Boy A (20 page)

‘This is all you’re getting, you little queen,’ the fat guy said, and he stirred his finger into the ice-cream-scoop of indeterminate veg. ‘Enjoy your greens.’

B
rose and took the tray from him. Then, staring straight into his eyes, tilted it so that all the food slid between their
feet. The fat guy looked down, and when he did so
B
smashed the tray up. It wasn’t that heavy, but the blow was hard enough to make the guy stagger back, and allow another shot.
B
held it by the sides, above his head, and slam-dunked it down onto his opponent’s hairline. This time, the guy’s legs dropped from under him.

He had a flap of skin hanging from his forehead, like a mangled second nose, by the time the prison officers could take
B
off to the segregation wing.

Back to where he had begun, almost. There was only a mattress in segregation, no bed, a chair but no table, a pot and a blanket. Only now he found he could sleep unafraid on his mattress. When the dreams came, he could take control. If the two dogs faced each other, slavering away,
B
found he could reach his arms into their world, and bang their heads together. They whined and whimpered and turned against him with their snarls, but they became friends, and both were saved. Other than the indignity of the pot,
B
was happy in segregation. He didn’t count the hours or the days. There was only him, no numbers, he just was.

It was an evening when the numbers came back. There were four of them. They opened the door and rushed in. They wore pillowcase hoods with ragged eyeholes. They looked like Klansmen. And by the noose of blanket-platted rope one carried, it was clear they meant to have a lynching.
B
knocked him down, and leaped like a power-surge for the emergency button on the wall. But he was blocked by two more. They wrestled him to the floor, and while three gripped his thrashing body, the fourth placed the noose around his gnashing, spitting head.

It was all they could do to hold him beside the grill, as the rope was threaded through it. Twice he got a hand free and punched pillowcased faces. Then they pushed the chair under his twisting feet.

Though his wrists were still held,
B
saw his opening to land a kick. He launched off the chair, and it toppled backwards to the floor. But he had exploded with sufficient force to ground his foot with a crack of broken jaw. And as the rope went tight he thought: ‘I got you, you fucker, I got you.’

I see no reason, Why gunpowder treason, Should ever be forgot.

It’s the 4th on Tuesday, when Terry comes around to pick up Jack. The cinema’s classic reshowing attempt has flopped, so they’re back to the arranged night out. Terry’s serious; his lips barely flicker into their usual smile when he sees Jack. It’s obvious there’s something on his mind. When he finds that Kelly isn’t in, he sits them both down on the sofa.

‘Jack,’ he says, ‘something’s been brought to my attention today. I’ve debated with myself, but I think you’ve got the right to know.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘There’s been a bounty posted on the Internet.’ He lets the words sink in. ‘For information about your whereabouts. The police are investigating, but it looks at the moment like it’s been posted in the States, in which case there isn’t really much we can do.’

Jack always knew that something like this could happen, but that hasn’t lightened the blow.

‘This doesn’t necessarily affect anything. There’s no information about where you might be, no pictures. It just confirms what we already knew; that there are people who will never let this go. But they don’t know a thing. In a way
this just proves how successful we’ve been, how successful you’ve been. They wouldn’t have to do this unless they really didn’t have a clue.’

‘The reward,’ Jack says, ‘it’s just for information.’

‘Just for information. There’s no explicit threat of violence.’

‘How much am I worth?’

‘Thirty thousand dollars, about twenty thousand pounds,’ Terry says.

‘Maybe I should turn myself in.’ Jack laughs a dry damned laugh.

Terry puts his arm around him. He can smell Brut aftershave, and beneath it the safety of the special Terry smell.

‘No one but me and the protection squad police know where you are, Jack. They’re not going to find you, I promise. Nobody’s going to find you.’

Jack wonders if he should tell Terry about the man he thought was following him the other week. Shell said it was just her ex, though, didn’t she? And nothing’s come of it. Maybe it wasn’t anything at all, just paranoia. If he says something, and Terry takes it seriously, they might move him. He’ll lose everything: Shell, Chris, Steve the mechanic, the job, his room, this whole world. He’d rather take his chances. He doesn’t feel like he could do it all again even if there was another Michelle out there.

Neither of them much feels like going to the pub after that, so they ring for a pizza. It arrives with a pubescent on a moped, and a free bottle of coke.

Jack guesses closest to the time they get back to the yard. Under the rules of the bet, Chris owes him a pint. A small victory in a grey day. Someone’s written
www.washme.com
in the thick city grime on the side of the van. Chris thinks it’s funny. It aggravates Jack’s Internet anxiety.

‘Are you coming to the fireworks tonight?’ Chris asks. ‘I’ll buy you your winnings.’

‘I said I’d go somewhere with Shell.’

‘Bring her along. I’m meeting Steve and his mate Jed in the Crown at eight, and then we’re going over.’

Fireworks sounds like a good idea. So does company, Jack’s feeling too broody to want to be alone with Shell. She’d know something was up. ‘OK, let’s go and ask her.’

Shell agrees, but Dave shoos them rapidly out of the office. He’s got an angry red boil on the side of his neck, which is threatening to go volcanic. The office is erupting too, into pandemonium over some lost stock.

‘Ungrateful bastard,’ Chris mutters, when they’re back on the unit side. ‘We were heroes a few weeks ago. He’s forgotten that one pretty quickly.’

Three children, wearing faces like film orphans and dragging a go-cart, intercept Jack, as he starts to walk home from the drop-off.

‘Penny for the Guy,’ their leader says, in a plaintive voice that suggests some illness could take his feeble life at any moment.

Unless Fawkes was a teddy bear in a babygrow, the Guy is not a close likeness, although they’ve tried to biro a beard on to its worn beige face. Jack finds himself giving the boy a pound anyway, before he’s even thought about it. They all rocket off as soon as they have the money, as if afraid he’ll change his mind. The cart rattles behind them on twin tow ropes. Guy Fawkes would be unseated if his stunted legs weren’t sellotaped to the plank chassis.

The Crown’s busy, being opposite the park. Actually it’s called the Crow, the ‘n’ seems to have fallen off. Not a good omen, but Steve the mechanic and Jed have managed to secure a table. Jed’s thick-set, olive-skinned, shaven-headed and could look menacing. Only he doesn’t; he looks
friendly and familiar. He stands up to give Shell his chair and goes off to try and find another one.

Chris arrives last, grinning like Scooby-doo, and holding a plastic bag full of fireworks and cans. He shakes Jed’s hand, apparently he’s never met him either, and kisses Shell on the cheek. They talk about work for the next pint, having to explain about people and events to include Jed. He doesn’t seem to mind though, or else he puts on a good show of polite interest.

Shell says that Dave’s been going mad all afternoon. Apparently the missing stock is worth quite a lot of money. If it doesn’t turn up, then not only will DV Deliveries have to pay for it, but they could lose the contract with that company. It’s sobering for a second, but Chris and Steve the mechanic crack with laughter when she tells them how she christened Dave’s boil ‘Mini Me’, because it mirrors his bald, bright red head.

It’s raining when they cross over to the park, just before the fireworks are due. Some scallies are selling disposable plastic macs for two pounds a pop. Chris hands out sparklers and lagers from his Asda bag, as they make their way to the chunk of crowd that looks the thinnest. The field is already thick with mud; Jack’s glad he wore his work-boots, not his trainers, but realizes that he’s going to have to clean them before tomorrow.

A bonfire, big as a house, is burning ferociously; but ropes prevent anyone from getting close enough to enjoy its heat. Two fit birds, with horsy waxed jackets, sit sharing a spliff on inflatable armchairs. He sees Chris eyeing them, torn between his friends and the potential pull. Jed and Steve the mechanic light their sparklers and this seems to sway Chris, at least temporarily.

Jack tries to write his name with his sparkler. The letters leave a brief imprint on his eyes, but the blackness quickly swallows them. Only by scribing into the air again and again in rapid succession can he reach the level of permanence
required to see his whole identity at once. Jed slashes Zs in the air with his brand, like Zorro.

The display starts with a warning, safety instructions delivered through a loud speaker. Stuff that should be common sense, pounded out from fear of litigation. The last instruction is to not discharge any of your own fireworks. Chris manages to send off a rocket with a trailing whistle almost the second afterwards, and soft laughter ripples through the crowd nearby.

The official rockets shoot up in clusters. They crackle like high amp rice-crispies as they fire. Explode into bright, life-loving, punk-rock colours. Then drift slowly downwards like destroyed worlds. Jack is entranced. He holds Shell’s hand, but doesn’t murmur a word while volley after volley lights up the sky. When it’s all over the darkness looks more dark because of what it’s known.

‘Which were your favourites?’ Shell asks, as they meander back to the pub or the car, still undecided which.

Jack preferred the long bleached streaks, that flowed down like Tina Turner’s hair, and he says so. Shell laughs and squeezes his hand.

‘Best legs in the business, Tina Turner,’ Steve the mechanic adds, with sham sincerity.

‘What business, shipbuilding?’ Chris says. ‘She looks like she could carry a steel joist under each arm.’

Jack laughs out loud, and then again silently, when he hears Chris describe himself as ‘in logistics’, to answer the wax-jacketed girl he has his arm around.

But the humour is short-lived. Jack is suddenly struck with the sickness of his situation. Laughing at Chris for bending the truth in the hope of a pull, when Shell, the woman that he loves, knows nothing about him that’s true. Not even a name. It all comes down to nothing.

The good mood vanishes. Jack tells Shell he thinks they should go home.

‘See you tomorrow, Bruiser.’ Chris winks.

‘Yeah, see you,’ Jack says. He waves goodbye to Steve the mechanic and Jed, and the two girls whose partially deflated armchairs they are carrying.

Jack says he’s too tired to make love, when they get back to Shell’s. It’s the first time they haven’t had sex when they’ve been together since that first time. Shell’s brown-sugar eyes look hurt. Jack puts his arms around her and tells her that he loves her. He’s never said it before, except when he was on ecstasy, centuries ago. He means it too. He means it with a sadness that could swallow him if he let it.

Jack’s restlessness contradicts his claim of exhaustion, but that is the least of the untruths that bother him. He can’t get comfortable on the mattress. He feels like he’s lying on his lies. They niggle at his skin like fleas, trap nerves in his spine, infest his mind. When eventually he does fall asleep it is shallow and disturbed. Full of bitter dreams that are almost thoughts, they are so clear. Thoughts about her. About Angela Milton. He wakes in the morning more weary than he went to bed.

They’re running late. Shell seems pissed off. He doesn’t know if it’s because they’re stuck in rush-hour traffic, or because he didn’t have time to clean his boots; they’re dropping great lumps of dried mud on the Clio’s carpet. He’s trying not to move his feet, but Shell’s jerking the car around, in anger or a futile attempt to make up ground. They don’t speak when they get out. She kisses him, quite coldly, on the cheek, and tears off up to the office. Jack is left to trudge into the yard, leaving parts of a fireworks field in his wake.

It’s another drab day at work. They pass a series of cardboard signs, tied to trees and lamp-posts, advising the world that Simon is twenty-one. Chris asks Jack what he did for his twenty-first, and Jack replies with a seemingly blithe trickle of lies, that turn out to pool around his feet for the rest of the journey.

On the way back to base, Jack finds his stories are smeared across the windscreen with the fumes and the flies. They spoil everything he looks at. Even tainting his view of the moon-blue motorway markers, which point to ‘The North’, as if it were a destination in itself, as if it were attainable. And suddenly he realizes that this can’t go on. Maybe with Chris it can, at least for the moment. But not with Shell. If he loves her he has to tell her. Or what does love mean? And though he feels sick with the knowledge of what he has to do, for maybe the first time in his life he actually feels in control of the future.

He strides into the office, barely noticing a look of disdain from Dave, who asks what he wants. He just wants to see her. Of course he won’t tell her now, but she’ll know something has changed. One glance at his face will show Shell his resolve. He’ll ask to come round tonight. He’ll bring some wine. No, not wine, she has to see that he’s telling her only because he loves her and trusts her so completely. And then they’ll talk until the morning, in a way that he’s never talked to anyone. He’s going to be completely open with her, and she’ll understand him, because this was meant to be; maybe this moment is the culmination of it all. Everything happens for a reason, that’s what Terry says.

Dave says: ‘She’s ill. She’s gone home.’ His lip curls up as he touches the bulbous sticking plaster on his neck. ‘Now get out, and don’t come in here with your dirty boots on again. I’m not running a bloody escort agency.’