5

 

Dear World, is it wrong that I am finding all this drama so intoxicating? Personally I think it says a lot about my own life.  No one would want my life.  My life consists of cynicism and traipsing around.  I told you.

 

So anyway, we have no choice but to hide out at my house until we can get hold of Marianne.  I get my mum to call Lorraine and tell her Joe is staying for tea, and having a sleepover.  My mum’s lips pull into a grimace at this part, because they all worry about us having sleepovers, of course. You know, in case I get fucking pregnant or something. I ask you. I just stare at her with big hopeful eyes, and I know she is feeling guilty about the whole Les thing, because she picks up the phone and calls Lorraine.  My legs are wobbly as I start back up the stairs.  Mum hangs up the phone quickly and comes after me. “What shall I get you both for tea?” she asks me. “Sara is staying at her friends house.  It’s just us.”

I shrug at her.  “Don’t mind.”

“Sausage chips and beans?”

“Can we have it in my room?”

“Of course you can,” she sighs, and I turn to go.  “Hold on Lou,” she says.  I can’t hold myself up anymore so I just sit down on one of the stairs and wait for it. “Look,” she begins gently.  “I know you don’t really know Les yet, but what’s happened is his flat he was living in, it’s his sisters, right?  And they’ve had this awful fight, and now she wants him out, and it’s just dreadful really.”

“Yeah, it is,” I tell her, but my sarcasm is lost on her.  Her eyes are full of the pity she feels for Les. She is holding a tea towel and wrings it between her hands.

“So it’s not forever,” she goes on. “It’s just until he gets sorted with another place, okay? That’s another reason why there is no point telling dad. He’ll go off on one for no reason, because it’s not going to be for long.”

“Does Sara know about this yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll speak to her when she comes home.”

I can’t see my older sister liking this news any more than I do, but this is the least of my problems right now.  I heave myself back up, and my mouth waters just slightly at the idea of sausage, chips and beans.

 

Joe is still lying on my bed, and sits up when I walk in.  “Mum’s bringing us tea up in a bit,” I inform him, stretching back out beside him. 

“Brilliant,” he says, with a smile. “I love your mum.”

“She’s better than yours, that’s for sure.”

“We go back to Marianne’s in the morning,” he tells me, as if he has been thinking this over by himself.  “If she’s still not answering her phone. We sit there and wait till she comes back.  It will all be fine.  We’ll get the bag back to Leon, and make sure he keeps it out the house. It will all be fine.” He nods with the certainty of his own predictions and I frown at him from the bed.  I have my pen again and I am doodling lazily on the wall.

“Is that what you do Joe, to get through life?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell yourself everything will be fine, and believe yourself.”

I hear him snort at me.  He does that a lot. “It’s better than what you do.”

“What do I do then?”

“Expect everything to be shit so you don’t get disappointed when it is.”

“Ha ha, I call that being intelligent. Like this thing with Les, you know what’s going to happen don’t you?” I sit up suddenly; pen in hand, a flurry of unexplained aggression washing over me.  He waits.  “He’ll move in, dad will find out, dad will be a prize knob, mum will cry, Les and dad will fight, mum will cry, Sara will probably throw a hissy fit and move out.  Mum will cry.  Les will stay, and dad will want to throw us all out of his precious fucking house. That is what will happen.  And they should be able to see that too, if I can.”

“And in all of that, what will you do then?”

I lie back down, and jab my pen at the wall. “I will get drunk with you.”

Joe gives a little laugh. “Fair enough.”

I feel grumpy and pissed off at everyone.  I wonder if that is what not eating much does to you.  I expect my body to react violently when my mum comes in with the food.  I expect my mouth to water again, and my eyes to fixate on the food, and my stomach to growl louder than ever.  But when she puts the tray down on the bed, and Joe picks up his plate, I feel a kind of disgust and loathing that takes me by surprise.  I put my plate on my lap, and push the chips around with the beans, and I see it for what it is, just like I did with the doughnut that day.  It was not a tasty snack to fill a hole.  It was a vile and lard filled trick.  I eat one sausage, three chips and a forkful of beans, and then I feel like crying.  I have no idea why.  I have no idea what is wrong with me. 

Joe tucks into his dinner like he has never been fed so well.  I reach out and scrawl doodles on the wall behind me.  Joe looks hungrily at the rest of my food. “Do you not want that?”

“No. Feel sick.  You have it.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“When can we get drunk again?”

“I don’t know.  Why?”

“It’s fun. Takes your mind off things.”

“I know, I’ll trade Leon’s bag for a bottle of cider. Reckon he’ll go for that?”

“I think I like the sound of drinking cider in the park with my retard friends. How wrong is that?”

“It’s not wrong. It’s fun.”

 

I sit up, resting my back against the wall and dropping the pen.  I rub my arms and this brings back the memory of the rough warmth of Travis’s hands closed over them.  A shiver of what I can only describe as lust runs through me, and I smile.  Isn’t it meant to be teenage boys that get all horny and hormonal and hot under the collar at inappropriate times? I realise I have never witnessed this in Joe, and fleetingly wonder if he is gay, like his older brothers sometimes accuse him of being.  I honestly do not know what is wrong with me.  I think Joe would kill me if he knew what I was thinking right now.  What I am picturing in my mind.

Leon scares me.  I don’t like being in his presence. He makes me feel uncomfortable, but I am unable to really articulate why.  He wants to be a hard man; he wants to not care about anyone or anything, as if somehow he believes this to be the best way to go through life.  It is what he seeks to achieve.  Not giving a shit.  Dealing drugs, if that is what he is doing, and we can strongly suppose that it is, is just his latest ploy to try to achieve this.  He is bizarrely determined to live as crooked and brutal a life as possible, and you can see it in every inch of him – his empty, hard eyes, his lack of remorse or empathy for anything or anyone.  The way his body ripples and bristles, as if every muscle within it has been injected with pure blind rage.  I wonder whom he is trying to impress, and I can only imagine that it is himself.

You might be wondering about Travis, World. Well he is a bastard.  All the girls say it.  That’s what I hear, so I don’t trust him, but I can see some of Joe in him.  Some.  His eyes give away more than Leon’s ever do.  His voice reflects his emotions – his frustration when he loses at Grand Theft Auto to Leon.  His humour when one of the little ones does something funny.  Leon barely acknowledges their existence, but Travis sees them.  He has human qualities, where Leon seems to have none.  I wonder how far he would go for his brother.  For either of them? I wonder these things World, because I am a curious person.  You wouldn’t believe how much of my life has been spent standing back quietly and just watching, just listening.  It is a skill I have honed well over the years, and it means that I know far more about everyone else, than they do about me.  It only occurs to me in rare drunken moments, that this is not necessarily a good thing.

 

When I finally look at my clock it informs me it is half past six.  Why does it feel so much later?  Joe and I stretch out on my bed and stare at the cracks in the ceiling.  “I’m surprised you haven’t written anything up there yet,” he muses sleepily.  We pass the evening feeling like we are on death row.  When I close my eyes I can see redness behind my eyelids.  It reminds me of blood, shifting and building, like a blood clot growing.  I blink as I involuntarily imagine Leon’s fist slamming into my face.  I picture blood exploding from my nose and lips, and the bridge of my nose collapsing and folding in on itself.  I am good at this.  Picturing violent and bloody scenes inside my head.  Sometimes when I look around me, all I can see is all the potential for physical damage.  Windows that could shatter on top of your head. Knives that could slip in your grip and plunge into your wrist.  Cars that could skid and career towards you, helpless on the pavement, the brute force of the gleaming metal pinning you to a wall, pulverising your organs.  Blood pumping like a fountain from your mouth.  I do it when I am speaking to people sometimes.  Especially people like teachers, and other grown ups who are not my parents.  I will find myself drifting off as they speak, and then picturing me smashing them in the face with something really heavy, like a brick or an iron or something.  Once, in science, I imagined Mr. Foster’s eyeballs flying out of his face after I lifted a stool and cracked him over the head with it.  They flew right across the science lab and splattered against the windows, sliding down slowly, leaving bloody snails trails behind.  I don’t know why I do this World, except maybe just for amusement. 

 

Every time the phone rings we expect it to be trouble.  We turn the music up and down, imagining we can hear the doorbell go.  Mum drifts up the stairs again later, and starts shoving blankets and pillows through the door.  You can tell she is on edge about Joe sleeping over, even though we have known each other since we were foetuses.  It is sad indictment of adult stupidity, that as soon as we entered puberty, they all started acting like we ought to fancy each other.  They had decided that we would, and nothing we could do or say would remove this idea from their heads.  ‘Watch them,’ even my dad said to my mum once, and he very rarely has anything to say that involves thinking about me. ‘They’re getting too big to go around like that.’ Luckily my mum ignored his insightful wisdom about my friendship with Joe.  She retorted with the well used, ‘Oh they are just like brother and sister.’ But you could see the worry in her eyes every time we went up to my room alone.  You just know that if I were stupid enough to get pregnant, the first vicious words he would say to her would be; ‘I told you so.’

 

That night, Joe falls asleep before I do.  I can hear him snoring gently on the floor.  I am lying awake, I am staring at the ceiling, and I am smoothing my fingers up and down the curves of my hipbones.  I am savagely proud of myself for barely eating today.  I tell myself it is the only way to get rid of the fat.  It is the only way to get the body I have always wanted.  In a strange and childlike way, I truly feel that when I am slim enough, everything will be different. 

 

 

 

Dear World, well here we are again, and the saga drags on another day…

The plan was to wake up early and run over to Marianne’s before she can do another vanishing act.  But we do not wake up until the bedroom door is kicked open, and when I roll over to groan at the clock I despise, I see that it is nearly ten o’clock.  Not good.  It is Sara, my sister, who has burst in on us.  She is taller and slimmer than me.  She has blonder hair.  It is straighter and silkier than mine.  She slams the door behind her, throws a bag onto her bed and looks as if she might explode. “Jesus fucking mum!” she growls, hands in her hair.  Joe sits up on the floor, rolling the ball of his fist into his eye and yawning.  I swap a look with Joe.  You don’t really need to bother speaking when my sister is around.  She is very good at having a conversation with herself, on your behalf, and filling in the blanks when you do not speak. “What the hell is she thinking? Do you know about this Lou? About her bloody creepy boyfriend moving in? Is she insane? Dad will go mental!”

I quite simply, do not want to have this conversation.  Joe is already looking alarmed about the time, and hauling himself out of his makeshift bed.  I pull my quilt around me, so that I can get changed under it.  Joe passes up my cut off jeans from the floor, and I only have to rummage around in the mess at the foot of my bed to find a suitable t-shirt.  Sara is ransacking the wardrobe for a change of clothes. “I cannot believe it,” she continues to rant. “I cannot believe that woman.  She knows how dad will react. She knows how he feels about the stupid house. And we’re supposed to keep it a secret for her? Bloodyhell! Great one.  Nice one mum.  Well done.” She plonks herself on her bed to pull off her shoes. “When is this supposed to be happening anyway? Do you know?”

“No idea.” I get out of bed and brush my hair in front of the mirror.

“Have you lost more weight?” Sara asks, frowning at me. I look myself up and down.

“I don’t know.”

“What size are you now anyway?”

“Twelve,” I say, and smile at her proudly. “Fourteens are too big now. I had to get mum to get me some new clothes.”

“Bloodyhell, well done!” My sister is beaming at me for some reason. I mean, really beaming.  It catches me off guard to tell you the truth. My sister and I have always got on really well, but these days I am old enough to recognise why this is.  I was always the quiet, calm one, and she was the opposite.  See?  No competition there.  Apparently when I was really little she used to pretend she was my mum, and choose my clothes and get me dressed and stuff.  I used to play with her for hours, and I loved it, but everything was on her terms you understand.  She doesn’t see life any other way.  Her beaming takes me by surprises and sends a warm rush of something like pride through me.  I smile, despite myself.  “You’ve done really well. You’re looking amazing you know.  Isn’t she Joe?”

Joe looks up with a start.  He looks exhausted and confused. “Hey?”

“Oh trust you not to notice,” Sara groans, rolling her eyes at me. “Men are all the same. Take Rich. Did he notice I’d had my hair cut and coloured? No he did not.  And when I told him, do you know what he said? He said, oh it doesn’t look any different to me!”

Joe has his trainers on and is hopping about impatiently. I tie up my hair and follow him to the door. “We’ve got to go,” I say to Sara.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t finished with mum yet,” she says, not looking at us as she goes back to the wardrobe. “She’s not getting her own way that easily! I’m getting changed then going back down there for round two.”

“Okay, good luck,” I sigh, and we leave.

 

I pause in the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth, while Joe heads to the front door. When I come down the stairs, he has the door open a crack and seems to be scanning the street. “Really surprised they haven’t come looking for us,” he murmurs as I come up behind him.  He tugs his phone from his pocket and frowns at it. “No calls either.”

“Maybe they trust you to get it back.”

“Lou?” Mum calls from the kitchen.  I know what she is going to say.  Take the fucking dog.  I want to just slam out of the door and not even look at her, but something pathetic in her voice makes me turn around.  She has been crying, there is no doubt about that.  Sara does not mince her words, or hide her feelings.  She is the opposite of me in that respect.  She has the unfathomable bravery to say exactly what she thinks at all times.  I only have this bravery when it comes to my wall. As I suspected, mum is holding out Gremlins lead to me. “Would you mind?”

“No, course not,” I mutter and snatch it from her.  I clip the lead onto the dog and we go out of the door, leaving her in her own sad silence in the hallway.

 

Outside the pavement is wet from yesterday’s downpour.  There are puddles everywhere.  But the sky is impossibly blue and vast and clear, not a cloud in sight.  We head for Marianne’s, and our legs feel heavy.  Gremlin trots a jaunty walk alongside me; oblivious to the disgusted looks Joe affords him, and I bring up her number one more pointless time.

We start to cross the fields that surround our estate, and the grass is wet and squishy underfoot.  A hell of a lot of rain must have fallen yesterday. The fields wrap right around the housing estate, enveloping it in green.  There are two parks on the entire estate.  A small baby one just around the corner from my road, and a bigger one for older kids on the fields.  It has a slide built into a hill, two swings, a battered old paint flaked roundabout, a climbing frame and a wooden castle with another slide coming out from the top chamber.  The bottom chamber is like a little hut, with a table and benches inside.  You can choose either wooden steps, or a rope ladder to climb up to the bit where the slide is.  We glance across, hearing voices from that direction.  There are kids circling on their bikes, weaving in and out of the apparatus, and whizzing down the hill. “Park and cider,” I say, more to myself than Joe. He nods grimly.

“You better fucking believe it Carling.” I look at him and wonder if he was serious about getting his brother to buy us some cider in return for their bag.  I wouldn’t put it past him.  He may not be a fighter, in any way, shape or form, but Joe has guts.  He may not be able to fight them back physically, but I know he is not as scared of them as I am. 

 

When we reach Marianne’s we breathe a collective sigh of relief, as both her parents cars are parked in the driveway.  We are assuming, and hoping desperately that this means she is with them.  Her dad drives a silver Renault Megane, and her mum has this nippy little black jeep.  Just as we approach the door, it opens and her mum comes out.  She looks a lot like Marianne, small and delicate with black hair.  She does a double take when she sees us there.  I wonder morosely how scruffy and sleep deprived we appear to her.  She is a nice lady, always polite and welcoming, but I can’t help detect a bit of uncertainty from her about us.  It’s like she is too polite and well brought up to act on the instinct she has not to trust us.  Funnily enough, that is pretty much how I feel about her daughter. “Hello there,” she says, one pale hand falling back onto her own chest.  She is wearing crisp white trousers and a blue and pink floaty, chiffon blouse.  She is holding a small watering can in her other hand, and starts to water the many pot plants that surround her front door. She wrinkles her nose at Gremlin.  “Marianne is in her room, go on up.  But you wouldn’t mind leaving the dog out here, would you? I am terribly allergic!” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh at this.

“Thanks,” Joe says rather gruffly, heading for the door. I tie Gremlin up to one of the drainpipes.

“I would leave him at home,” I feel the strange need to explain to Mrs. Sholing. “But my mum makes me take him everywhere.” I shrug at her.  I suppose I want her to know it is not my fault I keep bringing my dog to the house of someone who is allergic to him.  She smiles at me sweetly, and we go on in.  We remember to wipe our shoes on the mat, and head up the stairs to find Marianne. I can sense the urgency in Joe now.  I imagine he is thinking about what he will do, if she doesn’t have the bag for some reason. Either that, or he is repeatedly telling himself that everything will be fine. 

 

Marianne’s door is closed, so we knock on it.  It seems to take forever for her to open it, and I watch the sweat gathering on Joe’s forehead.  Eventually she unlocks the door and looks at us vacantly.  She is rubbing at one arm, and pulling her long sleeve down over her hand.  She doesn’t need to try to hide it from us, because we know exactly what she has been doing.  Her face looks even paler than usual. Joe glances once at the drops of blood we can see on her palm, and then crosses his arms.

“Where the hell did you go yesterday? We came back for the bag and you were gone.  My brothers wanted it back! And your phone’s been off!”

Marianne holds the door open so we go in, and she closes and locks it behind us.  “I lost my charger. You said to give you a day, so I went out. I am so sorry.” She says sorry like it is the last thing she means.  Joe looks around her room.  It is huge.  She has a double bed, a double wardrobe, and a massive oak desk at the window.  She has a view of the garden, so I walk over and stare out at the adventure playground beyond. 

“Where is it?” Joe spins around and demands.

“Chill out,” she tells him.  I wince.

“Don’t tell me to fucking chill out,” he warns her. “I need it now. You have no idea what shit I’m in if I don’t get it back right now!”

Marianne merely rolls her eyes and sighs, and crosses the room to her vast wardrobe.  She opens it, puts one hand in and comes back out holding the Adidas bag. Joe nearly collapses in relief, and so do I.  He snatches it from her and unzips it to check the contents.  “I didn’t try any, don’t worry,” she says to him.  He zips it back up and slings it onto his shoulder. He runs both hands back through his hair and closes his eyes for a small moment.

“Thanks Marianne,” I speak for him. “We’ve got to get it back now.”

“You’re welcome,” she sighs again and sits down on the edge of her bed. “Do you want to do something later maybe? Go out or something?”

“We’ll see how this goes,” I say, glancing at Joe. “He had to stay at mine last night. We’re both totally fucked to be honest.”

“Well you know where I am.”

“Thanks again,” Joe says, and lets himself out of her room. You can tell he doesn’t feel thankful at all, and he has not yet forgiven her for the panic she gave him yesterday, despite it not really being her fault.

“Are you all right?” I ask her tentatively, as I head for the door. She fixes me with a bright, brave smile, and her eyes are challenging me, but I do not understand why or for what reason.  World, I do not understand her at all.

“Oh yes,” she says, mysteriously. “I am now.”

 

Joe wastes no time in getting the fuck away from Marianne’s house, and I can’t blame him.  We grab Gremlin and run for it.  We are half way across the field, and on our way to his house, drugs in tow, when I finally say something. “She was cutting herself before we got there? Wasn’t she?”

“I saw blood.”

“Me too.”

“It’s fucking gross.”

“It makes her feel better.”

“Better about what? How can it?”

I shrug, and think back to the first time we found out about her self-harming.  It was at my house.  We were up in my room drinking cider.  Having a giggle.  Marianne is a very controlled drinker though.  She never lets herself get wasted like us.  She will just have a few sips of a pint and make it last all night.  You could tell the small amount she did drink loosened her tongue and her body, and made her pale face flushed with daring.  But she never lets herself go overboard.  I suppose she doesn’t want to make a fool of herself, whereas we don’t give a shit. We were playing monopoly.  It was one of those phases, one of those things you get into as a group for a few weeks, and then forget all about. Monopoly is hilarious when you are pissed, take my word for it.  I was getting ridiculously aggressive about having to pay extortionate amounts of rent to Marianne. Joe was just a giggling mess. I reached across to slam the rest of my money down in front of her, and knocked my pint of cider everywhere in the process. It mostly covered Marianne.  She found it funny, and merely stood up and pulled her wet top off over her head.  Joe had covered his mouth, and then his eyes, as she dropped the wet garment to the floor and stood there in her neat white bra, asking to borrow something of mine.  It was not until I had fetched her something to wear, and she reached out to take it, that I saw the scores of little white scars on the inside of her arms.  Some were tiny.  Just little nicks.  Others were longer, more jagged.  A couple were covered in scabs.

I think if I had been sober I would have pretended not to notice out of politeness and awkwardness.  But I was pissed and I held onto her arm, lifting it up for Joe to see, which in hindsight was just horribly insensitive and vile of me, but she let me.  She just smiled and let me. “What the fuck have you done to your arms?” I asked her.

“It makes me feel better.” She had taken the top from me and pulled it over her head, before sitting back down to our aghast faces.  She had shrugged her tiny birdlike shoulders at us. “It’s no big deal. Some people get pissed to feel better about life, like you do. Some people take drugs.  I cut myself a bit.  I just do it when I feel like I want to explode or kill myself or something. It makes me feel better. That’s all.”

She made it sound so normal, I remember now.  So plausible.  So everyday.  We had just accepted it.  What else can you do? Marianne, in my opinion, is not the kind of girl who needs looking after or protecting.  Marianne, in my opinion, is possibly the kind of girl who could eat you alive if she wanted to. But now Joe is looking at me as if I am somehow in on it.  Just because I sort of understand her.

“She’s not hurting anyone else,” I shrug uselessly. He shakes his head.  We are nearly at his house, and right away we can see no sign of Leon’s car. Fuck it, I think angrily.

“It’s warped,” he tells me, his eyes scanning the road for the Fiesta. “It’s not right.”

“You could say the same thing about getting pissed in the park,” I point out. “And you know that’s exactly what you feel like doing right now. So you can forget all this shit when it’s over, and release it. It’s the same thing.”

“His car’s not here,” Joe stops walking. “What the fuck is going on?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

Dear World, you don’t want to know how odd I felt then. If you try to imagine cold terror mixed up with a hot rumbling excitement then you might come close.  I had this sense of everything happening all at once and it wanted to floor me. Sparks of intrigue, of being close to things I always wanted to know about, all stirred up in my belly with a dragging dread of fear and the urge to get the hell away.

            I tie Gremlin up again and he sort of collapses on himself and stares up at me through his saucer like eyes, his pink tongue lolling out from his squashed up face.  We go inside.  Mick and Tommy are still in the lounge.  Tommy is racing around in just his shorts, flying a plastic green aeroplane through the air.  We go upstairs without a single word.

            Once we are inside the older boys room, Travis closes the door and leans back against it with his arms folded. I just stand there, feeling stupid and redundant. Leon seems almost breathless with anger.  He is breathing heavily through his nostrils as he whips open the wardrobe door and points inside to the empty space where his Adidas bag should be.  “There was a bag in there,” he says in a low, tight voice.  “Now it’s gone.  Do you know anything about it?”

            Joe is silent.  Our eyes meet in guilt and fear, and Leon automatically deduces that we do.  He lets out a roar and grabs Joe by his t-shirt, spins him around and slams him into the wardrobe, and then down to the floor.  It is a scene I have watched play out many times before.  But I have never seen Leon so angry, so dark.  There is no play in this. But I’ll tell you World, I’m a big coward really, because he has always scared me, and I have never liked him. Not just because of the way he treats Joe though.  It’s more than that, but it’s hard to explain. I start shouting, and try to pull him away from Joe, and the next thing I know Travis has hold of my arms, and is holding me back.  There is thumping and thudding on the floor as the brothers wrestle, and before the fight can escalate any further, the bedroom door is kicked open by Mick.  Travis drops my arms, and Leon swings his leg over Joe and gets up.  His eyes flick dangerously between Mick and Joe, and I cannot determine who he would like to damage more in that moment.

            “What the hell is going on?” Mick demands, hands on hips.  He is shorter than Leon, but stocky and square, with a boxers face.  He always wears his t-shirts tucked into his jeans.  “Are you fighting?”

            “No,” says Leon, his voice without emotion.

            “Bloodywell keep it down then!” Mick tells him, turning to the stairs.  He cannot leave without a stinging criticism however, because that is how he operates.  “You boys are always up to no good!”

            Travis says nothing as he pushes the door gently shut again, and we all hear Mick’s feet thudding down the stairs.  Leon immediately turns to Joe and smacks him on the forehead with the open palm of his hand. “All right faggot face, where the fuck is that bag?”

            “In a safe place,” Joe tells him, and I am amazed at how calm and controlled his voice is.  “We’ll go and get it.”

            “What the fuck were you doing in our room?” Travis asks him, but he is looking at me as he says it.  I feel my cheeks getting warm again. 

            “Looking for a lighter,” I speak up, my voice slightly shaking.  “It’s my fault,” I go on, as the silence stretches out. I hang my head in shame.  “I was being nosy. I was a bit pissed.  I looked in your wardrobe.” Travis lets out a laugh for some reason, but Leon is not finding any of this remotely funny.

            “If anything happens to that bag….” He shakes his head at Joe. He does not even see me.

            “You shouldn’t have just left it there like that,” Joe tells him. “We only moved it because Tommy was in my room again, touching all my stuff, and we worried him or Will might find it.  They could have found it easily.” Joe looks at Leon and shrugs his shoulders, as if this should be enough.  But Leon ignores all of this, and pushes his face close to Joe’s.  I watch Joe physically recoil from the closeness of his brother.

            “Go and get it back right now,” he says slowly and carefully, his hands resting on his knees, as he speaks to Joe with his nose touching his.  “Because if anything happens to that bag, I am going to put you in the fucking hospital.  Then when you get out, I am going to tell the people who that stuff belongs to, and they will find you and then they will put you back in the fucking hospital, right?”

            Leon turns Joe by his shoulder and shoves him viciously towards the door, as Travis opens it.  We go.

 

            We clatter down the stairs, the weight of an unreal day pressing down on our shoulders and making our legs feel weaker with each step.  Joe is reaching for the door handle when Mick shows his punched in face again.  This time he is holding Tommy by the hand.  “You off out again?” he frowns at Joe.

            “Yeah.”

            Mick pushes Tommy forward.  “Take Tommy will you? I’ve got to get on with Craig’s car, and I can’t get a thing done with him around.”

            The disbelief hits Joe between the eyes and he drops his shoulders and tilts his chin and his eyes up to the ceiling.  “No way!” he complains.  “Not now!”

            Mick grits his teeth and pushes Tommy’s small hand into Joe’s. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” he says, and that is that.  Joe shakes his head at me, screws his mouth up to stop himself from protesting, and opens the door.

 

            I pull the door shut behind me, and draw in breath as the intensified heat of the day slams into my eyes.  I still have no idea what time it is.  I untie Gremlin, and he looks like he is suffering now.  He is panting like crazy, and staggers ungracefully to his feet, looking at me desperately for pity.  Joe is running his fingers back through his sweaty hair.  “I have to take Gremlin home first,” I tell him, helplessly.  “I can catch you up though,” I add, when I see the horror in his eyes.

            “No, come on, let’s just do it,” he groans, and starts stalking off back towards the parade of shops, dragging Tommy along with one hand.  “This is just un-fucking-believable,” he is moaning as he walks.  I trot to catch up with him.  He is walking so fast, that I have to trot the whole way back to my house, and so does the poor dog.  Tommy is still wheeling his plastic aeroplane through the air and making annoying meeeowwwm type noises, that we try to block out for fear of killing him.

 

            Back home, I open the front door, unclip Gremlin from his lead and shove him through the door into the hallway.  I am just about to close the door and join Joe and Tommy, when I hear my mum’s footsteps pounding down the stairs in urgency. “Is that you Lou?  Lou?  Or Sara?” 

            “Me.” I shout back, one hand on the doorknob.  “I’m going out again.  I just brought the dog back.  He needs a drink.”

            Mum appears at the bottom of the stairs.  She is wearing her plastic backed apron and clasping a feather duster in one hand.  “Been cleaning your room,” she announces, breathlessly, trying to peer around me and the door to see whom I am with.  I let the door move enough for her to see it is only Joe and his brother. She uses her hands to smooth down her apron and smiles lovingly at Joe.  She is extremely fond of him, and I think at times she would like to adopt him.  “Hi Joe! Hi Tommy!”

            “We’re in a hurry mum,” I say, pulling the door again, “We’ve got to go.”

            “No, hang on, hang on, I need to speak to you!”

            “Not now!” I say, glancing apologetically back at Joe.

            “Les is going to move in.”

            “Oh fuck, not now! Does dad know?”

I can hardly believe this.  I cannot deal with this now.  She has no bloody idea how true the statement, ‘this is a life or death situation’, is for us right now.  My mum tips her head to one side slightly, her lips pressed together.  She has the same fair hair as me.  It is not dark enough to be brown, but not really light enough to be blonde either.  She wears her short and sharp around her face, whereas I keep mine long and messy.  She always has far too much eye make up on.  Her eyes look massive.  Her and Lorraine are hilarious really.  Her with the massive black eyes, and Lorraine with the huge red lips.  Neither of them knows a thing about subtlety.

“Lou please do not swear at me.”

“Sorry, but mum, dad said…”

“I know what he said, that’s why you can’t tell him!”

I drop my head.  I want to weep.  I can’t argue with her now.  In fact I can’t really ever argue with anyone.  I just use the occasional slice of sarcasm to make me feel better, and write the rest of what I really think on my wall.  It is all there for them to see, any time they fucking want.  But they never look. 

“I have to go,” I mutter and slam the door behind me.

 

I turn back to face the day, and the clouds are blackening fast, and skidding along the horizon.  Any time soon it is going to break and piss down on us, and I look wearily at the half naked three year old that has been entrusted into our care.  Joe looks at me with sympathy, and we head off again.  I finally bother to pull off my hoodie and tie it around my waist.  My armpits are slick with sweat.

We walk for a while in silence, me and Tommy struggling to keep up with Joe’s frantic strides.  Back across the fields again, back towards Marianne’s road.  I am thinking about mum and Les, and trying not to at the same time.  It is making me feel close to vomiting, so I force my mind to the situation at hand.  Joe and his mad family. For some reason, my mind keeps jerking me back to mum and Les, and I can’t quite believe it is true, and I certainly don’t want to believe that it is true, so I start to jog.

Joe laughs at me at first.  Maybe he thinks I am trying to amuse him, to make him feel better.  Tommy certainly finds it funny, and starts pointing his finger and howling at me.  I am not jogging fast, not at all.  Just enough to get my knees up, and my heart pumping.  It works though.  They may be laughing at me, but fuck them, it is working.  “What are you doing, are you mental?” Joe calls to me.  I keep jogging.

“No.”

“You’ll collapse, you spaz, it’s too hot for that.”

“I need to do my exercise at some point.  Doesn’t look like I’m gonna’ get the chance at this rate.”

“That’s exercise?”

“What else does it look like?”

“Insanity.”

 

It doesn’t matter.  It works for me.  By the time we get across the sun baked fields to Marianne’s house, I am so bone tired and drenched in warm sweat that I have completely forgotten about mum and stupid Les.  My body is all that concerns and overwhelms me, and I like it.  I listen to my heart thudding like hell through my chest, as we approach Marianne’s long driveway.  I feel far away from Joe and Tommy, as I watch them head up to the big door.  I feel like there is a dense and spongy fog surrounding me, and I can hear my heart, I can hear it drumming in my ears. This might sound crazy, but I feel like it is trying to tell me something. I imagine it pulsing double-time, propelling the blood at twice the speed around my veins and arteries.  I picture the globules of fat under my skin, being attacked by the energy particles, being eaten up and abolished.  I am a smiling panting pile of wide-eyed shit by the time we knock on her door, and that is fine.

Joe knocks and waits.  Knocks and waits.  Looks at me in my mist of dumb happiness, and then knocks harder.  Joe loses his cool and punches and kicks the door, but no one is fucking home, and that much is horribly obvious. Marianne is not home.

 

Jesus Fucking Christ.

 

“Call her,” Joe says in a small, clenched voice. “Fucking call her.”

I scramble for my phone. My palms are sweaty so I drop it. I grab it and find her number. “It’s ringing,” I tell him.  He is just staring at the door, with one hand still gripping Tommys. To my horror, there is no answer, and the phone goes to messages. I shrug and hang up.  “No answer. You can’t go home,” I hear myself saying in a hoarse, worn out voice.  Joe turns to face me, and I see he is close to panic.  “They’ll kill you.”

“Where the hell is she? Stupid bitch!”

I shake my head, and wince at the pain in my side. “God knows.  She didn’t say anything about going anywhere did she?”

“Idiot!” Joe says, letting go of Tommy’s hand and covering his face with his hands.  Tommy immediately wanders off towards what he can see of Marianne’s back garden.

“We’ll have to wait for her to come back,” I shrug at Joe, still catching my breath. “Let Tommy play in her garden.  Come on.”

I am only calm because I am completely and utterly knackered.  I started the day off with a mild hangover.  I am now teetering close to hysteria or panic or tears, and I am not sure which one I would prefer.  I take Joe gently by the elbow and lead him around to the back garden.  Tommy has already discovered the swing set and is having a whale of a time by himself.  Her back garden is massive compared to ours.  There is a solid six-foot fence around the perimeter.  There are fucking oak trees, and a summerhouse nestled between them at the bottom of the garden.  I would have loved a garden like this growing up.  I would have been out there all day.  Pretending there were fairies at the bottom, climbing trees, making dens.  It’s perfect.  It’s beautiful.   Instead I had a patio, a barbeque and a lawn that my dad used to throw fits over.  I mean, he used to tell us to walk up it one way, and down it another way and I am not fucking kidding.  He liked it short and green and fresh and untouched.  He was the same with carpets.  Walk one way; come back another, then you won’t wear it out.  I ask you.  I fucking ask you.  There were times I would have taken the insanity and violence of Joe’s house, over that fucking mind numbing soul destroying pointless shit any day. 

Joe and I sink down onto one of the two garden benches Marianne has.  Joe rests his elbow on the arm, and covers his mouth with his hand.  I lean back and fold my hands across my belly and try to take it all in, and this makes me smile.  “What are you smiling about?” he asks me eventually. “Why do you find everything so funny all the time?”

“What else are you supposed to do Joe? I ask you.  What else, in this kind of piss-taking situation, are you supposed to do?” I sit forward and my smile is reaching my ears now, and I feel so giddy with it all I wonder if my alcohol intake from last night, my fucking sixteenth birthday celebrations no less, has come back to haunt me, come back to ravage me.  My shoulders shake with the laughter.  “Joe?  Really?  What else can you do?  It is funny!  It really is funny.  It’s one of those things, like they always say, you’ll look back and laugh one day.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I know so.  We’ll be like, old and grey and wrinkled, sitting in our fucking rocking chairs in some manky old peoples home, going, oh wait, do you remember that day when we found the cocaine in your brothers wardrobe, and hid it at Marianne’s so the kids didn’t eat it, and then when we went back to get it, she had fucking gone out?”  I laugh and laugh at my own excellent imitation of an old person’s voice, and lean back again on the bench.  “We so will, we so will.  You’ll be like, yeah, remember how you jogged across the field for no fucking reason?  It will be one of those stories Joe.  Trust me.  You may be shitting yourself now, but in years to come, when life is so boring and tedious and predictable, you will look back on this day and feel glad.”

Joe regards me patiently and scratches his eyebrow with his index finger. “At least you make yourself laugh,” he muses, “You are insane, you do know that?”

“I’m sixteen, you know?”

“I heard what your mum said.”

“Hey?”

“About Les moving in.” Joe looks back at Tommy, who is swinging upside down, and he pulls his feet up onto the bench and wraps one arm around his knees.

“Oh that.”

I feel my cheery mood take a nosedive then.  It is almost like a comedown, and the only drugs I have ever taken are alcohol and pot, so I guess comedowns are really just a natural part of this disappointing life.  I stare out across the beautiful summer garden.  The birds are singing in the trees, and there are two squirrels chasing each other up and down the trunk of the largest Oak, and the shade of the fence behind us is a blessed relief on my sweat soaked skin.  I think about Les and his mousy brown hair that just flops about on his head, from one side to the other, and his ridiculous little moustache that can hardly endear him to anyone in life when it makes him look so much like Hitler.  I feel a great chasm of loneliness open up inside of me, and my previous good humour takes a shaky dive and falls in.

“You don’t like him, do you?” Joe asks me.

“I don’t even know him,” I shrug truthfully.  “He can’t be any worse that Mick.”

“Fucking Mick,” Joe sighs, shaking his head at Tommy.

“It’s only because dad will go bloody mental, that’s all,” I say.  “It’s his house. He still pays the mortgage.  Okay, he is allowed to move on and have someone else, but she is not.  I would say go for it to her, go for it and fucking show him, but honestly, Les! I ask you.  What a prize piece of stinking steaming stupid crap.”

I watch a helpless smile envelope Joe’s face, and the tightened wrinkled look of despair eases off, as he cracks up at me. “Did you write that on your wall yet?” he asks, snorting laughter at me.  I grin.

“Not yet.  But he’s getting more than that, believe me.”

“You’re so funny.”

“Not as funny as you.”

“Ha ha.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you twice.”

“Dare you.”

“Double dare you.”

Honestly, Joe and I have barely progressed past age ten.  Tommy is probably more mature than we are.  Joe seems to suddenly remember the shit we are in, as he lets out an agonised groan and drops his head onto his knees.  “Why did we take it?” he wails.  “We should have just left it there! We should have ignored it. Pretended we never saw it.”

“Joe, Tommy was in your room, going through all your stuff,” I stifle a yawn and lift up my arms for a stretch.  “He could have been in their room next.  He’s only three.  I know he’s a pain, but you know.  He’s three.”

“Why did they leave it there like that then?”

“They don’t think,” I shrug.  “They don’t care enough to think. Look, we’ll get it back.  She’ll be home soon.  If not, I’ll go and take Tommy home for you and I’ll just say I don’t know where you are.”

“They’ll make you show them.  Don’t trust them.  Besides, I can’t stay out forever.”

“Wait till your mum is home then.  They won’t do anything in front of her.  They wouldn’t dare.”

“They’ll find a way.”

 

Before long, the day is growing dull and the rain is already spitting down upon us, and little Tommy is whining and wailing that he is hungry.  There is no sign of Marianne or her parents.  I try calling her four more times, but each time it goes straight to messages.  I tap in a few abusive text messages just to amuse myself, but I don’t send them. I wonder helplessly if she is doing this on purpose.  If she is somewhere else, laughing and gloating at us.  We drag ourselves from the bench, and the beautiful garden, and start to trudge home.  There is no jogging this time, you can believe me.  The rain gets harder and harder as we cross the field, plastering our hair to our skulls.  I can even feel my knickers are getting wet, that’s how much it is raining.

We go to my house first, and I leave Joe rain soaked and miserable on my front door step, while I take Tommy by the hand and lead him home.  He tightens his small hand on mine and I look at him.  He is a little bare chested warrior in sopping brown shorts and trainers and I look at him and wonder what the fuck life is all about, really.  It always feels like we are just traipsing from place to the other.  Is that what life is meant to be like?  World, is that how it will feel when we are adults too? When I get to his house, I knock on the door and thankfully it is Mick that answers it.  He looks slightly drunk, and relieved, and grateful all at once.  “Good kids, you are, good kids,” he feels the need to tell me, as he ushers the dripping three year old inside.  I just turn and go.  I cannot see Leon’s car anywhere, so I quicken my pace and make it back home, and open the door, and Joe and me go in.

We make it upstairs without any interruptions or surprises, and we close the door on my room, and collapse, both of us, onto our backs on my bed.  We both close our eyes, and no doubt the un-fucking-believable day spins around like a horror show inside Joe’s head, just as it does in mine, and finally I scavenge for my pen under my pillow, suck off the lid and scrawl lazily upon the wall, ‘the sky turned black, the bitch was out, a bag of shit laughing at us, puddles, puddles and puddles of shit.’

Joe reads it and then laughs and laughs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two

 

Dear World?

Are you still there?  Are you still listening? I’ve still got so much to tell you.

Like how it still amazes me, how easy it is to not eat.  All those years of being fat, and I had thought food was my salvation, my friend, and my crutch to help me limp through a life that bewildered and bored me.  I can still remember the day I snapped.  I can still remember the jam doughnut that I crushed inside my fist, instead of inside my mouth.  I guess it made me feel stronger somehow, more in control, more savage.  Less of a fat loser.  See, if you want to know the truth I have finally figured out, it’s that my worst enemy has always been myself.  My biggest problem has always been looking in the mirror and seeing me, still standing there, staring back, when I really want to see someone else.  I just don’t want to, I mean I expect to. I am thinking about all this as I enter Joe’s house through the back door.

Joe stands in his kitchen, which is cramped and cluttered, with too many chairs around the small square table, and towers of cardboard boxes around the edges of the room.  I look around, and find myself agreeing with Lorraine, that the kitchen is a total mess.  The table is normally covered in an old checked tablecloth, with Lorraine’s china fruit bowl in the centre.  Today someone has used the tablecloth to mop up a spillage on the floor, and the fruit bowl is on the draining board.  The table is covered in crushed beer cans and ashtrays.  It’s Leon and Travis’s mess, and we are being blamed for it.

Joe is dressed in tracksuit trousers and a t-shirt.  His dark brown hair is all stuck up and messy, as if he has not even had a chance to look in the mirror yet.  Like me, he can’t stop yawning, and every now and again he touches two fingers to his forehead, as if the same pain rages in his, as it does in mine.  He has filled the sink with water and washing-up liquid, and starts to dunk cups and glasses into the water, while I look on.  I think about offering to make us both a coffee. Just then, Joe’s step-dad’s dog Rozzer comes trotting into the kitchen.  He is a German Shepherd cross, and lifts his fluffy tail in a greeting to Gremlin.  Gremlin responds by cocking his leg on one of the cardboard box towers.  I yank him away by his lead. “Fuck me!” Joe exclaims, lifting his hands from the soapy water.  “Isn’t that freak show house trained yet?”

“Sorry,” I tut, looking around for a cloth.  Joe drags a dishcloth out of the water and throws it at me.  “He’s threatened by Rozzer, that’s why,” I try to explain.  “He’s older than Rozzer, but smaller.  So it confuses him.”

“Looking like a smashed in cat confuses him,” Joe responds, and I laugh.

“You love him really.”

“He gives me nightmares.”

I laugh again, louder this time, and bend down to wipe up the mess.  This particular tower of boxes contains crisps.  One of the others contains peanuts.  Joe’s stepfather Mick works at the cash and carry.

“Just seen your mum,” I say from the floor. Joe lets out his breath.

“Oh yeah?”

“You better be on your way round to mine to clean up that mess or I’ll be having words with your mother!” I relay this in a near perfect imitation of Lorraine’s voice, the way she speaks as if her teeth are permanently clenched together. Joe laughs as he washes up.  “We didn’t even make this mess,” I point out uselessly. “We didn’t even come in here.”

“Well I got that in my fucking ear when I still in bed this morning,” Joe sighs.

“Why can’t they clean up their own mess?”

“They didn’t come back last night.” I make a face, my eyebrows rising and my mouth screwed up in thought.  Joe looks back at the sink, but jerks his head towards the kettle. “Do you want to make me a coffee? And some toast? I’m fading fast.”

“You drank more than me,” I point out, heading for the kettle.  I get two clean mugs down from the cupboard, and some bread out from the bread bin.  I want to ask Joe about the bags of powder in the rucksack.  Whose rucksack was it, Travis’s or Leon’s? What did he think the powder was?  I had no idea, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t biological washing powder or anything.  I put on the grill, and while the kettle is boiling, I poke my head around the kitchen door.  I see right away that Mick is sprawled out on the sofa, fag in one hand, cup of tea in the other.  He is watching Football Focus or some such crap.  I go back to the oven to check the toast, knowing that this is why we cannot say anything. “Where are the little ones?” I ask, referring to Joe’s other brothers, Will and Tommy.

“Will went next door to play,” Joe answers. “Don’t know where Tommy is.”

I suddenly think of the powder in the rucksack and a sick fear grips me, and makes all my hairs stand on end.  “What about…?” I say quietly to Joe.  He turns and looks at me, and I can see the same thought has spread like a germ through his mind too. He shakes the water from his hands and stalks from the room.

“Wait here,” he says to me.  I turn the toast over, and make the coffees.  When Joe finally comes back, he is holding his three-year-old half-brother by the arm, and the little boy is whining and struggling.  I go to the door to watch.

“What’s going on?” Mick demands from the sofa. Joe lets Tommy go, and he runs for his daddy’s lap and climbs all over him, still whining.

“Can you tell him to stay out of my room?” Joe complains. “He’s got his sticky fingers all over my CD’s! He broke one last week!”

I look at Mick as he comforts Tommy, knowing as well as Joe that he is wasting his breath trying to complain.  “Just think yourself lucky that you have a room, eh?” comes the haughty, confrontational tone that Mick uses whenever he speaks to one of his stepsons.  His tone goes up a notch, his voice is gruffer, quicker, more accusing.  Even if he is saying, pass the potatoes; it is more like pass the potatoes! I can do an excellent take on his voice too, well, his two voices.  Because when he speaks to Will or Tommy, his eyes go all dopey, and his tone softens and the speed of his words slow down.  “He doesn’t even have a bedroom, remember?” Mick directs this statement towards Joe’s tired face, accompanied by a puff of grey smoke from his fag.  I watch Joe’s shoulders drop, and I don’t know how he puts up with it.  I wonder if it crosses his mind to tell Mick about the dangers we discovered in the older boys bedroom last night.

Joe comes back into the kitchen and gives me a look that I know means, god give me fucking strength.  I pass him his coffee and his toast and he cocks his head at me. “You not having any toast?”

“No thanks.”

“You’re not still on a stupid diet?”

“It’s not stupid, and yes I am.”

“You look fine the way you are.”

“Well thanks very much.”

Joe chews his toast and nods at me. “You girls are all the same.”

“We are, aren’t we? Me and Marianne.  Exactly the same.”

Joe rolls his eyes at the mention of our pale-faced friend.  “Well not her obviously. She doesn’t give a shit what she looks like.”

“Come on,” I say, getting bored. “Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

Joe feels the same, I know.  His house is suffocating in so many ways.  There is too much stuff.  Every room is packed full of furniture; three sofas instead of two, three coffee tables, two units filled with glass ornaments and other nasty shit. Every room has these towers of boxes of stuff Mick brings back from work in case it is needed one day, and people.  Too many fucking people.  You feel like you are permanently enveloped within a crowd.  The house is never empty, ever.  I cannot remember us ever being alone there.  You are always bumping shoulders with someone, squashing past someone on the landing, or on the stairs.  The place reminds me of a rabbit warren.

I can vaguely remember it before Mick came along. We would have been about eight, I suppose.  My mum and Lorraine have been friends for years.  I have therefore known Joe since before we were even born.  We were in our mother’s stomachs, face to face almost, forced to sit in uterine liquid and listen to their spiteful gossip endlessly.  I am convinced this experience has shaped us into the cynical pair we now are.

Joe’s dad Tony left when he was five.  He’s a long distance lorry driver, and Joe sees him about twice a year if he is lucky.  Despite this, we both like Tony a lot.  We are not supposed to obviously, him being another one of the men who have left, another useless father who walked out and closed the door behind him.  But I don’t blame him one bit for walking out on Lorraine.  Jesus Christ, how did he last as long as he did?  We have to keep our admiration for Tony well hid.  God forbid Lorraine or my mum hear us say something positive about him.  He is tall and broad, and always wears checked shirts and jeans, and smokes rolls ups.  He is quiet and still.  He is a softly breaking sunset, while Lorraine is a fucking thunderstorm.

Mick met Joe’s mum when he fixed her car.  He used to be a mobile mechanic.  He still tinkers with cars a lot.  I mean, their back garden has three cars in it, and their front garden has two.  He never really gets around to fixing them though.  He works at the cash and carry now.  More money apparently.  He moved in when Lorraine got pregnant with Will.  I remember feeling sorry for Joe and his older brothers when this happened.  Leon and Travis never stopped complaining about this intrusion in their lives, this fake father figure who thought he could tell them what to do, or the two younger half-brothers that soon arrived to drive the house to the brink of its capacity.  Joe never said much about anything.  He is like his dad that way.  He takes it all on the chin.  He just takes it all.

We get the kitchen back to it’s usual clean, but cluttered standard, and then we leave.  We don’t know where to go, or what to do.  I can see it all tumbling around inside Joe’s head, because his eyes are dark and frowning, and his lips are tight and straight.  He looks just like his dad that way.  “I’m a bit worried about leaving Tommy there,” I say eventually, because as much as I despise the sticky little monkey-faced bugger, this is the thing that is keeping me scared.  This is the thing that keeps spinning back into my mind every time I try to shrug it all off and convince myself copious amounts of drugs in my best friends brothers’ wardrobe is nothing to get my knickers in a twist about.  Joe looks sideways at me.

“I know.  Me too.”

“There is no lock on their door.”

“I know.”

“Tommy or Will could easily find that stuff. Whatever it is.”

“I know what it is,” Joe says then, and I stop walking.  We have wandered to the fields behind the estate, so I lean down and unclip Gremlin’s lead. I wait for Joe to speak, and I can see a hundred secrets behind his troubled eyes. He releases a heavy sigh that smoothes its way down his body.  He is taller than me now, I notice.  Only by a bit. “It’s cocaine,” he whispers, even thought there is no one to be seen for miles around.  My eyes shoot wide open. “At least I think that’s what it is.” He lifts and drops his shoulders in a weak and guilty shrug.  I now narrow my eyes at him.

“How do you know?”

“They do it sometimes,” he tells me. “When mum and Mick are out.”

“Since when?”

“I don’t know,” Joe shrugs again, and looks briefly away from me, as Gremlin tears yapping across the fields, chasing a crow.  “I saw them do it about two months ago.  They just laughed about it.  I didn’t bother saying anything.”

“Okay,” I say, folding my arms across my chest and trying not to let it show that I am annoyed he had not told me this before.  If I tell you the truth World, I am annoyed but also sort of excited again.  I know, I know, it’s wrong, so wrong.  Joe is standing before me with this taut expression on his soft face, and all I can feel is tremors of stiff excitement careering through me.  Part of my mind wanders off on its own, picturing Travis, the bad boy, doing drugs and not caring. I shake myself out of it quickly, momentarily sickened by myself. “So if it is cocaine in that bag, why have they got so much of it? Are they fucking dealers or something?”

“I have no idea,” Joe says, and I believe him.  He is almost incapable of lying.  He is good at not telling you things, but he is hopeless at actual lies.

“They can’t seriously think it’s okay to just leave it there like that, with your brothers around.  I’m getting really worried about that Joe.”

“We should go back and move it,” he nods.

“Where to?”

“I have no idea,” he says again, as we start to head back.  He drops his head and his brown hair dances about across his forehead.  I wait for Gremlin to catch us up, then put his lead back on.  Joe walks with his hands inside his pockets, and his back bent.  For some reason, a small giggle escapes me.  He looks my way. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” I clap a hand across my mouth.  My stomach is growling at me and I rub it absent-mindedly, thinking about another coffee to shut it up.  “Was just imagining Leon and Travis, that’s all.  Finding it gone.” I snort again, and even Joe cracks a smile at this.  “They’ll shit themselves,” I point out. “But what will they do, or say?  Without dropping themselves in it?”

Joe just smiles at me.

When we get back to his house, we go in the front way so we can avoid Mick.  We hare up the stairs two at a time and then quietly open the older boys door.  None of them have locks on their doors.  They did once, I remember.  But Mick unscrewed them all when the boys kept storming off to their rooms to avoid being lectured at.  Now he can follow them into their room and carry on the lecture.  I smile again, my devious side wondering what words of wisdom Mick would impress upon them if he knew they had shit loads of Class A drugs stashed in their wardrobe.  I imagine his head exploding and it makes me chuckle.  Joe digs me in the ribs with his elbow.  He is crapping himself, I know it, but what choice do we have?  Tell Mick what we have found and witness world war three tear his family apart?  Do nothing and risk the little brats finding it and sticking their mucky fingers in for a taste? I feel the thrill of danger and fear galloping through my body, and it is enough to make my hungry belly shut up.  In fact I feel kind of sick, as we sneak into the dark room and open up the wardrobe again.  We feel and look just like sneaky little kids, stealing biscuits from the tin, and I just hope to God we don’t get caught.  Joe grabs the bag and we scramble back to his room.

In contrast, Joe’s room is light and airy, with the curtains drawn and the window wide open.  He clutches the bag to his chest, fear making him look like someone from a film, wide-eyed and full of emotion.  I smirk, thinking he never normally looks like that.  Funny thing is World, he looks quite sexy really.  I slap a hand over my mouth again and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.  I am not normal.  Really.  Joe looks at me in desperation, and I can almost imagine him throwing me the bag, as if it is a bomb or something.  But he doesn’t.  He just looks around for somewhere to hide it.  There is nowhere.

“Your house?” he asks, white faced now.  I shake my head.

“No fucking way!”

“Marianne?”

I think about this.  Her house is huge and vast and rambling.  She is an only child.  It is probably our best course of action until Leon and Travis come home.  Then they can fucking get rid of it.  We nod in silent agreement, and Joe slings the rucksack onto his back.  We leave the house as silently and sneakily as we arrived, and hear nothing from Mick and Tommy in the lounge.

Outside, the day is getting hot.  The sun beats down on our hung over brains and my stomach twists itself in hunger and fear and excitement.  I have never had a proper adventure before, I am thinking, as we start to walk quickly towards the fields again.  We can cut across them to where Marianne lives. We walk fast, me dragging poor knackered Gremlin along on his lead, Joe swinging his arms up and down, sweat beading across his forehead.  “This is like the fucking Goonies or something,” I say to Joe, and feel instantly guilty when he looks at me, because he is not enjoying any of this at all.  It is only me getting off on it, and I have no right, I realise then.  Just because my own life is so dry and so full of mind-numbing tedium. Just because I don’t have criminal older brothers, or a mad witch for a mother.  It never ceases to amaze me how fascinating other people’s families can be.  You never find your own family interesting, do you?  Nope, nothing to look at there.  Boring, boring, a bit annoying, boring, boring.  I want to giggle again, but I shut up and say nothing and we storm across the fields, and climb through the fence and come out onto Marianne’s road.

She opens the door when we hammer on it.  She is tiny and frail, like a bird, dressed in black from head to toe, and her green eyes light up when she sees us, but her smile is always devious.  “To what to I owe the pleasure?” she asks as Joe pushes past her.  She is nearly always alone, but Joe feels the need to check every downstairs room for any sign of her parents anyway.  Marianne fixes me with a beady-eyed stare.

“What is wrong with him?”

“We need your help,” I tell her, trying like hell to stop the smile from tugging at my lips again. “We need to stash something here for a bit.”

Marianne licks her perfect little lips at me. “Well aren’t I the lucky one?” she says to us.

 

           

Three

 

Dear World, let me tell you about Marianne Sholing.

Firstly, she is one of those people who gives very little away.  I mean, she is really, really good at it.  I have known her for a year, and still have no fucking idea what to make of her. In equal measures I feel both privileged to know her, and scared of her.   She only moved to our school a year ago, and she stood out right away. She is  small and thin, fragile looking, with jet-black hair that she wears loose to her shoulders.  She usually has a fringe.  Sometimes it is growing out, and she shakes her head to remove it from her eyes.  Recently she had it cut, and now it is straight blunt line just above her eyebrows.  Marianne has a small, round face, with a delicately pointed chin.  People at school laugh at her, and whisper behind her back.  They think she is a Goth, or a witch.  The people in our school are like vultures when it comes to new students.  You can see them standing around the edges, licking their lips and narrowing their eyes, the most vicious of them quickly working out the unfortunate persons weak spots.  They will stand and watch and decide right away if the person is worth knowing or not, worth being friends with.  I’ve seen it too many times.  I’ve stood back and observed the way they work, and it’s simple and shocking in its coldness.  And you might not believe this, but the girls are the worst.

I’ve always hated school for this very reason.  And you might think that it all starts when kids become teenagers, but you would be wrong World.  It starts way, way before that.  You see, people can’t usually see it, because everyone thinks little kids are so sweet and innocent and cute, but the truth is, the bitches and the bastards start young.  They really do.  Watch them.  Sweet and innocent, my arse.  Obviously they learn how to be a bitch or a bastard from their parents, and once they figure out how to be mean, they go for it, they find out that is the way forward, and forward they go.  I’ve been lucky mostly.  Plenty of things people could pick on me for, but I’ve got Joe, and Joe has the hardest family around.  Marianne didn’t have anyone, and they went for her all right.  Freak.  Weirdo.  Witch.  And that was how we became friends.  I’ll be honest; we felt sorry for her.

What we didn’t know then, was that she doesn’t need us to.   She mostly wears black.  When she first came to our school, she fascinated me.  I didn’t understand her at all.  She was obviously ridiculously clever and articulate, but more than that, she did not give a shit what the other kids said about her, or to her.  Eventually they got a bit spooked by her, and stopped teasing her.  They still hate her, believe me, but she doesn’t need them, so that is that.

Just like Joe, and me Marianne will be starting the sixth form at our old school in September.  I would have liked to have gone to college, and get away from it all, if I’m honest.  Maybe meet some new people, recreate myself among kids who have not known me since I was a child.  But mum said we could not afford the daily train fare, and what was wrong with the sixth form?  Walking distance, she had pointed out, and you already know everyone.  I hadn’t the heart or the energy to tell her that was the main reason I abhorred the thought of going back there.  Okay, so we wouldn’t have to wear school uniform anymore, and we would be able to come and go as we pleased, but what else would be different apart from that?  There will still be Scott Taylor and his pretty blue eyes, the Mr. Popular and handsome that would never look at me in a million years.  And there will still be Christine Raymond and Stacey Winters, the two biggest blonde bitches known to human history.  We will all just have to endure it, I suppose.

Marianne regards Joe and his rucksack with, hungry green eyes.  She nods through to the large kitchen.  “You sure there is no one home?” Joe sees fit to ask, as we walk through.  Marianne looks at him quizzically.

“What the hell have you got in there? A gun?”

Joe and I swap a look, which suggests to Marianne that it may as well be.  She looks even more intrigued now.  “No one is home,” she rolls her eyes at his desperate face, and shrugs at me. Then she sneers down at poor Gremlin panting and dribbling on his lead. “You can’t bring him in here,” she says. “My mum is allergic.” I tut and tie him up outside.  I think what a strange day the poor dog is having.  I go inside and wander slowly around the large country style kitchen.  Marianne’s parents have lots of old, oak furniture, and the large robust kitchen table is a particular feature.  It is huge and would look more at home in a farmhouse, and looks like it was built for a huge ruddy faced family to gather around, not just Marianne and her mum and dad.  She did have a twin, she has told us more than once.  A twin that died at birth.  Joe and I have yet to decide if we believe this or not.  “It is just me, myself and I,” she tells us, crossing her twig like arms across her black long-sleeved t-shirt.  “So what’s going on?”

“Do we tell her?” Joe looks at me and asks.

“Of course we have to tell her!” I snap at him. “We can’t ask her to stash it if she doesn’t know what it is!” Later, I come to regret this statement, but at the time it seems obvious.  Joe nods and lets the bag slide off his back and into his hand.  He places it on the kitchen table, and I notice that he has a large patch of sweat at the top of his back, between his shoulder blades.  Marianne walks up to him and peers into the bag as he unzips it slowly.  She sees the bags, and her mouth falls open in surprise, and she claps one hand over it and looks from Joe, to me, and back again.  Finally her shining green eyes settle on the bag.

“What is that and where the hell did you get it?”

“It’s cocaine, I think,” Joe tells her, and zips the bag again.  He pushes his hair back with the heel of one hand.  The sweat makes it stick straight up in dark brown points.  “It’s my brothers.”

“Holy fuck!” Marianne exclaims, her hand falling from her mouth. “Do they know you’ve got it? What are they, drug dealers?”

“No they don’t know we’ve got it. And I don’t know if they are drug dealers.”

“But you would assume they are, right?  With that much stuff?” Marianne crosses her arms again, and shakes her hair from her shoulders.

“We just need to hide it somewhere until they come back,” I explain to her. “We found it by accident in their wardrobe.”

“You found it by accident,” Joe corrects me. “Actually not by accident, because you were poking around in their wardrobe on purpose.” I give him a look of pure disgust and he stares me down.

“Lou Carling! Do I detect you have a crush on one of Joe’s dear brothers?”

I groan inwardly at Marianne and her incessant habit of speaking like an adult.  Not even an adult actually, more like an old lady most of the time.  I decide not to warrant her question with a response.  She smiles at me wickedly.  “Poking around in boys wardrobes eh? What did you hope to find?” I roll my eyes at her irritably, but it’s too late to halt the creep of warmth that flushes my cheeks.

“It was after you guys left,” Joe takes up the rest of the story.  “We were just looking for a lighter.  They’d gone out.”

“Now we don’t know where they are or when they’ll be back, and we can’t leave it in the wardrobe in case the brats find it!” I look at Marianne and see the concentration deepening on her face.

“You could have told your parents about it,” she says slowly, not sounding as if she really believes this herself.

“My mum would go fucking mental, and Mick would throw them both out and probably call the cops,” Joe replies. Marianne scowls slightly.

“So what?” she argues. “They’re both worthless twats, aren’t they? Why would you care? If they were gone, there would be more space for you.”

“Marianne,” I speak up. “They might be twats, but they’re his brothers. You can’t just do that to your family.” Joe says nothing.  Neither Marianne nor myself can tell what he is thinking.

“So how long do you want me to hide it for you?” Marianne questions, dropping her head slightly and peering at Joe from under her fringe. Joe releases a long drawn out sigh and drops his shoulders.

“Give me a day,” he says. “I’ll try and find them.”

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I look at Marianne and see a gleam in her eyes. I have to look at the floor and bite my lip, because I can tell she is relishing an adventure as much as I am, but I just bet she doesn’t make a stupid crack about the fucking Goonies.  “If anyone finds that stuff, we’ll be in deep fucking trouble.”

“You’re in deep fucking trouble anyway. You’ve stolen their drugs!”

“We couldn’t leave it there,” I argue with her. “The brats get their paws into everything!”

“Are you even sure it is drugs?” Marianne gives a little laugh and walks back to the bag on the table.  We watch dumbly as she unzips it again and actually lifts out one of the bags.  It looks like something you would see on the telly or something, on the news, when you see the police handling mass quantities of tightly wrapped drugs. She holds it in both hands, giving away how heavy it is. Joe is watching her in confusion. She looks up at us.  “It might be fucking salt or washing powder or something!”

“It’s coke, isn’t it Joe?” I look at him.

“I’ve seen them do coke,” he tells Marianne reluctantly. “A few times recently.”

She nods at him, and pulls her bottom lip in with her teeth.  She is thinking, I can tell. “Shall we try it?” she says. “See if it is?”

Marianne’s question hangs in the air between all three of us.  The scariest thing to me is that none of us immediately shoot her down.  That must mean that all three of us are considering her question.  I decide to be the sensible one, though God knows why, and fuck knows I don’t want to be.  “They’d kill you, don’t even think about it,” I tell Joe, and he nods solemnly.  Marianne looks momentarily disappointed with us, and stuffs the bag back into the rucksack.

“I’ll take care of this then,” she announces, slinging it onto her shoulder.

“Where will you hide it?” asks Joe.  She looks back at him over her thin shoulder as she leaves the kitchen.

“Trap door in my room.” she says and is gone.

“Is she joking?” Joe asks me. “I can never tell when she’s joking.  Can you?”

“I just hope we’re doing the right thing,” I say, as a monumental sigh escapes me, and I suddenly feel significantly less excited about all of this.  I am beginning to wish we had left it in the wardrobe and minded our own business.  So what if the brats had come across it?  That would be Travis and Leon’s fault, not ours.  It would technically be Lorraine and Mick’s fault too.  “Any idea where to start looking for your brothers?  And are they going to kill you when they know what we’ve done?”

“More like I should kill them,” he replies, with a toss of his head, and we both know this is never likely to happen.  Joe is the calmest; most grounded one in his tornado of a home.  His family make mine look normal.  I have known his family my entire life and the only one I like and trust is Joe.  By far the best thing about him is that he just gets me, like no one else does.  It has always been that way.  When we were babies and toddlers, I suppose we were pretty much forced on each other.  As we got older, our parents would comment on how well we got on.  Look at Lou and Joe, they would say, whenever they saw us together, aren’t they sweet?  They both have embarrassing photographs of us in the bath together, and running around outside with nappies on.

When I was a child, I can strongly remember Joe’s mother terrifying me.  She was always so loud, so screechy, and her lips so red and violent.  I used to cringe and squirm if she ever tried to pick me up or kiss me.  I felt like I had to pretend to like her, for mum’s sake. My mum defends her to this day.  She says Lorraine has to be like that, because of her boys, which would seem to suggest that she was completely normal and non-threatening before they come along, and I have a hard time believing this.  My mum thanks God she only had girls, and Lorraine curses God that she only had boys.  They still make stupid remarks about swapping some of us over.  If you had that many boys, you would be the same, my mum says.  Boys are hard work, apparently.  I can vividly recall Lorraine hearing Leon swear once, when he was about nine or ten.  It was someone’s birthday party, but I don’t remember whose.  We were outside playing pass the parcel on a picnic blanket, when Leon said fuck because the music stopped on the kid next to him.  Lorraine heard and waded through the children like a deranged monkey, screaming and huffing and snatching him up by his arm.  She dragged him into their kitchen, while everyone stood about and stared and tried not to laugh, and then she came back with a bar of soap, and proceeded to wash his mouth out with it.  You can see why she makes me nervous.

My mum still shakes her head and listens and sympathises whenever Lorraine comes over to whinge about her boys.  I am beginning to wonder if this says more about my mother as a person, than it does about the strength of their friendship.  When I look at them sometimes I see two people caught in a friendship trap.  Do you know what I mean World? There are people like it at school.  They reach out to each other when they are desperate for whatever reason, and then they end up stuck together.  You can see that neither of them really likes the other, or at least, they sort of wish they had more options.  But not everyone does.  Have more options I mean.  Maybe my mum falls into that category.  I think about it a lot.  Anyway, Leon was always in trouble, and Travis was what they affectionately called a cheeky monkey, or what my dad called a little shit.  I think Joe may have been troublesome at times, but by the time he reached about eight or nine, I think he just thought what’s the point?  He was always calmer than the other two, and they picked on him just for being the youngest.  There is only fifteen months between Leon and Travis.  As thick as thieves, Lorraine says about them.  I agree with the thick part.  And the thieves’ part. I can remember about a million mean things they did to Joe over the years, and he never fought back.  He never cried either though.  He was as silent then as he is now.  I don’t think I have ever seen him lose his temper.

When Marianne returns, Joe announces that we better go and find his brothers, before they find out what is missing from their room.  Marianne tugs her long sleeves down over her hands and grimaces at us. “Well, good luck with that. You’ll be back by tomorrow then?”

“Definitely,” Joe promises her. “Thanks so much for this Marianne. I owe you a massive favour.” He looks at me and jerks his head towards the front door.

“Thanks Marianne,” I say, and follow Joe out.  We untie Gremlin and start to head home, our heads hanging low, our thoughts dark.

“There is no way Josh or Ryan would have done that,” I say, just to break the silence, as we cross the fields again.  Joe has his hands in his pockets.

“Christ no,” he agrees. “Ryan would have wet his pants and Josh would have just told his mum or something.  Marianne is really cool.”

“This is quite a day, so far.”

“I know.  Unbelievable.”

“Do you just wish we’d left it there now?”

“Well, in a way. I don’t know.  You know what the brats are like.” Joe shrugs his shoulders and looks at me. “What the hell are my brothers doing?” he says, thinking out loud.

“Leon has been heading that way for years,” I reply. “Travis follows everything he does. It’s not really that shocking, if you think about it.”

“Not drugs, no, but in the house! That is.”

“They’re not exactly gifted in the brains department,” I remind him. “God knows what else they’ve got stashed in there!”

“Maybe Marianne was right.  You know, about letting them get caught.  Letting mum and Mick deal with it.”

We walk on in a nervous silence.  Gremlin is knackered, and his lead is completely slack and hanging at my side.  As we get closer to Joe’s house, I feel none of the excitement or giddy fear I did earlier. I wonder where it went, and wish I knew how to lure it back.  It was nice, for a while, feeling like something big was going to happen, and we were all going to get caught up in it, and in years to come I would look back and have a story to tell.  Now I just feel a sick knot in my stomach, and my mouth becomes incredibly dry, and my mind starts to wander towards the tastes and smells of the food I have been avoiding lately.  I am thinking it might be wise to grab something to eat from my house pretty soon.  Just an apple and a coffee, or maybe some dry crackers.  Something to keep me going. I think of Marianne and how much I admire her twig like arms, and I simultaneously curse myself for being such a fucking idiot, such a fucking sheep.  I started the summer thinking how great it would be to lose weight, and then go back to school in September, a new person.  Stacey and Christine, The Stick Insects I call them, would not even recognise me.  They would flock around me, gasping at the difference, asking me to tell them how I did it.  Scott Taylor would look at me for the first time ever, and his blue eyes would run up and down my body, and he would think I was a new girl at first. He will look at me, he will finally look at me, and then he will smile.  I won’t be the fat girl anymore.  I told myself that when I crushed that doughnut in my hand at the start of the exams in June.

The day is getting hotter, and I have no idea in hell what time it is, as we trudge out onto Joe’s road.  The sky feels dark and low, and the clouds on the horizon are turning navy blue, building up to grey and black.  There is that feeling of electricity in the air, of something about to happen, of a storm on it’s way.  I love storms normally.  I even like to stand outside in them.  But this feels different, and I wonder if it is because we can both see Leon’s beat up Ford Fiesta parked outside the house.  We look at each other.  Is it good or bad, that they are back?

As we near the house, the car door opens on the driver side and Leon gets out. He is nineteen years old, six foot three and spends most of his waking hours lifting weights. He looks like Joe, but his face is wider and his features heavier. He is wearing a Nike t-shirt and blue jeans, and he flexes his tattooed arms at us.  Travis gets out the other side.  He is smaller and thinner than his brother, but with the same light brown hair, cut short around the sides, and longer on the top.  He has a lanky quality to him, flexibility in the way he moves and walks, very casual and slow, whereas Leon is very quick and hard and solid.  They approach us immediately and fall into step with us, as we walk towards the house. Leon on Joe’s side, and Travis on mine.  That ripple of fear and excitement and inexplicable longing is rampant inside me again, and my eyes are wide with it. “Inside,” Leon says, and he sounds like a deeper voiced version of his mother, all clenched teeth and bubbling fury.  “Now.”