B002RI919Y EBOK

by Peters, Joe

  It felt good to be close to nature instead of hemmed in by walls and behind boarded or barred windows. The air was fresh and salty as well as cold. Since going to creative reading and writing classes in prison I had taken to carrying a little notebook around with me, scribbling down poems that expressed how I was feeling and what I was thinking. I pulled the book out now and tried to express what I was feeling in words.

  ‘Hello.’ A surprised woman’s voice penetrated the roar of the waves, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  I looked up and saw a girl in a waitress’s uniform looking down at me. It was unusual for someone to start up a conversation like this, especially a young woman on her own. I immediately warmed to her just because she’d had the nerve to stop and speak to me in such a friendly way.

  ‘Are you homeless?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I join you?’

  I shrugged and she sat down bedside me, staring out at the dark sea as well. ‘I like coming down here after work. It clears my head.’

  ‘Do you live here then?’ I asked. It was nice to have some company, especially someone who didn’t seem to have any agenda of her own.

  ‘I come down for the seasonal work in the hotels,’ she explained. ‘There must be somewhere you can go on a night like this, just to get out of the cold.’

  ‘I’m new to Penzance,’ I said. ‘I’d rather stay here. I like the sea.’

  She seemed to accept this response as perfectly normal and we chatted for a bit. When she got up to go on her way, she gave me some money. It was only about £15, but that would have been a lot for someone working as a waitress and I hadn’t asked her for anything.

  ‘I’ll come back and see you again,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a friend called Gareth. I’ll tell him about you and maybe he will have some ideas where you can go.’

  ‘OK then.’

  Once she had gone, I suddenly felt very alone and it took a while for me to settle down again on my own, eventually drifting into a fitful sleep. When I woke, I still didn’t feel ready to face the authorities and decided to explore a bit first and savour my newly won freedom.

  For the next two days I wandered around town a bit, trying to get my bearings, living off the last of the money that I’d been given by the workers at the centre. I went back down to the beach each night to the same place, hoping the same girl would come by again for another chat. I missed having people to talk to. Although being locked in a cell had been a nightmare, at least I’d had company. The only other homeless people I came across as I wandered around were old winos. There didn’t seem to be any young people at all and at night the streets became completely deserted–nothing like the buzzing Charing Cross night scenes.

  On the third evening, I’d been in my sleeping bag a few hours when a chap appeared beside me out of the gloom. I was instantly on my guard, ready to fight back to protect myself and my bag if necessary.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, his friendly tone immediately putting me at ease. ‘I’m Gareth. I heard you were here but I couldn’t find you last night.’

  He looked, as far as I could see, as if he was in his late twenties and just as easy-going and natural as the girl had been, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to talk to a strange young homeless boy on the beach. He sat with me for a while and just chatted, telling me about how he was into bodybuilding. Even in the dim light of the moon I could see that he was pretty pumped up. (I later found out that his appearance was partly due to the large quantities of steroids he took.)

  ‘You can’t stay here for ever,’ he said after a while, shivering as he spoke. ‘It’s too cold.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I assured him, although I obviously wasn’t. I still didn’t feel ready to go into some tatty hostel and have to answer questions and obey a load of stupid rules.

  ‘I’ve got a spare room,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have that?’

  Although I was still nervous about going home with anyone I didn’t know after my bad experience with Max, he seemed a genuinely nice guy and I was a bit fed up with feeling cold, so I agreed. I remembered how kind Mohamed had been to me the night I ran away and I knew that I had to start trusting people again sooner or later. We packed my stuff up and headed into town.

  He had a nice basement flat, warm and secure-feeling, and we sat around talking till about seven in the morning before finally falling asleep. He told me that he worked in a pub and didn’t have to go in till the afternoon. I confessed that I was on probation and explained how Jake and the others had stitched me up. I’m not sure if he believed that I had already been to prison at my age until he had heard the whole story. It actually sounded quite shocking to me when I heard myself telling it. I don’t think he thought I was seventeen either at first; people still never seemed to believe I was as old as I was.

  ‘You’d better go and see the probation officer down here,’ he said, ‘because you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them.’

  I knew he was right. Although I had no plans to get into trouble, if a policeman were to pick me up for something or other I would be in twice as much bother. I felt better about handing myself in now that I had a friend in the town. Gareth gave me a key to the flat so that I could come and go as I pleased, and so that I would be able to tell the authorities I had somewhere to stay. The next afternoon, once he’d gone to work, I walked into the probation office with my heart crashing in my ears and briefly explained the situation to the receptionist. She then fetched a probation officer, called Carol, who sat me down and listened patiently to the whole story.

  ‘You realize you’ve breached your bail conditions, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know. But I felt I was in danger there. They were going to beat me up again if they got a chance.’

  ‘But you’ve made yourself homeless.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’ve got somewhere to stay here. I’ve got a friend with a flat. He’s given me a key.’ I held it up proudly. ‘If you ring the outreach centre where I’ve come from they’ll tell you all about me. They’ll tell you that they agreed I should come.’

  Carol went out of the office to make the phone call, leaving me fidgeting nervously in my seat.

  ‘They seem to think you told your probation officer you were coming here,’ she said as she came back in.

  ‘Not quite,’ I admitted. ‘That’s why I’ve come to tell you.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, sitting back down. ‘Well, you’re here now, so you might as well stay. I’d better send for your papers. You must report to me every week, Joe, and not go off again without telling me. OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as innocently as I could manage. ‘OK.’

  I meant it too, because I could sense that she actually was keen to help me in any way she could and I realized I was going to need all the help I could get if I wanted to improve my lot in life.

  The first problem was how I was going to support myself. Because I was still under eighteen I couldn’t get dole money and she agreed to help me find out how I could get assistance, as long as I agreed to go to college and try to get some sort of skill or qualification. I didn’t object to any of this. I was very happy to work and make something of myself if someone would just show me where to get started. I certainly didn’t want to sit around doing nothing all my life, ending up like the old winos I’d met in London. But Carol was going a bit fast for me. She was asking me questions about ‘careers’ and what it was that I wanted from life, when I was still at the stage of wondering how I would survive each day and where I would be sleeping each night.

  To keep her quiet I told her that I fancied working with animals, and to be honest I did think that it would be better than having to deal with people all day, since other people had been the cause of every problem I had ever had. She decided that she would find a way of getting me into farming, which sounded fine to me.

  While she set about organizing that, I went back to the flat and Gareth sta
rted to introduce me to other friends around the town. We spent a lot of time hanging out together and one day the two of us were walking down a road called Belmont Terrace when we heard giggling and wolf whistling coming from above. Looking up, we saw some girls leaning out of an upstairs window, trying to attract our attention.

  ‘Hi,’ Gareth said, laughing, and I could tell he knew them already. ‘Where’s your mum? Where’s Sue?’

  The girls shouted over their shoulders for their mother until she appeared at the window too and it was obvious that Gareth fancied her, even though she must have been at least ten years older than him.

  ‘Can we come up for a cuppa?’ Gareth asked.

  ‘Yeah, come up.’ They were laughing and joking as we waited downstairs to be let in.

  They lived in the top-floor flat of a massive Victorian house and seemed like the happiest, most welcoming bunch of people I had ever met. Sue, I soon discovered, had three daughters and a son. Two of the girls, Kirsty and Tammy, were from her first marriage, and Sam and Lee were from her second marriage. She had divorced for a second time and was living on her own in the house with the kids. They were bantering and flirting away and I was having trouble keeping my eyes off Kirsty, who I thought was really pretty.

  I tried not to blush or stutter and they asked me all sorts of questions about who I was and where I had come from, seeming to be genuinely interested in my answers, although I only said that I’d had a rough time and had run away to Cornwall to escape. I was tired of talking about my past and I thought it made me sound more mysterious and romantic if I didn’t say too much. It felt as if they had become my friends the moment we walked through their door, and Tammy seemed to adopt me as if I was a new little brother, as if I was already part of the family.

  We started going down to the pub together in the evenings and they were just a beautiful, loving little family. I couldn’t believe how supportive Sue was of her children, compared to how my mother had been towards all of us and me in particular. She seemed to instantly include me as one of them and the more time I spent with them the further in love with Kirsty I fell. Could this be the love of my life that I had been searching for? I wondered. She was certainly very different from Lisa, and had the added attraction of being surrounded by a ready-made happy family. Whereas Lisa and I had been like two lonely survivors clinging together for protection against a hostile world and cruel fates, Kirsty and her family were like a safe port that I could sail into for sanctuary.

  Chapter Twenty

  Farmer Joe

  At the same time as I was settling into my new social life in Penzance, Carol, my probation officer, was working away at getting me on to a college course, despite the fact that I had no education and a track record of being a bit of a handful. She was obviously not one to be easily discouraged and within a couple of weeks she had got me enrolled in a college in St Austell, which was a fair distance away.

  ‘We’ll have to find you some accommodation there,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t be able to travel back and forth every day. It’s too far.’

  Although I was grateful to her for caring enough to make the effort, I really didn’t want to leave Penzance and my new-found family and friends; nor did I want to have to change to yet another probation officer and have to explain myself all over again to someone new. I didn’t want to go back to being lonely when I had just found a place where I could feel that I belonged. Carol, however, wasn’t going to let me put her off and sent me to visit the college she had found and to meet the man who had agreed to be my tutor.

  He was a funny little man who spent the whole time stroking his ginger moustache as he talked. He obviously knew I was in trouble because I was on probation, but he still seemed willing to give me a chance. I think the course they were offering me was partly funded by the Prince’s Trust, which is set up to help kids like me get a start in life. Most of the course, he explained, would involve work placement on an actual farm.

  ‘Can I go to a farm somewhere near Penzance for the work experience?’ I asked. ‘Because that’s where I have friends.’

  He said he would see what he could do, which I thought was pretty decent of him under the circumstances, and a few days later he came back to Carol and told her that he had found a farmer at Zennor, a village between the towns of St Just and St Ives, who was willing to take me on and give me a chance. The farm was only about an hour’s walk from Penzance and meant that Carol could continue being my probation officer.

  Then I heard that Sue and her family were being offered a council house in St Just, which seemed like a sign that things were meant to be. Something was finally going right for me. The farmer I was going to be working for at Zennor was a widowed lady who had been left with a farm which was too much for her to manage on her own. It was a live-in position with food provided and she was a really nice woman. I was to live with her in the old farmhouse, which had an Aga and all the traditional country comforts.

  My duties covered just about every aspect of farm life. I had to feed the chickens and the pigs, and milk the cows. I would also go to college a couple of days a week to learn all about agriculture. The old lady showed me how to do everything; she even taught me how to drive the tractor, which I loved doing. I took it out on the road sometimes, although I don’t think I was strictly supposed to, feeling very free and grown-up, as if I was finally getting a grip on my life and amounting to something worthwhile. I worked hard from six every morning to six in the evening and it felt good because I was learning so much. I far preferred it to drifting around the streets of some city all day, or hanging around in a squat or a basement, drinking and smoking and talking rubbish with a bunch of drunks.

  At the end of each week I had £35 in my pocket, which seemed like a fortune to me, since all my living costs were taken care of. I even bought myself a pushbike so that I could get around faster.

  I met a lovely girl called Holly, who was from a posh local family and who I fancied almost as much as I fancied Kirsty. I soon realized that neither of them were interested in being anything other than my friend, which was a disappointment and reaffirmed my suspicion that I was ultimately unlovable and was going to have to resign myself to ending up alone. Although it was wonderful to have a circle of friends who felt almost like family, what I still wanted more than anything else was a soulmate, someone who would be just for me in the way Lisa had been. I tried everything to win Kirsty over, and her sister Tammy used to take the mickey out of me something terrible as a result.

  Quite soon after I met them I thought it would be a good idea to take Kirsty a little bouquet as a token of my love. I had no money at all at that stage, so I borrowed some flowers from the local graveyard on my way over. That was bad enough, but I also forgot to take the ‘with sympathy’ card out.

  I could see that Kirsty was very touched when I first handed them over, even if Tammy was already mocking me over her sister’s shoulder. Then she found the card.

  ‘Oh my God, Joe,’ she yelled, ‘you’ve nicked these off someone’s grave.’

  The whole family fell about laughing as my face turned the colour of beetroot. None of them was ever going to let me forget that.

  Every weekend I was free to please myself and I would always walk into St Just to see the others, drawn to them like a magnet. One Saturday they told me they were going to be throwing a barbecue and I thought I had better make a contribution by taking something with me. They were always doing things for me and I was finally in a position to give something back. I thought I would ask the farmer if I could take some chops because I knew she had freezers full of different cuts of meat which she held back from the butcher.

  The day of the party she had gone out and I thought I would help myself to something and then offer to pay her from my wages later. Before setting out for St Just, I went to the main deep freeze and rummaged around amongst the various bags and boxes for the right thing. It was hard to see because all the plastic wrappings were frosted up, but I eventually came acr
oss a bag which seemed about the right size for a big family party. I could just see through one side of the plastic and it looked like nice meat, so I decided on that one and closed the lid. I felt a bit bad about doing it without asking the farmer’s permission, but she had always been so nice to me I thought it would be OK. I popped it into a carrier bag and cycled over to St Just.

  There were already lots of their friends and family at the house and the barbecue was blazing away by the time I got there. They all gave me my usual warm welcome and introduced me to anyone I didn’t already know.

  ‘Look at that for a chop,’ I said proudly as I handed Sue the carrier bag, which she took through into the kitchen to unpack. I think she was a bit shocked by the size of it, but grateful for the meat none the less. I was just getting myself a drink and chatting to everyone when I heard screams coming from inside the house.

  Everyone was running in to see what was going on. The women in the kitchen were screaming and laughing and running around, apparently not knowing what to do.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ someone said and I looked across at the table, where my bag was now open, revealing half a defrosting pig’s head, complete with eye and ear and teeth.

  ‘Get it out of my kitchen!’ Sue was screaming while everyone else was falling about laughing.