How the Trouble Started (8 page)

The Social on Wellgate is slipped between a shoe shop and a florist. It has a narrow, brown-tiled front and a dark corridor that leads to the unknown. Pubs are frowned on in our house and I can’t remember an occasion when Mum or I have ever been in one. A few pubs around town have shut up recently, they have grey grilles over the windows, but the ones in the centre are still open and ready for action. I settled myself out of the way, high up on the stone steps of Parrot’s Dentists where I could see up to the Red Lion and the Wagon, across to the Social, and down to the Dog, the Castle, and Romero’s fast food place. I’d brought a book with me because I knew it was going to be a long night, but I’d only been there twenty minutes or so before the drinkers began to appear, the street started getting busy and I had to put the book away. There was evidently a one-way system in place for drinking in Raithswaite and everyone travelled in a downward direction. The general order was Red Lion, Wagon, Social, Dog and then the Castle. I watched people moving in packs from pub to pub, chatting and pushing each other along. There were the smokers to watch too, coming in and out, borrowing lights, falling into conversation, groups merging together and slowly dissolving before growing again. I had to watch closely to make sure I didn’t miss Jake’s mum, but I was enjoying myself, it was fun to watch all this toing and froing in my town centre on a Saturday night. I gulped it down.
This
is what people did at the weekend, I understood. They didn’t all sit in with their library books and classical radio turned so low it sounded like an orchestra playing in a cave over the other side of a hill. They didn’t glower at the closed curtains when people shouted to each other in loud voices in the street. They
were
the loud voices in the street. It looked good fun to my eyes. Some of the women were spectacular in their shiny dresses and heels with their hair, big, smooth and glossy, almost sparkling. You could see the confidence a mile off as they strode their way along, bright shoes pointing forward. I enjoyed myself sitting up there, watching the night happen around me.

I’d been on the steps about an hour before I saw Jake’s mum making her way down the road. She was alone and unlike most people she bypassed the first two pubs and headed straight to the Social. She had on a dress and a pair of heels and there was colour on her cheeks, a redness to her lips, but there was none of the glamour or glitz of the other women to her. She was wearing the uniform, but it didn’t work like it should. Her skinniness let her down. Her flesh seemed limited to the amount that would just about cover her bones, and it made her look pinched and mean. There was nothing luxurious about her at all, not like the other women, who laughed and linked arms with each other and looked at men and didn’t care when they were spotted looking. Those women seemed to be having the time of their lives, like it was a Hollywood night out, not Raithswaite on a Saturday. Jake’s mum walked with her handbag clutched to her front, her eyes down to the pavement, glancing up only when she needed to, taking tight little steps through the town. And whilst I’m one to sympathise with the underdogs of the world, with the people in their cheap clothes, I couldn’t do it this time. All I could think of was Jake, at home, chips in his tummy, probably already in bed, lying under the sheets thinking about ghosts and ghouls and the terrors of the night.

I kept my watch on the Social front door and people came and went but Jake’s mum wasn’t one of them. At half eleven people started oozing out of the narrow entrance in a steady stream, looking for taxis, heading off down the road or joining the growing crowd at Romero’s. Town was shutting up and I had no idea where she’d got to. It wasn’t until the street was much quieter and Romero’s was down to its last few customers, and I was thinking that I must have missed her surely, that I saw her again. She came out of the Social with a huge man, a ponytailed man in a black shirt. He turned, pulled down a shutter over the entrance and locked a padlock. They walked back up Wellgate together, up towards the library and the square, and I followed. She nestled herself in towards him, he dropped one of his bulky arms around her tiny shoulder and I thought it must feel as heavy as wet rope. They walked slowly, in no rush to get anywhere, her looking up at him like he was the Blackpool illuminations, eyes wide, her lips smiling. I trailed them all the way to the wrong side of town and a house on the Faraday Estate. I thought about Jake, alone in the dark little house on Fox Street. I waited across the road for twenty minutes and when other people started turning up with cans and bottles, and music started seeping out from the house, I knew that nobody would be leaving any time soon.

I didn’t want to scare him but I could think of no way of getting to him that would scare him less. I picked the smaller stones, but he still looked terrified when he pulled back the curtain and peered down into the backyard. I dropped the rest of the stones to the ground and waved for him to come down. A minute later he opened the back door wide enough for me to squeeze through. There was a warm fuzziness to him and he looked slow on his feet and I knew I’d woken him up. I followed him through to the front room and we sat down. He reached for the light switch but I told him he’d better leave it. He looked at me blankly and I realised he might have thought he was dreaming. ‘I was walking through town,’ I told him, ‘and I saw your mum coming the opposite way, and I didn’t like the thought of you all alone so I thought I’d better pop in and check you were all right.’

‘You saw my mum?’

‘Yeah, she was out in town. I don’t think she’ll be coming back for a while.’

‘Is it still night time?’ he asked, and I was annoyed at myself for being as inconsiderate as his mum.

‘It’s after twelve,’ I told him, ‘it’s the middle of the night and I didn’t like the thought of you all alone in here. I thought you’d be frightened.’

‘I don’t like being by myself,’ he said.

‘Listen Jake, it’s important you don’t tell your mum I was here. I think she was upset at leaving you alone, and we don’t want to make it worse by letting her know I had to come and check up on you. We don’t want to upset her more, do we?’

He nodded and I couldn’t think of anything else to say and we sat on the couch in silence for a while, and it was like a bad date in a film and I regretted coming.

Eventually he asked, ‘Are we going to the haunted house?’

I’d been stupid. I shouldn’t have come like this. I should have told him what I’d been planning. The idea was to make him feel better, not unsettle him more. I told him it was far too late for the haunted house.

‘We should get you back to bed,’ I told him.

I pulled him up and we walked down the hall to the stairs. I had a good look around as he shuffled slowly along, and the house looked clean enough, as much as I could tell in the gloominess anyway, I had to give her credit for that. But there were no pictures or plants anywhere that I could see; there was nothing to make the place homely at all. It was brighter upstairs with the landing light and Jake’s bedroom light already on. His room was in more of a state than the rest of the house, but that was just young lads, I understood you couldn’t blame her for that. He climbed into bed and I sat down on the edge of his mattress and looked around the room. There wasn’t much to suggest it was a little boy’s room. If it wasn’t for the clothes scattered around you would’ve had a job to know at all; there were no toys or books anywhere. I didn’t notice the drawings until he’d snuggled himself up in bed. They were stuck above the bed and my heart slipped into my throat when I saw what he’d drawn in one of them. Pride of place in the middle of all of them was a drawing of me and Jake in the upstairs room of the haunted house. A big white ghost flying above us. I pointed and asked, ‘Is that one of us?’ Jake turned and looked and nodded and said, ‘In the haunted house.’ It was a mixture of feelings. I was pleased it was on his wall, that he’d thought about it enough to turn it into a picture, but it made me uneasy to see it in full view. ‘It’s brilliant that, Jake,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got a real talent there.’ He curled up in bed and hugged himself and said, ‘Thanks.’

‘Would you mind if I borrowed it for a few days so I can do a copy?’

‘You can have it. Are you staying?’

‘Shall I stay until you’re asleep?’

He nodded and put his thumb in his mouth and was quiet and still in seconds. I didn’t know he was a thumb sucker. I waited with him until I was sure he was asleep, tucked him in a little better and took the drawing down off the wall. I rearranged the other pictures so there was no obvious gap, had one more look at Jake and left the room. I kept the landing light on and walked down the stairs to the dark ground floor, through the kitchen and let myself out of the back door. I was tired by then, but not too tired to check. I made my way home via the house on the Faraday Estate. There was still music playing and loud voices coming from inside. A man and a 
woman
 left by the front door and snuck around the back holding hands and giggling. I left them to it and dragged myself home. I didn’t get in until about two in the morning and I knew I’d be for it when Mum got hold of me, but I also knew that it didn’t really matter much.

Trouble is worth facing down for something you believe in.

I should have been braver in the face of trouble once before. The whole thing still upsets me to this day and afterwards I decided I would always try to do the right thing, regardless of how much bother it could lead to. I’ve always loved animals but we were never allowed a pet. Mum said animals were mucky.

‘Cats aren’t,’ I told her, ‘cats are clean.’

‘Just because an animal has the instinct to bury its own mess doesn’t mean it’s clean Donald,’ she said. ‘Think about where they walk, what they get into, and then think of them prancing around the house on their filthy paws. And when you’re not there, jumping on your kitchen surfaces, sleeping on your pillows. Cats are sneaky creatures.’

The closest I had to a pet was Mr Mole’s dog, Scruffy, who I used to walk sometimes, but even Scruffy wasn’t allowed in our house, so I knew a pet of my own was unlikely. But the day I found the kitten I thought for a silly few seconds that if I took him home and Mum saw him, she might be persuaded to let me keep him. She would, of course, have screamed at the sight and made me get it out of the house straight away, but this was before the trouble and before all hope was extinguished from our world.
Maybe
, I thought, she would see the kitten and her heart would melt. But I never managed to get the kitten to the house. I wasn’t alone when I found him; I was with Reece Aighton.

It was a hot day and I’d been riding my bike on the waste ground behind the backs of the houses, wondering what to do for the rest of the afternoon, when Reece turned up. He lived in the new houses they’d built at the top of Hawthorne Road and was in the year above me at school. He never spoke to me at school but we occasionally bumped into each other at weekends, or in the holidays, and mucked around together for a bit before he would turn nasty and I would sneak off.

He was rich. His dad drove a little silver sports car and in the summer they would zoom up the road with the top down, both of them wearing sunglasses, looking straight ahead, like they owned every house on the hill. Reece always had money in his pocket and that afternoon an ice-cream van had been round and he’d bought himself a ninety-nine and a can. We put our bikes down and were sat by the corner of one of the garages so he could eat his ice cream and drink his drink. We were throwing stones to see if we could hit a bin that was sitting at the side of one of the garages opposite. Reece was annoyed because I’d hit it twice and he hadn’t got close. He didn’t like to lose, especially not to someone like me. He finished eating and stood up as a sign that he was going to start taking the game seriously. But then I hit the bin for a third time and his patience snapped and he started throwing stones at me. They stung and I told him to stop, but he was treating it like it was part of the game and said that I was being a crybaby. I was about to pick up my bike and ride off when we heard a small crying sound coming from behind one of the garages. Reece put his stones in his pocket and we went to explore. By the time we got behind the garage the noise had stopped and we had a root round but couldn’t find anything. Just as we were about to give up and head off the crying started again, near to my feet, and I got down on my hands and knees and had a look through the long grass. I found a grey kitten about a foot away from the garage wall, sat like a tiny statue, his tail wrapped neatly around his feet. Reece was at my side quickly and leant forward to give the kitten a stroke but a sharp claw shot up and swiped at his hand before he made contact. Reece pulled his hand away and held it up to have a look. There was a small tear with little blots of blood bubbling through.

‘He’s vicious,’ he said.

‘Probably just scared,’ I said. ‘He must have lost his mum.’

Reece peered down at him and said, ‘He doesn’t have a collar. Do you think he’s a wild cat?’

There were sometimes feral cats that ventured from the fields into the back lane and ate food from the bins.

‘He must be,’ I said.

Reece leant forward to try and stroke him again but this time the kitten got his claw in deep and Reece cried out in pain and took a swing with his foot. The kitten flew back and hit the wall of the garage and stayed put where he landed, looking stunned.

‘Don’t kick him!’ I said.

‘He needed to learn a lesson,’ Reece said, and shoved me over. I got myself up and looked at his face and saw that he was blinking away a tear. He looked as shocked as the kitten. He inspected his hand which had turned pinky-red around the edge of the new tear. He kicked the wall of the garage and shouted something that wasn’t a word and I knew that things were going to get worse and it was time to leave. I started to walk away. I was hoping to get rid of Reece and then come back and check on the kitten, maybe even rescue him and take him home.

‘Let’s go. You should get home and get your hand cleaned up,’ I said. Reece held up his hand like he was showing me a stab wound.

‘I can’t let him get away with that,’ he said, ‘don’t be stupid Donald.’

He threw a stone at me and then hit me on the arm. ‘He could attack anyone. Just think if he went for my little brother.’ I’d seen Reece’s little brother. A curly-haired four-year-old with a big head and thick arms and legs who would terrify the kitten more than the other way round. ‘He’ll be one of those gypsy cats anyway,’ he said, ‘and they carry diseases. I’ll probably have to have an injection for my hand. I might get admitted to hospital.’ He kicked the wall of the garage again. ‘We should put a stop to him before he attacks anyone else.’ He took a stone out of his pocket and threw it at the kitten. The kitten was trying to walk off, but was still dazed from the kick and was limping. ‘Go and get some stones,’ Reece told me. ‘You can’t leave me to do all the work. We need to stop him.’

‘He’s hurt. We should leave him. We’ll get into trouble.’ I could hear the whine in my voice and I knew that Reece would hear it too. He turned on me. ‘He’s hurt? I’m hurt! Is a dirty little gypsy cat more important to you than me?’ He hit me on my arm harder than before and rubbed a stone into my head until I cried out.

‘Go and get some stones,’ he said, his face close to mine, his breath sweet and cold.

‘I don’t think we should,’ I said.

‘Go and get some stones,’ he said, again. When I didn’t make a move Reece pushed me to the ground and we wrestled for a bit, but he was much stronger than I was. He pinned me down, his knees on my arms, his hands pushing my hands to the ground. He leant forward, brought up a glob of phlegm from the back of his throat, and spat it in my face. ‘Go and get some stones.’ I walked to the front of the garages, wiping my face clean with my sleeve as much as I could. My bike was lying on the ground. I looked up and saw the roof of my house and my bedroom window. I was ready to make a run for it when Reece appeared behind me. He pushed my arm up against my back until I thought it would snap and said, ‘Don’t make me tell everyone you were a pissy-pants coward Donald.’ He let go and I picked a handful of stones up from the gravel and followed him behind the garage. I was praying that the kitten had run off, but he hadn’t. Even then, when Reece threw the first stone as hard as he could, I was still thinking that I might be able to stop it.

A few months later, after the little boy, when I was back at school, I heard a rumour about myself. Reece had told everyone what happened, but he changed the story, so that it was me who was intent on killing the kitten and him who had tried to stop it. He told them that I smashed the kitten’s head open with a big rock and then kicked it into a stream. I don’t think anyone would have believed him even a few days before, but when I came back to the school I was already a killer and the kids were happy to start believing anything about me. Within a couple of days I’d gone from being a normal little kid who didn’t know how to stand up to a bad lad, to a murderer and a kitten killer. A psycho killer.