by Adam Thorpe
‘If I can’t cook green frogs,’ says Noah, quietly taunting. ‘Or go to the ace pool.’
‘Daddy, this morning Noah said my poo’s like chocolate toothpaste.’
‘Did he? I’m sure it isn’t, Steph.’
‘You’re not listening.’
David is certain that if Noah goes zorbing, something terrible will happen. Everything is just a matter of threads and choices, second by second. Sometimes a crack opens and you see what the outcome might be, and instinct kicks in. It is evolution’s little hint, the helpful whisper. The hominid smelling the unseen beast on the wind. A telephoto lens clicking. The teenage girl not taking that path, not right then.
‘Sorry, Noah. That’s definitely a no-no. Noah’s no-no. And the Lord said to Noah, no.’
‘Daddy,’ enquires Steph, screwing up her face, ‘are you going mad or something?’
‘Lemme see the poster,’ says Noah.
David unrolls one of the photocopies on the cropped grass. Fay looks up at them, as suddenly distant as a bird call over chasms and waterfalls, over the forest’s endless upper canopy, trees and more trees to the horizon.
‘She’s miss-ing,’ says Noah, his finger hovering over the black capitals at the top.
‘For the moment,’ says David. ‘We’re going to help find her, by putting this up in the van. It’s our mission.’
‘I’m Miss Milligan; she’s Miss Ing,’ says Stephie brightly.
‘Miss Ing-land!’ shouts Noah. He looks about him, surprised at his own wit. ‘Miss Ing-land! Miss Ing-land!’ Like a football fan.
‘I don’t think this is very appropriate,’ says Lisa, scowling at David as if it is all his fault.
Steph scowls at Noah in turn. ‘England’s spelt different, stupid.’
David rolls the poster up. He mustn’t let the rage overwhelm him. ‘No worries. And let’s not forget her little dog, guys. We have to go find that bitser too. Her only friend.’
‘That what?’ shrieks Steph.
2
FAY
23 January 2012
‘That’s not a Staffie,’ says her friend Janice, chewing and chewing with her mouth wide open so the banana smell makes Fay want some. ‘It’s a mixture. What’s its name? Stinky Gingernob? Stinky Gingernob Two?’
When Fay tells her the name, the slag collapses like she is having a heart attack. Then she puts her head on one side and puts her hands on her hips like Mrs Pratt over your desk when you’ve not done your coursework and she says, after cracking a bubble, ‘Whyyyyyyyyy?’
Fay doesn’t really like Janice. Apart from the stupid slag calling her Gingernob all the time just because she’s jealous (Ken says you’re not ginger, you’re ruby-red and beautiful), there is something about her. Hands on hips, mascara, bright-green coat, not even fourteen. She’s in the year below. Fay is fourteen and three months, with freckles on her nose that she would like to scrape off. She feels even older since she did her Year 4 work experience fortnight in the toddlers’ clothes shop on Totter Hill back in the autumn. Now Sheena, the owner, gives her odd jobs to do on a Saturday because she did good with them snotty little kids and Sheena is the best person in the world. Old enough to be her gran, probably, but still as beautiful as a film star when the light isn’t too bright, when she isn’t stood under one of them spotlights in the shop. Fay hasn’t got a proper nan. Her mum Rochelle had a mum who copped it when Rochelle was born, and there was no dad because he was in prison, so her mum had to be adopted and the family were cruel twats, according to Rochelle – they didn’t like the Irish!
Sheena said on the third day of work experience, ‘Fay, with your green eyes and red hair you’re a second Maureen O’Hara.’ ‘Eh? Come again?’ Sheena laughed, although sometimes she could be in a right mard. ‘Maureen O’Hara was a gorgeous actress in Hollywood, she looked fantastic in Technicolor.’
Fay says to Janice, ‘Pooch is a he, not an it. And Ken says as he’s more than half Staffie.’
‘What’s the other half?’ Janice says, wiping her eyes. ‘Your mum’s ex? And I don’t mean yer dad, neither.’
‘Jack Russell, moron.’
Janice grips Fay’s wrist and tries to give her a slap but Pooch bounces up and down barking his head off until Janice backs away. She’s stopped chewing.
‘I’ve swallowed me chuddy, I’m gonna suffocate to death,’ she says, gripping her own throat as Fay laughs.
Rochelle says not to go on her own to this place and that place, on account of the dealers and the pervs, which means Fay pretty well can’t walk further than their own crescent, so she pretends she is going with Janice or Evie. Mum sees dealers and pervs everywhere. She says everywhere round here is a shit hole.
Pooch is worth ten friends, any road. A few weeks back, walking up Riseholme Road, he snarled and showed his yellow fangs at a couple of nobheads who’d normally mell your head in. They were jumping up and down in their trackie bottoms behind the underpass railings.
‘Weapon dog, is it? Luvvit. So ugly it kills with a single stare, like.’
‘Oh, Raging Bull, so scary,’ said the other, whose voice cracked in the middle. She told them to bog off but they didn’t come any nearer. Trouble being, when she headed down to the leisure centre, where there were some good grassy bits and where some dead-fit blokes with loads of muscle were smoking outside, Pooch snarled at them too, and they whooped and laughed and made her feel a right div.
She walks Pooch up to the Nene Road playground, where her stepbrother Craig has gone with his mates, passing the weird church with a roof that looks like a giant has thought the godshop were a horse and sat on it. She went to a comedy show there, year before last, with the school: Little Red Riding Hood, loads of singing that hurt her ears and a bloke with a stupid wolf face what wouldn’t stay on. Her friends kept laughing. Baking hot and the seats were frickin uncomfortable, but she was stuck in the middle of the row. Torture, it were. There’s a big patch of grass behind the church for Pooch and her to run around in, but then someone’ll only come out and give her a Bible or a bollocking.
Pooch interrupts the boys’ football, dreaming he’s Mario Balotelli, and Craig gets really annoyed, and it’s him who gives her a right bollocking because it’s him what’s a goal-scoring machine and not a fuckin ugly dog, OK? So Fay ties Pooch to a bench and has a go on the swings until some fat-arse from St Francis calls her a baby. ‘Ginger, gingertwat baby.’ She gives him a mouthful of abuse after untying Pooch and runs off towards Burton Road and the bypass, face hidden inside her furry hood.
The gate into the fields and woods coming up to the overpass has barbed wire along the top. So does the stone wall. She could climb over except she doesn’t want to tear her leggings and add to the holes that are already there but are invisible because she’s splotched orange lipstick in the right places on her thighs. She is out of the estate now, and she feels free and a bit frit, being here on her own. But she isn’t on her own. Craig should not have tried to stamp on Pooch’s head. It was wrong. Her stepbrother doesn’t have the same feelings as she does for animals. He’s only eleven and yet already the spit of his dad. Craig’s mum passed away a long time ago. Fay’s mum has to be his mum too after Ken (and the dog and the bass guitar) moved in, along with Craig. Ken is Craig’s dad and they come from London, and Craig thinks he and his dad are number one and that everyone round here is mentally disabled.
In the first week, when Fay was eight, Ken walked in with red eyes and put his hand on her head and said, ‘Your stairway lies on the whispering wind, me little sparrer.’ He’s never ever tried it on, though. She’d have bitten him on the face and screamed if he had.
Why couldn’t they all have moved in with Ken and Craig in mega-cool London, instead of staying on in the Ermine?
‘You don’t want to be going to Sin City, duck.’
‘But there’s never nothing to do here, Mum, except from sitting in town.’
‘You don’t know as how lucky you are, Fay. You could be in Louth.’
Rochelle took a long, deep drag from her cigarette. She’d been told to stop by the health visitor because of her weight.
‘I were raised there,’ she added as if her daughter didn’t know. ‘Fuck knows how I survived.’
Pooch came free with Ken and his tickly goatee beard, as Rochelle would joke. A tiny puppy. Rochelle doesn’t like dogs, but puts up with Pooch just like she puts up with all sorts. Maybe she hasn’t noticed the fresh holes in the carpet, which is dead manky and already had holes in it. Ken doesn’t bring a lotta dosh in, as he calls it, except when he was delivering out of a van for a while, but he’s stopped Rochelle from ending up in the clinic. Fay isn’t sure what that means exactly. Janice told her a clinic was a loony bin, but Sheena said it was where you went for a bit of mental calm. It’s because Rochelle has problems remembering names and getting her tongue round words sometimes. She has trembly hands and shaky legs that can only just carry her big body up the stairs. But that in’t going insane, is it?
‘I’m not feeling over-well today,’ her mum keeps saying, as if it’s summat new, as if she hasn’t said the same thing the day before. ‘But I’ll save me tears for the pillow.’
Fay walks along Burton Road’s grass verge and onto the concrete bridge with the bypass underneath it like a raging river, four lanes wide. She stops to do up the hot-pink lace on her right trainer but it isn’t easy with Pooch pulling. She yells at him to stay put. She can feel the bridge tremble when a big lorry goes underneath. There’s a splotch of mud on the trainer that is pretending to be part of the leopard pattern. She wipes it away with her tissue then throws the tissue as high as she can but the wire fence is higher and the breeze here is too strong.
She’s never come this far before, not on foot. The fence is there to stop people throwing worse things than tissues at the cars and lorries thundering along far below. But you can still chuck a can or a brick high enough to get over the top wire, because stuff like that doesn’t care about the wind. Maybe it’s to stop people throwing themselves over, people who’ve had enough of Lincoln. The sign advertising the Samaritans is still there stuck to the fence, but it is all faded. NEED TO TALK? PHONE … Someone has crossed out the number and put their own number with FOR A MEGGAAA COCK after it. Nobhead. That could kill someone, if they are almost decided to top themselves but not quite and Hull had beat Scunny or whatever and there en’t more to life for them than football.
The sign made Ken laugh when they were in the bus together once, when his car was off the road; he had a solo gig in the White Heather halfway up that dead-straight road to Scawby near the roundabout. She was supposed to watch his gear when Ken’s new mate Damien with the red eyes never turned up. It was a big posh bungalow with a carvery and there were loads of tossers only there to get kegged who’d never heard of T-Rex or The Who or even Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ken said never again – I’m back to the pavement and a fucking hat – so they went home early and watched Shrek II with Rochelle through a cloud of dope. Fay was allowed one puff. It burnt her throat. That was the idea, laughed Ken. ‘Dunno bout them tossers,’ she’d said to him in the late bus going back, ‘but I reckoned you was tops.’
He’d been looking out of the window, so the big cross with wings tatted on his neck was all she could see, and the scabby zits under the hairline, and the copper earring. And then his face appears and he slops this drooly wet kiss on her nose which probably the others are thinking is a bit paedo and says, ‘Oh, and there’s me looking forward to phoning that number on the bridge.’
It’s true, his goatee beard does tickle.
She presses her hands against the cold wet wire and then her lips, squashing them against it. Gimme a kiss, Mason Greyback! She’s Selena Gomez today, not Maureen O’Hara. Wizard of the Year. It’s so high up here, it’s what flying in a plane would be like. Magical powers, turning all them lorries to jelly. Gerroff, Mason, I’m concentrating on a spell! You don’t ever reckon it’s a high bridge from the road because of the trees before it and the road just carrying on as normal, then you get onto it and you are flying. She can see miles and miles over fields and woods, right out to Scunny probably, although she isn’t sure she is facing north. She knows Scunthorpe is in the north of the county because they’ve just had a fieldwork test in geography and some perv had crossed out the S and horpe on the land-use map she had to use. There is something on the horizon, she doesn’t know what, a bit like a castle, but it is probably a massive power station she can hide with her little finger. There is steam or smoke above it. The sun comes out and everything is lit up and she is happy and all she needs now to be perfect is a cherry Coke.
Pooch keeps tugging on the lead, not looking at the view, scrabbling to get off the bridge on the far side where the road carries on. There are no buildings on the far side, only fields of mud and bare trees; she can see that from here. You must be joking, Pooch. That’s like the wilderness in Ken’s video games: enter at your peril. Scorched earth, he calls it. A big motor is coming from town. It is slowing down. A big SUV with tinted glass so you can’t see in. Not red, or she’d scarper. Ken says if you see a flash red Land Rover and the old geezer offers you a lift, saying he’s a mate of the family, never take it. Never. Promise?
Who the frick do you think I am, Ken?
This one’s green. But only pervs slow down, even in smart cars like this one. Her heart’s hammering suddenly.
Passing her, the window slides down and there’s a sad bloke’s face, but not old. Staring at her. Then stopping a few yards further on, near the Samaritans sign. Fuck! There en’t no one around. She runs back off the bridge towards the estate and home and safety.
Only halfway back does she think he was stopping to top himself, maybe.
3
HOWARD
27 January 2012
He wonders if he has the right to call it a day. They’ve played five games and are halfway through the sixth and nothing good can happen to him now, too skint to recover. They are all steaming in Don’s new tacked-on heated conservatory with its hibiscus, balsams and a gaudy one called a Congo cockatoo. A few months back for the summer match last year they were out in the garden, where a pleasant breeze played havoc with the lolly, and even the Chance cards ended up in the gardenia bed. Now the garden is nuclear bare. New year, fresh start. Mizzle, though. It’ll start getting dark soon.
He’s a wheelbarrow man, has been trundling round the board with an uncanny ability to miss desirable properties – and as usual he’s bought into stations and utilities, a strategy which he’s kept to over the years, despite its minimal returns. A feller of habit, he is. They all are, although their annual Monopoly pub crawl is a shadow of its former self. Last year, starting from the browns – the Lord Nelson in the Old Kent Road – they fizzled out in Northumberland Avenue, bloody Ian Glossop a virtual stretcher case. That was age. And the bar-girls never knowing what ale was, now they are all foreign.
He tilts his chair back and regards the other players with fake bonhomie. Lunch was the usual microwaved nosh, followed by the deluxe box of holy chocolate truffles from Our Lady of Grace Abbey that he’d found in Waitrose, believe it or not, on the way here. In memory of Diane, who regularly insisted they drive to the monastery, out beyond Tealby towards Kirmond le Mire, for the truffles and their holy cucumber body cream. Just as well he brought it along, because Trevor’s donated some home-made toffee that breaks your face. As for drink, the various six-packs of Stella are history, furled cardboard, empty cans stopping the kitchen bin lid from closing properly and making that ear-splitting din, particularly painful now he’s on hearing aids. He has an awful thirst, he’s played badly, his best properties keep flopping over, white bellies up. He’s about fifteen quid down. He picks up his Chance card:
Go to Bucket. Do not pass Scapa. In so many words.
Win some, lose some.
He needs a breath of fresh air. In the old days he’d have stood in the garden and smoked, but he’s long given up. Chain-smoker
too. The hotels line the board like the Monte Carlo waterfront, if line the waterfront they do in Monte Carlo, and not one of them is his.
‘Gangster land,’ he murmurs.
‘Eh? Whassat, Howard?’
‘Who’ll put me up for the night?’
‘You mean,’ says Don, sliding his yappy little Scots terrier past his luxury strips, ‘in real life, or on the board?’
‘I can’t risk the drive back,’ Howard admits. ‘All them Friday patrols between here and Swinderby. I want to enjoy myself.’
‘Order a sherbert,’ suggests Don.
The bastard didn’t want him using the spare bed. That’ll be his Sandra fussing. As if he might be incontinent or something.
He keeps schtum, just declares himself a bankrupt. Don’s eyes light up. ‘You throw the towel in too easily, Howie. Persist is my motto.’
Remember who you’re talking to, schmuck. ‘I’ll bet none of you bastards know what day it is today,’ he growls.
Gary checks his watch. ‘January 27th.’
‘And?’
General shrug. They’re all still in the game and calculating, cogitating.
‘National Holocaust Memorial Day.’
‘Something about it on the news this morning,’ says Eamon.
The others say nothing. The game continues.
‘I might take a butcher’s at the, er, the park,’ Howard announces.
They all turn to look at him. He’s giving his specs a wipe, breathing on them and rubbing the lenses with a relatively clean hankie. Helps to keep busy.
‘Is that prudent?’ says Trevor.
‘Take care, now,’ says Ian as if it’s a trip to Somalia.
‘Don’t forget your hi-vis jacket,’ Gary jokes. He hasn’t understood.
‘Now that’s another bloody ridiculous thing,’ moans Eamon as is his wont. ‘Fluorescent yellow everywhere. Bicyclists, police, jumped-up traffic wardens. Have you seen them school kids in them? Just to walk to school. European mollycoddling, I call it.’