Michael nodded on.  I wondered why he hadn’t told me this before, but then I guessed he had probably been waiting for an audience.  It was the kind of news that deserved an audience, I thought, smiling back at him.  It was the kind of news that deserved a celebration.  “He’s really getting out?” Jake was asking, his jaw hanging open in awe.

“Yep,” Michael nodded proudly and smugly. “Had the call last night.” He glanced at me then. “Wanted to wait until we were all together to tell you. Just two weeks boys, just two weeks, and life will be fine!”

I walked along, nodding and smiling where I was expected to.  I was pleased for Michael obviously, pleased for him, and intrigued to meet the infamous Anthony Anderson, but somehow I couldn’t get as excited as I would have liked.  Two weeks was such a long time, I reasoned.  A lot of shit could happen in two weeks.

Down at the beach, we dumped our stuff on the sand and gazed around.  It looked like the entire school was down there, I thought, squinting out at the constant flow of bare legs and wet heads parading past us.  Billy was in a ridiculous state of excitement about it all, which I found hard to understand.  Weren’t these all the same people we saw and loathed inside school, day in, day out?  Why were they suddenly all his best mates?  He and Jake dashed off towards the water, Billy hollering out at someone he knew.  I unbuttoned my shirt and sat down on the sand, pushing my bare feet under it and wriggling my toes about. Michael jumped down beside me and handed me a perfectly constructed roll up. “Thanks.”

“No problem. You look like you need it.  Fucking Howard, eh.” I nodded morosely and accepted the light he held out.  I inhaled deeply and then breathed a smooth stream of smoke up into the air.  I could feel him watching me.  “What a dick,” he added. “That Howard.  Such a twat.”

I had the feeling he was trying to edge me into a conversation I did not want to have.  So I nodded and rolled my eyes to show I agreed with his sentiments; Howard was a dick and a twat, alright.  “You okay?” he gave in and asked me finally.

“Yeah, I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well with John gone, and that arsehole living with you…You can come back and stay with me again you know.  Any time you like.  My mum won’t even notice.”

“It’s okay.”

“Are we gonna’ start some more shit with him then?”

I glanced at him sideways. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” he shrugged. “Project Arsehole.  We need some new ideas.”

“It’s too late Mike,” I told him, feeling a little overwhelmed for some reason. “He’s got his feet well and truly under the table.  There’s no point.”

“What?” Michael demanded, sounding really annoyed. “Why?”

I groaned a little and lay back on the sand, draping one arm over my eyes as I smoked.  “Because it’s over, that’s why.”

“How is it over?  Because he’s in your house?  You can still get rid of him!  We can still try!”

I sighed under my arm and wondered why everything always had to be such a fight with him.  Why did he even care? “Look he’s the big boss man now, yeah? He pays for everything.  His rules.”

“Yeah well it shouldn’t be like that, should it?” he demanded hotly. “Are you just gonna’ give up?”

I nodded. “Yes.  I am.  I am giving it up.  Okay with you?”

“No not really.  Because I know how much you hate the guy.  I know he makes your life a misery.”

I felt a jerk of panic then, that’s the only way I can describe it.  I felt freaked out and under inspection, like the true pathetic me was rising close to the surface, too close, and I had to hide it, I had to keep it from him.  I grew panicked that he had seen the bruises.  That he knew something.  I jerked to my feet. “You don’t know shit actually,” I said, and walked angrily away.

He let me go, but I could feel his eyes on me wonderingly for a long time, as I weaved moodily in and out of the crowds.  I walked on like that for ages, just staring down at the sand beneath my feet.  I pulled my headphones on and listened to The Smiths. Take me out tonight, they sang, in dark and solemn tones, because I want to see people and I want to see light, driving in your car, oh please don’t drop me home, because it’s not my home, it’s their home, and I’m welcome no more.  You shouldn’t really listen to depressing music when you’re down, should you?  I didn’t care though.  The words were a sort of comfort to me, I suppose.  I felt like I always did when listening to the music I loved.  That the words were meant just for me, that they had me in mind, and were going to help me somehow.  I truly believed that, you know.

So I walked on, listening to The Smiths, which turned into The Clash singing I Fought The Law.  I walked on, staring down at the sand, and as I walked, I felt like there was some invisible pressure on my shoulders, pushing me down the whole time, pressing me deeper into the sand.  Everything felt like an effort.  Walking, moving along, even breathing, all of it.  I didn’t like the way I felt one bit.  Sort of down and low and disgusted and enraged with myself.  I wondered again, why I didn’t tell Michael.  I reasoned with myself that there was no point.  What could he do anyway?  He was a fourteen year old kid and a known trouble maker.  Another kid no one would believe.  In truth though, somewhere at the back of my mind, I knew it was because I was humiliated by it all.  I kept seeing myself the way I knew Howard must have seen me that night; some skinny runt of a kid forced down on the kitchen table.  Put right in his fucking place.  No way out.  And the memory, when it came, both choked and slaughtered me.

I kicked along morosely, brooding over my situation, when suddenly I felt a small hand pull at my arm.  I whirled around, startled and nervous, and there was Lucy Chapman, smiling her sunny smile at me, waving her hand a little bit in the air.  I pulled down my headphones.  “Sorry,” I said. “In a world of my own.”

She laughed.  She was wearing this bright red swimming costume, with a little blue denim skirt on the bottom.  Her hair had that beach look to it.  Like she had been swimming, and then laying on the sand, and now it was all half damp twirls that smelled like coconut.  I snapped out of my daydream.  I felt my heart pumping loud and fast.  I felt all these fuzzy warm feelings rippling through me softly, drowning out the dread.  “It’s all right,” she said to me. “Penny for your thoughts, as my mum says.”

I smiled slightly and shook my head. “You wouldn’t want to know.”

“Oh okay.  The others here?”

“Yeah, back that way.  I was bored.  Just having a walk.” I couldn’t help staring at her then.  I tried not to, but the way she was, all tanned and freckled faced, and her hands wrapped around the shoulder strap of her huge beach bag, she was just too much.  Too much.

“So how’s your summer been so far?” she asked me. I continued to smile at her, probably in this really dopey way.  I couldn’t get enough of her.  It was these waves you see.  These waves of warmth and goodness that just radiated from her, whenever I was around her.  I couldn’t explain it.  I still can’t.  “What’ve you been up to?”

“Oh you know,” I said with a half smile, meeting her eye.  “Getting in trouble.”

“Well funny you say that, because there was this wild rumour going around that you ran away from home and got taken back by the police!” She was staring at me in wonder, her chestnut eyes watching mine.  A clump of damp hair fell from her ear across her eye, and she pushed it back with one finger. “Is that true?”

“Hmm, sort of.”

“You ran away?  Why did you run away?”

“That’s an exaggeration.  I was only at Mike’s and my mum knew I was there.  She just sent the boys in blue to scare me.”

“My dad heard it from someone else,” she grimaced at me in regret. “You know how small towns are.  I was worried about you though.”

We started walking then, just slowly at first, back the way I had come.  “Hmm,” I said. “Bet your dad’s worried now then.”  She made a face.

“Yeah, kind of.  He’s a bit over protective.”

“He wouldn’t exactly jump for joy if I asked you out again then? You know, on a proper date this time?  Just me and you?”

We stopped walking again, and she turned to face me, and her eyes were troubled and a little guilty and when she shook her head at me, I felt my good mood crumble to dust.  “No he wouldn’t let me yet,” she said. “Definitely not.”

“Not right now because you’re too young?” I pressed her.  “Or not right now because of what he’s heard about me?”

“Both.”

“Okay.  No problem.”  I scratched my head and started walking again.  She caught me up though, and surprised me by slipping her arm through mine.

“But I agree with him on one thing.”

“What?”

“I am too young.  For all that.  I mean, I look at Zoe and she’s like determined to live life at a hundred miles per hour.  But I’m not ready for that.  We’re only kids once, right?”

I decided to take this as a compliment of sorts, how else could I take it?  So I smiled back at her, and enjoyed the weight of her arm through mine.  “So would your dad have a problem with us just being friends?  Just meeting up like this?”

“No,” she said, smiling broadly. “Not at all.”

That day at the beach turned out to be one of the best ones I had that entire summer.  I forgot about everything.  I forgot about mum, and Howard, and my face against the kitchen table, and I forgot about whether I was going to tell anyone or not, or whether anything like that would ever happen again.  That day was all the things it should have been.  It was laughter and piss taking, and music and hastily rolled cigarettes, and girls in bikinis, and wrestling each other in the sand.  It was staying out as long as we could; watching the sun spread a mirage of warm colours out across the sparkling ocean.  It was feeling Lucy beside me, her bare arm against mine, her warmth spreading through me, keeping out the cold.  It was sun tans and sandy hair, and shirts tied around waists, and feeling like we could stay there like that forever.  Those kinds of days are rare, and get rarer the older you get, so when you  get one, you should hold onto it for as long as possible.  I didn’t want that day to ever end. I didn’t want to have to trudge home, with no bike, back to them.

When I went home, mum told me my dinner was cold and Howard looked up from his newspaper and smiled at me.  His eyes were like cold stars I thought.  I took the cold dinner to my room and poked at it.  I was a tumbling mess of so many things.  I listened to About A Girl and smiled thinking about Lucy.  Then I sat and shuddered when I remembered my head hitting the table.  I remembered the shock I had felt afterwards, alone in the kitchen.  Shock which left me frozen to the spot, unable to understand or believe what had just happened there.  And then something else had slipped over me, this woeful feeling of having my worst fears confirmed, of having been right from the beginning about this guy.  The anger shook through me from time to time, especially when I heard him laughing with my mother downstairs.  Fucking ugly twisted ape man.  Small eyed balding gorilla.  I would find myself comparing him to animals, and then thinking that this was insulting to animals.  I would find myself thinking, I need to do something, maybe Mike was right, maybe we can keep the plan going, maybe there is something big I can do to get rid of him.

But you know what happened whenever I next saw the man?  Fear.  Fear would kick in out of nowhere, blindsiding me, staggering me to the core.  My mind would feel white with shock and awe, and the fear, it was paralysing and consuming, and all I could do was try to avoid the man, try to keep out of his way.  I soon noted what times he usually left the house, what times he usually returned, what times he watched his favourite TV shows.   I made myself scarce when I could.  I tried to remain off his radar, getting up from the sofa whenever he walked into the lounge, disappearing to my room when I heard his key in the lock, or his car purring along outside.  It seemed the smartest course of action, for now.  I came to the dinner table when asked and ate my food wordlessly, while my mother babbled on about nothing, and if I ever found her alone, the words would fill my head, almost frantically, the words I needed to say.  But they would dry to nothing inside my mouth every time I came close to speaking them.  I found myself wanting to forget about it.  I talked myself into believing something I knew was not true; that it would never happen again.  That it had been a one off.  Sometimes I would hear my mother rattling down the phone to John, exclaiming how well behaved I was being, and it made me feel cold and sick and I felt the urge to snatch the phone from her hands and beat her over the head with it.

I wrote in my notebook daily, constantly.  That became the hole into which I poured my thoughts and my emotions, as they streamed like piss out of me on a daily basis.  I tried to stay focused on exciting things, like Michael’s brother coming out of prison, and the party he was planning to welcome him home.  Sometimes he would look at me just a little too long.  He would ask me how things were at home. “Alright,” I would tell him. “He’s a prick but I just stay out of his way.”

27

So inevitably things unravelled again.  Badly.  Obviously they did, or I wouldn’t be stood here now, with the knives and everything.  It was a week before I turned fourteen.  Days later I would look back and see that it had been inevitable, that everything in my life had in fact gained this sort of grim inevitability.  I sometimes felt that if I stared hard enough into the distance, I could see the shit that was coming, just around the corner, but I had no way, no idea how to avoid it.  The trouble was, everyone was obsessed with going to the beach.  It had become a magnet for every teenager in town, and I started to resent it, the familiarity of it, seeing the same faces every day, being part of the crowd.  I wondered what the hell they had left to say to each other.  Oh look, it’s the beach!  The one we’ve lived next to our entire fucking lives! I tried suggesting other places to go, other things to do with our time, but the rest seemed fixated on mixing with the girls there.  Michael and Zoe were now officially girlfriend and boyfriend.  She could barely survive twenty-four hours without seeing him, it seemed, and I was starting to find just about everything tedious.  The sun, the sand, the endless burning skies…The only thing that made it bearable was the hope of seeing Lucy there, but her parents were stricter than most and would not always let her come down.

So that day there bad omens from the start, and I could feel them, believe me I could.  First, Lucy did not show up, and Zoe had no idea if she would.  Secondly, the batteries on my Walkman died on me, so I didn’t even have music to settle my grated nerves.  Jake was at another job interview.  Michael was all bare chested and thrumming with teenage hormones, a warm beer in one hand, and Zoe in the other.  I found myself gazing off into the distance almost constantly, examining the horizon for a brown haired girl in a bright red swimming costume.  Billy was unintentionally pissing me right off. He was particularly hyper that day, racing around the whole time, constantly over excited about seeing people he knew.  “You’d think you would’ve had enough of these losers by now,” I grumbled, as he returned from yet another exuberant meet and greet. He merely laughed at me, smoothing back his wet hair.

“They’re not losers, they’re friends from school!”

“You hate them at school,” I reminded him tersely. “And you saw them yesterday! Nothing has changed Billy.”

“Well maybe you’re the loser!” he said, making a face at me. “And I don’t hate them at school. I don’t hate anyone.”

“Shut up Billy.”

“Yeah shut up Billy,” laughed Michael, as he took a break from kissing Zoe, who sighed very dramatically and leaned into him, pressing her cheek against his naked chest.  I groaned and rolled over onto my stomach, stuck a cigarette between my teeth and lit up.

“You’ll have black lungs,” Zoe informed me with a lazy, love struck smile.

“Do I look like I give a shit?”

“You don’t give a shit about anything!” she laughed back at me.

I lifted one hand and ploughed it back through my sweaty hair. “Ah I keep telling you lot, I’m just bored of all this…it’s boring lying here!”

“Oh you’re just in a shit mood ‘cause Lucy hasn’t shown up yet,” she teased, lifting her head momentarily from Michael’s chest before dropping it back there again.

“It’s not that,” I argued. “It’s the same pissing place, every pissing day.”

“Grump,” Billy said, gazing out across the sand. “Hey isn’t that Mark over there?”

“I don’t know Billy,” I replied, not looking up. “Why don’t you go running over to find out?”

“I’m going to,” Billy retorted, getting abruptly to his feet.  When he had gone, I lifted my head from my arms and stared at Mike pleadingly.

“He’s driving me mental Mike.”

Michael was grinning back in amusement.  “Me too.  He’s so fucking hyper.”

“Hey you two,” Zoe purred then, “I’ve got something here to cheer you both up.” She was smiling rather pleasingly, as she ducked out from under Michael’s arm and began digging around in her oversized striped beach bag.  I could have kissed her when she tugged out a large bottle of vodka and a bottle of coke.  “How about something decent to drink?” she asked, grinning wickedly.

I rolled over, sat up and clapped my hands.  “Alright Zoe!  Nice one!”

“Where’d you get that?” asked Michael, staring in wide mouthed awe, as she stuck the bottle of vodka between her knees and unscrewed the cap.  She poured in the entire bottle of coke, replaced the lid, shook it up a little and then took the cap back off and allowed herself the first few gulps.

“Older brothers,” she shrugged, dragging a hand across her wet lips and passing the bottle to me.  “There you go Danny-boy, that’ll stop you moaning!”

“I think I love this girl,” Michael mused, when the bottle made its way around to him.

“Me too,” I enthused.  I sat there for a while then, taking the bottle and swigging it when it came my way.  I was just smiling and nodding and blinking.  It was the first time I had ever tasted vodka, and it made me want to cough, and brought water to my eyes. The effect was pretty instant, I have to say.  My spirits were already climbing mile high, and I was wondering if sprawling on the beach with your mates wasn’t actually such a bad way to spend a day.

“Knew it’d cheer you up,” Zoe winked at me, and downed a few more mouthfuls.  She had this reckless look in her eyes then, and it sort of thrilled me, because I could understand it.  I wanted that drink to keep coming, maybe forever.  I wanted to hang my arms around her and around Mike, and I wanted to not give a fuck about anything ever.  I guess that’s why people drink eh?  Because of the way it makes you feel, like all you ever need to do is just laugh, and laugh, and not care.

“Are we gonna’ save some for Billy?” I asked then.  Zoe looked at Michael, her shoulders bunched up as she giggled.

“Only if he’s back on time,” Michael said, and we all laughed.

By the time Billy did return, dripping wet from a dunk in the sea, the three of us were huddled together, lapping up the dregs of the bottle and giggling like fools.  He stopped just in front of us, frowning deeply as he examined what we had turned into during his brief absence.  “What is so funny?” he asked us suspiciously.  We looked at each other, and tried and failed to contain our amusement.  His eyes then narrowed in on the bottle that swung loosely from Zoe’s hand, and his mouth fell open in dismay. “You bastards! Is that booze?”

Zoe burped into her hand, swayed against Michael’s shoulder and held the bottle out to Billy. “Here you go Bill!  Happy birthday ginge!”

To that, we all fell about laughing.  Billy took the bottle and slumped down into the sand beside us. “Not my birthday,” he grumbled, lifting it to his mouth. “And don’t call me ginge.  I can’t believe you shits drank this without me!”

“Ah no poor Billy,” I giggled at him helplessly. “Serves you right for running all over the beach trying to be mister popular!”

Billy tipped the last of the drink down his throat and hurled the empty bottle miserably into the sand behind him.  He crossed his legs and dropped his head into one hand. “You’re all total bastards,” he admonished us.

“Cheer up Bill,” laughed Michael.

“Easy for you to say,” he returned with a sneer. “This day is turning out to be a complete shitter.  First of all I nearly get my arse kicked by Higgs and his mates, and then come back here to find my so-called-friends have been drinking without me! Thanks a lot!”  He gazed at the sand mournfully, as he scooped up a palmful and watched it slip through his fingers.  Michael had hoisted himself into an upright position.

“What did you say about Higgs?”

“Oh him and his twat friends, they’re over there having a football game.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So I caught up with Mark to say hi, had a bit of a kick around, and then it turns out Higgs bought the fucking ball, and ‘cause of this everyone is his best fucking buddy or something, so then I had to take off so they didn’t kick my arse!” Billy scooped up more sand with both his hands and let it trickle slowly down onto his bare feet.

I looked quickly at Michael, wondering if he was thinking what I was thinking, and the quick, firm nod he gave me told me that he was.  He leaned towards Billy then, his dark eyes wide and alert.  “Does he want to start shit with us?”

“No,” Billy groaned. “He was just being his usual tosspot self.”

“Think he wants to start shit with us Mike,” I said, my tone grave but my smile stretching as Michael looked my way, and started nodding.  “How about we go over there and kick their arses?”

“Don’t bother,” said Billy. “You guys are drunk.”

I shrugged and started to get up.  “So what?” I argued, suddenly starting to feel a bit aggressive.  “I’ve really kind of missed Higgs lately, what about you Mike?”

Michael got to his feet and rubbed lazily at his belly.  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve missed him a lot.  And we’re not in school now, are we Danny?  No teachers, what a shame.”

Zoe had slipped down onto her belly, and her sunglasses had slipped down onto her nose.  She gazed up at us, waving her feet from side to side in the air behind her. “You guys are gonna’ get killed….” She warned in a sing-song voice.

“This won’t take long,” Michael told her. “You coming Bill?”

“Oh Christ,” Billy grumbled, climbing back to his feet. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.  You do realize there are four of them and three of us?”

“You do realize they’re all pansy arsed dick faces?” I replied, causing Michael to double up with loud laughter.

“You’re drunk and you’ll get killed,” Zoe said again, resting her head down on her folded arms. Michael merely shoved Billy and I to get us moving.

“Ignore her!” he commanded. “To war men!”

We marched off, one after the other, and I allowed the stupid thrill of it all to overtake me.  I knew I ought to stay away from Higgs, but the vodka had made me feel careless and brave, and fuck it, I hadn’t felt like that in a while.  I had missed it.  I felt ridiculously big and brave and confident as we frogmarched our way across the sand behind Michael.  We weaved arrogantly through the crowds, on the hunt for a common enemy. “Take no prisoners,” Michael was chanting as we walked. “Shoot to kill!”

We soon spotted Higgs and his friends, kicking a ball about near the waters edge, all shirtless and impossibly and beautifully tanned and glowing.  It was the sight of them that set me off really.  The gleaming polished smiles, the perfect fucking hair, and I felt it rush through me like a torrent then, just pure fucking hatred, deep fucking anger, out of nowhere.  I thought about John getting fired, and leaving early, and the trouble I was in and the fear that greeted me every time I turned the light out at night.  All of it, all of it seemed to come down to one boy.  I broke into a run, Michael and Billy close behind.  I saw this definite and wonderful expression of alarm on Higgs face as I hurtled towards him at top speed.  But then a flicker of a smile crossed his lips, and he nudged one of the boys close to him, alerting them to the oncoming attack.  The first thing that happened was me colliding with Higgs, knocking him down onto his backside.  The second thing that happened was more of a surprise.  Higgs suddenly had a far bigger crowd with him than Billy had realized. They seemed to assemble behind him out of nowhere, and we instantly saw our mistake.  “You guys are dead,” Higgs informed us happily, as he got up from the sand, brushing at the seat of his swimming trunks.

We looked at each other once, turned, and started running.  Billy was already miles ahead, this squat flame haired boy streaking off into the distance.  We were slower, weighed down by alcohol and too much sun.  We raced back past Zoe, who appeared to be asleep, up onto the promenade, and past the beach café and shop.  I looked back over my shoulder once and saw at least eight or nine of them tearing after us, their expressions grim and determined.

“Watch it!” a man on the promenade warned us, as we roared through. The crowd became denser, but we kept running, we kept hurtling forward, until Billy crashed into a fat woman carrying two trays of chips.  Michael and I skidded to a halt, and turned back, just as they came at us.  It seemed to be over in seconds.  I remember brief moments of frantic scuffling and punching, and then there were stronger, surer arms pulling us apart, holding us back from each other.  I found myself staring blankly up into the face of Officer Heaton.  I remembered him from that morning at Michael’s house, the morning they had ordered me to go home.  There was another officer holding onto Michael and Higgs.  Everyone else seemed to have dispersed unseen back into the crowd.  I felt sick then.  I gagged, swallowed, gagged again.  I was horribly certain I was about to throw up on a policemans shoes.  Officer Heaton gave me a withering look of displeasure and recognition.  “You again,” he sighed. “Have you been drinking?”

I shook my head and pointed at Higgs. “They were chasing us!”

“You’ve all been drinking,” Officer Heaton said firmly, shaking his head at me as if daring me to lie a second time.  “Drunk and disorderly in a public place boys.  You better come down the station with us and sober up.”

24

 

            Michael’s mother was still away, so I stayed put.  I worried about her coming back though, and started to think about asking Billy if I could crash at his next.  John finally came storming around on Monday morning, hammering on the front door so loudly Michael had no choice but to let him in, or risk upsetting the neighbours.  “You don’t have to live with that bastard, do you?” I asked him, when he appeared in the lounge, where I was sprawled out in the dark watching This Morning.

“I’ve got all my stuff packed up in the car,” John ignored me and said.  “You need to stop being a baby and come home to see me off.”

“You don’t care about anyone but yourself,” I muttered darkly.  He rolled his eyes and stamped his foot.  He looked hot and sweaty and out of patience.

“That’s crap, why am I here then?”

“To say goodbye.  Goodbye John.”

“You have no choice,” he shook his head and told me then.  “You either come home yourself, or mum is going to call the police and send them over to fetch you.”

I jerked forward then, my legs uncrossing and my feet slamming into the floor.  I felt all of my anger and frustration crashing into me then, and in that moment it might as well have all been his fault.  “They can’t make me live with that bastard!” I hissed at him through my tightly clenched teeth.  He recoiled slightly.  Stepped back into the hallway where Michael was hovering unsurely.

“Try living in some care home then,” he told me in thinly veiled disgust. “See if you like that any better.  Look, you don’t have to like the guy.  Just come home and behave yourself and they’ll leave you alone.  It’ll probably fizzle out before you know it.  You know what mum’s like.”

I leaned slowly, wearily back into the sofa and crossed my arms.  I looked back at the TV. “Just go John.”  John emitted a soft growl before turning to look at Michael, lifting his hands and dropping them in a loose, help me, gesture.  Michael just looked around at the hallway awkwardly and scratched at his arm.  Finally, my brother gazed at the floor, shook his head twice and walked out.

After a few moments had passed, Michael stepped into the room. “You’re really not gonna’ see him off?” he asked me.  I glared back at him, as if the answer were obvious. “Come on,” he said. “It could be your last chance to make him listen.  Think about it that way.”

“He’ll never listen Mike.”

“Just try,” Michael urged. “He’s your only brother mate, that’s all I’m saying. I would never want to fall out with mine.”

“Fine,” I huffed then, getting up from the sofa.  “But it won’t work, I promise you.”

I left the house and rode home, picking up my pace a little as the words I wanted to say to John began to gather inside my head.  I was struggling though.  None of them seemed to be the right words.  None of them seemed to do what I needed them to do.  And as I neared the house, and his car parked outside of it, I was no closer to finding them, no closing to getting them to say what I needed them to say.  I saw my mother and Howard going back inside the house and closing the door behind them.  I wasn’t sure if they had seen me or not, but I was glad they had gone.  John was in his car, with the engine on.  He must have spotted me in the wing mirror, as he turned the engine off then, and rolled the passenger window down.  I rode my bike up to the window and peered in at him.  He breathed out in relief and offered me this hopeful smile.  “Ah Dan,” he said. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”

“I don’t want you to go John,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it, or why I thought it.  I just looked at him then and thought don’t go, just don’t go.  His smile fell away and his shoulders drooped.  “Not yet,” I added, when I saw the look on his face.  “I’ll come home, if you do.  I want you to stay longer, to check him out.  I want you to listen to me a minute.”

“Oh Danny, please, don’t do this to me!” he groaned. “Don’t you think I’ve already had this speech a hundred times from mum?  Am I supposed to never leave home?  Look after you two forever?”

“John, just listen a minute, about Howard…”

“Danny, I spent a lot of time with him yesterday and he’s really not that bad.  You just need to climb off your high horse and give him a chance yeah?  Stop judging him based on people from the past!”

“But listen, there’s something about him…something…I’m not just saying this!”

“What are you talking about?”

I stared back at him, words filling my head and dropping away again.  I didn’t seem to have the words to describe my dread, my sense of fear, because I couldn’t even explain it to myself.  The way Howard had squeezed my neck that day.  How he had blocked the doorway, and called me a stupid bastard.  All of it.  I wish now that I had just spat it out, just told him exactly what had happened, exactly why it was bothering me, but I stand by the reasons I didn’t.  I knew what he would think.  “What is it?” he demanded impatiently.

“He’s…he’s just not very nice to me.”  That was all I could come up with, and even as I said it, I heard how childish and pathetic it sounded.  John was giving me that look.  The weary eyes, and the shaking head and the sigh he always released in order to muster up the patience he needed to deal with me.

“What the hell do you expect Danny?” he said to me. “Mum told me everything.  You slashed his tyres and spiked his drink and vandalised his club! Grown ups are never very nice to you, in case you hadn’t noticed, and that’s because of the way you behave!”

I saw this was going nowhere.  John was itching to be on the move, to be driving away from here, and us.  I had the strongest feeling then, that he would never be back.  So I pulled away.  I lifted one foot onto the pedal of my bike.  “You know something John?” I asked my brother.

“What now?”

“Go and fuck yourself! I’ve got fourteen year old friends with more guts than you’ll ever have, so go on, fuck off!”  I spat on the ground, kicked off angrily and rode away from the car.  I was faintly aware of John calling my name, but I ignored him and kept on going until I was gone.

In the end, I had no choice but to return home.  Two police officers turned up at Michael’s house on Tuesday morning, battered on the door and woke up Mrs. Anderson, who had wobbled home the night before.  “Do we have to escort you home young man?” one of them asked me, directing a nod to the patrol car parked in the street.  I looked at it and felt a desperate sinking feeling in my belly.  I didn’t bother answering them.  I simply thanked Michael, apologized to his mother, got on my bike and cycled slowly home, with the police car rolling along slowly behind me.

Unable to get my head around what she had done, I refused to speak to my mother for the first few weeks of the summer holiday.  I didn’t see any point. As far as I was concerned, we had nothing to say to each other.  She made the odd, tentative attempt to make amends with me, but whenever she opened her mouth to speak to me, I turned around, walked to my room and locked my door behind me.  I moved around that house like some silent, brooding storm cloud.  I played music in my room that tortured my soul, or at least, that was how it felt.  Everything had a desolate feel to it.  I kept my door closed, and locked.  I stayed out of the house as much as I could, but when I was there, I lived in the side-lines once again, and in the background, I was always watching.  I watched Howard move all his stuff in, and I watched him relax into position.  It became quickly evident to me that he was a man with particular tastes and ways of doing things.  He bought his big silver monstrosity of a TV with him, and our old one was taken to the tip.  He bought his TV cabinet with him, complete with shelves full of wrestling videos.  He paid for us to have Sky TV installed so that he could carry on watching all his favourite shows.  Whenever I walked past the lounge, I would see them curled up on the sofa together, eating popcorn, or large bowls of crisps, laughing and shouting at the wrestling referee.  She was able to leave her job at the garage and just work at the Co-op instead.  He spoiled her with new clothes, meals out, and visits to the hairdressers.  She looked better than she had in months.

I tried hard to avoid dinner times, when we would eat things that Howard liked.  It was either meat and two veg, or steaks and thick cut chips.  The cupboards became overflowing with his snacks.  Jam filled donuts, tortilla crisps and dips and Jack Daniels whiskey.  I would shake my head and slam the doors in disgust.  I didn’t want to eat a single thing that appeared to be his.  That was getting harder and harder though, as he took control of the shopping and paid for everything on his credit card.  My mum thought she was in heaven.  She could buy whatever she liked.  She could fill the trolley right up, and not have to walk around the supermarket with a calculator in her hand.  His belongings started showing up everywhere, replacing all of ours.  His brand new brown leather sofas were brought in to replace mums tattered paisley ones.  I missed those sofas when they were gone.  I couldn’t remember us ever not having them.  There was a smiley face on the arm of one.  I’d drawn it in permanent marker when I was nine.  His were too sleek, too shiny, and too rigid.  They creaked and groaned when you moved on them.  I stood back and watched it all without comment.  The house seemed mismatched and at odds with itself.  Howard enjoyed things that were new, and smart and top of the range.  I found myself pining uselessly for the old and the tattered and the original.

He seemed intent on immediately stamping his mark over everything and my mother seemed to welcome it at every turn.  He was like a dog, pissing all over his new territory, warning others off.  And I ran into his warnings every day.  He was a man with rules.  He liked order.  He said he thrived in a neat and orderly environment.  He said the mind could not function properly if it were surrounded by clutter. He would make a cup of tea, drink it, and then wash the cup, wipe it up and put it away again.  He remained humorous about it, but you could tell he just did not understand why everyone else didn’t do the same.  He had rules, and they crept in stealthily.  Shoes were to be removed at the door.  He and my mother had slippers lying in the hall, and they would slip into them, before slipping into eachothers’ arms.  He was particularly protective of his leather sofas, announcing regularly how much they had cost, and walking around them about a hundred times day, checking them for rips or stains.  I strained my ears every time I heard them together, looking out for bickering or arguing, desperate to pick up even a hint of a crack in their sickly sweet love story.  But there was never anything.  More and more I looked at them and felt that they were united against me, taking sly little shots, giving me a message.

John called a few times from Leeds, to let us know how things were going, but I refused to speak to him.  I didn’t have a brother any longer.  And every night, the worse thing was the uneasy, gnawing feeling that settled over me.  I couldn’t sleep while my stomach was all tied in knots.  I couldn’t even write about it in my notebook, because I didn’t know how to explain it, I didn’t have the ability to articulate it…

I think Michael was the only one who noticed a change in me.  He kept slapping me on the back and telling me to snap out of it, or wake up.  “Don’t worry about it,” he kept telling me, whenever he found me lost in thought, chewing at my nails. “Don’t panic.  It’s not over, you just have to bide your time.  What goes around comes around.”

The thing was, Michael spoke the truth without even realizing it.  He was right, I mean, when he said that what goes around comes around.  He was talking about karma, I guess, people getting what they deserved, people’s actions coming back to haunt them.  His words came back to me the morning I discovered salt had been sprinkled onto my toothbrush.  I was close to retching, having spat the vile mixture of Colgate and salt back into the bathroom sink.  I turned the tap on, stuck my head under and let my mouth be filled with water.  Then I stared down at the globule of frothy toothpaste I had spat into the sink, and poked it with my finger.  I lifted it to my mouth and tapped it with the end of my tongue.  Salt.  No fucking denying it.  I washed it away and inspected my toothbrush.  I was bowled over with confusion.  Blown away.  I wandered from the bathroom in a fuzzy kind of daze.  The taste of salt lingered in my mouth all day, and the bad feeling lingered even longer.  The same thing happened again before bed.  I checked my brush first this time, and sure enough, someone had sprinkled a liberal dose of salt onto it.  I stared at my reflection in the mirror above the sink.  I shook my head at myself.  I was dumbfounded.  I didn’t know what to do, or say, so I did nothing, said nothing.

After that, strange things started happening every day.  I could have cried the day my favourite Doc Marten boots went missing from the hallway where I had been told to take them off.  “Probably in your room, under your bed, with everything else,” my mother said when I asked her about them.  I felt the red mist close to the surface whenever I was near her, so I backed off wordlessly.  They weren’t under my fucking bed, because I had taken them off in the fucking hallway the night before!  Now they were not there.  They were gone.  I felt like a dick, hunting everywhere for them, even out in the garden.  I even phoned Michael and Billy to check I had not left them at one of their houses and walked home in my socks without realizing it.  I felt like I was going mad.  I didn’t want to confront what the feeling in my belly was telling me, so I didn’t; I just kept on hunting for them.  For two days they were missing.  Two whole days.  And then, just as inexplicably as they had vanished, they reappeared again, lying discarded in the hallway, with the laces missing.  What the fuck?

The tyres on my bike went down overnight, and when I turned it upside down to check for punctures, I discovered an inch long slash in each one.  I recalled what the gang had done to Howard’s car, and I felt sickened and threw the bike down in horror.  There were other things too.  Weird stuff was mounting up day by day.  It was getting harder and harder to breathe and at night I lay in a tortured suffering and felt like something was coming, like something was getting closer and closer and closer.  Sometimes I would come home from school to find my bedroom door wide open, when I knew I had left it shut.  Another time my wardrobe doors had been flung open, as if someone had been searching for something.  On that occasion, I kind of flipped out a bit, and stormed down the stairs to demand some privacy.  My mother looked up from her magazine in the kitchen.  She looked at me like she always did; like she both pitied me and feared me, and as for him, Howard, he was stood behind her, massaging her narrow shoulders.  And he was smiling, like he’d won the fucking football pools or something.  So I lay awake, night after night, wondering if I was imagining half of it, or blowing it up in my mind.  I wondered if I was going nuts, or having some kind of teenage breakdown.  I was unable to fathom any of it.  I couldn’t come to terms with an answer, I couldn’t clutch at anything solid.  I felt like I had wandered into a bad dream and couldn’t find my way back out again.

I didn’t tell my friends about any of this.  Not even Michael.  I wasn’t exactly sure why I kept it all to myself.  Except that being with my friends was about the only time I felt good, and relaxed, and if I felt like that, I didn’t want to ruin it by talking about the darkness I felt seeping into my life.  I didn’t want to bring us down.  There were a few times I came close to confiding in Michael, especially when he asked me how things were with Howard in my house.  But then I would think about how it would sound if I told him; ridiculous.  I would shut my mouth and try to make it all just go away.  In some ways, I suppose I thought okay, fair enough, the bastard is paying me back, whatever.  I thought maybe I did deserve it, and I thought maybe my mother would agree.  But this other anxious, nagging voice told me that adults were not supposed to behave like that.  I mean, two wrongs don’t make a right, isn’t that what they were always telling us?  And as for the man himself, he carried on as if nothing was wrong, as if everything was fine and dandy and normal.  That was either exactly how he felt inside, or he was one hell of a good actor.  When I thought about it, he reminded me of how Eddie Higgs performed at school, because that’s what his behaviour was; a performance.  Sweetness and light in the classroom, and evil unleashed in the playground.  It was the same thing and it revolted me.  I watched Howard worm his way into my mothers good books on a daily basis.  It was as if he was constructing himself as her perfect man; meeting every expectation and desire, and then some more.  With her, it was easy to see why she doted on him the way she did.  Everything he said was so good-natured, so reasonable, so helpful.  Everything he suggested was designed to make life easier and more bearable for her.  Because she deserved it you see, she deserved having someone to look after her.

He suggested that I ought to help out more around the house at my age.  He winced when he saw the state of my room, and started leaving the hoover outside my door as a hint.  He wondered why I couldn’t collect up my own dirty washing and bring it down to the machine instead of expecting her to do it.  He made a noise in the back of his throat when I left the dinner table, and them, to the washing up.  To every remark, every suggestion and comment, my mother would nod with enthusiasm and fix me with a challenging stare.

I tried to avoid him wherever possible, but when I did run into him, his tones were never quite so pleasant out of my mothers’ earshot.  His voice would rumble gruffly and sneeringly out from between his neat rows of teeth.  “Turn that awful shit down, you’re giving me a headache,” he rapped on my door once to complain.  Another time, I was minding my own business, eating my breakfast at the kitchen table, when he came up behind me and stopped.   I knew he was there.   I could sense his presence and smell the Old Spice aftershave he plastered on every morning.  He stood there for a few minutes, right behind me, not saying a word.  I finally gave in and looked up at him expectantly, and do you know what he said to me then?  He smiled a bit, leaned towards me and said; “Where’s your old man then eh? Ran off and left you did he, eh?”  I turned my head slowly, stiffly, back to the table and blinked down into my cereal bowl.  What the hell kind of question was that, right out of the clear blue sky?  I didn’t answer him, couldn’t bear to look at him let alone speak to him, but he carried on, talking in this low, sneering voice while my mother pegged clothes out on the line.  “Couldn’t be bothered with you I suppose. Ah that’s not very nice is it?  Your own dad not wanting to be around you.  I must be lucky eh?  Got a great relationship with my old man.”

And then next, came the death of my bike.  My mother, calling to me from outside in an exasperated, pained tone, and when I arrived on the doorstep, her gazing at me rather solemnly and apologetically as she explained that Lee had accidentally ran over my bike when he had returned from the club in the early hours of the morning.  “I did tell you a million times not to leave it in the middle of the drive!” she said, all flustered and torn between pity and anger, as per fucking usual.  I rushed past her to see it.  There it was, this awful tangled ruin of a bike lying in front of his prick mobile car.  Tears of disbelief sprang into my eyes before I lashed out, kicking first the useless bike, and then his car.

“I put it away!” I cried over my shoulder, shaking my head as I stared down at the wretched, mangled thing.  “I put it away I know I did! That stupid tosser ran over it on purpose!”

She did not reply.  She did not try to soothe or console me.  She just slunk back indoors, and already I could hear his soothing tones placating her in the kitchen.  I sank down to my knees on the driveway and allowed the deep rage to spread through me, and as it did I felt it pulling me down, hanging me with weights, making it impossible for me to hold my head up.  “Bastard,” I growled through tightly gritted teeth.  My hands were bunched up fists sat uselessly in my lap.  “Bastard.”

Sometime later, when things got worse, when things started to unravel in spectacular fashion, I took the time to reflect and came to the conclusion that Howard must have had his own master plan in action the entire time.  Maybe from the very beginning, maybe from before he even met me.  Like Michael’s Project Arsehole, his would have involved a Plan A and B, and so on as well.  His would have had it’s subtle, thought out phases of appliance.  As time passed, I found it easy to see how he would have implemented it.  And he had been right about one thing.  I never should have made an enemy of him, but it was too late by then, it was all too late.  We had inadvertently started this war, this battle, and the cycle was in motion, and it was one of those vicious circles, wasn’t it?  It was certainly vicious anyway.  His Plan A would have been making my dear mother like putty in his big hands.  Playing on her insecurities, her fear of being alone, her inability to cope, her exhaustion.  Plan B would have been the pranks he played to get back at me.  Sinister but ultimately harmless.  Plan C kicked in shortly after.  Plan C was made a whole lot easier for him by the absence of John, and any adult that would believe a word I said.

25

 

             Life was satisfying and frustrating in unhappily equal measures.  I was obviously used to living on my own, and I understood that moving in with Kay and her son was going to involve some compromises.  I was not a man who finds compromise easy.  It did not sit comfortably with me; giving in.  Of course, in business, at work, there were always times when compromise was needed, but I tried to keep them at a minimum.  I was not the boss so that I could do things the way other people wanted.  I was the boss so that I could have things my own way.  The right way.

I sensed early on that Kay longed for someone to take control.  She had been in the driving seat for years, you see.  She had been alone.  Some people are born to be alone, they are made that way whether they like it or not.  Kay was not one of those people.  She spent her early years trying desperately to please her mother.  Despite her feistiness, she was at heart, a people pleaser.  We’d had long, drawn out conversations about her early marriage, to Johns father.  “We married too young, but we were in love and we wanted to prove everyone wrong,” she said.  She did it to escape her mother, you see.  She had John when she was twenty years old.  She tried to make it work, all of it.  For a long time, she stuck at it, day after day, until one day she looked at herself in the mirror and realized that she was living a lie.  She did not love David, not the way she was meant to, not the way she knew he loved her.  She stuck it out for a bit longer, for John, and for everyone who loved David.  She thought if she put her heart and soul into it, she would love him properly one day, she would feel the nerves of passion in her belly once again.

She succumbed to an extra-marital affair.  “David was too nice,” she explained, the night we sat in the car up on the cliff top.  She was drinking champagne and wearing a knee length dress.  The dress had slipped down her knee when she lifted one over the other.  I watched its silky crumple towards her thigh.  “He was too eager, too everything.  Drove me mad in the end, that’s why I did it, and God I know it was evil of me really, to hurt him like that.  It was like I wanted to destroy my whole life.  My mother thought I had gone mad.  She really did.”

I understood.  I had not met David, it was unlikely I ever would, but I could see him in John.  He stayed in the middle, on the fence, like his mother, born with the desire to please others, but without the defence mechanism that led her to be fiery.  John was consistent, placid and plodding.  I found him pleasant and dull.  He wanted to see good in people, so he picked it out, even from the bad.

“And after that I guess I got what I deserved,” she went on, now leaning into the leather of the seat, resting her head back, showing an extension of pale, slender neck.  She emitted a long, solemn sigh.  “On my own, with a young child.  My mother wouldn’t speak to me let alone help me in any way.  So I struggled on.  Bloody hated it though.  Having to do it all myself.  All the decisions, and the sleeplessness, everything.”

She didn’t really need to explain anything to me.  I could read her like a book.  Her face hid nothing, she wore her heart on her sleeve.  She longed to be cherished.  But she felt the need to offload on me, and that was fine.  I was a good listener.  I enjoyed hearing her story unfold.  The thing was, her story always came back to him.

She called him her son, but really he was her penance.  She felt guilt whenever she looked at him, because he never should have been born.  He never should have been.  “Stupid fling,” she said of his father.  “I fell for him in a schoolgirl crush type way.  He was younger than me, a guitarist in a band, full of charm and confidence.  He could have had any girl he wanted, but he liked me.  And he was funny, and wild, and adventurous, and it was all great fun for a while, but that was all it was ever meant to be. Until I found out I was pregnant.”

She had expected him to run like the wind, but he was curious about family life.  She was just starting to get her life back, with John at school, and a part time job, and a stab at a social life, and now this.  This thing growing inside of her.  This parasite latching on to an unwilling host.  She told me her deepest secret that night in the car.  Later on I reclined the passenger seat, slipped her dress over her head and fucked her with my hand held over her mouth.  But before that, she told me.  Her eyes were heavy with overloaded mascara and metallic blue eye shadow that had collected in the lines.  Her lipstick had worn off and her hair was tousled.  “I’ve never told anyone in the world this,” she said, and her eyes seemed to pierce right through me then, they seemed to shine a light right through my heart, and I wanted to crush my lips down upon hers until I felt our teeth clash.  “It’s the worst secret I have,” she went on, her voice a small girls whisper.  “People would hate me if they knew. I hate myself.”

In truth, what she did, or nearly did that day was neither evil or wrong, and if I had known her back then, I would have told her this.  She didn’t want the child that was growing inside of her.  The thought of it made a panic rise up in her chest, a sensation of life escalating out of her control and away from her dreams.  She resented the ache in her breasts and the sickness in the mornings, and she resented the thought of being chained to Brett forever more.  She took a taxi one day, all alone.  She went to a place, in secret.  She had to sit in a waiting room for a long time, with other women, who looked just like her, pale and drawn and soaked in guilt.  She had an appointment at ten o’clock to kill the baby.  She was going to take a pill that would make her start to bleed.  The blood would leak and flow until the baby flowed with it.  She would go to the toilet and flush it away.

That was it.  Her dark secret.  The reason she viewed her son with fear and self-loathing.  “I still don’t know what made me run out,” she croaked, closing her eyes briefly and then opening them to the release of one solitary tear.  “Maybe it was what my mother would have said, maybe it was Brett.  Maybe it was the baby.  I don’t know.  But I ran out, I couldn’t do it, and so I had him.  And you know what?  This will sound terrible Lee, but as soon as he was born, I held him and looked into his face, and he looked back at me, and I thought, he knows.  He knows.  Crazy I know.  He was minutes old for God’s sake.  But I felt it that day, and then I felt it again and again.”

By this, she meant the years that followed.  The sleepless nights that did not end until he was three.  The tantrums and the wilfulness.  “He was horrible,” she told me, a small smile playing on her lips.  “I mean, I can say it because it was true, and because he knows it’s true.  He was so sweet on the outside that everyone fell in love with him, because he was such a beautiful child.  But they didn’t see what he was like on the inside, they didn’t know what he was like at home.  Christ, it was one battle after another.  Everything! Getting him to eat, getting him to sleep, getting him dressed, whatever.  Everything was a fight, all the time, and of course by then Brett was bored and stressed, and then he got in trouble with the police and I kicked him out.”  She looked a little self-pitying then, her lower lip protruding slightly, her eyes downcast.  “So I was totally alone, with these two kids.  Didn’t have a clue what I was doing most the time.  Just gave in to Danny to shut him up.  Just gave him whatever he wanted because I was too exhausted to fight him.”

Too exhausted, and too full of gut churning guilt whenever she looked at his face, more like.  Fancy living with someone, day in day out, knowing that you came close to killing them?  That you were minutes away from extinguishing their existence before it even began.  Imagine what that would do to your mind, and your soul.  Of course, Danny did not know that she had wanted to abort him.  Of course, he didn’t.  He didn’t know it at thirteen and he sure as hell didn’t know it as a newborn baby.  It was just her guilt torturing her, convincing her that karma was staring her in the face every time she changed his shitty nappy.  He didn’t know what she had nearly done, but he did know that he had one over on her, because kids can pick these things up.  He knew she was weak and he knew something was not quite right, and he took advantage of this, and that became their life.

So I knew.  I knew her secret, and I knew his.  I knew their story.  But we were here now.  I had stepped onto a new block of life.  The next one in the order.  It was as it was supposed to be.  We had our love, and we had our home, and we had our future, and it was this that gave me satisfaction, as I had known it would.  The frustration was a less welcome thing; something I had not planned for, something I was compromising on.  The thing was, I wanted to know her story.  Her own story, made up of the steps of her life that had led her to me.  But all she could talk about was him.

Her story was him.

I listened, I always listened.  But her obsession frustrated me.  It was however, imperative that I had all the information, so I was never going to tell her to shut up about him.  I already knew he was our enemy.  I knew it before I met him.  I knew it when she told me all about James, and Frank Bradley.  When she laughingly tried to warn me off.  I didn’t quite grasp the severity of it until the night the little bastards slashed my tyres though.  That was when I knew I had to play closer attention.  There was a spanner in the works, plotting to mess things up.  Okay then.

So I allowed her to whine on about him.  Day after day, night after night.  Romantic meals that became peppered with her exasperation with his school report, long walks at the beach that turned into animated rants about his rudeness, or his smoking.  Her body, weak against mine, as she sobbed about how lonely she was, how she could not cope anymore, how she was close to giving up. “He actually hates me,” she told me the day we decided I would move in to lend a hand.  “That’s the thing that scares me, because I know it’s true.  And he doesn’t just hate me because I’ve made a mess of things, and he doesn’t have his dad, he hates me because he has no respect for me, because he looks down on me.”

“You can’t go on like this,” was what I told her.  “You’ll end up in hospital or something.  You need to look after yourself at some point, put yourself first.”

“But I’ve let it slip for so long.  I have no control over him, whatsoever.”

“You can reclaim it back.  Little steps.  You’ll feel stronger anyway, once I’m there, because you’ll have back up and support.  You won’t be doing it on your own anymore.”

I didn’t have to convince her obviously.  Yes, moving in was my idea, but it was something that would benefit us both, in more ways than one.  She needed financial help.  I had lent her money for the rent twice, and more for bills she was behind with.  It was pointless, wasn’t it?  We would both save money if we lived together.  There was nothing to stand in our way, as far as I could see.

She reminded me of slashed tyres and spiked drinks, and in response, I roared with laughter. “You think that would put me off?  You think I’d let little kid stuff like that keep me away from you?  That’s nothing, and I can guarantee you, give him a few weeks to get used to it, and life will be fine.  I can guarantee it.”

“He will make our life hell!” she had nudged me playfully and laughed.  “If he’s done stuff like that already, what the hell will he do when you’re living there?  Christ, I wouldn’t eat a thing or drink a thing if I were you!”

“Doesn’t scare me,” I told her.  “I’m not frightened of a thirteen year old and neither should you be.”

Well he reacted as we expected he would, so that was fine, we were prepared and we even laughed about it later.  Him throwing a tantrum, trashing his room, running off.  I wanted to laugh in his face the day he cycled home with the cops behind him.  I didn’t need to though.  The humiliation was dragging his shoulders down.  He was in a sulk then.  Hilarious stuff.  John gone, and him refusing to speak to his mother.  He built up a wall of silence and refused to come down from it.  Dinners were eaten in silence.  Anything we said to him, or asked of him, was returned with silence.  Well, he probably thought he was punishing us, but what he was actually doing was giving us an easy ride, a rest.

So I settled in.  It felt like home, but that was more to do with coming home to Kay every night.  Waking up and rolling over to see her face in the morning.  She owned a rare kind of natural beauty.  She looked stunning with her hair and make-up done, like a model, but she didn’t need any of it.  First thing in the morning, she looked like an angel, she looked like she could smile and break your heart.  She was happy and it showed.  She slept well and awoke rosy cheeked and wide eyed.  She could relax about money, and bills, and decisions.  She laughed about it.  “Oh you do it!” she said.  “I’m not doing anything!”

It was other things that frustrated me, not Kay.  I didn’t like clutter and rubble around me.  You don’t need it.  You don’t need to hoard magazines, and collect ornaments, or crockery, or pictures.  Your mind needs space around it.  Mess irked me.  It made me wince and grimace.  It made me feel restless.  So that was one thing; to start making some rules.  For their own benefit.  Kay laughed the first time she saw me dragging a hoover around the lounge, snuffling up toast crumbs from the floor.  “I just can’t stand mess,” I kept telling her with a smile.  “I can’t leave it there and look at it, I can’t sit and watch the TV with it there.  Sorry honey.”

“Don’t bloody apologise!” she had roared in amusement.  “You carry on love!”

Well…things build up, and you can’t tolerate it forever.  Spanner in the works, and all that.  Thorn in my side.  Because she worried about him, and she fretted about him, about whether he was eating enough, or sleeping enough, or up to no good when he was out with his friends.  And still, the guilt.  The guilt plagued her mercilessly.  It was another one of my frustrations; her feeling bad about herself.  It wasn’t right, or fair.  Enough time had passed, and now it was time to iron out those lingering frustrations and get things settled the way I wanted them to be.  I had compromised, and now it was getting thin.    So I wondered what this kid was really made of?  He didn’t look like much to me.  So he had a nice looking face, big deal, so what?  Apart from that he wasn’t much to look at, or think about.  I looked at him and thought that she had made a big mistake not aborting him when she had the chance.  He was a waste of space with a sneering expression and hair like a girl.  He dressed down to the extent that he looked like a tramp most of the time.  He listened to music so loud it shook the whole house.  So I started with a few tricks, a few pranks, as he was obviously such a fan of these childish things.  I played him at his own game to see how he would like it.  I don’t suppose he did like it much, but he didn’t say a lot about it, so I carried on, seeing how far I could push, seeing how much I could get away with.

I came home from work late one night.  It was about three in the morning, and there he was, creeping around the kitchen, rifling through the cupboards for food.  It all fell into place then; how he managed to avoid meals with us and not starve to death.  Sneaky little fucker.  I felt a stab of anger and resentment immediately.  In fact just running into his scowling little face was enough to set my teeth on edge.  There he was, helping himself to food I had worked and paid for, while he did fuck all, despite me pressuring Kay on numerous occasions that he ought to have chores.  I decided there and then that the ridiculous silence had gone on long enough, and it was about time him and I got a few things straight.  I went into the kitchen, and closed the door behind me.

I dropped my keys onto the kitchen table, making him jump and turn in guilt, packet of crisps in one hand, chocolate bar in the other.  “All right you little fucker,” I sighed, raising one of my feet onto the nearest chair and leaning out over my knee.  My entire being seemed to fill the room then, and I felt it in myself, the way the energy fizzed through my body.  I felt myself physically fill the room, and I felt the boy diminish, and I liked it.  “What’re you doing sneaking around the house at this time?”

He glared back at me, despising me for even speaking to him, for even looking his way.  He glanced at the crisps he held.  “What does it look like?”

I chuckled softly and smoothed my beard with my thumb and forefinger.  “Fuck me, you can speak after all!”  He sort of rolled his eyes and grunted and made to move past me, but my foot came down quickly, blocking his path, blocking everything.  “Oh no you don’t,” I told him calmly.  “You put those back right now.  If you ate the meals your mother makes, you wouldn’t be hungry now, would you?  So put them back.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” he started to say, but I wasn’t interested, so I finished for him.  I snatched the items from his hands and hurled them at the wall behind.  He stared back at me, open mouthed and scared and I was glad.

“I pay for that food, little man,” I hissed down at him, pointing my finger at his face.  “I pay for the fucking food by working my arse off, so you don’t turn down the meals we provide, and come down here in the middle of the night, stealing, all right? You’ve got no respect, you know that?  No respect for anyone, and I’ve pretty much had enough to be honest, watching what you put your mother through. I’ve run out of patience.”

There was this loaded silence between us then, as he stared at me, and I stared at him, and so I waited.  I watched his face as he switched between anger and fear.  I wondered which one he was going to land on.  It really intrigued me; what this little rebel without a cause was made of.  I wondered how long it would take to get him into line.  Finally the boy licked his lips, swallowed and gave it to me.  “Fuck you,” he said to me, as clear as day.  Fuck you.

I took him by surprise.  I laughed at him and then grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his head down onto the table.  I was surprised by how light he was.  I could have picked him up like that and tossed him across the room and watched him crumple in the corner.  “What did you just say to me you little bastard?”  I kept him down by his neck and pushed my lips right into his reddening ear.  “What did you just say to me?”  I tightened my grip on his neck then.  Dug my fingers into the skin as hard as I fucking could.  I felt like they would pop through the skin and meet in the middle of his neck.  He was making this aaaaaa sound right at the back of his constricted throat, with his eyes squeezed shut.  I leaned in so that I could see the fear and the surprise on his face, and in his eyes when he opened them to find out what the fuck was going on in his pitiful little life, and I soaked up that look, I mean I relived it for days to come, and it was a surprise to me, the power I had and the way I sucked it right up into me.  “You got something to say to me now little man?” I relaxed my hold and asked him.  “You want to say that again?”

“No,” came the breathless, panicked reply, and I was pleased with that, so I let go of his neck.  I placed my hands down on the table on either side of him, and I was leaning right over him, and he was like my prey, caught, ensnared, powerless until I decided otherwise.  I watched him lift one shaking hand to rub at the marks on his neck.  His face was working, like he was trying like hell not to cry.  I wondered how brave he really was.

“That’s right,” I told him from above.  “You’ve got nothing to say to me except yes sir, and no sir, do you get that?  Things have changed around here you little shit stain, do you get that now?  And I want you to stop being a spoilt little baby and taking the piss.  Toe the line, and we get to be one nice little happy family.  Piss me off again, it won’t just be your bike gets broken.”

I straightened up then.  Smoothed back my hair and walked out, leaving him there to think things over.

22

We spent the rest of Sunday listening to music at Billy’s house.  Michael seemed cool and confident about everything, sprawled on the floor reading a magazine, while Jake rolled us smokes, and Billy rolled around laughing over the prank we had played.  I didn’t feel like that funnily enough.  I felt like I was in hiding.  But I had to go home eventually.  Billy shook his head when he had run out of laughter. “He’ll be painting the hall brown by now!” he said, nudging me with his elbow.  We were side by side on his bed, our backs against the wall.  “Anyway, listen,” he said then, suddenly coming over all serious, as he straightened up and smoothed his hair down with both hands. “I’ve got even more information from Steve!”  His eyes were bright and eager and alert, and both Jake and Michael looked up from what they were doing, mouths falling open in intrigue.  Me, I really resented the instant stirring of nerves in my gut.  They made me want to wriggle and fidget.  My mind wandered again, before I could prevent it, back to the hand on the neck, back to the squeeze.  I didn’t think I wanted, or needed to hear what else Billy had to say.  “He found out where Howard came from,” said Billy, leaning forward over his knees now that he had all eyes on him.

“Go on,” Michael urged, impatiently.

“He’s been at Nancy’s about three or four months.  Came from somewhere in Essex originally.  Apparently he’s been running bars and clubs all over the place for years, then stepped in and saved Nancy’s just before it went down the shit hole.  He shows up with his money and experience, and suddenly things are on the up again.  Now everyone’s talking about what a great place it is.  Everyone wants to go.”  Billy paused for breath. “That’s what Steve reckons anyway.  The other thing is, he plays cards after closing sometimes with a bunch of other men.  Some of them cops Steve reckons.”

We gazed around at each other, absorbing the information and what it might mean.  I found Michael’s bright eyes firmly on me, as he nodded.  “Very interesting,” he said. “He was just going on about cops being friends, wasn’t he Danny?  Like he was trying to warn us, or threaten us or something.”  I nodded in return, my expression solemn.

“Well anyway,” Billy went on. “Basically Steve warned us off the guy.  He said don’t bother messing with him.  His exact words.  What do you think about that?”

Jake stuck a roll up between his teeth and shook his long fine hair from his eyes as he lit it up.  “That is starting to sound like a bloody good idea,” he said. Michael glared at him instantly.

“What?  Are you mental?  This is even more reason to get rid of the guy Jake! You wouldn’t want someone like that hanging around your mother, would you?”  Jake sighed and looked at me.

“Why don’t you just talk to your mum?” he asked.  “Just tell her what you’re worried about.  Tell her you don’t like him.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know my mum,” I told him. “She’d have a fit if she knew we’d been sneaking around, and the fact I hate him won’t bother her! Plus, this isn’t enough, this isn’t enough to prove he’s a bad guy.”

Jake looked frustrated and ran his long fingers back through his hair. “So what exactly is the point in all this then?”

“The point Jake, is to make life difficult for the guy and get rid of him!” Michael barked then, appearing genuinely aggravated that Jake did not see this as clearly as he did.  “We have to mess with his head any way we can, find shit out about him and blackmail him, and get him away from Danny’s mum!”  He rolled his eyes and looked back at me. “But mate,” he said, a little more gently. “At the end of the day it’s up to you whether we keep going or not.  I don’t give a shit if we get in trouble, but it’s you who has to deal with the fallout at home.”

I released a sigh and glanced at Billy’s hi-fi system for a moment.  The Clash were singing Guns of Brixton.  When they knock down your front door, how you gonna’ come? They were asking me.  With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?  That was sort of what it came down to, I thought then.  Do nothing, surrender, or put up a fight.  I looked back at Michael and nodded. “I know but I don’t want that prick in my life, or my mum’s.  It’ll be worth it, if it works.”

It was agreed.  No backing down, no chickening out.  We sat for the following hour, detailing the next shots we would take.

The fallout at first, was predictable enough.  My mother was alone when I arrived home from Billy’s.  I came in the back door, and found her in the kitchen.  She was sat at the table, her back rigid, her face like stone, and her hands clasped firmly around the stem of a wine glass.  Her eyes were red around the rims.  “Wondering how the painting went by any chance?” she asked me as I tried to sneak past.  There was a worrying shake to her voice.  “Well we didn’t get much done in the end,” she sniffed, not looking at me.  “Was the strangest thing really.  Lee came down sick. I mean, really suddenly.  Doubled up in agony he was.  One moment he was fine, and the next…”  She shook her head as if she could not fathom it, and finally she turned and her eyes locked on mine.

“Oh dear,” I said, not looking forward to what was about to erupt.  She turned in her chair, turned right around, one hand on the wine glass and the other gripping the back of the chair.

“You boys think you’re so bloody clever don’t you? And don’t you dare come the innocent with me young man! I’ve been your mother long enough to know when you’re lying, which is most of the time! You little idiots put something in his drink, didn’t you?”

I said nothing.  Just stood there with my arms hanging and my face blank.  I just stared back into her quickly reddening face and felt my fear washing away.  I wanted to laugh at her for some reason.  I wanted to scream laughter right into her twisted little face.  I wanted to say, yeah, so what?  I kept my mouth shut.  There were tears shining in her eyes, but her mouth was an ugly snarl.  “We know that you did, so you don’t need to have the guts to admit it Danny.  And what about his slashed tyres, eh?  Funny that happening after you admitting damaging Frank’s car!  And no other cars in the street are targeted!  Like someone’s trying to give him a message, eh?”  She paused, tilted her head, maybe giving me the opportunity to speak, but there was no point, so I stayed silent.  “I wanted to call the police,” she said then. “But Lee wouldn’t hear of it.  For some reason, he actually likes you and wants to be friends with you!”  She got up then, still clutching her wine glass, and she seemed out of breath, as if if her anger was consuming all the oxygen.  “I don’t know why I’m surprised at you Danny, but I never thought even you would stoop this low!  Spiking someone’s drink!  Do you know how dangerous that is?  He’s been so ill he’s missed work!  What the hell is wrong with you?”

I started to edge towards the door. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I muttered uneasily.  “We didn’t do anything.”

Her eyes shot wide open then.  I moved quick, but she was quick getting after me, screeching; “Liar!  You are nothing but a liar!  I don’t believe a word you say, not ever!  And it won’t work!  Do you hear me, it won’t work!”  I was on the stairs, pounding up them to escape her. “He told me!” she was screaming behind me. “He told me nothing you do will ever scare him away!  It doesn’t matter what you little shits do!  He loves me!  Did you hear that you twisted little boy?  He loves me and I love him back!”

I wrenched open my door and slammed it behind me.  “I am ashamed to be your mother!” I heard her shriek.  “If I knew where your dad was I would pack you off to him, because I have had enough!”

I slid the lock across the door and pressed my forehead into the wood.  I could hear it vibrating with her noise.  I stayed like that until her noise stopped.  The house fell silent.  I heard her car starting up outside, and then I was alone.  It didn’t matter I thought, while I shook with rage and blinked away tears.  It didn’t matter, what she said or thought about me, it didn’t fucking matter at the end of the day.  All that mattered was the plan.  All that mattered was keeping that creepy gorilla away from my home and my life.  Love, I thought, my lips parting in a snarl, how the fuck could they love each other after a couple of weeks?  “Bullshit,” I turned around and told Kurt Cobain.  He stared back at me from above my bed.  I’d bought the poster for £3.99 in Our Price, and it was the best one I had.  Just him, glaring through his hair, looking like he felt how I felt most of the time in this life.  Confused and pissed off.  I stomped to my desk and hit play.  Smells Like Teen Spirit throbbed it’s steady, building beat.  I turned it up as loud as it would go. “Plan C is next anyway,” I said to the poster.  “Plan C starts tomorrow, you stupid fuckers!”

“What the hell is Plan C anyway?” Billy wanted to know, when we were gathered again after school the next day.  This time we were at Michael’s.  He had returned home from school to find a note from his mother pinned to the fridge.  She had gone to her sisters for a few days, and he was alone.  We spread ourselves out in the lounge, the stereo on, blasting out The Stone Roses.  Michael beamed and clapped his hands at the question.

“You’re gonna’ like Plan C,” he announced to us in confidence.  “Plan C is prank call time!”

I was sprawled on the sofa with my legs dangling over the arm.  I had a pile of tapes on my belly and was sorting through them.  “Nice,” I nodded in response.  “I like the sound of that.  Subtle.”

Michael jerked his head towards the phone in the hallway. “Who wants to go first?”

Plan C was still in action a few weeks later, as school limped along towards the last week of term.  The summer holiday stretched out beyond us like a promise.  It would have dragged, that week, if we hadn’t had the plan to keep us busy.  I kept out of the phone calls, which had become a daily source of fun for the gang.  I’d played witness to a fair few though, and that was good enough.  They would put on fake voices and call Howard at his flat, or at the club.  They pretended to be people he owed money to, or women he had dumped, while I curled up with laughter in the background.  When nothing came down on me at home, they got braver.  They called the club and spoke to the staff, telling whoever answered the phone that Howard owed them money and if he didn’t pay it soon the club would be torched.  Sometimes I was genuinely shocked by the stories Michael came up with.  His voices were brilliant too.  It was like he could create a believable and realistic character out of thin air, and then just become them totally, for however long the phone call lasted.  Sometimes laughter would get the better of him though, and he would be forced to hang up and sink down to his knees, gasping for air.  They were times that all four of us just ended up rolling around on the floor at Mike’s house, hugging our bellies as we screamed laughter at the ceiling.  Every day, I slunk home, expecting the shit to hit the fan, expecting my mother and Howard to confront me, but nothing happened.  Nothing.  Howard stayed away, and my mother floated in and out of the house to see him, as if nothing could touch her, as if she knew and cared for nothing.

Towards the end of the week, the gang took things up yet another notch. I guess Michael was feeling untouchable, because even I was shocked when he told me what they had done the next day at school.  They had snuck out together, dressed head to toe in black, and hurled a couple of bricks through the back windows of Howard’s club.  Then they had scampered back off into the darkness.  Hearing this, some nerves returned to chew at me, but I reminded myself that they were on my side, that was the thing.  They were doing this for me, and also, it was working!  Howard had stayed away, which was fine with me.  John was packed up and leaving within the week.  I had returned to being the invisible kid in my home, but that was okay, I reasoned.  I scribbled in my notebook every chance I got, spilling out the details of the plan, clinging to my writing and my music, gathering them all together at the end of each day.  And when it was all out of my system, I would just lie back and stare at the ceiling in relative peace, reflecting that it was all working, it was all coming together.   I thought about the merit Mr James had awarded me in assembly for my story in the newspaper.  I’d had to go up in front of everyone to collect it.  Lucy told me that she kept a copy of the story under her pillow, and this admission flushed me right through with renewed hope that one day, maybe when we were older, something would happen between us.

Looking back, I was an idiot.  We all were.  We thought we were big and clever and rebellious and we thought we had some measure of control.  We were all fooling ourselves.  We were none of those things, and it didn’t take long for me to see this.  On the last day of term I cycled home alone.  We were meant to be meeting up later, at the beach.  It was going to be brilliant.  The whole school would be down there, they said.  People were going to sneak drinks down there, and bring food and music.  One huge out of control party was on the horizon.  I had a faint smile on my lips as I cycled along, planning in my head what clothes I would change into, wondering if Lucy would be down there, wondering if I would have the guts to talk to her again…I was watching my front wheel rolling, and when I finally lifted my head, it was Howard’s silver Mercedes that I saw, parked in the drive, right in front of me.  I yanked my brakes, and skidded to a standstill.

 

23

 

Okay, I thought, and started to weave my bike up onto the pavement towards the drive.  Okay then.  I climbed off my bike beside the long silver shark of a car.   I just stood there for a few minutes, thinking.  I could get back on my bike I thought.  Get back on and get the hell out of there.  Go down the beach early and wait for the party to start.  Or, I could carry on, and walk inside my own house as if nothing had ever happened.  I could put on the clothes I wanted to wear, and sort out some music and roll ups to take.  As Michael seemed keen to impress upon me daily; they couldn’t prove a thing.  I hadn’t done a thing.  My hands tightened on the handlebars as I chewed at my lip and thought things over.  There was no doubt in my mind that turning around and cycling down to the beach was a far more attractive option, but then I bristled with a sting of anger, and remembered that I did not want to be like John.  I did not want to pretend everything was okay and just go along with things.  I didn’t want to roll over and surrender like some dopey puppy dog.  And what was that bastard doing alone in my house anyway?  Since when did he have a key?

I forced myself forward then, or rather my indignation did.  I had plenty of it back then, you see.  I was fed up of these bastard men taking liberties, the arrogant pricks.  I reminded myself of the plan, of not taking it anymore, of fighting back.  I imagined myself as the true man of the house as I stalked towards it, and propped my bike against the wall outside the kitchen.  The back door was slightly open, and I could see Howard was there all right.  He was sat at the table, and I felt myself recoil slightly, at the sight and the size of him.  The kitchen was a small room, but with him occupying it, it seemed even smaller, like there was not even enough room for the air.  He was leaning back in the chair closest to the hallway, with his fucking cowboy boots up on the table, and a beer in one hand, looking like he fucking owned the place, and Jesus Christ, I wanted to spit at him.  I stiffened with the resentment that flooded me then.  My nostrils flared and my top lip lifted.  I stepped in through the door, and he merely grinned at me, and lifted the beer in a hello.  “Ooh look who it is!” he exclaimed with excitement, making out he was pleased to see me, but I could see it was all fakery and bullshit.  He was drowning in the stuff.  It seeped through his very fucking pores.  His feet left the table and hit the floor. “Danny the boy with no tongue! You got your little friend behind you to do your talking, or are you all alone?” He cocked his head at me questioningly.  “Oh good.  ‘Cause I’m here to have a proper chat with you mate.  Man to man, so to speak.”

I attempted to swallow the incredible dryness which lined my throat and started to walk towards the hall. “No thanks,” I growled in reply.  Howard was on his feet quickly, blocking the doorway with his immense frame, beer still in hand, and a friendly smile on his face.

“Whoa hold on there a minute, where you going so fast?” he asked me, his tone dropping now.  “Slow down.  Your mum asked me to come and talk to you.  Just you and me, and it’s pretty important, so here I am.”

I clenched my fists and stared at the tiny amount of space on either side of him.  “I don’t think so,” I said.

“Unruly little shit, aren’t you?”  he said, and his smile had faded to nothing.  I scowled at him.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, ponderingly, his small eyes narrowing slightly as they took me in and worked me out.  “You and your little pals.  Little troublemakers eh?  Bunch of fucking comedians.”

I shrugged my shoulders, and despite my inner nerves, I offered him a withering sneer.  “Don’t know what you’re talking about prick.”  I dragged the word out and met his eyes while I spoke it.  I watched his small eyes widen and his thin lipped mouth drop open.  It was then that it struck me who he reminded me of, who he looked like, it was that fucking WCW wrestler, Steve Austin, or Stunning Steve Austin they called him.  Christ I thought then, they could have been twins.

“Prick?” he repeated the word as if the feel of it in his mouth offended him.  He cocked his head and hooked his thumbs into his belt.  He frowned.  He looked genuinely puzzled and confused.  I just stared back at him blankly. “Prick?” he asked again, and shook his head at me.  “My god, you kids today are unbelievable!  You know what I would have got if I’d ever dared say that to my old man, or any other adult for that matter?” He unhooked one thumb and patted his belt with his free hand, whilst his eyes drilled into mine.  “I would’ve got a taste of this, little man.  Real arrogant little shit, aren’t you?  I mean your mum, she warned me about you, but I guess I didn’t really believe her, until I had the pleasure of meeting you that is.  Now you listen here mate,” he slid his hands down his thighs, leaning down until his face was level with mine.  He looked at me as if I were an alien, something he  had never encountered before, and he spoke slowly and surely, as if I were stupid.  “I know it was you and your mate put that stuff in my drink.  Yeah, that’s right, I know it.  I know it’s you and them making silly calls, and I know it’s you lot who smashed my windows and slashed my tyres.  Oh yeah, I know, and your mum knows too, which is why she asked me to come here today to speak to you about something we’ve come up with, but before I do I’ve got something of my own to tell you.”  He smiled at me then.  I felt chilled to the bone, I’m telling you, I felt cold all over, and it was a sweltering July day outside.  There was an icy glint in his eyes and as he stared into me, he ran a slow and considered tongue around his lips, coating them in a thin trail of saliva, and I felt for a second then, that he was preparing to eat me.  “You’ve gone and made an enemy of me,” he nodded, “and you really didn’t want to do that.”  He straightened up then, and I released the breath I had been holding and looked again at the options of space on either side of him.  It felt like my chest was close to bursting with the panicked hammering of my heart.

“You can’t prove anything,” I decided to tell him then, fighting to keep the shake from my voice, desperate to uphold an unbothered exterior, while inside I was panicking, inside I knew there was something wrong with all of this, inside my heart was beating faster and faster and faster.

“No I don’t need to buddy,” he told me, delivering a fresh and dazzling smile.  “But you need to realize that your pathetic little stunts haven’t worked, yeah?  Just like I told you before, your shit won’t scare me away, in fact if anything they’ve brought me and your mum even closer together.  United, you might say.  So carry on if you feel the need, but you’re wasting your time, because I am still here.”  He lowered his voice down to a whisper. “I’m still screwing your mother.” His smile flicked up at the edges, and his small eyes shone, enticing me to react, and then he merely rocked back on his heels, drank his beer and waited.

“Get out of my way,” I said through gritted teeth.  He laughed.

“I haven’t quite finished yet, little man.  Hang on,” he held up a hand and feigned a serious expression.  “What your mum wanted me to talk about, you see, well, you know she’s been struggling to pay the rent, and work two jobs, and I’ve been helping her out with money here and there, you know? Well we just decided you see, it’s crazy us paying two lots of rent when we spend all our time together anyway, so look, take a look over there!” He finally moved to one side and revealed the hallway, and a pile of luggage that was sat neatly by the front door.  “I’m moving in!” he yelled happily, and slipped back into his chair at the table. “Isn’t that great?”

“You can’t be!” I yelled, taking a step towards the pile of bags, and then staring back in horror at Howard, and the smug look upon his face.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, or hearing.  I felt like the walls were crashing down on me then.  I felt like the entire world had gone fucking crazy.  “She doesn’t even know you!” I cried, and it was true, how could she?

“She knows enough pal,” he grinned back at me, rubbing his hands together in unmistakable glee.  “Thing is Danny, let me explain it to you.  She needs me here because of you.  Because she can’t cope with you.  So if you wanna’ get pissed off about me moving in here, get pissed off with yourself, little man.  You wanna’ blame someone, blame yourself.” He picked up the pack of cigarettes that lay on the table and pulled one out.  I was a dumb and shaking, sweating ball of maddening, relentless anger as I watched him stick it between his teeth, flick the flame on his lighter and inhale.  He leaned forward then, caught my eye, and grinned a lop-sided grin.  “You stupid little bastard.”

Well, to say I went a little bit insane after that, is probably an understatement.  I went completely insane.  I had no more fear then, none.  I had nothing but red mist.  The red mist swirled like a tornado behind my eyes, and the faster it swirled, the darker it became, until it became black.  I don’t really remember what I did, or said, except for I know I screamed you fucker quite a lot, and I know that John appeared from upstairs and manhandled me away, with his arms around my middle.  I’d gone for him too.  I remember kicking his shins, scratching his hands and punching his head.  He somehow, I don’t know how, managed to drag me upstairs, shoved me in my room and shut the door on me, with him on the other side.  He held onto the handle when I started to wrench it up and down.  He tried to tell me to calm down so that he could come in and speak to me.  I told him to fuck off, told them all to fuck off.  I screamed and bellowed and kicked my door until I made a hole in the bottom of it.

After a while I could hear my mother downstairs, so I locked my door and changed my mind about wanting to come out.  John and her conversed in tense tones on the stairs.  She rapped on my door and I screamed at her to fuck off. “Danny, I can’t afford the rent on my own!” she started wailing on the other side, while John mumbled words of discontent in the background. “We’ll lose the house!  Stop being such a child and let me come in and speak to your properly!”

“Big mistake,” I could hear John telling her.  “They needed time to get to know each other first mum, what are you thinking?”

I got up from where I had slumped on the floor and pressed my ear against the wood.  Howard’s voice was droning on downstairs.  I tried to pick up what he was saying, something about not throwing his weight around, and being more of a lodger than anything, but mum and John were arguing over the top of him, so it was hard to tell.

“John, I’ve been at my wits end!” she was saying. “You have no idea!  Do you even know the awful stuff that boy has been up to lately?  Well I can’t cope, and who have I got to help me now you’re off eh?  Not my mother, and not his father, no one!  I can’t do it John, so you can say what you like and think what you like, but I either have Lee here to help me emotionally and financially, or I get carted off to the bloody loony bin, and I am serious!”

“If you let Lee move in now, you’ll be living in a war zone,” John told her.  She laughed.

“We already are if you hadn’t noticed!  Since we moved here, that boy has been nothing but trouble!  Fighting from day one, stealing, lying, getting arrested!  Damaging people’s cars!  I can’t control him John, I admit it, I hold my hands up! He doesn’t listen to a word I say, because he has no respect for me whatsoever!”

“Your mum needs a rest,” I heard the gruff voice in the hallway.  I kicked the door again then, I couldn’t help it, I just had to.  I turned around, picked up my chair and threw it at the wall.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” My mother screeched. “I’ll kick the door down if I have to young man!”

“Mum, leave him, leave him, come on, we all have to leave him.”

She listened to John, and I listened to their footsteps hurrying back down the stairs and away from me and my rage.  I didn’t know what to do with it then.  I stared wildly around at my room.  I wanted to smash the window and kick in the wardrobe.  I stayed where I was though, anger rooting me to the spot.

Eventually a thought came to me.   I don’t have to live here.  They can’t keep me here if they hate me so much.  No one will care if I just fuck off.  So I packed a few clothes and things into my school bag, opened up my door and stole out onto the landing.  I could hear all three of them still discussing me in the kitchen.  They had the door closed for obvious reasons, which made it easier for me to creep down the stairs.  Just before I opened the front door I heard Howard talking in this voice which was the complete opposite of the one he had used with me.  “I won’t interfere,” he was assuring my brother.  “I’m not into all that.  I’m just here to help Kay with the rent and bills so she doesn’t have to kill herself working two jobs, and I’m just here for her, that’s all.  To support and care for her at the end of the day.  Once you’re gone, you know?  To help her out, that’s all.  And I’m pretty sure once he gets used to the idea, and he gets to know me, he’ll be just fine.  I can guarantee it John.  I’m convinced of it.”

Fucking bullshitter, I seethed and slipped out of the door without any of them knowing.  I walked around the corner, with my hands in my pockets and my head low, and I suddenly felt the loneliest person in the world.  I went around to the back of Michael’s house and began to hurl stones up at his window.  “Come on you bastard let me in!” I yelled, before it dawned on me that he would be down at the beach by now, that they all would be.  My legs seemed to go weak on me then, so I sat down heavily on the back doorstep.  I caught my head in my hands and as my breath hitched in my chest.  My heart remained in a panic.  I knew I should go to the beach to find them.  I knew I should join them, join in the fun, but my legs didn’t want to know at that moment.  So I stayed where I was, staring through my fingers at the thousands of dog ends that lay scattered on the dry earth around the doorstep.  I felt wretched and sick, if you want to know the truth.  Worse than that, I felt small, and like an idiot.  I thought helplessly about all the things I had done to drive my mother crazy.  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut when I realized how easily I had driven her towards his arms.  I sat there, accepting the trembles of rage, and feeling queasy with the awful turning, churning that went on in my belly.  I sat there and could not believe that any of this was really happening.

I stayed there for so long, that the sun began to slip down in the sky behind Michael’s alley way.  Dusk was upon me.  Fingers of gold and orange reached out on either side of the sun, washing the sky and bathing the unkempt garden in an eerie, pinkish light.  I pictured my friends at the beach, maybe dancing around a fire, maybe drinking stolen beers.  I wondered if Lucy was there with them, celebrating the end of the school year.  My backside grew numb and cold on the step, so I shifted position and sat sideways instead, pulling my legs up onto the step and leaning against the closed door.  It was like a bad dream, I thought, as the time slipped by.  What made it all worse was the niggling feeling that I was only getting what I deserved.  My mother had fallen in love with some kind of monster, and nobody could see it except for me.  I chewed my lip until it felt sore, remembering their words in the kitchen.  To them, I was the problem, I was the one at fault.  No one had heard Howard call me a stupid little bastard, and no one had heard him say I had made an enemy of him.

I was so relieved when I finally heard Michael dragging his bike down the alley, I could have cried.  I was close, I can tell you.  I felt like my life had slipped through my fingers and smashed into pieces on the ground.  I felt like I was staring at the pieces of it, with no idea how to collect them up or reassemble them.  I stayed on the step, hugging my knees and shivering in the growing darkness, and I called out a warning to him as he bundled through the gate. “Hey Mike, it’s me.”

“What the hell, Danny?” he said, coming quickly towards me. “What you doing there mate?  Where the hell were you tonight?”

“Something happened.”

“What?”

“Mum’s let Howard move in.  He’s moved in Mike.”

“You are fucking kidding me!” Michael spat, arriving beside me, his expression outraged, his fists already balled. “No way!”

“He knows everything Mike,” I said, my head hanging. “He hates me.  He’s fucking moved in.  They just let him.  I can’t live there now Mike.  I can’t live with him.”

Michael breathed out slowly and placed his hands on his hips.  He shook his head and gazed around in wonder.  “Stay here mate,” he said to my relief.  “Just stay here.”

20

 

            Michael had us all assembled at the base the following day after school.  It was imperative he said, that we be there.  It was vital.  The dinner with Lee Howard was to go ahead that night, and it hung over me all day, like a bad smell I could not shake off.  I looked at Michael when I needed light, and hope and humor.  He had come prepared.  He had torn the side off an old cupboard box and propped it against the wall on the table.  He had a permanent black marker in one hand, and had scrawled across the top of the cardboard in capital letters; PROJECT ARSEHOLE.  It made sense, I thought.  We were all there that day.  Jake, he was sat at the table in his usual fluid style, yawning while he expertly rolled us a few cigarettes to smoke.  Billy, was on my other side, and squirming with the excitement he found in telling me how hated Lee Howard was down at Nancy’s.  Mike waved his pen about and commanded us to be silent.  We were all there the day we decided to mess with Lee Howard.  Maybe if I’d said no, maybe if I’d said hey, let’s not bother, maybe, who knows,  maybe things would have been different.

“This is Plan A, and it goes into immediate effect,” Michael was shouting in the style of an American army officer.  Jake slumped back further and yawned again.

“No chance of you guys just giving him a chance first, eh?”

“Are you mental?” was Billy’s outraged retort.  “Have you listened to a word I said? Steve hates the guy, Jake, hates him!  He’s already looking for a new job!”

“Everyone hates their boss,” Jake pointed out, exactly as I had before I met the man in my hallway.  “He might be a nice bloke outside of work.”

“You sound like John,” I told him, unimpressed.

“He’s an arsehole Jake,” Michael said, holding up a hand to indicate there would be no debate on this fact. “It’s obvious.  Worse than Frank Bradley, right Danny?”

“He’s got really mean eyes,” I nodded at Jake.  “And he’s bloody enormous!  Like a giant gorilla!”

Jake laughed and lit the first roll up. “Just thought you were trying to stay out of trouble, that’s all.”

“Listen men!” Michael bellowed at us then, eyeing us all fiercely and pointing at us with his marker pen.  “This is not the time for doubts and fears! This is what we do!  We make trouble for bad guys!  Now come on, who is with me?  Who’s on board for Project Arsehole?  The stuff I’ve got planned needs as many men as possible, so come on!”

So that was it.  The start of the war, if you like.  The start of all of this.

I cycled home when the finer details of Michael’s first plan had been discussed and confirmed.  It was to start that very night, the night of the dinner.  I arrived home later than planned and met my mother struggling with shopping bags in the driveway.  I slammed down my bike and made an apologetic face at her stressed grimace.  “Sorry.”

“That’s all you ever say,” she muttered, and staggered on into the house with her bags.  “And put your bike away properly!  Someone will run over it one day and you won’t be getting a new one!”

I growled a little under my breath, picked my bike back up and wheeled it around to the back.  When I stepped into the kitchen, she was chucking packets and tins of food into the cupboards, and her face was flushed and irritated.  John appeared calmly in the doorway and offered to help.  “What are we having?”

“Some chicken thing,” she panted, stepping back from it all to push her hair back away from her face. “I’ve got the recipe somewhere.  Can you put the rest of this away for me boys? I’ve got to have my bath and get ready, and I’ve already got a banging headache from the stress of it all.”  She pressed one hand to her forehead and whimpered.

“It’s only dinner mum,” John reminded her.  “No need to get in a state.  Why not just order takeaway?”

“I don’t want to!” she snapped at him, whirling around and marching from the room. “I want to make something special for Lee, and make up for how rude Danny was to him last night!”

John waited until she was upstairs before he looked at me. “You met him last night?”

“Yeah, he popped in to say hi. And I wasn’t rude.  I didn’t do anything.”

“And what was he like?”

“Hmm,” I replied, with a knowing smile. “You’ll have to make your own mind up golden boy.  I’ll be very interested to hear your opinion afterwards.”

I went up to my room and listened to Nirvana until dinner was ready.  I needed it pumping through me to prepare me for what was to come.  I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and my feet danced at the bottom of the bed, and I thought about everything Michael had said.  I had a job to do at the dinner table, but the most important thing was not provoking my mothers’ anger, whilst interrogating Howard as much as I could get away with.  We needed as much information, or ammunition as possible.  It would all be written down in the notebook later.  The boys had their own part to play, and it was the knowledge of this that gave me a brave and warm feeling inside as I waited.  By the time I was called down for dinner, I was throbbing with resentment and scorn, my fists curled at my sides under the cuffs of my oversized shirt.  I entered the room and slid into a chair and offered the man an icy smile across the table.

For some time, I just sat and ate in a good natured silence.  I tucked into the chicken dinner my mother had slaved over, and just listened to the flow of adult conversation around me.  John had a few questions for Lee, which I paid close attention to.  In fact I watched John almost as much as I watched Howard.  I tried to note his tone, and his facial expressions, but my brother was always so polite and pleasant to everyone, it was impossible to tell what he really thought.  I at least hoped he had noticed how the guy talked with his mouth full.  I watched him do it, fascinated.  It was sort of obvious that he knew he shouldn’t do it, that he knew it was rude, or whatever.  He tried to chew and swallow faster when he had something to say, but it was like his words couldn’t wait, or they were too important to hold back, so they would spill out anyway, food or no food.  He was so impatient to deliver his opinion, that good table manners went out of the window.  It disgusted me, so I chalked up another reason to despise him.  I took time dissecting the way he was dressed too.  Those stone washed jeans again, and a matching denim shirt.  Awful.  Just seeing him in a denim shirt made me want to collect up every single shirt like it in the entire world, throw them in a pit and set fire to them.

And then there was the way he interrupted people, and spoke over the top of them.  Again, I noticed that he did it in a clever way, not making it too obvious.  He would nod and say yes, yes while they were speaking, and he would slide in little words here and there, agreeing with them, and before you knew it he had stolen the conversation, whipped it right out from under them.  Took it off on his own boring tangent.  I sat and stared and absorbed and prickled, and wondered how the fuck my brother and my mum could not see what I saw.

My ears pricked up when he started to tell us about Nancy’s. “Really turning the place around now,” he said, still chewing and gulping down the remnants of a new potato.  His pale blue eyes went around the table, taking us in one by one.  He had this serious tone as he forked another potato into his mouth and nodded at us. “That place was going down the toilet when I arrived.  Unbelievable how bad Philips had let things get.  It was only a couple of months away from folding completely.  But crazy as it sounds, that was the kind of place I was looking to invest in.  I mean, to put your money into a place that’s already a success is fine, but to go in and turn around a place that’s on the brink of disaster, is more of a challenge.  I mean, you can’t take much of the credit if the place is already doing well.  You can’t say you’ve achieved much.  No, I wanted a challenge.  I had no fear about that.”

I shot a look at John.  He was nodding and eating, but glancing constantly at the clock on the wall.  I started to worry that he had plans after dinner, and was just going to shoot off once he had eaten.  “Just needed money and fresh blood,” Howard was still saying.  I watched him fork a piece of chicken, whip it around in the sauce and then pop it into his mouth.  He chewed hard and fast and then said; “Plus experience of course.  Luckily I had buckets of both, and I could see what a little goldmine the place had potential to be.”

“You’ve got lots of experience in pubs then?” I spoke up.  It was the first time I had said anything, and I felt all their eyes fall on me at once.  My mother seemed to suck in her breath and lower her head slightly, her eyes averting to her dinner plate.  Howard just looked at me and nodded enthusiastically.

“Oh yeah.  Been working in pubs and clubs my whole life.  There’s nothing I don’t know about working in that environment.  God, I’ve done it all over the years…” he grinned through his food and started to count off on his big, thick fingers.  “Barman, doorman, manager…”

“Drunk?” I enquired brightly and teasingly.  I avoided the desperate look I knew my mother was probably giving me and let my eyes lock with Howards.

“Danny for God’s sake,” my mother complained.   I heard John clear his throat.  Howard’s expression did not really alter as he stared back at me.  He stared back, and refused to look away.  He made a hand gesture towards mum.

“No, it’s all right,” he assured her.

“There was no need for that,” my mother was shaking her head at me.

“Sorry,” I shrugged. “Just a joke.”

“It’s all right,” Howard said, his thin smile stretching out a little at either end.  “I see what you’re getting at, and the answer is obviously no.  You wouldn’t get far in any job, let alone in the drinks business, if you were a drunk.  You only have to look at the guy I co-own the place with.” His lips lifted apart then, as he smiled with his teeth.  I could see all these little bits of chicken stuck and stranded between them.  He had small teeth, I noticed then.  Small and straight.  “Your mum warned me about you,” he said.

I shrugged and glanced at John, who had finished his meal and pushed his plate away.  When I looked back, I found Howard still staring at me.  I felt myself stranded there too. I looked away, at the wall, or the floor, or the food on my plate, but whenever I looked back his face had not changed and his eyes were still completely on me.  I shivered with it.  Shivered from my scalp right down to my feet, and I hated myself a bit then, and I started to make myself think about the gang outside, doing their bit.

“You guys could learn a lot from Lee,” my mum announced, putting down her knife and fork and pushing her own plate away.  He looked away from me then, smiling intently at her and slinging an appreciative arm around the back of her chair.  “I’m serious,” she said. “Started out with nothing and worked his way up to the top, isn’t that right honey?”

“Well yes,” he agreed, as I stared on in horror.  “The fact is boys, you can’t climb as high as me if you’re too fond of the drink.  Back when I was wiping tables and cleaning toilets, I told myself, one day I’ll the boss of a place like this, and then I made it happen.”  He turned his other palm up on the table as if to say there you go, simple.

I felt close to bursting with my scorn and my disbelief.  I wanted to open my mouth up wide and scream laughter across the table.  I wanted Michael right there with me, so he could share the moment, so he could see what I saw.  I looked at the way Howard sat in his chair, leaning back like king of the fucking castle, like he fucking owned the place, with his arm now draped over my mothers’ shoulder.  I looked at him and saw a gorilla.  A monkey man, a body packed full of power and energy and I offered him my fakest smile. “Well done,” I said.  “Really pleased to hear that.  Amazing stuff.  Never been so inspired in my life.”

“I got to make a move mum,” John said quickly, filling the gap before my mother could admonish my sarcasm.  I looked up in genuine alarm as he shoved back his chair and carried his plate to the sink.  “Meeting someone.”

“Who?” I asked, but they all ignored me.  John leaned in and offered his hand to Howard, who got to his feet and shook it vigorously.  I wanted to vomit then, I really did.  I wanted to bring my chicken back up and hurl it across the table.

“Nice to meet you finally Lee,” he was saying, and then he was gone, out the door, the sneaky, spineless, waste of space bastard.  I sat at the table, dumbfounded, just shaking my head at the back door.  My mother was watching me intently so I looked her way and waited.

“We’ll leave you to wash the dishes Danny,” she said to me curtly.  “I think it’s the least you can do.”

I groaned at the pile of pots and pans stacked up beside the sink.  I dropped my head into one hand. “Great, thanks.”

She smiled a tepid smile, and rose from the table with her wine glass in hand. “Well the thing is Danny, when you start to behave as well as your brother does, you’ll be able to have the same privileges, won’t you?” She left me with that pearl of obvious wisdom and carried her wine through to the lounge.

“We can’t all be perfect,” I mumbled, and started to roll up my sleeves.  I felt relieved though, to be honest.  The dinner was over.  I had plenty to tell the gang, plenty to laugh about, and if everything had gone to plan, their part would be done and dusted now too.  All I had to do was clean up the dishes, and escape up to my room and wait.  I went to the sink and started to fill it up.  My mum had this little old transistor radio that she kept on a shelf above the sink.  I turned it on and fiddled with the knob for a bit until I found a station playing The Doors.  I began to hum under my breath, and for a moment I was totally lost in the music, as I waited for the sink to fill.  It was Break On Through.  I opened my mouth a little and sung along so no one could hear.

It was not until I heard the strike of a match behind me that I realized I was not alone.  I jumped, just a little and looked over my shoulder, and there he was.  The big gorilla.  He was still sat at the table, his gut straining slightly against the tight black belt he wore.  He shook out the match, placed it on the table, took a long pensive drag of his cigarette, and looked at me.  As I stared back, he lifted one cowboy boot and placed it on the chair next to his.  How fucking rude, I wanted to say.  “So,” he said finally, softly. “Your mum tells me you’ve been in a lot of trouble lately?” I offered him a blank stare and watched him rise slowly from the chair.  It was like watching a mountain rise and rise.  It was like he was never going to stop.  His cigarette dangled loosely between his thin lips as he gathered up the last of the glasses on the table and placed them on the side next to me.  He then positioned himself squarely on my other side and pulled a tea towel from the hook down below.

“You better not be helping him Lee!” My mum yelled out a warning from the other room.

“I insist!” he bellowed back, grinning down at me. “Dinner was amazing!” He picked up a plate I had just washed and began to dry it.

“I’ve got it,” I muttered. “You’re all right.”

He carried on regardless, so I looked back into the sink of water. I felt filled with a hot and trembling anger. I blew breath out noisily between my teeth, picked up the next plate and started washing faster, just desperate to get this over with now and get the hell away from him.  For a few moments, there was just the splash of the water as I scrubbed, and the music murmuring from above, just The Doors, and then; “Troublemaker eh?”

I shook my head.  This was horrendous.  I fixed my eyes on the bubbly water and searched for something biting to reply with.  “Ah lost your tongue again, like last night?” he said.  His voice was low and smooth, like a purr, and he followed the question by puffing his smoke out above the sink.  I watched the grey swirls rising in the air towards the radio.  “Maybe you keep your mouth shut so you don’t say something stupid eh?”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I heard myself say, looking up at him. He returned this with a small and knowing smile.

“Oh course I do.  Get kids like you in my place all the time.”

“Yeah well I hear you’re not so popular down there, anyway.”

“Oh?  What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.  Just been doing my research, that’s all.” I glared back down at the water.  To my utter disgust and fury, I found my hands were shaking under the bubbles.

“Oh well that’s nice,” he said easily. “To hear you’ve taken such an interest in me, but you don’t need to go to any trouble to do that. You can ask me anything you like.”  He stopped drying then and screwed the tea towel into a little ball, before tossing it onto the side.  “Listen, I don’t want a row with you mate,” he said, puffing more smoke out above the sink.  “But I do have one thing I want to say to you.”

I scowled up at him.  I didn’t want to, not one little bit, but I felt I had to.  I had to show him I was not flustered, that my hands were not really letting me down under the water, that I was not afraid of anything, or anyone.   I glared darkly up into his face, and I noted how small his eyes were, far too small for that large, prominent forehead.  They seemed to beam out from his face like pebbles on a beach, like stones. “I’m crazy about your mother,” he said softly. “I think the world of her, and things are getting pretty serious between us, so…”

“Yeah whatever,” I snapped, cutting him off in the rudest way I could think of and turning my shoulder to block him out.  He stood still, in a shocked little silence, and I started to think I had won, I had got the better of him and he would shut the hell up and shuffle on out of there.  And then he started talking again.

“I also know about all the shit you gave the last guy she went out with,” he said, and then, as he said it, he moved closer to me and placed his hand on the back of my neck, as he leaned in towards my ear.  I just froze, my hands turning to stone beneath the water. “Just to warn you little man, that kind of shit won’t work with me so don’t waste your time.  I won’t be going anywhere, and the sooner you get used to that the better.”  He pulled back, tightened his hand briefly, and then was gone.  I turned slowly, locked in a dumb stupor, and watched him saunter casually down the hall to the lounge.  I found myself stood there, staring back at the water and wondering if it had really happened.  It was so quick, just this brief hard squeeze and then nothing, gone.  I found myself rubbing at my neck, questioning if it had really happened.

Before long, I was unable to stand either the dirty dishes or the booming laughter that flowed back from the lounge, so I gave up and went into the back garden for some fresh air.  The evening was cool outside, the daylight dwindling.  I could hear the distant voices of children playing, probably riding their bikes around in a last set of circuits before they were called in for bed.  I found a roll up in my back pocket, squeezed it back into shape and lit up, leaning against the back wall of the house.  As I smoked it, I wrapped one arm around my middle and took deep slow breaths, in and out, in and out, but it wasn’t working, the rage was building and bubbling and rolling around inside of me helplessly.  I projected it all bitterly towards my mother, the hurt swelling every time I imagined her talking to him about me.  The bastard was too well prepared, I thought.  I would have to tell Michael tomorrow.  I felt an impossible and shaking hatred for her then.  She was never on my side was she?  Never.

Just moments later the back door pushed open and she appeared beside me, her face small and pale in the darkness of the garden.  As soon as she saw me she folded her arms over her chest and tapped one slippered foot angrily against the ground.  I made a slow and unbothered job of finishing my smoke and dropping it before speaking to her. “Checking up on me?”

“Thought you might have disappeared somewhere,” she replied cooly.

“Sounds like a plan,” I muttered and started to walk past her.  As I did so, she reached out and grabbed my arm, stopping me.  The look in her eyes was desperate and confused.

“Why do you want to spoil it for me?” she begged.  I shook her off.

“Why do you have to pick the biggest bastard boyfriend ever?”

She shook her head, close to tears. “You don’t know anything about him.”

“Neither do you,” I said, and went inside.

Up in my room I closed the door and went to the window to wait.  I made myself comfortable there, with my music on low, and the window slightly open.  I sat and let the cool breeze soothe the angry redness of my face and mind.  Every now and again, without even meaning to, my hand would rise and wander to the back of my neck.  I was afraid to ask myself if it hurt or not, if my skin could still recall the press of fingers.  I knocked the thoughts away when they came.  What had happened there?  Eventually I retrieved my notebook and sat at the window scribbling lyrics into it instead.  It was the only way to get the thoughts from my head.  Stone me, why can’t you see?  You’re a no one, nowhere, washed up baby who’d look better dead. I did it to stop myself thinking and wondering, but it didn’t work too well.  My mind kept taking me back there, kept replaying it over and over again in my mind.  He had stepped closer.  Leaned forward to speak into my ear.  It was just a hand on my neck, I rolled my eyes and told myself.

Yes, but had it been a pat or a squeeze, or what?  Surely it had only been some kind of clumsy pat, and my heart had no business beating so hard and so fast under my clothes, as if it was trying to get out.  A pat was okay, I thought.  A pat on the back, or the shoulder would have been better, I replied.  Why hadn’t he done that?  You didn’t touch people’s necks, did you?  I tried to think as I scribbled down words, had I ever done that to anyone?  In play, or jest, or anything? The questions flew into my mind faster than I was able to chase them away.  A pat on the back would not have gotten me into this state, I thought.

Sometime later, I was still perched at the window, scribbling down my favourite parts of Stone Roses songs, when I heard the front door opening down below.  I immediately dropped my pen and book to the floor and yanked the curtains across to disguise myself.  I could hear them talking, softly and lovingly.  I could hear the wetness of their prolonged kissing.  And then, through a tiny gap in the curtains, I watched the big man himself sashay brashly down to his car and get in.  I held my breath.  The engine roared into life, he drove off a little way, and then all hell broke loose.  Raised voices.  Slamming doors.  My mother ran down to see what was wrong.  I could see him stalking around the tyres, stooping down to inspect each one in turn.  My mother started to flap about and talk in a high voice, and every now and then she just stopped and stared up at my window.  I ducked down and smiled to myself.  If Michael and the boys had had enough time and nerve, then all four of Lee Howard’s tyres would be slashed and stabbed in several places.

21

 

 

            Fear and regret steamrollered me into moving the next morning.  In fact I don’t think I have ever got out of bed as fast as I did that day.  I grabbed my bike and scooted over to Michael’s house.  I ran around to the back and started to throw stones at his window.  I got three solid hits in before he appeared at the window, bleary eyed and messy haired.  He opened it and stared in amusement down at me. “What the hell? It’s seven in the morning!”

“I know. You coming out?”

“Oh man.  Hang on.”

Minutes later I watched him bundle sleepily out of the back door, still pulling his arms through his checked shirt.  “You’re insane,” he yawned at me. “What’s going on?”

We started down the alley and climbed onto our bikes. “Had to get out the house,” I explained to him. “Before mum work up.”

Michael nodded, releasing another mammoth sigh. “Oh shit, yeah, I nearly forgot.  What happened?  Did they go mental?”

“No,” I shook my head, my eyes on him. “Not yet.  She called a taxi for him then went to bed.  Didn’t say a word to me.  They were out there talking for ages though.  He knows too much Mike, that’s the problem.  He already knows what we did to Bradley, everything!”

“Shittinghell,” Michael shook his head very seriously as we rode slowly along.  “You know, we went a bit far actually, got a bit carried away. I hope to hell no one saw us out there.”

“He deserves it,” I grumbled, eyes down, following the progress of the front wheel as it rolled me along.  “Should’ve got you to smash all the bloody windows too.”

Without discussing it, we had cycled out onto Somerley road and were heading towards town. “What about the dinner?” Michael wanted to know.  “Find anything useful out?”

“Nah not really.  Just that he’s a big mouthed cunt who talks with his mouth full and interrupts people all the time.”

Michael snorted laughter. “Fair to say you still don’t like him then?”

I grunted. “And fucking John.  Jesus Christ Mike, he arranged the whole thing, it was all his idea, and he asks fuck all and scoots off right after dinner!  Useless fucking twat.”

“Jesus,” Michael whistled through his teeth. “Sounds terrible mate.”

I nodded.  It was terrible, and now that I was up and out and thinking about it all again, it was just awful.  I was getting this crushing tightness in my chest, this horrible sensation of having no room to breathe, of anger filling each and every part of me.

“We need to do something,” Michael said then, and I nodded in agreement, feeling the same, but I had no idea what.  We rode on for a while in silence.  I took the time to gaze around, noticing for the first time how quiet and still the streets were.  It was Sunday, and the town had not woken yet.  I’d felt a rise of excitement in seeing Mike, but I could feel it drying up inside of me now.  Instead there was this gnawing anxiety, and it was there constantly in my head as we rode our bikes along; tell him, tell Mike about Howard’s hand on your neck, tell him, because you know it wasn’t right, you know it was weird, it was…I still didn’t really know what it was.  That was half the problem.   I kept thinking about how it would sound if I said it to him, and the further time moved me from the moment it had occurred, the more I found myself wondering if had even happened, and if it had, if it meant anything at all anyway.  Maybe it didn’t mean anything.  Some adults were like that, I thought, they ruffled your hair and patted your back, even if they didn’t know you that well.  Like June Madison, touching my arm, holding onto it even, as she rocked back and forth with laughter that crinkled up her eyes.  So why then, did just thinking about it make me shudder?  We rode up and over the two bridges, towards the high street.

The shops were all closed, and the high street seemed ghostly and desolate in the absence of shoppers.  A gang of swooping, screeching seagulls had decided to follow our progress though, and every time I glanced up at their beating wings and open beaks, I was reminded of the gang before I knew them, circling their bikes outside my house.  It seemed like a lifetime ago, I realized then.  “Are you okay?” I heard Michael asking me.  He was looking at me with a frown.

“Hmm?”

“You okay?  You hungry?  ‘Cause I have an idea.”

I shrugged in reply and he gestured for me to follow.  He crossed the road and took a left down a narrow alley that ran along the back of the high street.  All the businesses, shops and cafes backed out onto this alley.  Michael stood up on his pedals and pumped his legs, picking up speed until we arrived at the back of Nell’s Diner.  It was a traditional style café, popular with teenagers, cheap and cheerful and a place to hang out.  There was a white van parked out the back, the doors open, as it made its deliveries.  The smell of baking bread and cakes rolled sweetly down the alley towards us, and I closed my eyes briefly, inhaling it deep within my lungs.  Michael nodded, and as we looked on, a portly bald man in a white apron, came out the back of the café, grabbed a tray from the van and staggered back inside with it.  It was then that Michael made his move, and made it swiftly.  He was so fast, so sudden in his actions, that I was almost left behind in surprise.  I had barely caught up to him, when he stopped his bike, reached into the van, grabbed the nearest thing to hand and sped off again.

I was right behind him then, roaring with laughter as he struggled to cycle fast with two massive French sticks tucked under one arm.

We kept cycling, seen by no one, doubling back on ourselves and riding down towards the old Priory church.  We zig zagged through the ancient, crumbling tombstones of the long dead and forgotten, and freewheeled down the hill, through a deserted car park and out onto the quay.  There was no one.  Not a body in sight.  Just old sailboats and dingy’s jostling gently on the shining water of the harbour.  I was laughing too much to cycle, so I got off and pushed my bike up to the edge of the water.  Michael dumped his and claimed a bench, as always, sitting on the back with his boots on the seat.  I joined him, weak and breathless with laughter, and as I flopped down, he pushed one of the sticks onto my lap, and it was still warm. “Breakfast is served!” he said, grinning broadly.

“You’re mental!” I told him, still giggling and wiping at my leaking eyes. “You can’t just do that!  You dirty little thief!”

“Hey don’t call me names, I just got you breakfast!”

“You’ve done that before haven’t you?”

He nodded.  “Once or twice.  Tuck in.”  He tore a huge chunk of bread off with his teeth.  The sun was spilling orange juice out onto the water as it continued its climb up to the clouds.  The light reflected off his black hair.  He looked for a moment, as if he had a hazy halo surrounded his head, and it made me have to look down, look away.

“Thanks Mike,” I told him. “You’re a legend.”

“I know.  And you’re welcome.”

For a while we just ate in silence.  It was nice.  Just sat there, staring at the orange tipped water and not saying anything about anything.  We could have been anyone, I thought, anyone going anywhere.  The warmth of the stolen bread filled our minds and our stomachs.  Beyond the harbour, the marshland grasses stood tall and proud, swaying in the breeze that teased our hair.  Swans glided by in pairs.  Ducks quacked, especially when they got a whiff of our breakfast.  We started throwing them some after a while.  We didn’t have the room to eat an entire French stick each. I pulled my feet up onto the bench and wrapped my arms around my knees.  The seagulls croaked and squawked behind us, strutting about on the grass, hoping for leftovers.  The boats bumped and moved gently against each other.  I found myself wondering if this view, this silence was what my mother had been trying to tell me about before we moved here.  I just stared at it, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out what it meant to me.  “We should do this again,” I said eventually, turning to Michael.  He was tugging pieces of bread from the last portion of his stick and tossing it out to the ducks.  “It’s nice, I mean.  Everyone else asleep, or whatever.”

“We should.  It’s cool.  Think of all the mischief we could get up to with no one else around.”  We looked at each other and grinned. “You want to know the next part of the plan?” he asked me then.  I swallowed and smiled a little.  My stomach pulled down, not wanting to go there.  “Got a shit hot idea,” he went on. “Laxatives in his drink!”

I laughed out loud. “We can’t do that!”

“Yes we can,” Michael giggled. “I can steal them off my mum.  We did it to Higgs once!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, at school. Slipped them into his coke in the canteen.  He doubled up instantly.  Legged it to the toilet, shit stains everywhere!” Michael let off a peal of laughter, lifting his chin to the sky and clapping his hands together. “Brilliant!”

I nodded. “God, I wish I’d seen that.”

“Well we’ll do it to the arsehole. Whenever he’s next at yours call me, and I’ll bring them over.  It’s easy.”  He slipped down beside me then, hunting in his pockets for a cigarette.  Coming up with nothing he sighed and dropped his hands into his lap. “If you want to, that is. You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” I said, staring back out at the water.  “I’ll do anything Mike.  I do not want that creep with my mother.  Trouble is, I don’t think he’s gonna’ be the pushover Bradley was.” I swallowed again, and it was there on the tip of my tongue, tell him, tell him what you’re thinking, what happened, what it might have been, what it might have meant, tell him!  I felt Michael watching me carefully, waiting for more.  I coughed into my hand.  “I mean, she’s warned him hasn’t she?  He’s prepared for it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Michael replied simply. “He still has a limit.  Everyone has a limit.  We’ll push him to it. Whatever it takes to piss him off.  Whatever it takes to get rid of him, we’ll do it.  One thing after another, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Only thing is, you’re mum is gonna’ be pretty pissed off with you for a while.”

I shrugged. “Used to that.”

“But be careful at school,” he advised me. “Stay out of trouble with Higgs and everything. We don’t need all that shit.”

“Be a good boy?” I looked at him and grinned.

“Prove them wrong,” he corrected me.

I had a puncture when I got home, so I turned the bike upside down, and sat on the doorstep to spin the wheel around.  I was lost in this for a moment, sleepiness washing over me from my early start, so it made me jump when my mother cleared her throat loudly right behind me.  I immediately felt the guilt stealing across my face, and looked up at her reluctantly.  She regarded me as she always did.  Eyes narrowed down, forehead furrowed, and mouth small.  “You were up early,” she stated.  I opened my mouth to explain but she didn’t let me speak. “Lee’s coming over in a minute. To help with the painting.”

I floundered, struggling for words, struggling with the heavy sinking of my gut.  She turned and grabbed the kettle and carried it to the sink to fill.  I stood up and wiped my oily hands down the legs of my jeans.  “What painting?”

“About time I started sorting this place out,” she replied with her back to me.  “Gonna’ start with the hall. He’ll be here all day helping me. I might as well ask him to stay for dinner again to thank him.”

I had no words for her.  I could only stare at her back.  I watched her make her coffee and carry it away.  I would have been lost in anger and disbelief if I hadn’t recalled Michael and his plan.  So I hovered near the door until I heard her upstairs, and then I dashed for the phone.  Do you ever read a book, or watch a film, and watch the main character start to make a massive mistake?  You can see it’s all going to go horribly wrong, and they should be able to see it as well, but somehow they can’t, and they go blindly on, they go staggering dumbly towards this stupid, stupid thing.  You want to scream at the TV or the book, don’t you?  You want to reach out and grab them and shake them, pull them aside and say hey, really you don’t want to do that, it’s all going to backfire, listen to me a minute.  Well I wish I’d had someone to do that for me that day.  With the grotesquely unfair and useless benefit of hindsight, I can now see that I should have stopped myself.  I should have sat back down and got on with looking for the puncture.   I should have politely ignored Michael’s offer to help humiliate and deter Lee Howard.  I should have stood back patiently in the sidelines, and waited for it to go wrong by itself.

But I didn’t.  All I could see was that man, and his pebble like eyes, and his monstrous chest, and his shining forehead, and I wanted to hurt him.  I wanted to punish him for ever coming near my mother in the first place, and I wanted to show him that his words in the kitchen meant nothing to me.  That shit won’t work with me, he had said.  Well I wanted to show him that his shit wouldn’t work with me either.  So I called Michael and told him to come over with the stuff.

Michael arrived on his bike, with a battered old tool box swinging from one hand, just moments later.  He found me sat forlornly on the doorstep with my bike lying on the ground before me.  I held my head in one hand and gazed up at him.  I felt sick.  “What’s the matter?” he asked me, dumping down the tool box. “You look like you’re ill.”

I blew my breath out. “You got the stuff?”

He lifted his t-shirt and showed me the tub of pills poking up from one of the front pockets of his jeans.  “Mum swears by it,” he whispered. “Totally undetectable in drinks.”

“Don’t think I want to know.”

“Your tyres need pumping? I brought the tool box as a cover story.  You know, we’re out here fixing our bikes.”

“Got a puncture,” I told him wearily. “Your alley is full of glass.”

“Oh cool.  Genuine cover story.  Why’s he coming back over anyway?”  He knelt down then, unclipped the lid of the rusty tool box and started to pull spanners and screwdrivers out. “Puncture repair kit in here somewhere, I know there is.”

I got up then.  My stomach felt cramped and small so I stood up and stretched myself out.  I put my hands in my pockets and gazed down the driveway. “Painting apparently. I think they know we did the car,” I said softly. “They must do.  My mum’s face Mike.  They know.”

“Don’t freak out,” he warned me. “Guilt shows if you’re not careful.  They can’t prove anything, or they would have said something by now.”

Just then we heard the sound of a car purring smoothly into the road.  We looked up and watched the silver Mercedes, the very car Michael and the others had sabotaged last night, roll up into the drive behind my mother’s Fiat.  Michael shot a look at me.  I was chewing my nail, my lip curled up, my forehead creased. “For fucks sake,” he hissed. “Relax.  They know nothing!”

Howard climbed out of his car, locked the door, and then checked it.  He looked up and nodded at us in recognition.  He then lowered his head slightly and walked right around the car, scrutinising it.  I heard Michael snort discreetly beside me and I resisted the urge to elbow him.  Finally, Howard nodded in satisfaction and came up towards us.  “Morning lads,” he announced, clapping his hands together loudly as he approached.  Michael smiled back at him sunnily.  I tried not to look as guilty as fuck.  Howard was wearing his cowboy boots, with the pointed toes, and the horrible stone washed jeans.  His black belt pulled tightly restrained a degree of middle age spread, but above that loomed a body of serious power and strength.  He was wearing a crisp white shirt, tucked into his jeans, and with the top three buttons undone.  I met his eyes briefly before looking away.  I thought how they reminded me of marbles, little balls of glass flicked with blue.  He was smiling, but that smile seemed to see right through me, and appeared as fake and as dangerous as the look in those eyes.  “Up to no good I bet?” he said to us.

Michael raised his eyebrows and smirked.  “Always,” he replied confidently.  I kept on chewing at my nail.  Howard jerked his thumb towards the house.

“Your mother in there?” he asked me.  I nodded, unable and unwilling to speak.  “Lost your tongue again eh?” Howard rocked back on his heels and hooked his thumbs into his pockets.  His grin seemed frozen in place, unflinching.  He glanced at Michael. “Not very talkative is he?”

Michael was still smirking nicely. “He’s just a bit choosy about who he converses with,” he said.

“Oh is that so?” Howard looked amused, as he looked from me to Michael and back to me again.  “Ah that’s all right, except I wanted to ask him a few questions, so maybe I can ask you and you can answer for him then?”

Michael frowned and folded his arms.  He looked ready for war and he looked like he was enjoying every minute of it.  Not like me.  I was sweating.  I could feel it breaking out across my neck and shoulder blades, and dripping slowly down my spine.  “What questions?”

Howard shrugged. “Well there was some funny business last night, that’s all. Came out and found all my tyres slashed.  I didn’t realise it wasn’t safe to park a nice car around here.  A bit rough is it?”

“What are you, new?” Michael demanded, his tone churlish, his lip lifting.

“Been in town a few months,” Howard replied steadily. “Of course I’m no stranger to rough types.  Get all sorts in the club.”

“Oh yeah?” Michael sounded bored now.

“Yeah, yeah, just the other night we caught a couple of low lifes trying to deal drugs in the toilets.  Had some of my staff keep them busy while we called the cops in.” He sniffed then.  His grin seemed to have faded. “Pays to be on good terms with the police in my game.  Favours for favours, you know?  Got some good friends in the force.” He nodded at us.  “Always handy. “  He smiled then, and it reminded me of a shark, all those little teeth lined up neatly, revealed one by one by the parting of his thin lips.  “Well better get on with the painting eh? Have this place looking like home in no time Danny.”  He walked past us and patted me on the back.  I was taken by surprise by the contact and sort of jumped and turned and felt a strange creep of disgust.

Michael sneered when he had gone.  “Shittinghell,” he hissed through his teeth. “What a fucking giant prick.”

“What does he mean, like home?” I asked wonderingly.  Michael looked intense and took my arm, pulling me down the drive a little way.

“I was paying more attention to the bit about cops,” he said. “What was that about?  Do you think that’s true, or more bullshit?” I just shrugged unhappily.  I felt weak for some reason.  Weak, and small and tired.  But Michael was grinning back at me then, his grin growing bigger and bigger, his eyes lighting up. “We have to be careful,” he told me.  “Wait ‘til he has a drink on the go and then sneak in.”

I sighed and turned back to my bike.  “You gonna’ help me fix this or what?”

We had to wait, and Michael was all for it, keeping his eye on the kitchen, and the hallway beyond, where we could hear my mother and Howard talking in low tones.  Every now and then Michael cocked his finger and shot an imaginary gun in their direction.  I remained silent, brooding, unwilling to talk.  We fixed my bike and hung about, waiting for the chance.  I rode my bike up and down the drive just to kill time and keep busy.  Michael remained close to the back door, his dark eyes alight with mischief.  Just when I was starting to get bored of the whole thing, Michael marched up to me and winked. “Two drinks,” he whispered. “They just made them and left them on the kitchen table. One tea and one coffee. Do you want to do the deed, or shall I?”

My mouth was dry.  I nodded and pushed him a little.  “You. Mum’s is the coffee.”

He grinned and turned back to the house.  He was only in there about a minute.  And then he came reeling back around the corner of the house, his smile ear splitting, his hair flying back from his forehead.  “Go,” he urged me, jumping onto his bike and pushing off.  We didn’t waste any time.  We were gone in seconds.