Boy A Page 9

  A realized from B’s face that he hadn’t really expected to catch the eel. Even so, B struck just as he had described, smooth and steady. But when he swung the eel over the bank they both realized that they had nothing to put it in. They had reached the end of their plans. The end of the line. But they couldn’t just let it go, not after all that trouble. The eel felt danger, it thrashed on the woollen trap to free its teeth, and dropped to the concrete. Both boys just looked on, as it started to writhe its way back towards the water. Flecks of rust and brick-dust sticking to its lithe slimy body. It must have been able to smell its home, just feet away. But it saw the boys in front of it and changed its tack, heading left towards the deeper shadows, and the softer foe.

  ‘Grab it,’ B yelled.

  And A, knowing that he had to, did. Disgust twisted through him with every twitch of the thick, slick, fish-snake. But he held it, with one hand around its throaty gills and the other on its tail. It struggled and glared and gasped at him, showing tiny dagger teeth tangled with streams of red wool.

  ‘Get something to hold it down, quickly,’ he said.

  B appeared, with their digging tools. He slid A’s flat wood beneath the eel, and pushed the point of the nail just slightly into its oily back. Then, with a half-brick, he banged it home. The eel hissed wetly, and bucked its head upwards, as the nail passed through it and into the wood. Fatty blood splattered. One small drop went in B’s mouth.

  The eel fought for an hour, while its tormentors shared A’s pack-lunch. They always shared. B got free school meals, but the scrap-saving, flap-armed dinner ladies didn’t do take-outs. He tried to feed the eel a bit of Mighty White crust, only for some reason it wasn’t hungry. It twisted around to bite at the nail though, tearing the hole in itself larger and larger, yet still unable to get free.

  When it finally gave up the ghost, B ripped it from the board and threw it into the Byrne. It sank for a moment, and then inexplicably rose to the surface again. They pelted it with stones like they had the jonny. But it wouldn’t go away. Eventually it drifted out of sight.

  Even after lunch, and half a flask of lemon-barley, B was sure he could still taste the drop of eel blood. It moved somewhere inside him. And his hands felt dirty from where they had touched it. Like when he’d had to touch his brother, who was also slimy. Sure that the sticky secret was still on him. Sure that the next day’s light would reveal where translucent globs had clung while in the dark.

  They left the rod where it lay, and climbed back up to the road.

  B had always been an Outlaw, just like Just William. But somehow high jinks are not acceptable from certain people. If your hair isn’t ruffled, but greasy and uncut. If you’re dirty, not from climbing trees, but because you don’t wash. If you have thin pursed lips instead of a cheeky grin. But there was more than this too. He could sing the lyrics, but he couldn’t understand the melody. There was something missing from this boy called B, something broken maybe, or never allowed to grow. People could feel the empty bit. And they were wary of it. He was a starer, B, and his stares created discomfort. Uneasy himself, he was a vector of unease, spreading it in slow ripples. His teachers tended to ignore his absences, because everything became much pleasanter when he wasn’t there. The tension was gone, the thick heavy air that you get before something happens. This is what they said afterwards, anyway.

  On B’s estate all the buildings were fused into termite rows of tenements; unevenly heighted, with tunnels twisted through their midst into unseen yards and further blocks. Washing hung from tightrope lines, which traversed above the streets at unnatural angles. Most of the clothes were too grimy with age to ever be properly cleaned, and the air felt too cold and damp to dry them. Technically the area was condemned, due for regeneration. But the project, like Stonelee, had run out of money. There were hardly any children still living there. Families were prioritized for escape.

  B’s brother liked it, though. And as the bread-stealer of the house, his views went. The estate was almost impossible to police: a lattice of courts in which you couldn’t be trapped, because each was linked by alleys to four others. The permutations were simply impossible to investigate. So many flats were disused that there were always plenty of holing places, even for those too knackered to keep running. Once inside the estate you were safe. Provided of course that you could ever feel safe in such a place. The brother did. He ran with a gang, who didn’t seem to like each other much, but who worked as a co-operative for burglaries and beatings. They called themselves the Anthill Mob. After the cartoon, not as admission of their insignificance.

  Like a Satanist, B hated the one he worshipped, his brother. A brother that taught him, protected him and used him. To whom he was soon to have been apprenticed. The inadequate, that boasted about the women he conquered, and the faggots he bashed. Who called B maggot, when drunkenly fucking him one night. And swore him to a secrecy so deep that he hardly dared to think of it again.

  B tried to use the secret to fill the gap in him. But found that it jolted around, wearing away at the sides, and making the breach even bigger. So instead he buried it. Down beside the Byrne.

  J is for Jonah.

  Just Jinxed.

  Chris puts his mobile back down on the van’s cluttered dash. Driving while on the phone is not one of the offences for which he routinely abuses other road-users. Jack had never seen a mobile before he went into secure accommodation, maybe on the telly. Now they’re everywhere. Even scally little kids have them. Terry gave one to Jack, to go with the panic button/pager, so they can stay in touch, for safety. Chris’ phone is perfection, a slim Nokia, an ideal of scale and beauty. But Jack already knows enough of the world to see that newer, smaller, comelier mobiles will be created; to make this goddess an ugly and embarrassing hag.

  ‘You hungry, Jack?’

  ‘I could eat.’

  ‘There’s a McD’s at the next drop. Let’s do brunch.’ Chris says the last bit in his London Luvvy voice.

  It’s all about getting from A to Z, this job of Jack’s. Not so much map reading, more making time pass. But they have ways, him and Chris. They have the radio, they have the games they play and they have the delights of the service stations they service. If they unload quickly, with the time saved by Chris’ shortcuts and fast driving, they generally have fifteen or twenty minutes spare at each stop.

  ‘You’ve got to take plenty of breaks,’ Chris had explained on the first day. ‘If you don’t then the office’ll shorten the journey times, and before you know it you’ve got three more deliveries a day, and they’re laying people off.’

  They pull into the slip road that guides them around to the services. The yellow brick road to McDonalds. They have to eat first, so the time signed on the delivery sheets approximates their ETA. It takes a while to park. Chris always wants a space where he can back the van against a wall, so no one can force the doors open.

  ‘I’ll get these, Bruiser,’ says Chris in the queue, when Jack starts to hunt around his pockets for change. ‘I reckon I still owe you for saving me from a beating the other weekend.’

  Jack has felt a difference at work over the last week and a bit. As people gradually heard about the fight they warmed to him. He asked Chris and Steve the mechanic not to tell anyone, but it was too late, they’d both already let it out. They couldn’t understand his reticence, when he’d done the right thing. No one thought he was a monster. Couldn’t he see? Everyone respects someone who stands up for a mate.

  It’s true, it was all smiles at the unit this morning. Jack the lad, that’s what they thought. But Jack had wanted to keep it quiet; Jack is still terrified that this could come out. That it will all come out, and he’ll go back in. Or worse. Tell me I’m not a monster, then.

  He agonized all weekend over whether to talk to Terry about it. But Terry is an official, even if he is much more; and Terry is too moral to trust on something like this.

  Every day for the past twelve, Jack has expected a knock on the door.
A gang of fierce blue uniforms to tell him his licence is revoked. And, although he’s scared of returning to prison, some mornings when he wakes, he almost wishes they would come. To put an end to the waiting and the fear.

  In a way it wouldn’t be so bad to be back inside. He knew where he was in there. He had routines. All right, they were routines that he hated, but they divided his time neatly. There was no wondering how to get through the day. No decisions of any consequence to be made. Only that biggest one.

  But his confidence grows each time the knock doesn’t come. Every evening that he goes to sleep in the same bed he woke up in. He’s adjusting.

  ‘So what you having, Jack? Bacon sandwich meal?’

  Jack nods.

  Even McDonalds has had to adjust. Chris told him that when they started doing breakfasts in England, they tried to sell pancakes and maple syrup and muffins, and all kinds of crazy American shit. Brits just didn’t go for it. Mass advertising campaigns said that fifty million Americans couldn’t be wrong. But they were ill judged. Not everyone believes what they read. Bollocks, said England, more people than that go to watch baseball every week. You can dictate our foreign policy, but you’ll never dictate our breakfast. So Ronald conceded, and invented the McBacon Roll with McBrown sauce. Though he still served it with a hash brown.

  They take their paper-blanketed trays, and sit down on the hard-backed plastic chairs. Jack is sure they used to swivel, once upon a time. McDonalds is at its best in the morning. Everything is freshly cleaned. Like in his memory. Like in the adverts. Jack loves McDonalds because of those adverts. He watched them for years in secure accommodation and prison. McDonalds was a land where everyone was happy. Even some of the meals were happy. And the food, when he finally tasted it again, didn’t disillusion him. It’s not so much cooked as chemically generated to be delicious. You can tell that teams of scientists have worked on every detail. Getting it just right.

  But there’s a gherkin stuck on the wall. Marring the immaculacy of the white tiles. It must have been there since yesterday; they don’t serve burgers yet. It’s wrong of the cleaners to have missed it, and their failure makes Jack feel slightly let down.

  They time their breaks flawlessly, heading back to the unit at precisely 2:30, to pick up more stock. It’s crisps today. Their firm does local distribution for a company that makes snacks, seemingly just for garages. At least Chris says he’s never seen them sold anywhere else. Big bags of salt and vinegar sticks, bacon balls and cheese puffs. The piles of identical goods make Jack think of Hacendado. It’s a long time since he last saw Hacendado. It’s getting to be quite a while since he saw Michelle too.

  ‘Don’t be ignorant, come and sign the stuff out, Jack. You haven’t seen her since the party.’

  Up North ignorance is a social thing, not intellectual. Manners are more important than knowledge. Normally Jack likes this.

  ‘I just…’

  ‘Come on. What are you going to do, never go in the office again? You’ve got to face up to it. What are you afraid of?’

  Who knows? Jack doesn’t. Confusion, upheaval, humiliation, even happiness, perhaps. Putting his head above the parapet. Climbing high enough to fall. To fail. But he follows Chris into the office.

  They pass through the doorway which marks the distinction between two worlds. On one side of it the floor is concrete and the walls are whitewashed breeze-block. On the other there are carpets, corridors, computers, Café Costa cappuccinos, women. The only women in the yard-side are on the calendar, they arch their naked backs and smile with promises and tease their own breasts. The women in the office-side don’t do any of these things.

  Michelle doesn’t even smile when she sees Jack.

  ‘Hi, Jack,’ she says coldly, then she files something away.

  ‘Hi,’ he replies, aware suddenly that his fear has hurt her.

  There is no sparkle in her eyes when she turns to him.

  They all perfunctorily perform to sign out the snacks. Even Chris doesn’t try a joke. Although the atmosphere is as dense as Kev from accounts, and probably warrants one.

  ‘Look, Jack,’ Michelle says abruptly. ‘Do you want to go for a coffee after work, talk about it?’

  ‘I, well, Chris, I get a lift off Chris.’

  ‘I’ll take you back after,’ she says.

  ‘OK.’ Jack is sheepish. Collared like a bad schoolboy. In the days when that meant scrumping apples.

  The last deliveries are nearby. Regular haunts, where Chris laughs with the staff, leaving Jack free to think. When he was young, the petrol stations had a few cans of oil and a cash register. Maybe some peanuts if you were lucky. Stuck to a board that gradually uncovered a woman; always disappointingly more clothed at the end than seemed likely at the outset. Garages now are like supermarkets were then. Supermarkets are like towns, as alien and alluring as Las Vegas, only with strip-lights instead of neon; parades of goods you didn’t even know existed, built next to things similar, or identical or absolutely distinct. It’s the choices that overwhelm Jack. Consumerism in prison was limited to short printed lists. Now he can lose an hour reading the ladverts in the back of Loaded. There are too many choices in the world.

  He has no option but to meet Michelle. The deal has been done. Chris wishes him luck, before shredding the van out of the yard. Jack’s work boots feel heavier than normal as he heads into the office. The air in Michelle’s room is lighter though.

  ‘Just hang on a minute, can you, Jack? I’m still finishing up.’ Michelle’s cheeks are flushed and there is the barest hint of a smile on her lips.

  Jack wonders why on earth he has been avoiding her. Now that he sees her again he can think of nothing better than to be near her. He watches her efficient, pale, hands flirting their way through the final few forms of the day. Her nails are painted the briefest pink, just scarcely darker than they would be if they were left. He imagines those nails stroking his face. Feeling its post-shave smoothness, like in a commercial.

  Michelle walks quickly on the way to Café Costa. Jack has to slightly extend his normal stride, to stay up with her without seeming to hurry. A jogger comes towards them. He wears the absurdly tight track suit bottoms that serious athletes wear to define themselves as such, to show they are unfettered by fashion. Jack has to step close to Michelle to let the man past, and in that tick-tock, where he can smell her, and feel her hair against his cheek, he starts to grow hard.

  The swish pseudo-Italian coffee shop seems incongruous coming from the industrial estate. But behind it are gold and chrome-mirrored offices that front on the ship-canal. This road is another border between worlds. Michelle looks longingly at the bold new blocks, filled with solicitors and ad-execs, not crisps and white vans. But there’s also determination in her eyes, and Jack suspects that one day soon she will be there.

  She orders a mochachino, which Jack doesn’t manage to pay for. He has a coke, overpriced and weak, in a kid’s cardboard cup.

  ‘So why have you been ignoring me?’ is her blunt opening gambit, once they’ve sat down.

  Jack is grateful for the distance they are away from the nearest people. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, in all honesty.

  ‘Is it because you were embarrassed about the “I love you” thing? You don’t have to be. I know you didn’t really mean it, I thought you were rather sweet.’

  Sweet is something that Jack is unused to being; he wipes his sweaty fingers on his blue nylon trousers. They have seven pockets, these trousers, all the lads at the yard are forever losing keys in them. Most prison trousers have none, they’re cut out for visitors: hand-jobs and hand-overs. Jack feels a bit like he’s on a visit. Just the two of them, sat across a low table. But only Terry ever visited. Never a woman.

  ‘I think I’m a bit scared,’ he blurts, amazed at his own openness. But still only revealing in order to remain hidden.

  ‘Scared of what? Of me? I know Chris’ nickname for me, but I’m not a nympho, Jack.’

  ‘No,’ he says,
a bit too hurriedly. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just. I don’t know. I’ve never really been in a relationship,’ he nearly says ‘before.’

  She laughs, ‘Jack. I’m not asking for one. I’m not even after one at the moment. I just want a bit of fun. You know what they say: “All work and no play makes…” She stops herself. ‘Everyone thinks they’re the first one, don’t they? I guess you’ve had that all your life, haven’t you?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I can’t believe we’re talking like this anyway. It’s not like anything’s happened. We haven’t even had so much as a snog. What are we discussing?’

  Jack shrugs, and smiles. He feels safe with her, he really does. And he wants that snog like he could burst with it. But he knows he could no more do anything about it than he could tell her the difference between a mochachino and a latte.

  ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I said I’d go round mum’s after work. I’ll have to drop you on the way. But why don’t we do something tomorrow night? Watch a film or something? If you fancy it.’

  ‘That’d be cool,’ Jack says, feeling anything but.

  Michelle’s car is a Clio. Chris said that ‘Clio’ was meant to make you think ‘Clit’. Otherwise they’d spell it with an ‘e’, like normal, wouldn’t they? Clever advertising, he reckoned, sexy, supposed to appeal to strong women. It doesn’t make Jack more comfortable.

  When she drops him, and he starts to open the car door, she beckons him back, leans forwards and kisses him ever so softly, at the join of his lips and cheek.

  Kelly isn’t in, and Jack races to his room to watch Michelle manoeuvre the curvy turquoise car out of the space and off down the street. He feels bizarre, at the edge of excitement and in complete turmoil.