by R. J. Morgan
“Thanks.” I put my head to my hands. “I do feel awfully queer,” I said, “like I’m going to throw up – I mean, like I’m going to vomit or something.”
“I’ll give you a minute, all right, son?” He ducked under the door and out of the room.
I checked every corner. There was a laptop open on the desk, but it didn’t seem to be on. I put my coat over it. I took the small bin from under the desk and threw up into it. I held the edge of the desk to steady myself, and placed the funny heart monitor box in the gap between the desk and the drawers.
Robin was leaning on the low wall at the bottom of the hill, lightly kicking a bedding plant with the top of her shoes. When she saw me, her face brightened. “Jake, that was so realistic!”
“That’s … because … you dashed my head on the counter and nearly broke my face.”
“Oh, my bad.”
“My cheekbone feels like it’s broken.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t need to look any more weird.”
“I said I was sorry. God!”
I sat on the wall and she stood over me.
“Did you do it or what?” she said.
“Yes, I did it.”
“Good lad!”
I liked it when she said that. I handed her the pizza. “I got it free,” I said. “It’s chicken.”
“It’s pigeon,” she said. “Bin it.”
We walked towards Wimbledon High Street. Robin fixed her eyes on a gang wearing black hoods. “We’re losing it,” she said, watching them like a bloodhound. “They’ve taken Southfields. Now they’re taking Wimbledon, Collier’s Wood…”
“Like Tescos,” I said.
“Yeah,” Robin said, “except the hours are even worse, there’s no pay and a massively increased chance of getting your head kicked in.”
“Raw deal,” I said.
“Stop talking.”
“All right.”
Her face became lost in her hood. I noticed two boys with black hoods were watching her. One pointed. I touched her elbow. “Let’s go,” I said, “get your Oyster card out.”
Robin turned to look. The hoods broke into a run. Robin ran. I chased after her.
We hurtled down the street, past buskers and chuggers and sleepwalking shoppers who woke when we ran past them. The hoods hoofed after us. We darted across the road just as a bus was going to make its break from the traffic.
I grabbed Robin’s collar and heaved her on to the bus just before the doors closed.
“NO!” she screamed. “Stop! Stop this bus! I can’t … I can’t just be on any bus!”
“Robin.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “Robin, calm down.”
“Let me go!”
I watched as the chase turned into a stampede. The hoods were punching their arms in the air. I put my hand flat to my chest and scanned the terrified eyes on the bus.
“It doesn’t matter where the bus goes,” I said, “I can always find my way home. I’ve lived all over. I’m like a homing pigeon. You’re Robin and I’m a pigeon. I’ll stay with you, I promise.”
“It’s not that, you monk.”
“What?” My voice was high. “I’ll be here is all I—”
“I can’t just get on any old bus and go anywhere I like. What are you going to do if we get attacked?”
“Attacked?”
“Yes, attacked.”
“Human shield?” I forced a smile. She sank to her seat and kept her head down as the bus trundled down Kingston Road towards the world’s capital of homesickness, Tooting.
“We should change buses,” I said.
“Why?”
“That’s what Jason Bourne does.”
“The only thing you’ve got in common with Jason Bourne is that you’re both retarded.”
We changed buses. Robin looked all around. She pulled her hoodie over her eyes. All I could concentrate on were her kiss-shaped lips. I tried to keep looking away from her.
We drove past Tooting Bec and Robin jumped up. “Come on, get out.”
She swooped into the street and cars braked to avoid crashing into her. She dashed into the station and I nearly fainted trying to keep up with her. “Where are we going?”
“Paris, you idiot!”
“We can’t use our Oyster cards,” Robin said, feeding money into the ticket machine. “They’ll track us.”
“Who?”
“Them.”
“Who?”
“Who? You an owl?” She slapped a paper ticket into my hand. “Come.”
We ran down the immense escalator to the platform and I got to the bottom before I realized I didn’t have to think about which muscle to move in which sequence.
As we waited for the train, I shielded Robin from view of the platform camera, and in that moment, I felt quite human, not just some bag of bones sitting on the wrong side of a clipboard. But when the train rolled to a halt and the doors slid open, Robin climbed on and spread out on a double seat, indicating that I was not to sit next to her, and I went back to feeling how I always did: left out, miserable, and wheezy.
It was a long way to St Pancras, with many stops and an endless carousel of commuters. Robin checked every face that entered the train. I tried to lighten her mood. “Robin hoodie,” I said, pointing at her. “Geddit? Robin hoodie?”
“Rubbish joke,” she said. But I could see she wanted to smile.
“I’m just going to the station with you, right?” I said. “I haven’t got my passport.”
Robin dug in her pocket and took out two British passports. Both pristine. I took them from her and checked they were ours. “How did you get my passport?”
“I found it in your mum’s drawer,” Robin said. “Took ages.”
“We don’t have tickets.”
Robin produced two tickets, and two consent forms.
My eyes widened. “We haven’t got any money.”
Robin kissed her teeth. “I got bare money.”
“I can’t spend your money.”
“I’d spend yours,” she said. “Don’t be sexist.”
We got off the train at St Pancras and I was horrified to see Robin disappear into the human traffic on the left-hand side of the escalator. The left-hand side means you have to walk. Who walks up an escalator? There are so many things to consider. First, the cardio; you have to have the lungs and stamina to be able to walk up a million stairs. Second, balance; you have to hit every stair and not get dizzy on the way. This means keeping your eyes on the back, or the backpack, in front of you and hoping they don’t stall or turn around. And last, the social pressure: you can’t stop otherwise the person behind will bump into you, and in London this would mean getting yelled at.
My pumpkin hand gripped the roller and I was dragged into the fast lane. I paced myself, concentrating on Robin’s grey back, keeping time with my feet. A few times, I closed my eyes, my balance adjusting in the darkness. I forced myself to breathe in shallow and deliberate breaths. I remembered the baby bird who would chant “I must not stop till I get to the top”, which kind Dr Kahn said was an example of negative language, but I chanted it anyway. With a dull ache in my matchstick legs I finally reached the top. Without the time to celebrate my small miracle, I followed Robin through the maze of tunnels and into the station, and there we got our reward.
The station soared to the sky. A dome of beautiful light that made you feel like you were sky-walking.
“I never been here before,” Robin said.
“Never?”
“I’ve never been further than Southfields.”
I turned. “What?” I reeled. “You’ve never been to the Southbank?”
She didn’t reply.
“You’ve never been to The National? Hyde Park? To Trafalgar Square? To … to … Ha
mpstead Heath? Never?”
Robin shrugged again.
“You’ve never been out of London? You’ve never seen mountains? You’ve never seen the sea?”
“Never, all right?”
She walked away, her head down and her hood up. I thought of Isaac’s mum and dad taking us to the museums of Kensington and Holborn, to Wimbledon Championships, to see Arsenal play, and to an NFL game at Wembley. I thought of them taking us to sketching classes in the National Gallery and to workshops at the National Theatre, to readings at King’s Place and films at the Ritzy. London was bigger then, and more colourful; it had tin men and dinosaurs and letters the size of elephants. London was Wonderland and Brixton was the rabbit hole, the very heart of it, and the best place in the world.
In the Departures lounge, I fiddled with my headphones whilst Robin paced a small patch of tiles by the toilets. I looked at the ceiling and wondered if this was a blind spot where the security cameras couldn’t see her. As she paced she was probably debating whether to let me go through with whatever it was she was setting me up for. Were we running away? Forever? Or was it something more sinister? Maybe she did have a plan to escape from the Beast. Or maybe she was smuggling something? Maybe I was her mule.
Either way, I knew I would walk straight up to that passport desk and get on that train.
A loudspeaker announced our train. We waited until the queue built up. The man at the desk barely looked at me as I handed him my passport.
The metal detector beeped and I had a pleasant conversation with the guard about the pins in my leg and hips. He seemed impressed by how much hardware I had on me and let me through, telling me not to stand out in the rain too long, and I laughed even though I hate that joke.
I waited at the corner of the large white wall and watched Robin’s bag get pulled apart. I watched as she had to sidestep the machine and get an electronic wand wafted over her body. I watched as a woman with plastic gloves searched her up and down.
I walked ahead so she wouldn’t think I had seen her being humiliated like that, and when she caught up with me I thought she would be angry, but it was worse, she was calm, as if everything that had just happened was completely normal.
We had a table to ourselves on the train. I opened my rucksack and pulled out my grandmother’s orange dress.
“You hemmed it,” Robin said.
I nodded.
“How do you know how to do that?”
“I used to be in charge of costumes when we did our sketches. Costume, hair and make-up authenticate the sketch.”
She was silent for a moment. “Did you and Isaac fall out or what?”
I didn’t answer.
“Agony, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“All right,” she said, taking the dress out of my hand. “Watch my bag, innit. Cash money.”
She came back looking like a different person. The colour of the dress brightened her face. Even the spider broach looked trendy on her Peter Pan collar.
She shrugged. “It looks dumb with my Converse.”
“No, I like it. It contrasts. It’s interesting. Like you don’t have to try so hard.”
Robin thought about this for a while and then nodded. She sat down and scooped up her braids, twisting them into a bun on the top of her head. Her neck was long and graceful, like a swan’s. “Why aren’t you allowed to wear whatever you want in London?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me that,” she said.
I was distracted by the loud patter of French from the seat next to us. A man in a black suit, massive and tanned like a wrestler, was talking into a mobile phone.
“You’re French?” I said to him when he’d finished on his phone.
He raised one eyebrow. “Yes?”
“But you’re reading the Times in English.”
“Of course.”
“That’s clever.”
“To the English people, perhaps this is clever.”
“Can you speak English as well as French?”
“But of course.”
“How do you say ‘I’d like to exchange this money’?”
“Je voudrais changer des livres sterling, s’il vous plaît,” the man said.
“Je vou-day en…”
“Je vou-drais changer des livres sterling, s’il vous plaît.”
“Je vou-day en change de leaves un vous-ay.”
The man scrunched his newspaper. “Je … vou … drais … changer des livres sterling … s’il vous plaît.”
“Je voudrais en pa pap de dap dap civils play.”
“That is enough!” He sprang to his feet and stomped off down the aisle.
I laughed. “I think I’m going to like France,” I said to Robin.
Then the thought hit me. “Oh my life! We’re going to France!”
Robin relaxed as London rushed away. When she smiled, her cheeks dimpled, and when she really smiled, her left cheek dimpled again.
I felt like an intrepid explorer, carefully navigating the space between us, feeling out the questions I was allowed to ask.
I bit on my thumbnail. One of the very few advantages of having been shunted out of every institution I’d ever been enrolled in is that I was qualified to ask other people about it. “Why don’t you go to school?”
“NFI.”
Not Formally Invited.
“What happened?”
She looked out of the window and watched the steady progress of a cloud. “I got in with this … crowd,” she said finally. “Just … people I thought was friends. There was so much drama. So much stuff going on, violence, death threats, real-world stuff like that… And I’m supposed to concentrate on sedimentary rocks or ignorant rocks or some bollocks? When there’s death threats?”
I nodded. “Don’t you love it when they talk about bullying? I’m, like, no, I don’t want to fill in a form. I don’t want to discuss this in a meeting with him. I don’t want restorative justice, which is basically someone having a nice chat with him. I want the police because he has threatened to rape me and burn my house down.”
“Innit,” Robin said. “I was held down and stabbed with a fishtail comb once. That fucking hurt. And then when the group got at it again the police were like… Look!” Robin craned towards the window. “Look at the tunnel! We’re going under the water! Ahh!” She laughed and her teeth glistened beneath the lights. “Hold your breath.”
We held our breath as we travelled beneath the water. I closed my eyes and warned myself to not freak out, but I hated the idea of an entire body of water being above our heads, and I couldn’t shake the image of water crashing in over us. Long after I had breathed again, Robin exhaled.
“You can hold your breath for ages.”
Robin exhaled, laughing. “I hold my breath in the bath,” she said. “I hold my head under and don’t come up.”
She watched the travelling darkness.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I like it.”
My thoughts turned back to school. “Then what happened?” I asked. “How come you don’t go to school at all?”
“I clocked a teacher. Got two days. Two days, that’s all. Then when I destroyed the science block by making a flame-thrower out of the gas taps, I got peed.”
Permanently Excluded.
I tried to look surprised. “That was you?”
Robin shrugged.
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“No, I made this one tiny flame and set fire to this piece of paper. That was it.”
“And then what happened?”
She sat up straighter. With every word, her expression and accent changed. Her hands moved to animate her story.
“This bloody Shanice sprayed her cheap-arse hairspray everywhere and the flame went right across the table and set fire to everything.
Shanice’s chemistry book goes up in flames and Shanice goes mental, screaming, and throws the book. So there’s this burning book flying through the air, the table’s on fire and everyone’s, like, ‘Fuckin ’ell, Shanice!’ And then the book lands on the windowsill and sets fire to the wood and the glass is poppin’ and then the flame goes right up the blinds and I was, like, ‘Fuck’. The supply teacher’s there trying to get his specs on to read the fire extinguisher and everyone’s screaming at him to put the fire out. ‘Put the fuckin’ fire out!’ And he’s going, ‘Be quiet! Hang on!’ and we’re trying to wrestle the extinguisher off him, slapping him away, and he’s proper fighting us for it, trying to put his fucking specs on, and before you know it, the fire’s gone up this display about Einstein, so now it looks like a hate crime. Then it goes, whooosh! up the next set of blinds and finds some yellow stuff which goes, Fsssh … BANG! Then everyone shits themselves and is, like, trying to trample over each other, screaming in their phones and whatever, but, anyway, everyone got out. Then it spread across the room and stuff was popping and exploding out the windows and then the floor collapsed.” She stopped. “Nightmare.”
I laughed and covered my mouth with both hands. Robin smiled but it quickly faded. It always does.
“Anyway, at the unit, this one scrape calls me a ticker and backhand smacks my face. I lose it. Break her socket. I had to go DC for that one.”
“God … the Detention Centre.”
“Nuthouse, more like. Shed full of raped drug addicts, that place.”
I nodded.
She sniffed. “And you?”
“If I told you, you’d go off me.”
“I ain’t on you.” Her expression was stone cold. But then she broke into a little smile. “Go on. Can’t be that bad. You ain’t institutionalized.”
“I was.”
“Really?”
I shrugged.
“Where?”
“Meadow Gorge.”
“Shit. How did you wind up there?”
“I went to school one day, and then it turns out I got on the roof and it was this big thing.”
“What did they say was wrong with you?”