Ostrich Boys (3 page)

Kenny pulled a face like I was a moron. And maybe I was. Who knew?

“I don’t want those three ever to forget what they did to Ross, okay?” Sim said. His eyes had taken on their snooker-ball stare. “I want all their neighbors and anybody who walks past their house to know all about it too. And every time they clean it off, we’re just gonna go back and spray it on again. And again. Every night if we have to.”

Kenny wasn’t too sure he liked that. “I can’t do it on school nights. You know my mum won’t let me out if it’s school the next day.”

Sim gritted his teeth. “Christ-on-a-bike, Kenny …” He turned and stalked away toward the leisure center.

Kenny looked at me.

“You’ve pissed him off,” I said.

He looked worried. “You started it.”

And we had to run to catch up.

“You know what I thought was weird about the funeral?” Kenny asked. “The vicar. Didn’t you think he was weird? He could’ve been talking about me, couldn’t he? Or anybody, really.”

“I bet he’d never even met Ross,” I said.

“Yeah, exactly. That’s what I mean. He was going on and on about this kid who walked and talked and went to school, but it could’ve been anybody. He made Ross sound like this paint-by-numbers person who hadn’t been painted in yet.”

“Vicars probably use the same speech for everybody,” Sim said. “Doesn’t matter who you are.”

“They should have asked
us
to say something,” Kenny said. “We knew him best.”

And that was the real point, wasn’t it? As Ross’s best friends we felt we should have been included. But we’d been lost in the crowd.

“Maybe we should have been the only ones there,” Kenny said.

Sim laughed through gritted teeth.

We kept to the walkway alongside the beach, round the
back of the leisure-center car park, wanting to stay away from the main road in case someone had discovered our graffiti and a Munro was on the hunt. Then when we crossed the miniature-railway lines and turned away from the beach I realized that, despite what I’d said earlier, Sim was still leading us to Chichester Road and Nina’s house.

Kenny said: “They definitely should’ve stopped teachers from going. All except his mum, I mean.”

“She’s not a teacher,” I told him. “She’s a lecturer, at the college.”

“Same difference. But I suppose it was all right Miss Dean being there. Ross always said he thought she was okay.”

“She’s a librarian,” Sim said. “They’re not teachers; they don’t give you half as much hassle. If there’s a fire in the school and I’ve got to choose who I’m gonna save—a teacher or a librarian—the teacher’s gonna burn every time.”

Kenny and I agreed. Harsh but true.

“He didn’t fancy Miss Dean, though,” Kenny said. “She just let him borrow loads of books all the time.”

“That’s kind of what librarians do, Kenny.”

“Funny, Blake, funny. You know what I mean. She let him have extra books—more than other people. He was
always
reading.”

“He wanted to be a writer,” I said. “I guess you have to read a lot of books to be a writer.”

Sim was angry again. “And that was something else about the funeral, wasn’t it? When they got that girl from Year Eleven to read out his story.”

“Janine somebody,” I said. “They chose her because she’s always in the school plays. I heard she’s supposed to be going to drama school next year.”

Sim didn’t care who she was or what she did. “Smug cow—I can’t stand her anyway. They should’ve asked one of us to read it. And it wasn’t even his best story, was it? I’ve read all his stories; I would’ve chosen a better one.”

“Didn’t his dad choose it?”

“Yeah, well, proves what
he
knows. And it was the way everyone was clapping that really pissed me off.”

Kenny didn’t understand what he meant.

“People were always having a go at him about wanting to be a writer, weren’t they? People like Munro. Always giving him grief. But after that smug cow read his story they all sat there clapping and saying how good it was.”

“She probably thought they were clapping her,” Kenny said. “I was clapping the story. And they were all pretenders. Hypocrites, I mean.”

“Everyone there was a hypocrite,” Sim said.

“Except us.”

“Obviously.”

We walked by the abandoned paddling pool—these days the only thing to paddle in was litter—and headed down to the boating lake. The water was still, black and shiny. It
might have been painted on. Ducks grumbled at us for coming so close, unimpressed with being disturbed.

I believe I’ve been let down a lot by adults: by parents who don’t listen, teachers who don’t care and strangers who
presume
. But this afternoon had felt like a genuine betrayal. How could they have let it happen? It was shit to think that Ross would have been disappointed in his own funeral.

And nobody had even bothered to ask us our opinion. We were his best friends, we knew him better than anybody. When his parents were giving him hassle, when he got into trouble at school, when Sean Munro and the other morons were battering him, he came to us. Because we were his friends. We knew everything about him. But after they’d burned him up, they didn’t even ask us how we felt.

“Maybe you’re right, Kenny,” I said. “Maybe it should’ve just been us there today.”

We crossed over the lake on the wooden double-humped bridge in single file, our feet loud on the planks. Kenny spat over the side and watched the small ripple he made on the water’s surface. We used to hang around here a lot when we were younger, during the summer holidays, what with Ross and Kenny living not so far away. I wondered what we’d be doing this summer without Ross. For the first time ever, I wasn’t looking forward to it. We skirted the kiddies’ sandpit and scrambled up the small grass slope back onto the main road. The Wellow Hotel at the top of Chichester Road was opposite.

“Maybe that’s what we should do,” I said. “Have the kind of funeral that Ross would really want.”

And that was when it all fell into place: the lightbulb lit up.

“In
Ross,”
I said. I grabbed Sim’s arm. “We could give him a real funeral. A proper one.” I got hold of Kenny too. “But we do it in Ross, in Scotland.”

They looked at me like I was cracking up.

“Don’t you get it? We’ll take Ross to Ross, just like he always wanted. There’ll be no vicars, no teachers, no parents—just us, his best friends. Doing something for him he always wanted to do. A proper memorial.”

Even in the dim light I could see Sim liked the idea. He nodded, beginning to understand what I was getting at. “We could, couldn’t we?”

Kenny seemed less convinced. “But he’s dead. He was cremated.” He spoke like I was a child. “How’re we supposed to take him to Scotland when he’s in an urn?”

Sim let a slow grin slide across his face. “We steal him. Right?”

I grinned too. “Exactly.”

Kenny groaned.

Ross’s urn was sitting on the table in front of me. And as soon as his sister turned her back I was supposed to steal it. And him.

At the moment she wouldn’t even let go of it. She kept touching the smooth sides, rubbing it like Aladdin rubbed his lamp—as if she was hoping Ross might leap out, same as the genie always did.

It was old-fashioned-looking, squat but curvy, marble white with swirls of gray. I couldn’t stop staring at it. And weird thoughts kept popping into my head. Like, did he fill it to the brim? He was a skinny fifteen-year-old; if he’d been a twenty-eight-stone fat knacker, would he spill over? Would it matter if I shook him up? Could you tell the difference between arm ash and leg ash? Freaky thoughts—but I couldn’t stop myself thinking them.

Yet, in a way, they were the easier thoughts too. The
truth of Ross being gone forever, of my best friend being nothing more than ash in a jar, still felt impossible and bizarre.

“I don’t like thinking this is really my little brother,” Caroline said, as if reading my mind. “I want to pretend it’s more like something he’s left behind to remember him by.”

I nodded and mumbled something close to an agreement, and felt thankful she was willing to talk over my awkwardness. I’d been scared she might think it was kind of sick, kind of creepy for me to turn up and ask if I could see the urn. But now I reckoned she couldn’t stop wanting to look at it either. It was horribly magnetic that way.

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, pulling it back into a hasty ponytail. She had a wide forehead, a thin, straight nose and a point to her chin. She was a slice-of-birthday-cake prettiness. But it was crumbling away beneath the tears.

It was a glorious June Saturday morning and the sun streamed into the kitchen through the window over her shoulder, making her untidy hair glow in a hazy mess. It was hot out there, and it was close and stuffy in here. My T-shirt was sticking to me. I’d been in this kitchen a hundred times at least, enough that I never noticed what stood on the shelves anymore. But it didn’t feel like the same kitchen today. All the doors and windows were shut tight. The whole house felt claustrophobic. The sadness that filled it was like a suffocating pillow pushed down over my face.

“Yesterday made it true,” she said. “I think up until the funeral yesterday I could pretend it wasn’t real. Or was just some kind of stupid mistake.”

It was the way I’d felt too. The funeral had made the past week solid, undeniable fact. Which was yet another reason for hating the crappy funeral.

She dug in her pocket for a tissue, then turned away from me as she blew her nose and wiped at her tears. Seeing her cry made me wonder if I should admit to her what we were planning. I liked her. If there were going to be sides, maybe she should be given the chance to choose ours.

Not that I got to say anything, because Sim’s face appeared at the window behind her. He was wearing sunglasses, peering inside. He waved to get my attention and tried to mouth something at me but I couldn’t read his lips. Then Kenny poked his head up next to him and the two of them started waving, signaling, desperate to tell me something. Caroline was digging for a second tissue. I glared at Kenny and Sim, hoping they’d get the message to get lost before she saw them.

“I honestly thought I would have run out of tears by now,” she said. Half smiling, but not meaning it. “Do you think you’ll ever get used to it?”

I was too busy trying to figure out what Kenny and Sim were telling me.

Caroline looked up. “Blake?”

I nodded, ducking my head so she’d follow my eyes back
to Ross on the table instead of to the window over her shoulder. “Yeah. Sorry, I’m, you know … What did you say?”

“It doesn’t feel right without him,” she said, reaching out to touch the urn again. “The house feels empty; I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to him not being here. It must feel weird for you too, because you were his best friend. School must be strange without him. Do you think you’ll ever get used to him not being there?”

I stared at the urn. “No.” I shook my head hard enough to stop any slippery tears of my own from escaping. “No.”

“Because you were always together, weren’t you? You and Sim, and that other boy.”

“Kenny,” I told her. “Kenny England.”

She nodded and I looked back over her shoulder at the two of them waving and miming at me. Kenny was wearing a bright orange T-shirt that was far too big for him. He was drowning in it, the baggy sleeves coming down to his elbows. He kept shaking his arm at me, flapping the sleeve like a wing.

Caroline nodded. “Ross was lucky to have friends like you.”

I met her eyes, wanting to know if she really meant that. She’d always called him Little Brother, never Ross. She was seventeen and I’d expected us to be just stupid kids to her; she only put up with us because she had to, because we were her brother’s friends. And, of course, Kenny, Sim and I fancied her—much to Ross’s amusement (and sometimes
annoyance). She was on the county netball team and we went to watch her play every chance we got. We didn’t give a damn who won. She just looked fantastic in her PE kit.

I remembered Ross once saying, “I bet I wouldn’t have any friends at all if my sister was a dog.” And with hindsight, maybe one of us should have told him it wasn’t true.

She didn’t look much like my stunning netball fantasy today. She was wearing a shapeless jumper and stretched, scruffy jogger’s pants. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Her sadness made her ugly. And I knew she’d had a big bust-up with Ross last week, and she might just be feeling guilty about that. But she didn’t seem to be feeling sorry for herself. The way she talked was the way I felt. It made me feel kind of protective toward her—I wanted to cure her of her grief like Kenny, Sim and I were going to cure ourselves of ours.

She gripped the urn in both hands. “You know, I can remember so many things about him now. Little things, I mean. Things that happened on holidays or just funny things he said that I swear I’d never have remembered in a million years if he hadn’t … if he was still … It’s like, if he was still here, I wouldn’t need to remember them. Maybe wouldn’t have even wanted to.” She gave that half-smile again, which was nothing like a smile, really. She was fighting the tears again. “Weird, isn’t it?”

I nodded and decided I really was going to tell her about our plan. I even opened my mouth to spill everything, but
we heard keys rattling in the front door, and then the door open.

“My dad’s home,” she said, getting up. “He’ll want to see how Mum is. But you can stay—he’ll be really pleased you’re here.”

I’d hoped I could avoid having to see Ross’s mum or dad. “I thought your dad was at work.”

“No, he’s been at the police station. They called really early this morning.” It was lucky she was already halfway out the door because then she couldn’t see the look of sudden horror on my face.

All I could think was either Munro senior or Mr. Fowler had called the police about the graffiti. And of course the first people the police would contact about it would be Mr. and Mrs. Fell. It was their son’s name sprayed over other people’s property, after all. I waited in the kitchen, expecting Mr. Fell to come charging through to accuse me. I racked my brain for a convincing alibi. But I heard footsteps going upstairs and guessed he wanted to see Mrs. Fell first. But did that mean he didn’t know what we’d done last night? Or was he just asking her opinion on what to do with us? She’d always been the strict one.