The Summer We All Ran Away (15 page)

“Of course he wants to go. Don't you, Davey?”

The coward knew to say
yes, I'm really looking forward to it
. The rebel wanted to suggest that his mother should take him, and give James some time off to go shopping. Their compromise was a mutinous silence. It lasted only a second, but in that second he knew he was caught.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said James wearily.

“He's only nine,” Helen began.

“Nine's old enough to appreciate a nice gesture! We always said – haven't we always said? – we always said we will not raise our son to be a bloody spoilt brat.”

Helen put a hand on James' arm. It amazed Davey that she was so comfortable touching him. It was like watching someone petting a scorpion.

I'm not your son
, he thought.

“Davey, James is right. You are sounding quite ungrateful. He's gone to the trouble of finding a really nice day out for both of you - ”

He didn't find it, he didn't! Someone just mentioned it to him!

“ - and all you do is look like he's taking you to prison for the day. What's the matter with you?”

“N-n-n - ” A deep breath, “ - nothing.”

“Something's the matter, or you wouldn't look like that. Stop looking so bloody miserable!”

Of course I look miserable, I am miserable! You're yelling at me and you made my mother yell too! How am I supposed to look?

“Sorry,” said Davey, burying his nose in his glass of milk.

“I should think so too,” James said, and disappeared back behind his paper. Davey watched his mother out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes after a squall she would make eye contact with him and give him a reassuring smile or a wink, telling him that she still loved him and that she was still
on his side
. Not today. He slid off his chair, took his plate to the dishwasher, and started upstairs to his room.

Passing the dining room he heard James again. He was angry, and that meant he was almost certainly talking about Davey. Davey stopped to listen.

“I'm serious, Helen, he was sat right there watching you! Waiting for you to give him a little smile and let him off the hook! He's trying to get around us by going to you behind my back.”

“I backed you up, didn't I? I told him he was being rude. What more do you want?”

“I want you to not undermine me. He's got to learn we're a team. He can't get away with splitting us up like that. If we're not consistent, he'll never learn. He's ungrateful, he's getting spoilt. We're trying to give him a nice life and he doesn't appreciate it. It's not on.”

“He's a good boy.”

“He's not a bad boy, but he's got to learn. He's nine years old, for Christ's sake, what's he going to be like when he's a teenager? We've got to get control of this now or - is he listening outside?”

Davey scrabbled madly for the stairs, but James was too quick for him. He knew now there was no escaping, he was going to be hit. Crying made James angrier, but he couldn't help it. He was only nine years old, and James was strong.

“Right, then,” said the climbing instructor, friendly and encouraging. “You're all strapped up. Off you go.”

Davey hadn't known what to expect of an indoor climbing centre, but he had certainly not been prepared for the sheer vertical reach of the wall, studded with lumps of moulded plastic. He had no idea where to start. James tutted impatiently, took Davey's right hand and forced it onto a large orange hold above his head.

“There,” he commanded. He seized Davey's left hand and jammed it roughly onto another hold. “Now put your feet up, here - ” His fingers gouged into the flesh of Davey's calf. He would have bruises later.

“Now pull yourself up,” said the climbing instructor. “Come on, you can do it, that's it.”

Painfully, Davey inched upwards. There were holds everywhere, cheerful primary colours like nursery school toys. His legs ached and his fingers trembled. James climbed swiftly beside him, his face right by Davey's shoulder.

“Come on,” said James. “Keep going. Go for that one there.
No, not that one, you'll never get anywhere,
that
one.” Again Davey's hand was seized. He clung to the one remaining handhold in a panic. “Stop being such a wimp, you're not going to fall, now reach up here, like that - ”

His arm was stretched painfully high, his fingertips sore and throbbing. He was secure, but stranded, stretched long and tight like a squashed spider. Now James' fingers grabbed at his ankles again, forcing his knee to bend. His kneecap crunched painfully against the wall and he cried out. James slapped his leg irritably.

“Give over complaining, it wasn't that hard. It's your own fault for not concentrating. Foot on here. Here.
Here!”
Another slap. “If I can climb this wall
and
hold you on
and
show you where to put your hands and feet, you can at least listen and do as you're told. Use that leg to push up - ”

They climbed higher, higher, higher. Davey's arms were pulling out of their sockets and his legs were elastic bands. James was right beside him, pushing, pulling, grabbing, crushing, jabbing, taunting, criticising. Occasionally the instructor shouted up encouragement. The holds grew sparser. James was forcing him to reach and stretch further than he had ever thought possible. He whimpered in pain.

“Give over,” James hissed. “Fuss about bloody nothing. We're nearly at the overhang.”

Davey squinted up at the looming out-swelling of brown-painted fibreglass. He remembered looking at it from the floor. It was dangerous to be up here. They were too high. They were too high.

“We'll go up to it and touch that blue hold on the end. Then we'll climb down again. Alright?”

He couldn't move. He was frozen to the spot. He glanced down, saw the rope snaking out behind him, felt his palms turn damp.

“Come on. Don't freeze. Move. Move!”

“I c-c-c-can't,” he whimpered. “I'm scared.”

“What the hell are you scared of? You're on a safety rope,
you can't fall. Get moving.”

“I can't! I can't, I can't, I can't, get me down, I c-c-c-can't d-d-do it, I w-w-want to g-g-g-get d-d-d-d-d-down.”

James peeled Davey's fingers off the hold and pulled his arm up above his head. Davey struggled and sobbed.

“Stop it,” James hissed. “You're making an idiot of yourself, and you're embarrassing me. Stop panicking, do what I'm telling you and you'll be fine.”

“I c-c-c-c - ”

“Grab on there. There. Right? Right. Now this hand. Come on. Let go. Let go!”

Beyond speech, Davey shook his head.

James thrust his face right into Davey's. Davey closed his eyes in terror.

“Look at me. Look at me! Stop that silly performance and look at me!” Davey shook his head stubbornly. “How do you expect me to help if you won't follow a simple instruction?”

“I want mum.”

“Well, mum's not bloody here, is she? It's just you and me. So you're going to do what I say for once and stop trying to hide behind her! Now listen. Listen! Give me your hand. Give it to me! And stop that stupid noise, you're safe!”

Davey clenched his fingers even tighter around the grip and shook his head.

“Right,” said James, his voice dangerously calm. “If you're going to be such a little brat about it, I'll show you how ridiculous you're being.”

And he slid one strong, sinewy arm in the space between the moulded fibreglass and Davey's hunched body, and pushed Davey off the wall.

“I've never been so embarrassed in my life,” James said to Davey, threading the car deftly through the late afternoon traffic. “Will you stop that bloody racket? I don't know what you're upset about, I'm the one who should be upset. Telling everyone I pushed you.”

“But you
did,”
Davey whispered.

“You what?”

“You d-d-d-did push me.”

James stared at him. Davey wiped tears from his face and stared back.

“You p-p-p-pushed me off the w-w-wall,” he repeated. “With your arm.”

To their left was an abandoned pub, windows boarded up, sign faded to a pale greenish blur. James wrenched the wheel sharply left and cut across angry traffic to bring them to a screeching halt in the empty car park.

“Listen to me,” he said, his finger inches from Davey's face. “I did
not
push you off that wall.”

Davey was baffled. Did James really not remember doing it? Or was he remembering wrong?

“But - ”

“I didn't push you,” James continued, “because there was no way you could fall. All I did was to demonstrate to you that you were safe. I did it because you were being stupid, and not listening. Do you understand?”

Davey was speechless. A sign above the car declared that these premises were protected by SCAMP security.

“Do you hear me? I didn't push you. I
did not
. I don't want to hear you saying that, ever again, to anybody, and especially not to your mother. Are we clear?”

A dog barked in the distance.

“I said, are we clear?”

“Yes,” said Davey.

“And what have you got you say for yourself?”

Davey lowered his head. “I'm s-s-s - ” James waited.

“I'm sorry,” Davey managed at last.

“Good. Then let's go home.”

James shoved his way back out onto the carriageway. After a few minutes, he turned on the radio and put the volume up loud.

When Davey was fourteen he grew taller than James, and realised that his stepfather was actually shorter than most men and that in a few years, he himself would probably be physically stronger. Davey's greater height seemed to unleash some new fury in James, or perhaps it was merely the ending of restraint over attacking someone smaller and weaker. The beatings became more frequent, more violent; three times in his fifteenth year Davey was unable to return to school on Monday because the bruises were too prominent.

“Why do you keep m-m-making excuses for him?” Davey pleaded with his mother one afternoon. “You w-w-w-wouldn't let him hit you like this. Why do you let him d-d-d-do it to me?”

Helen shook her head helplessly. “He does it for your own good.”

“How? How is this for my own good?” Davey held out his arm. His wrist was black and swollen with bruises. “What's he t-t-t-trying to achieve?”

“You make him do it! You know he's got a temper, and you provoke him anyway! Besides, he's got a point. If you're going to amount to anything you need proper qualifications, not some airy-fairy nonsense - ”

“I don't
w-w-w-
oh, Christ, I don't
want
to do Economics or Maths! They're b-b-boring and I'm no good at them! I like English Literature and History.”

“Maths and Economics are what you need to get a proper degree employers will take notice of. James knows what he's talking about. You need to start listening.”

“W-w-why won't you listen to me? I don't want to work in a m-m-m - ” deep breath, “ - merchant bank. I want to g-g-g-go to university and study English Literature and then - ”

“Yes? And then? What comes after that? You don't want to be a journalist, you don't want to work in broadcasting, you certainly wouldn't make a teacher. If you could give us one single, solitary example of what you actually want to be, Davey, maybe we'd listen to you, but as it stands, all you can
tell us is what you
don't
want. Well, it's not good enough. I've sent your options form in, and that's that. We've spent a fortune on your education, you're not throwing all that away.”

In the solitude of his room, Davey stripped off his sweatshirt and examined the bruises along his ribcage. Would he ever escape? It was wrong for a grown man to hit a kid, he knew that; but what would anyone make of a seventeen year old who let himself be beaten up by a man shorter and older than he was? They'd laugh and tell him to toughen up. There'd been a window of opportunity when he was small and vulnerable, but that window had closed long ago. He was on his own, and he would have to find his own way out.

“Why are you even doing Maths when you're so fucking awful at it?” Simon asked, as they slouched among the trees in the Arboretum. Simon was smoking a cigarette in an elegant black holder.

“Because they made me,” said Davey.

Simon laughed. “They can't
make
you,” he said.

“Of course they can. They pay my fees.”

“Okay, so they can
make
you fill in something on a form, and they can
make
you come here five days a week, and they can
make
you turn up to classes. But they can't actually
make
you learn it, can they?” He blew a smoke-ring over Davey's head. “They can't
make
you write the right answers down on the papers. You straight boys are so unimaginative.”

“You were a s-s-s-straight boy yourself till three weeks ago,” Davey protested.

“No, I just hadn't told anyone. Just fucking flunk the exam, dimwit. And what the hell can they do about that?”

“Turn over your papers, please.”

Davey stared at the paper. A curious exhilaration came over him.

“I just don't understand it,” said his mother tearfully. “How
could you have failed?”

“I t-t-t-told you I was no good at maths. I really did tell you,” he repeated uneasily. “Anyway, an E's technically a p-p-p - ”

“Mr Bell said you should get a C at least, a B if you worked hard.”

“Mr Bell's a fool,” said James. His voice was calm, but his expression was furious. “We're paying a fucking fortune for our son to be taught by a fool.”

“James,” said Helen.

“I've a good mind to go and sort this out face to face.”