Boy A (2 page)

The tea is too sweet, which makes it extravagant somehow, and Jack savours it.

‘Which hospital do you work at?’ asks Terry.

Kelly’s reply vaguely washes over Jack’s ears, but he watches her face: round, kind, wilful, helpful.

Then she asks him a question, something about the weather or the journey. It takes a moment for the words to achieve significance in a mind still reeling in new sensation. Sensing his stumbling, she redirects it to Terry.

A cat slides easily through the kitchen flap, and saunters into the room, while the three of them are still engaged in this two-way conversation. It’s a slate-grey tabby which, with narrowed eyes, selects Jack for its favours: rubbing against his leg, before settling on his lap to cajole a tickle. Its bones feel frail like chicken, but the fur is warm and soft, and it purrs pleasure.

‘There, I knew you were all right, Jack,’ his new landlady winks. ‘He’s a good judge of character, is Marble. Aren’t you, Marble?’

She gets up to give the cat’s back a quick tousle, and Jack can smell her hair. Vigorous, green-meadowed Alberto Balsam adverts.

‘Marble, this is Jack. He’s our new lodger.’

She addresses the cat as if it’s a child, not a baby, but one that starts to be a companion.

The small-talk continues, though it’s not small for Jack. Terry nods a smile with anything that Jack utters. He chose Manchester, he found the house and Kelly; and against any and all the doubters, he is sure that this boy, his boy, will make good. The fact that Mrs Whalley, whom he likes, so clearly likes Jack, confirms to him that he is right to like them both.

Even Terry can need reminding that it’s OK to like Jack.

Kelly shows them around her home with enjoyable pride. She gives operating instructions on the washing machine and dishwasher, and the other white wonders of the kitchen. Jack is impressed with his room. Terry had deliberately talked it down so he would be. It’s a box-room, small, with a low sloping roof, but recently decorated. The wardrobe and desk share a flat-pack freshness that the allan-key on the
window sill confirms. Clean newness seems to reverberate. The exception is a slightly battered portable telly, which sits on the desk’s corner, so that it’s watchable from in bed.

‘It’ll not get ITV for some reason, Jack,’ Kelly says, ‘but there’s nothing but rot on that channel anyway. Try not to have it on too loud if I’m on nights. House rules here are just common sense and courtesy. I can see that you’ve plenty of both, so I’m sure there’ll not be any bother.’

After another cup of tea Kelly confides that she has promised to eat with a friend before they both start work. The daylight has already dimmed through the lace curtains. She comes back down the stairs wearing her uniform, and with it an equally functional black cardigan. She offers to let Terry stay the night, and when he refuses, begs a promise to come back soon. She shouts final friendly commands as she leaves the doorway.

‘I’ve left a key in the pot on the kitchen table, but it’s the spare I usually leave with the neighbour, so I’ll have to get one cut as soon as I can. I’ll not be back till the morning, so make yourselves at home. There’s plenty of videos if there’s nothing on the box, and any amount of fast food places at the end of the road. You’ll have seen them as you came. But if you just want a sandwich or something then help yourself to the fridge. There’s not much in there, I’m afraid. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow, Jack. Bye Terry, see you soon.’

And the door slams to a still house.

‘She can’t half talk, heh?’

‘She’s nice, Terry. Thank you.’

‘Ah, c’mon.’ Terry must have noticed the tear in Jack’s eye.

But it’s quickly blinked away. Terry probably wishes he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t said anything. Though it doesn’t matter and he’s seen far worse.

Later they kick back in the spiced-fat comfort of a doner kebab. Chilli sauce burning into cans of apple Tango, almost
too slippery to hold. Jack has never had a kebab, which one of his cellmates professed to miss more than his family. The Styrofoam box reminds him of something. He stares at it, pooled juices already congealing into waxy solid. It is McDonalds, only they used to come in these boxes. McDonalds was the stuff of childhood treats, another good omen. Jack is a great believer in omens. The mundanity of prison focuses the mind, tuning recognition of pattern and difference. A black grain in puffed rice at breakfast can mean a bad day, seven matchsticks left a good one. Primitive societies set great store by these things. Prison is primitive.

Together they study the Sunday night football round-up. Terry tests on players and form. Jack Burridge supports Luton Town of course: ‘Luton Airport who are you?’, ‘The Hatters, the Hatters and we’re all fucking nutters’. The odds of finding a fellow fan up here are remote, but he must demonstrate a knowledge of his team. Actually Jack has never had any real interest in football, but he can talk a good game. He’s shared a cell with a Celtic Casual, a Chelsea Headhunter and a middle-aged Notts County trainspotter called Trevor who was doing five months for getting his thirteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant.

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.

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.