Graffiti My Soul (21 page)

Next minute, he's faffing about trying to get something out of his briefcase, but I've prised it out of his hand and flung the thing over the fence into Auriol Park before he manages to flip the second catch. Combination locks are the bomb for people like me. Secure as you like, but no good in an emergency.

Probably lucky he didn't get his hand inside and make contact with the pepper spray or whatever it was he was after. He's so angry he would have been lethal with it. Eyes bulging like a maniac. Hands stiff and outstretched like the Auriol Frankenstein, ready to grab my throat. I've got all the respect in the world for technique, those self-defence masters that are all about showing you
the right thing to do
, that
preparation is the best defence
, which is why I haven't taken any of his abuse seriously. Why I don't feel the threat. No amount of self-defence seminars are gonna prepare you for my level of preparation. It's why I've floored him even before he's finished speaking and drawn breath.

But then he's running after me, so I may have been projecting when I said that he was lumbering. He's on his feet quicker than a
person his age should be. Sprints after me as I head into the park. Probably not a bad thing. Gives the old boy the chance to have a bit of a run round. Tire him out a bit. I'll get him on the floor again, easy.

My heart probably shouldn't be pumping the way it is; like one of those cheesy Vegas showgirls giving a succession of rapid-fire high-kicks. Thump thump thump thump thump. No let-up. I'm not scared exactly, but I'm feeling the pressure. Most of the time you punk someone, they stay on the ground inert, like a broken doll. I'd long stopped holding out for that extra variable, where they'd get up and start getting all vigilante on my arse.

This is what fucks my head up. I start thinking too much about the piousness of the Surrey viligante who wants to keep the streets clean. Who probably wants to keep the streets white. I start seeing red . . .

I probably go a bit too far when his mouth becomes filled with blood, but that's always been my problem: obsessive attention to detail. It's cool that he has my scarf as his own little souvenir of Punking #2, as I have another one exactly the same at home. It's soaked with his own blood anyway. I only would have slung it. Who's gonna think that a kid will have the brains to buy two of the same scarf six months earlier, just in case? Will he be able to identify the silver Mongoose I rode off on? No problem if he can, as I lifted it earlier from outside the video shop. I ride a mountain bike, and it's stayed in the garage all night, wheels bone dry, not an ounce of dirt on it. Walk my shoes in the mud round my way so they can't place me round Auriol's green spots. Down to the details, every last one.

This isn't the work of a criminal mastermind. I just gave it a little thought before I came out. Grown-ups are always asking kids to think before they act. They shouldn't ask such things of us if they're not going to like what they get.

59

I know even before she's said a word that she's had a drink. I get this feeling when I put my key in the door of what kind of afternoon I'll be having. When Dad left, there was a couple of years when I'd get that feeling every day. We lived this real-life Groundhog Day for longer than we should've. The reason I spent so much time at the Harrier Centre when I should have been up in my room reading about dinosaurs or battering my Playstation. I had to go somewhere.

Since secondary, the feeling's evaporated, and I forget about the sharp intake of breath pulling from deep in my chest as I shut the gate and walked to my front door. It's nearly banished to memory, bar the odd day when someone's made some thoughtless remark that she takes to heart and then mulls over, like whoever it was had pinpointed her exact place in life, leaving it down to me to get some food and coffee down her and re-set her axis.

Now I'm a grown-up boy, I'm an expert at it. But I won't lie, there are days when I'm on some fucking high cloud, like you've had a good race, or an afternoon where you've clicked with a girl, and you get home, and turn the key in your lock and sense immediately that she will be on the sofa with a wine glass, and all your good spirit disappears, popping loud and clear and irretrievable like a needle stuck into a balloon. All the private things that made you feel happy earlier no longer exist. All you can do is assess the state of the drunk woman and try for the thousandth time to sort her life out. (And start mentally planning on when you are going to get the hell out.)

Also, the hall light is on. We only have that light on downstairs when someone is getting ready to leave the house. You put the key in the lock, and clock the hall light on through the glass panels in the door, lights on in the middle of the day, and you know that she
must be distracted and feeling careless about wasting electricity, and if she's feeling that way about electricity . . .

If I'm too happy or wrapped up in myself to listen to my sixth sense, the clue is in the light. Always in the light.

‘I've done a terrible thing,' she says, not waiting for me to sit down. When she talks in that deep tone, hoarse, using the back of her throat, like she's channelling a dead spirit or something, you know it's going to be something heavy, not some stupidness about one of the old coots on her rounds calling her a stinking Jewess or anything.

‘Please don't tell me you've hit someone in your car,' because that had happened before. A cyclist whose wheel she clipped and then pegged it before he could get her details. On her way to do a fill-in shift and well over the limit. If she had to care for people under the age of seventy-five, someone would have sniffed out the problem a long time ago. Maybe that's why she's still there. So the only person who has to deal with it is me.

‘Nothing like that,' she goes, but she's still using the voice. She's also still not looking at me.

We both talk to the TV in these situations. It's much easier than staring anyone in the face.

‘I've made a fool of myself.'

‘How? At work?' ‘No. Last night. At Billie's.'

‘At Billie's? Look, can you just turn
Countdown
off for a moment? I can't hear you over that racket.'

‘There's no need to shout at me like that in my house, Veerapen. I'm not a child.'

‘I'm not shouting at you. I just want you to turn the sound down on the TV so that I can hear you better. That's it . . . So, at Billie's?'

‘I looked like such an idiot.'

‘No disrespect to Billie, but she's not got anything to brag about. She's a mess.'

‘Don't start mouthing off, Veerapen. Those are our friends. That family has been good to us.'

‘I know.'

‘And it wasn't anything to do with Billie, or even at her house.'

‘You just said you made a fool of yourself at Billie's.'

‘It was on the way home.'

‘I don't understand. What's that got to do with Billie?'

‘Don't be so impatient and I'll tell you. She was in one of those moods where you could see she'd been anxious and upset all day, so as soon as we arrived, she was trying to get us all drunk. Make the house merry, she kept saying. I was driving and wasn't in the mood to get smashed, but you know how it is when she gets an idea in her head and wants pleasing.'

‘Please don't tell me the pair of you were getting trashed all evening like a couple of teenagers.'

It's far easier to talk about getting trashed with Mum if we include Billie. Makes it all sound far more casual and accidental. We've done this before. It's another conversation that I'm an expert at.

‘She was trying so hard to be the life and soul. It was pathetic. The woman is seriously depressed, she needs professional help.'

‘Yeah, we know all that. What does that have to do with you, and what's going on here now?'

‘It wasn't just me and Billie there. She'd invited someone else.'

‘Keith?'

‘How would you know that?'

‘What other bloke's going to spend any time round that house?'

‘You're getting very rude about people as you get older.'

‘Lucky guess. I met him with Jason down the Bowl and he couldn't stop asking about her. So this is about Keith?'

‘He walked me home because, in trying to be a good sport for Billie and act the perfect house-guest, I'd managed to get myself over the limit. I could have got home easily enough, it's only a few roads, but Keith wouldn't have it. I was clicking the locks on my key, and he kept pulling the keys out of hand and clicking the locks back. It was so funny.'

‘Sounds hysterical.'

‘Will you stop taking that tone with me? I'll ground you otherwise.'

‘OK, I'm sorry. So what happened? He walked you home, right?'

‘I let him keep the keys and he drove me home before walking to the bypass to catch a bus. His car's in the garage or something.'

‘That all sounds fine. So what's making you so upset?'

‘I'm getting to it.'

‘Have you eaten today? Can I get you something to eat? I could make a sandwich, or put that soup in the microwave.'

‘Don't change the subject, Verapen. You're just like your dad, always wanting to talk around the subject, never tackle it head-on. I'm trying to tell you something here.'

‘I'm not talking around anything. I'm listening.'

‘No, you're not, you're just making noise with your mouth. Yak yak yak, that's all it is.'

‘I'm listening, Mum. You either want to tell me or you don't.'

Mum turns off the TV and switches on the light so that we're no longer in darkness. She hasn't combed her hair since she got up, but she doesn't look ill, tiredness overtaking the drunk state; if you were peering through the window, you'd see a lazybones with a bad case of bed head, nothing more. Once we get the lights on, her moving off the sofa to do it, me taking her cue and putting the kettle on, I know we're getting somewhere, movement being the enemy of all wallowing. Get a drunk to start acting useful and you divert all kinds of catastrophe, so long as it's restricted to light-switching and TV control, rather than boiling pasta or giving you a lift to the shops.

The first thing I do is pour the rest of the wine down the sink. It's not even the decent stuff, just a nasty bottle of no-brand Chardonnay bought at the Co-op down the road. It was Mum who taught me about wine, that's how come I can be such a snob about it, and why I get so hurt when, not for the first time, it sinks in how quickly she must have bought that bottle. Probably picked it up without even looking at it. (Which explained a previous time a
couple of years back when I got home to find her mopping up the remains of a bottle of non-alcoholic that she'd thrown against the wall on realising that she was living the haste/speed conundrum.)

So I get busy with the teabags and listen as Mum tells me how she made a pass at Keith in her car outside our house at ten thirty-five p.m. How he reciprocated and came indoors. How it was over by eleven. How they never even made it up to the bedroom.

Because I have some kinda respect, I'm silent, but I'm heaving so hard my guts have spilled from my throat and loop round my neck like those big thick hippy rope necklaces the girls are wearing these days. I'd look almost fashion forward, until you realised that I've just scopped my insides out on hearing my Mum talking about shagging on the sofa I've just sat on.

‘Why are you telling me this? D'you want me to become more fucked up than I am already?'

‘I thought we had a close enough relationship for me to be able to tell you these sorts of things. You're not a kid any more.'

‘But I'm still
your
kid! It's not the sort of stuff I want to be talking about. Haven't you got a girlfriend you can spill your guts to?'

‘Yeah, Billie.'

‘Yeah, OK. I get the picture.'

‘Also, in a
gloriously
sick twist, your father called just after eleven. God, he's got a sixth sense that man. Keith had just that second left and he was on the phone.'

‘What's he doing calling after eleven?'

‘Trying to get hold of you. You don't return his calls, do you, Mister I-don't-have-a-father? You're always out. He thought he'd get you at that time of night.'

‘Great. Now he's calling all-hours. Thanks for the message.'

‘You don't get it, do you? As soon as I heard his voice, I crumbled, told him what had just happened. That's why we're having this conversation now, so that you hear it from my mouth, not his. So you don't get a distorted, agenda-filled account of what happened.'

‘I'd rather you both kept it to yourself, to be honest. I'm sure I don't need to hear this.'

‘D'you think I want to be telling you these things? Private things? But I've been going crazy turning it over in my head all day. Had to call in sick because I couldn't face having to pretend everything was OK, and then half the day's gone, and you're home, and you talk about wanting to help, so . . .'

‘I get it. Calm down.'

‘I am calm, Veerapen. Stop talking
at
me with that tone. I might be feeling vulnerable, but I don't need to be patronised, thank you very much.'

‘Sorry. Does this mean that you're going to stop seeing Mike and start seeing Keith? I thought you said Mike was all right.'

‘Don't you listen to anything? The reason that I'm in this state is because I know I've made a mistake. Mike's a great man, a really kind man. I never had any intention of hurting him. But everything with him has been moving so quickly, the Keith thing caught me on the hop.'

‘What kind of explanation is that?'

‘I was . . .'

‘It's fine.'

‘I was . . .'

‘Really, you don't have to go any further.'