Born Different (9 page)

But, Gabe would
love to see the look on Alistair’s face when he realised he’d been
shafted. Leave him broke for a while so that he couldn’t flash his
cash at Grace. Yeah, it was mean, even wrong perhaps, but what
Alistair was doing was wrong too. And yeah, two wrongs don’t make a
right, neither do two rights. Nothing made everything alright.

And something
in Gabe twisted perversely and it made him smile and feel a bit
better, like a brief light wave of pleasure that magically
dissolved the worry. This might actually help his cause with
Grace.

Gabe had no
other grand plans. This was the one that had fallen into his lap.
Like a golden opportunity. And even though Gabe knew deep down in
his own heart that he should walk away, he had nowhere to walk away
to. And time was ticking.

“’Bout time we
got their ladies and fancy cars eh boys. About time we had a taste
of the high life. We gotta do this or we’ll be licking their shoes
forever. Licking their butts for our dinner!” Dave said placing his
hands up in front of his face, scrunching his fingers like he was
holding a bum and licking the air between the back of his hands
vigorously with his dark brown furred tongue.

And Gabe
thought that however disgusting and funny Dave was, he was
right

“The Beautiful
are going to find it impossible to fail in life however clever or
not they are. Whatever wrong choices they make or opportunities
they miss, there will be plenty more that follow. They have been
born into other paths, better paths, lucky paths, paths lined with
gold. ‘Bout time we got a bit of the gold girls.” Johnny was
convincing.

The Beautiful
did always look so perfect. All of their clothes were high end
designer. Their clothes bore the names of the fashion designer men
and women that the world put on pedestals. Clothes that you had to
pay hundreds of pounds for. Gabe knew that labels were just
branding and people seemed to love all that. Brands were lifestyle
choices or preferences. It was probably some elaborate coded
messaging system but Gabe just didn’t get it. Brands helped
identify you, your place, your people. Brands labelled who you were
or who you wanted to be. There just wasn’t a brand yet invented
that fit Gabe’s ideas of his self-image. And there probably never
would be, as the brands tended to aim for the masses.

But Gabe had to
admit that the expensive clothes that The Beautiful wore did wash
better or they got dry cleaned like they were supposed to. Their
clothes were never dirty, creased, bobbled or shrunk and well worn.
They could afford to follow fashions so that they always looked
faultless.

Gabe knew why
he and his friend hated them so much, their perfection just
highlighted their imperfections. And it wasn’t fair. Why shouldn’t
they have a bit of that too?

And then there
was everyone else in between. The Middles. Not as obviously
offensive to Gabe and his friends, just a lot more insidiously so.
The masses, the ones in the middle. They were middle of the road
but they took up the whole damn street. The mass of all the others
that when viewed as a ‘lump sum’, as Gabe and his friends did
indeed view them, were just so placid, insipid and mundane. They
may all sound different to each other, interesting and exciting
even, but Gabe thought that they were all kidding on too, whether
they knew it or not.

All branded in
every aspect of their lives too. Maybe not with the luxury brands
like The Beautiful had, but brands all the same.

Even looking at
his friends now as they were pulling on their black gloves and
putting up the hoods of their black hoodies, he could see that they
were branded. It was everywhere.

Everywhere Gabe
looked he saw advertising for brands, on the bus that passed, on
the windows of the bus stops, the over flowing bin was even full of
branded consumer products. It was everywhere, on every magazine, TV
programme and on every webpage worth looking at.

There was
plenty to keep The Middles busy, following all the self and
socially imposed routines and behaviours and purchases, from the
shoes that they wore to the thoughts that they thought. Following
false beliefs blindly. Looking at them Gabe imagined that they were
all whistling in the dark. Scared as hell but keeping up
appearances.

Gabe had a big
decision to make and he thought about everybody else generally
without exception, and to him they all seemed to be playing dress
up and make believe. There seemed to be no substance. Not one of
them was real. The Middles, their ways and their lives were so
completely alien to Gabe. The Middles were ordered and they knew
where they were going. They did all the things that everyone did.
They all watched the same things and did the same things and wore
the same things.

In the middle,
there appeared to be no passion, no real celebration or
commiseration, no all good or all bad but everything else that was
in the middle and grey. The Middles were just one big wave of the
rest, all pretty much indistinguishable from each other. All normal
and boring. All keen and eager and pleased to keep up the pretence.
Gabe thought they lived with no depth of thought or consciousness.
They didn’t even know that they were alive. Not really alive! Not
really living their one and only lives. They were too busy ticking
boxes and toeing the line and pretending to look busy and doing as
they were told.

They were all
totally brainwashed and ruled by fear so taking the Valium, the
heroin of the masses like Ambrosia, and now so addicted to
believing in everything that they were told and sold through all
medias and advertising that they were always hungry for more, but
in this glazed eye state they were oblivious. Gabe thought that
they were oblivious to everything.

“Did you hear
they caught the flasher? He’s only a bloody doctor! See, I told
you.” And Frank had told them it wouldn’t be a weirdo, an obvious
weirdo, like them. That it would be one of The Middles. The same
people who pointed the finger at The Damned always had three
fingers pointing back at them.

The Middles
were even oblivious to the fact that they let the real sickos of
society hang out among them. Because that was the truth of it, as
far as Gabe and the rest of them were figuring it out. Really
freaky people; the child abusers, the fraudsters, the wife beaters;
these people had to blend in, they had to get close to other people
and install trust and earn respect. This was the trick. This was
invariably their modus operandi. The way and the only way that they
could operate. Authorities and tabloids always blamed the young and
the under classes, the punks and the underbelly of modern society.
The outcasts and the loners. But if you actually read the
headlines, heard the true stories, invariably, in fact almost
without exception it was the man next door. The scout leader, the
nurse, the bank clerk, the judge, the millionaire, the head of the
child protection unit. The unmasked monsters were in reality, the
‘you never would have guessed it’ man or woman. Nearly always. The
ones hidden in the camouflage of a ‘nice life’ were the ones that
committed the crimes from the absurd to the most heinous. Strange
people were often blamed as a smoke screen, using their differences
to incite a hostility and distrust, while the ones hiding out in
the mass of The Middles got on with the real crimes of the day. The
Middles were blinded to the obvious.

Rarely was it a
complete obvious weirdo. That is why it made such big news when it
was, and this is what ‘they’ wanted everyone to believe; that there
were monsters, and bogey men and strange folk hiding in the
shadows, ready to pounce on you if you strayed from the flock. If
you didn’t follow the rules. Stay in the boundaries. Play the
game.

But in reality
it was here, among The Middles, where the evil hid and they hid
well.

It always
shocked and amazed Gabe that the real truth of it all was, that for
all the world’s problems, it was far more likely that you would be
killed, hurt, maimed, raped, used and abused by someone that you
already knew, usually more often than not, by someone that you
actually
loved
. By someone that was supposed to love you.
Now how messed up was that? Friends and family members, your
nearest and dearest.

Gabe thought
the majority of The Middles probably did nothing wrong and there
were probably some good, kind intelligent and creative ones among
them but they too disappeared in the wave of them all, the sea of
them. They were tricked so as not to appear very outstanding at
all. That was what The Middles had done to themselves, banished
competition and made everyone the same so even their brilliant
could not shine. They gave credence and celebrity to the ordinary,
to the talentless. Real talent and perhaps even genius had been
ignored and had to go and get a job on the till at Tesco or serve
happy meals at the McDonalds on the ring road for minimum wage and
forced to deal with middle management. All that middle management
created by and for The Middles. All those name tags to pin on
themselves so that they could pretend that they weren’t really just
a number.

Gabe got even
more despondent thinking about how many potential great scientists,
talented artists and free thinkers of the twenty-first century had
been overlooked, drugged and trodden down in a misguided attempt to
make none of the really average to weak among The Middles feel bad
about themselves. They had invented normal and average to wrap
themselves up warm in, a one size that fits all, but it was a false
blanket, a false crutch. They had bitten off their noses to spite
their faces in the grandest of senses.

Gabe and his
gang didn’t like anyone really and mostly, despite all of their
justifications; it was simply because nobody liked them. And that
was how these things worked.

I’ll like you
if you like me. I won’t like you if you don’t like me. I will hate
you if you hate me. Do you love me? Well then I might just love you
back. But then again I might not as love rarely follows any kind of
rules.

Gabe had
realised something that he thought was almost as near to being a
truth as it was possible.

Gabe had made
up his mind. If no one liked him then, sod the lot of them.

“Are we ready
to rock and roll then?” Johnny the natural born leader.

“Yeah let’s do
it.”

The van was
hidden in Dave’s garage. Dave’s mum knew better than to ask them
what they were up to. She had lived through this sort of activity
for so many years that she was an expert at turning a blind eye and
a deaf ear. The least she knew the better, even if she always knew
perfectly well what was going on. She just noted the time on the
clock, just in case an alibi was needed, and she just carried on
with what she was doing. Another round of washing to go put on the
line before she could have a break and stop for a minute for a cup
of tea and some biscuits. She kept her mind busy with looking
forward to her Alanon meeting later, where she would have a chance
to hear the sound of her own voice.

“Where the fuck
did you get this?” Franks eyes nearly popped out.

“Does it
matter? Friend of a friend and all that. I got papers, you want to
see ‘em?” Dave shot back, eyebrows raised.

“No, no. Don’t
worry Dave.” Gabe realised that they were better off not
knowing.

There was a
radio inside and not much else.

“Ok so this is
the plan. Frank goes up on to the walls overlooking the area and
Gabe, you just sit in the van with the ignition running ok. If you
hear from any of us, just drive ok?”

“Drive
where?”

“Erm, drive
where? Just come back here ok?”

Gabe was
beginning to think that this master plan was not very well thought
out at all. He had an exam after lunch and he didn’t need this. But
it felt a bit too late to back out now. And Gabe also realised that
this van would be perfect for transporting his art works down to
the school. He did need one last favour.

Johnny told
Dave and Frank to get in the back of the van and he jumped into the
passenger seat, leant over and opened the driver’s door from the
inside for Gabe. As he did so the interconnecting door to the
kitchen slammed shut with a loud bang that scared the shit out of
all of them. As one door opened, another one closed firmly
shut.

Sitting in the
van in his required spot, with the engine running, Gabe opened the
car window and lit a cigarette from the packet Johnny had left in a
vain attempt to look a little less conspicuous and obvious. He
could see Frank in the distance, squatting up on the wall and
vaguely hidden behind the leaves of a tree. Gabe had no idea where
the others had disappeared to, somewhere down the back garages of
an old run down estate off the ring road.

What the
hell am I doing here?
The thought kept turning over in Gabe’s
head. He felt paranoid, he could see a CCTV camera and there were
quite a few odd looking people about. Gabe knew he shouldn’t be
here, he should have said, ‘No!’ Gabe just had a really bad feeling
on him, almost like a premonition that this was all going to end
badly. He felt sick to the gills and the tobacco smoke wasn’t
helping either. Everyone looked like a potential undercover cop or
worse. He had promised himself he was going to change but what if
it was all too late now, that this was it. Today would be the day
that they got caught or that today would be the start of the rest
of his life entrapped in the four walls of courts and prison cells.
Why was he still with these people? Gabe didn’t feel that great
being in his own skin today. How had it come to this?

They had
surpassed anyone’s low hopes for them. For a second, Gabe had a
moment of clarity and realised that he was becoming, if he hadn’t
already, which he felt sitting here as a getaway driver to a
robbery that he undoubtedly already was, exactly what all others
had thought or said that he was. He was fulfilling all of their
doom filled prophecies and not fulfilling any of his own dreams.
Not one of them.