Boy A (7 page)

‘What was that?’ Jack asks, his bleary mind aware that something peculiar just happened.

‘An Elephant,’ says Chris. ‘A White Elephant. They’re supposed to be dead good.’

‘An elephant,’ Jack repeats. ‘I don’t understand. What d’you mean, an elephant?’

‘A pill, Dodger, that’s what I went to get. We’ve just had ours. I thought Steve had told you.’

‘I thought you were going to tell him,’ Steve the mechanic protests. ‘It was your present.’

It’s evident from Jack’s face that he’s not happy. Chris puts his arm around him: ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate, I should have said something earlier. I mean, I thought you knew. You being the bad boy, I assumed you’d be up for it.’

Jack doesn’t know what to say. He can’t tell them that he’s on licence for life; that any minor infringement of the law could put him back inside. He can’t say that he’s spent seven years, longer if you count the homes, trying to stay away from drugs. That Terry told him there were people who would use any blemish on his prison record to prove he
wasn’t reformed. How could he explain that he’s already dazed beyond belief with novelty, and battered by the alcohol, and that this night had been the best night of his life, but now it’s suddenly not?

But he doesn’t have to say all this because his eyes tell a tale; and Chris is drunk not stupid.

‘Look, it’s cool, Jack, it’s no big deal. We’ll be with you, we’re all in the same boat, and it’ll be wicked. Nothing bad’s going to happen. What could happen? Losing a bit of control never killed anyone.’

‘Yeah, no one dies on pills, unless they take like twenty and dance for two days and die of exhaustion,’ Steve the mechanic joins in. ‘Or they drink too much and drown, or not enough and overheat their brains. Or…’

Jack doesn’t know Steve the mechanic well enough to tell if he’s being very dry or very dense; but Chris says, ‘Steve!’ and raises an eyebrow, which is sufficient to shut him up.

‘It’ll be fine, Dodger,’ Chris says. ‘But we’re all getting a bit old for that peer group pressure shit. If you really don’t want to that’s no big deal either – go to the toilet and make yourself sick. Just bring that baby right up.’ Chris laughs. ‘You’re looking a bit worse for wear anyway, a nice chunder’ll probably do you good.’

The DJ shouts, ‘Scream if you want to go faster!’ like they used to on the waltzers at the fairground. People do scream. There’s a roar from the sunken garden; but Jack realizes that he doesn’t want to go any faster. That everything is moving quite quick enough for the moment.

‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I think I am going to go to the toilet.’

‘That’s cool,’ says Chris. ‘It’s not a problem.’ And he is clearly doing his best to organize his soused features into an expression of brotherly concern.

Jack was worried that he wouldn’t be able to make himself
sick. As soon as he smells the toilet bowl he realizes these fears were unfounded. Before he can even get his fingers near his mouth a sudden retch brings a beer-based stew gushing into the scarcely cleaner water.

‘Someone’s having a good time tonight!’ a stranger’s voice cackles from beyond the cubicle.

Jack spits to try and remove the swinging strands of mucus from his mouth. They cling like creepers, though, and he has to use the back of his hand to wipe them away, putting a stripe across a shirt cuff at the same time. He peers into the khaki swamp at the bottom of the bowl, hunting for the elephant. He can’t see anything pill-like, but the effort of interrogating the organic matter so closely brings forth another volley of vomit.

The sinks outside are coated in cups and screwed-up paper towels, but the water tastes flinty and fresh. Jack washes his hands and his face, and tries to clean off his cuff a bit. Beside him a skinny, ginger bloke is filling a plastic bottle with water. He is dripping with sweat, and chews gum with a bottom jaw that chomps sideways like a manic cow. His pupils are huge, like pebbles polished round and smooth, but with a warmth in them that makes a grin shoot across his still swaying mouth when he sees Jack looking at him.

‘It’s fucking heaven tonight, innit?’ ginger bloke says, with a real strong southern accent. But before Jack can even start to form an answer, the man is off, already dancing as he passes through the toilet door. Just as it’s about to close, he turns and shouts: ‘Be lucky, mate.’

It was the twelfth of December, the twelfth month.
A
was twelve. The electric clock/radio by his bedside table said 12:01.
A
was waiting for it to read 12:12, he hoped there would be some sense of cosmic rightness when it did.

At 12:11 there was a knock on the door. It was Terry,
A
could tell. He hadn’t known Terry long, but there was something calmer, more patient, that separated Terry’s knocks from the rest of the staff. He knocked from genuine politeness, not formality.

‘Come in,’
A
said, although the lock was on the other side.

Terry did. ‘It’s your mother,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this.’ Though he had just used the easiest, because
A
now knew the rest.

A
’s face froze, as it tried to catch up, as it tried to register the news. Then it crumpled, and while he considered this fresh blow, the tears came.

He had known for three months his mum was dying, but still it hadn’t steeled him to the shock. Neither had the long periods without seeing her. They had only made him miss her more. So he cried. He cried for her, he cried from guilt,
he cried from self-pity and he cried for the loss of his last link to love.

Terry put his arm around him. Like he meant it. Like he might be a new link.

The last time
A
’s mum had visited him in that home she reeked of perfume. As if by application of eau de toilette she could somehow persuade the staff she’d been a good mother. Maybe she was just trying to hide the stink of death. But perfume’s attraction lies in the smell of decaying fruit, and
A
could see she was disintegrating before his eyes.

She never wore make-up when she came to see him. It only ended in sad clown streaks. Probably she never wore it at all anymore. She didn’t know anyone in the town she’d been moved to, so why bother? She seemed like she didn’t even know his dad any more. She looked old, and
A
understood that she was old. Because although she was barely middle-aged, that word supposes another half of life to come; and his mother didn’t have this. She looked as ill as she was. The skin that hung limply from her face was a sallow yellow, the colour of congealed lard on unwashed dishes. When she told him that she had ovarian cancer,
A
could not dismiss the feeling that he was the seat and cause of this: the original cancer that came from those ovaries.

A
’s father had never visited. The first time that
A
saw him in eighteen months was at the funeral. He looked smart, that was what struck
A
first. He had never seen his dad in a suit, even at the trial. He looked too smart,
A
thought. He looked smarter than he looked sad. And he looked a lot smarter than he looked pleased to see
A
.

There were not many mourners. Both
A
’s parents were only children, and
A
their only child. All the grandparents were long dead. The whole family was genetically inclined to disappearing. And a lack of relations had helped his parents vanish too.

The motorcade was one car long. Two if you counted the car his mother was in; stretched out in the back of a black hearse. Three if you counted the undercover protection squad officers, who followed just in case.

Protecting who?

Terry rode with
A
and his dad, in leather luxury.
A
cried freely. His father looked out of the window.
A
wished that Terry would comfort him. But it was his dad’s job, not Terry’s. Even if his dad didn’t want it.

A
had not been into church since the day when it all began, but it brought back no memories. This new-town church was red brick and squat, tacked on to a town hall and leisure centre. The sign outside was solid and bold, freshly painted. Fresher than the decrepit-looking vicar, with his greasy grey curls and pocked cheeks.

Reverend Long shook the hands of Terry and
A
’s dad, clearly unsure which was the parent of this boy. He managed to squeeze sympathy into his smile for the adults, but
A
could see he just wanted the funeral to be over.

The three fathers followed the coffin-bearers in, and
A
followed them all. There were a few more people inside the church. Mostly from his mum’s new work,
A
supposed. New work, new identity, new town, new church, new life. She had a new life now, if you believed in that stuff.

The choir sang the ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ song. It was like a creature itself, a many-legged, many-backed white beast. Being a school day, it was mostly made up of the retired and the half-witted, over-enthusiastic substitutes.
A
couldn’t remember his mother ever having been religious; but she had enjoyed repeats of the television series about the vets. He pictured his mum and him curled side by side on the sofa. His dread of a new week at school had always spoiled Sundays, and at the same time made him savour every second. There were no Sundays left now. They were all piled into a wooden box with brass handles.

A
sat between his dad and Terry on the front pew. The vicar climbed the three steps to his oak soap box, and swallowed a burp, before saying: ‘Dearly beloved.’

This minister, who didn’t know
A
’s mother, spoke of things about his mother that
A
didn’t know. Things about her life before he was born, and since he’d been gone. Things that his dad must have told the vicar to say, things that left a space where a child should have fitted.

The Jesus behind Reverend Long’s head was full of space as well. Like the church itself, it was modern and simple and probably cost a lot more than it looked like. The cross was just two planks nailed together; and the figure of Christ on it was fashioned out of a single length of barbed wire. Like the thorny crown had spread all over his body. There was something frightening about the gap between the wire ribs, and the legs dangled spastically; badly made, as if the sculptor was already bored with his creation when he got to them.

A
pushed his hands into his empty trouser pockets, twisting the spiral of unravelling material that he’d discovered at his trial. It had been his security blanket, that spot in his pocket; at a time when security was all around him, and nowhere to be found. One of the papers described him as ‘nonchalant and arrogant’ at the end of the first week.
A
’s lawyer must have known this wasn’t true, but he was afraid the boy’s body language was wrong, and
A
had to keep his hands on his lap for the rest of the month in court. It didn’t make much difference to the jury.

The hole was deep. Six feet is not far up, but it’s a long way down. Brown water lay at the bottom, and a worm struggled to escape it.
A
wondered if the worm would be better off not fighting. Drowning was supposed to be quite pleasant, if you just let yourself go.

A
had gone into a gasping hiccuping state, where the tears no longer came. On the whole he preferred crying. When he cried he was less able to think about the pain.

A
’s mother had always told him that she wanted to be cremated when she was gone. She’d said she wanted her ashes thrown from Hartlepool pier, where his father had proposed. She hadn’t talked to
A
about it at all when she knew she was dying. He supposed she’d changed her mind. But he didn’t like the idea of her being eaten. Of the worms tugging themselves through her.

The bearers lowered the coffin down to plug the slit in the earth. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, his mother had told him once, when she was weeding her flower-bed.
A
realized by the graveside that his mother had filled a space in him. A vacuum that even nature refused. Maybe that anyone would refuse but a mother.

It was a hard sensation for a child to frame. It was a bit like when his father had taken down the hallway mirror.
A
had always glanced in it when he went past. Not from vanity,
A
was not equipped to be vain; more from brooding curiosity, to see what it was that made him so despised. After the mirror was gone
A
continued to look there for weeks, and the space always filled him with a yearning dread. When what he wanted was evidence that he existed, there was something horrific about finding just a blank wall, with a hole where a nail had been. That’s how it was when he buried his mother.

It had been frosty for days. He could still see the caterpillar tracks in the grass of the miniature JCB they’d had to use for the grave.

On the vicar’s direction,
A
and his father both took a handful of the hard earth. Which scattered and bounced on the coffin lid, like a soft drum roll. But nothing happened. There was no trick, no Paul Daniels to make it not be true.