Boy A Read online

  When Terry leaves, Jack prowls the house, tentatively opening drawers and doors. He feels the weight of the pans, and touches the contents of the fridge, reading sauce bottles like books. He takes the dry blast of the airing cupboard on his face. The deep hall rug between bare toes, with its well-worn trough connecting the lounge and the front door. Eventually, when he has sniffed and stroked his way to some intimacy with this dark and strange new house, he curls foetal beneath the duvet in his small box-room. And despite the unfamiliarity of everything around him, Jack feels safe, because he knows he is the apple of his uncle’s eye.

  It is under Terry’s careful gaze that the events of the next two weeks will unfold. An orientation time for Jack. An opportunity to adjust before he starts his job. A fortnight only, to try and lose the bewilderment with which he looks at this world.

  They will visit parks, restaurants, pubs, an art museum, an airport. Jack will open a bank account, fills in forms, make his name more real with each one. He is going to stand in a crowd at a Saturday morning market, shaking with fear at first, immobile while strangers’ faces file around him. They will walk on a moor, where the silence is absolute, no noise but the sound of their own feet brushing the bracken. They will ride there in Terry’s car, which Jack has only ever watched from afar. Has never before felt the vinyl seats under his fingertips. Heard the radio on its one working speaker. They are going to laugh when, in town one day, a rottweiler bangs its face against a van window, desperate to get at a cat. They will buy the Big Issue, from a guy who says he was ready to give up until Terry came along. And Jack will say that he knows how this feels.

  Each day for fifteen, Terry is going to pick Jack up at 7:30 am, the time he will soon be picked up for work, and show him another alien angle on life. And every night Jack is going to close his eyes and not believe this is happening to him.

  Every hour, whether with Terry or alone, he will practise his story. Learn his legend. Focus on the things he needs to do to make himself a little less a fish on the riverbank, a little more the man a different boy might have become.

  B is for Boy.

  A Boy named B.

  Child B was exactly the kind of boy that your mother told you not to play with. Probably his mother would have too, had she been there. Had she given a fuck. He had shoulder-length hair that fell naturally into tight scouse curls, and even at nine a faint bum-fluff moustache on his upper lip. He looked like a juvenile, scanky, Bobby Ball. But he was too thick to be funny. Stupid not through lack of native wit but from a determined resolution to remain ignorant. Ignorance was his armour. He walked with a swagger, advertising a readiness to fight that was ridiculous for his size. Legs spread wide, feet splayed outwards, fists balled. A strut adopted from his older brother. A brother known around town as a man not to be messed with. Who none the less messed with B.

  He was a loner, child B. Not like some, because of natural inclination. He was a loner because he carried an aura, something beyond even his walk and his constant spitting. Something that kept other children at bay like wolfsbane or garlic might ward off monsters. Children can be monsters too. We know that now. But once children were just children.

  Child A, before he even knew B, knew more than most what poisons might be concealed inside angelic frames. Of course he was to see, in glorious Technicolor, the depths to which a child could fall. But he’d already had inklings. He had experienced first-hand some of the cruel possibilities. Growing up in a run-down mining town, where the pits were everywhere.

  Once A had walked home with one shoe. Ripped junior Y-fronts stuffed into the pocket of the trousers that he’d managed to rescue. His other shoe was still thickly lodged in a tree; impervious to sticks and stones and names and all the other things that A felt so deeply. He trudged with a sock sodden from the pavement, and a lopsided swaying like the plastic boy on the Barnados boxes would walk, his legs imprisoned in torturous iron callipers.

  It was long dark when he made it home, shivering from the tear-cloaking drizzle. Aching from rabbit punches and dead legs and hours of futile efforts to rescue his shoe. His mother hugged him before she started shouting.

  ‘We’ve been worried near enough to death. Where the bloody hell have you been?’

  He’d rehearsed the story in his mind. He couldn’t tell them the truth. Some bitter shame locked it in him. He knew with cockeyed childish intuition that they wouldn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend the depths of his anguish. He firmly believed that his tormentors would increase his suffering if he went to adults. Maybe they would have.

  ‘I was playing football with my friends,’ the word made him wince. ‘The ball got caught in a tree and we all threw our shoes to get it down. But mine got stuck, and that’s where I’ve been, trying to get it down.’

  His mother stroked his hair, and this kindness was almost more than his body could take. His lip began to waver, but he caught his father’s eye and managed to check it.

  ‘Come on,’ his dad said. ‘Let’s go and get the bloody thing before it really starts pissing it down.’ He broke off to get his keys. But in that instant of eye contact, when he had been about to cry, A had seen his father’s disgust.

  They both sat in silence with their shame, as they drove to the field by A’s school. Water pooled with the cement dust in the back of the battered pick-up, a ladder looming over the windscreen. A felt like a condemned witch when he climbed it, a broom in hand, and a big hangman’s bough above him. The rungs were treacherous, slippery even in his dry trainers. Lightning flashed like a cheap horror gimmick. And A knew, what his father forgot or ignored, that up a wet ladder under a tall sycamore was a harmful place. A route that belonged to the storm. His dad held the ladder steady, as if in a half-hearted suicide pact. And A worried, more even than death, that his father would see the ripped pants still bulging in his trouser pocket.

  It went on for months like this. Years, in child time. A small boy being bullied by a group of such diversity and size that he seemed to have no moments of freedom. No respite save at home, where he tried desperately to hide his engrossing unhappiness. He lay awake much of most nights, plagued with anxiety. Sometimes he fell asleep in class.

  His teacher, Mrs Johnston, née Grey, disillusioned and going through divorce, thought him lazy like his left eye. She noticed that he always seemed to be dirty, and looked like he’d been fighting. Other children told on him, even some of her nicest girls. There could be no smoke without fire. Besides, he had the same startling blue irises as her filthy, philandering fuck of a husband. Though she neglected to mention this last point at the trial.

  After a while A ceased even to protest while he was punished for imagined misdemeanours. He bore all with a stoical silence. Soon he just stopped going to school.

  The alternative was dull, but painless. Wandering the streets of an old coal town. Mostly A could stay out of the way of the few other primary kids that bunked. Stonelee was a hard hilly culture, cold and mindless, mineless. Under-employed or unemployed, the positions available. A’s father, an occasional demolition foreman, was firmly middle class. The Eveready battery factory floundered and failed. Other punier attempts at rejuvenation died outright, or lived briefly like the summer stingers on the slag heaps. Even the pound shop struggled. Tumbleweed Kwik Save crisp packets blew down the empty market street. Alternate Thursdays the fruit and veg stall still came. The butcher, famed for his pork sandwiches, was closed by E. coli. When A read this in the Northern Echo he thought E. coli was a bailiff. Bailiffs flourished.

  ‘How d’you get five hundred cows in a shed?’ said a boy that A vaguely recognized.

  From his seat on the gravestone, A looked at him. He was from the year below, rough. His eyes were staring, burning. A, not sure if it was a trap, spun around, poised to flee. But curiosity kept his buttocks on the cold, grey slab.

  ‘How d’you get five hundred cows in a shed?’ the boy asked again. His voice was deep, though of course unbroken. A wondered if he was putting it on. />
  ‘I don’t know. How?’ A said slowly, earnestly, hopefully. He wanted this to be a real joke, not a trick or an excuse to punch him.

  ‘Put up a Bingo sign.’ The boy laughed, much more than the joke merited. A laughed as well, as hard as he could.

  The boy kicked at a stone cross with the flat of his foot. It rocked slightly in its foundation hole. He kicked it again but it moved the same little way and no more. Looking around, as if for some new way to impress, the boy saw a brown glass bottle, left by the churchyard’s night-time clientele. He picked it up, and A knew that he would smash it; but the boy wished to demonstrate an abandon far beyond that. He sailed the bottle grenade-like, through the trees and over the church wall, towards an unseen road. Before it had even landed A felt the attraction of this abandon, the exhilaration that it could offer him. He could just hear the pop of the bottle as it exploded, then the brakes of a car and a crunch, and more broken glass. Then came horns and slamming doors. But they were already running.

  The boy ran like he walked: fists balled, arms nearly straight in his ripped green bomber. He led A onwards, inwards, through the church’s doorway, left open for the poor and the needy.

  It was cool in the church, an escape from the closeness outside. A remembered the big brass sanctuary knocker on Durham Cathedral, with its devilish eyeless face. Churches had always been a place of safety for criminals. Not that he was a criminal, but he was beginning to feel the appeal of crime.

  Like Stonelee, the church was old and ill kept. Hanging steel lamps showed paint flaking off the walls like dead skin. A mural of Mary prayed handless, where the cement had fallen. The two boys, breathless and silent, walked around, looking for somewhere to hide. Stepping over the names of benefactors and bishops, almost erased by the shoes of centuries. They took a seat in a small side chapel, joining a plaster saint. His eyes were half-closed, like he was sleepy or stoned, and he held a coil of rosaries long enough to tie someone up.

  They grinned at each other with excitement when they heard the people come in. The footsteps sounded gruff and out of place in the emptiness. But the noises soon faded, leaving them undiscovered in their private chapel. A’s newest and only friend, a boy named B, stole a hymn book, while they sat waiting for the feeling that it was safe to leave. A gazed at the roof, painted a passionate blue with golden stars, looking somehow more real than the sky outside had been. It was supported by pillars, thick as God’s thighs, and near their tops more anonymous saints stared down. Most bore the means of their martyrdom, some ghoulishly held their own heads.

  They shared the remains of the day. Outlaws, confirmed in petty shoplifts and pointless vandalism. Acts that nonetheless bonded them, blended them. Separation from the world brought them to each other. People who saw them, while they walked homewards, would swear they were a pair. They fitted together those two boys, with letters where their names should be. A and B, united by their difference, intrinsically linked, like pen and paper, salt and pepper, accident and emergency.

  But events flowed on, as steady and dirty as the Stonelee Byrne, and at the end of the road stood three figures. A recognized them as boys from his class, junior demons.

  A had become used to long cuts: double-backs and dirttracks. Somehow B’s abandon had lured him into unaccustomed bravery.

  ‘Let’s go this way,’ he said, trying to pull his friend down a side-street.

  But B didn’t recognize the urgency in his voice. ‘Naw, it’s much longer.’ He offered A an Opal Fruit instead.

  And then it was too late anyway. The three boys had spotted them, and were already sidling forwards.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in school recently,’ one of them said.

  A felt the hopelessness building inside him. These false pleasantries would slide into an attack. Sudden or slow, the pain was inevitable. All the worse because he had enjoyed the day. Now B would despise him, or even join in against him.

  ‘Anyone would think you’ve been avoiding us. Aren’t we your friends any more?’

  ‘No look, he’s got a new friend, haven’t you, you little shit.’

  ‘What’s your friend called, spastic, or can’t he afford a name?’ The inquisitors laughed with childish brutality.

  A would have run for it, but already his classmates had penned them in. Trapping them against the wall of a house.

  B looked at these older boys. His neck stretched out like a weasel’s as he stared slowly into each of their faces. Maybe then they suspected they had picked the wrong kid.

  ‘All right, you, just piss off,’ said one. ‘It’s him we want.’

  There were none of the preliminaries that usually marked fights in the under-tens freestyle event. No pushing or grabbing or wrestling. B punched the speaker hard in the face. A proper punch with his weight behind it. Like his brother taught and used. The boy crumpled, and as he did B hit him again on the back of the head. The second boy started to raise his arm to thump, but before his blow was prepared, B had smacked him too. In the eye and then the throat and then the eye again. The boy shrieked like a baby and stumbled away backwards. The third one had already run off. B kicked the boy who was on the floor. Lashing at him, showering him with blows. A joined him, savouring his abandon, feeling its shelter. The boy on the floor sobbed and begged them to stop.

  Eventually they did.

  None of the passing cars did.

  A was happier that night. His mum commented on it. For once he slept well. And when he woke it was with nervous excitement, at the prospect of meeting up with B again.

  When B went to bed, he retrieved the stolen hymn book. He tried to read it, but most of the words frustrated him. He was barely beyond his abc. Could just write his own name, and recognize a few common expressions. ‘Dog’ was one of the first words he had learned, and in that book he found its opposite. Not cat but God.

  That night B went through the hymn book, scribbling out God and painstakingly writing his own name above each reference. B did not believe in God. His brother had told him that God did not exist, one night while B had pleaded for His help. And that He did not help seemed to prove his brother’s case. Perhaps, though, there remained a trace belief, or else who was he offending with his tightly gripped black Berrol? Maybe B too felt the heart-pounding exuberance. The power of his own abandon. Some fraction of the thrill of that fiery first rebel. Or maybe he was just trying to dare God into showing Himself.

  C is for Coast.

  Can You See the Sea?

  Time passes for Jack with shrinking soap and growing confidence. A month has gone by since his freedom arrived. In the seamless sameness of prison schedules, days lagged and loitered. But now every hour is different; disorder is all about him. Though he seeks comfort in some small routines, these just form a raft in the sea that surrounds. He loves this sea, embraces its impossibility, opens his lungs to swallow it as it swallows him.

  There’s a quality, a sort of paleness, in these mornings, that Jack has quickly come to adore. Like today, he often gets up at six to have the short walk to the paper shop to himself. The thin damp air seems to welcome him to the day. He fondles the chunky pound coins in his pocket, as comforting as his testicles. This is the last he need spend of his ‘pies’, his prison wages. Tomorrow he will get his first fortnight’s pay: a wage in pounds, instead of pence.

  The paper-shop man is sorting stacks of dailies while he daydreams. He smiles a grizzled grin at Jack, his new regular, and passes him the Star. Not the Sun, never the Sun. Despite its promise to be implant free, Jack cannot forgive the Sun, whose coupon campaign to extend his sentence was such an unqualified success. He swaps one of the nuggets from his pocket for the paper and his change, and leaves the man to his thoughts.

  Jack waves his thanks to the lone car that lets him pass on the zebra crossing. Amazed at how much a part of society that small action makes him feel. He notices a curious clean patch on the car’s boot, where something in the shape of a fish obviously used to stick. He wonders what it was,
and whether the owner knows he’s lost it.

  Over breakfast of toast and tea Jack reads his Star. There is no mention of him in it today. During the last few weeks the debate has still continued sporadically. He hopes that maybe it’s finished now, and turns to page three. Her blond framed face is slightly pointed, foxly. Slim thighs, ribcage delicately lined where she breathed in to conceal her tiny female belly, just at the instant of shutter closure. Her breasts are art: formed by a man’s hands for the viewing pleasure of other men. Soft planets, golden and impossibly high, and no less perfect for all this. Jack feels his virginity acutely.

  Breakfast is the only part of the routine where disorder can intrude: the times when Kelly is there. Though he likes her, Jack prefers it when he eats alone, and he can prepare himself for his day. Afterwards he washes and shaves. The razor issued with his new identity is becoming blunt, and with a seminal consumer urge he resolves not to get a replacement blade, but an entirely new razor.

  Brands bubble in his head as he walks to the meet: Wilkinson Sword, a bit too military; Gillette – the best a man can get; Sensor; Mach 3; I liked it so much I bought the company; Bremington; Reminton. He was allowed TV in the early years. In the home, which wasn’t a home, but began to seem so compared to the prisons.

  He waits by the forecourt of the garage. He’s tense in the open, where so many eyes are upon him, where someone might recognize him. But it’s getting easier. Jack sees a lot of garages. The job that Terry got him is with a distribution firm, delivering supplies. Servicing service stations.