by Tom Anderson
Gaby put her sketchbook away, and pulled out the rusted bar again. ‘I’ll keep this out on the way back,’ she said.
‘Whatever.’
‘Protection,’ she said. Then, just as I was about to take offence, added, ‘For both of us. I heard some of the druggies they kicked out of the sixth form last month were coming up here tonight. Ella told me coz they invited her.’
‘She’s working tonight,’ I said.
‘Ooh look at you suddenly her best friend.’
I scowled at Gaby, and she flexed the bar at me.
‘Bet you two were talking about me, weren’t you.’
‘Not much,’ I said.
‘Bet you were, though.’
‘Only a little.’
‘Go on, then. What did she say?’
‘Nothing serious.’
‘Bull. Bet you did. Bet you were both having a full-on gossip about me.’
My breath jumped off another heartbeat, and I blurted, ‘Only one thing,’ and as soon as it was out, I caught this hot rush of regret.
‘What? I knew it. Come on, tell me.’
‘Well, she mentioned your art, and it was clear she didn’t know you did driftwood and that you collected stuff from the beaches. Why doesn’t she know? If she’s like your best mate?’
‘Coz I don’t use that stuff in school,’ Gaby said, again, not needing a moment to think. ‘You know that!’
‘Yeah. But not telling a friend about it?’
‘Why should I?’
‘I dunno. Seems a pretty big part of you, to me.’
‘Pretty big part of this me,’ Gaby said, stopping in her tracks and tapping her head with the bar.
‘Yeah, I know you say that. But I don’t get it.’
‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘I’ve said it before. There’s real life and there’s fake life. School and Art classes are fake life. Why would I want to waste real stuff on my fake life?’
‘How do I know this is your real life then?’ I asked.
‘You don’t. But it has to be, for you, doesn’t it? It’s the bit where you exist.’
‘That’s harsh, Gaby.’
‘No it’s not. It’s beautiful.’
I didn’t say anything more. The carpark was a few steps away now.
‘Plus,’ she added. ‘I’m gonna make money from my beach art. You watch. Don’t want Mrs Rogoff or anyone else to have a legal share in it, do I! You can have a cut, though, if you stay my friend long enough.’
She was slipping the bar away into her backpack again.
‘Just you watch,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be worth a fortune one day. I promise you it will.’
‘You sound like my dad,’ I said.
Chapter 9
I suppose (and this is not something to admit to Dr Wentloog, ever) that being harsh on my dad is something I started doing for survival.
That might sound a bit funny, but it’s the truth. There you have it. Being as honest as I can, there. I basically got so much crap from other kids about him, that eventually I realised it was better to just take control of the whole situation, and my way of doing that was by making sure no one could slag him off more than I did.
Didn’t really work though, of course. I just ended up nearly in fights, or getting put down by kids so badly that I wanted to simply stop being anyone, anywhere, ever. So then I became his main defender. Then I went back to being his worst critic, until one day this middle ground kind of found me.
He’s never made it any easier for me, either.
What happened pretty soon after I started ragging on him myself to other kids was that I’d feel really bad about it. I used to call him a loser or say I hated the fact he used to be posh. That all seemed fair game, but when kids then started saying the same stuff back to me, or even worse stuff to each other in front of me, I got angry quick. Seemed I couldn’t hear the same things I was saying. It was like I owned the rights to it. Which is not how things work in Chapel Shores Comp.
Once a few of the nasty ones worked the situation out, I was done for. It’s funny how those types do somehow suss stuff first, isn’t it? It’s like they have some sort of sixth sense for what’s going on in timid kids’ heads. Two of the whinier ones in Joe Poundes’s crew seemed to know my thoughts, and how to play me, even before I did.
That was what caused the first of the little incidents that got my folks worrying about me. Or my mum, at least – Dad hasn’t ever really worried about anything. Maybe it’s the leftover posh in him. Ouch, there I go already.
Anyway, what happened was that this kid, who operated under some kind of protective umbrella that came with being in the Poundes gang, got right on my case about my dad and I lost my rag with him. The kid was called Sylvester George, but they nicknamed him ‘Skunk’ and he properly lived up to it. He got the name from having some sort of stripe in his hair when he was a bit younger, but I reckoned it suited him better because of the way he went round firing these stinking jets of spoken poison at people he didn’t like. Or worse still, at people he thought it would impress others not to like.
In History one day Mr Lloyd was running through his ‘LLJ-LBJ-Lincoln-etcetera’ routine, and then making it all about himself with the ‘David Lloyd George’ thing, before noticing Sylvester and going ‘Hey! I didn’t even notice that. Sylvester George. Well I never! With you and me there’s a Lloyd and a George in here. And also a David!’ He pointed at some silent girl in the back who’s surname was indeed David.
‘Brilliant!’ he went on. ‘We’ve got them all. Just need an Abraham now and we can make at least two full president names or initials in this classroom.’
‘Luca doesn’t count though, Sir,’ said Skunk.
Mr Lloyd, fully missing the point, just thought there was a gap in the history knowledge and went to correct: ‘No, it’s not the Luca bit, Sylvester, that we need. It’s “Lincoln”. Abraham Lincoln was a US president.’
Then he turned to me, finally shredding any hope I had that he might drop this embarrassing thing of his and run back into whatever his lesson was gonna be about.
‘Anyway, Luca,’ said Mr Lloyd. ‘Is that part of your name on your Dad’s side or your mother’s side?’
‘Eh?’
‘Who’s Lincoln and who’s James?’
‘Dunno, Sir.’
He looked at me, exasperated. ‘You don’t know which of those surnames was your mum’s and which was your dad’s…’
‘Oh, er, yeah. I do.’
‘So come on then. Which was it?’
‘Which was what, Sir?’ There was one of those horrible rumbling chuckles, when the class are laughing at you rather than with you. They never laughed with me. That was a privilege only really kept for people like Skunk George or Joseph Poundes.
Mr Lloyd sighed again.
‘Luca,’ he said. ‘What I mean is,’ and he paused again to show his exasperation, ‘which surname in your second name – “Lincoln-James” – comes from which parent? More important for us here, in what is meant to be a History lesson of some kind, is whether “Lincoln” is your dad’s name or your mum’s.’
‘Oh, er… it was my dad’s,’ I said.
‘Good. So your dad is Mr Lincoln?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ideal. Now, we’ve got there, at last. Thanks Luca.’
He turned to the class then said:
‘So Luca’s father is clearly the one with presidential characteristics, then.’
Which was when Skunk laughed.
Mr Lloyd didn’t get it at all, and added. ‘I know. It’s a funny thought, isn’t it? Glad you like that, Sylvester.’
Skunk stopped laughing and looked at me.
‘It ain’t that at all, Sir. It’s just, have you seen Luca’s old man? He’s like the least presidential person in the
world, Sir. He’s like one of those charity sellers with a yellow jacket that my mum always refuses to come to the door for.’
Then Skunk sat back, pleased with himself and waited for the class-wide laughter that this life owed to him whenever he spoke up. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh. A class of kids laughing with him, and at me. Again. Before Mr Lloyd could do anything to stop it, there it came. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.
I think it was the first time I properly got the feeling – the moment this wriggling, clawed creature first woke up in my belly and chest. My head went hot and tight at the back, and then I started breathing super hard because it felt like I was going to be sick. As the cramps ran from my stomach up, I breathed harder and then realised the deep gasps were in order to stop tears instead. That was when the anger started to run at me, and I closed my eyes. All I cared about was that there were loads of people seeing me, and that I had to make sure I didn’t do something embarrassing that I’d never recover from. It felt like anything could happen – I could have been about to wet myself as easily as I could have been about to cry. I closed my eyes, breathed deep one more time and then lost a moment. Or it could have been several.
There was a loud bang, and when I opened them again everyone had gone silent. I could feel the pain in my knuckles and then I saw the blood. In front of me was the victim of my only, pathetic little way of coping: a metal pencil case my mum had bought me with ‘Reggae Festa’ written on it in green and orange letters. It had caved in under my fist, and the now jagged rim had cut into my little finger and back of my hand during the blow. The girl next to me in the seating plan, whose name I since deliberately forgot, looked like she wanted to cry now instead, while Skunk just looked annoyed his laughter had died.
I rammed my hand under the desk before Mr Lloyd could see it.
‘What was that?’ he asked. I looked straight ahead, trying to keep a blank expression as if someone else could have possibly made the noise.
Mr Lloyd dropped back onto his lesson plan. Only five minutes too late to save the rest of my life.
‘Today all of you are going to…’
Who cared what we’d all do. Something had come out of me that day, and it was something Sylvester George was certain to have the intelligence to exploit.
As the lesson drifted on, the pain started to feel good. Feel amazing, in fact. You could focus on it, and I kept telling my brain that it was only some sort of quirk of biology telling it this feeling was meant to be bad. Enjoy the pain, said my heart to my nerves. And that’s what I did. I was in control, too. As the rising, swirling sadness – which would always follow these moments of panic from now on – set in, I could thankfully focus on something else: the acute buzzing in my hand. The trickle of blood going cold and drying in the folds between my fingers came with the thought I’d chosen that feeling, to prevent whatever had been about to happen in my head. It made me want to yell with joy.
I couldn’t of course, and instead I had to spend the rest of the day ignoring Skunk as he tried to rib me about being the ‘president’s son’ and kept saying his parents would offer my dad a job if he ever wanted one. In a way I knew I deserved it, for not managing to let his crap wash over me in the first place.
It was only when I got to the bunkers at the end of the day, on my own, to think and watch the sea, that the real low started to come at me from within. The first wave of it had been a little tremor. This second blast was a feeling that ate you straight up and didn’t even stop when there was none of you left to eat. And nothing, not old-school reggae, not food, not even pain could hold it back. This is what it’s like, I realised. This is what it’s like to envy those who don’t exist.
There were plenty of people who didn’t exist in school, of course, metaphorically speaking. Kids like the girl next to me in History, the boy whose face was covered with rash and who came to school in pressed trousers every day or the other girl whose surname Mr Lloyd had only recalled when it reminded him of his own. My place had been with them until that day, but then, out of the blue and by my own doing, I’d made myself exist too much to ever be comfy with it.
But then there was not existing, and there was not existing. Those kids must have still had tastes and likes, dislikes, hopes and fears, ideas. I pressed my back against the concrete of the bunkers. No blood pumping through them. No short breath, or feelings, or insecurities. How cool to just be a bunker instead, I thought, made of hard stuff and gathering algae. They didn’t have to think.
Maybe I could wish hard enough and turn into stone, I thought.
Yeah, I wished. Never going to happen though, was it.
Instead, and because I wasn’t brave enough to do anything to change the situation, I’d be in school the next morning. Again. The first day of a whole lifetime of being on the radar of kids like Skunk any time they couldn’t find a better joke elsewhere.
The time between now and then would involve waiting. Waiting to exist in their eyes while you wished you didn’t have to exist in your own. One step closer to the stone pillar I’d wanted to become that first afternoon in History. Or could that be one step further away?
It was only a day before my mother noticed the marks on my knuckles.
As if suddenly deciding to care about what was going on in my life, she quizzed the hell out of me about it. Not long later the sleeping trouble started, and she caught onto that, too. She was checking on me by stealth in the middle of the nights, because to her not sleeping was something to get really worried about. I didn’t want to tell her I’d always woken up in the dark to strange sights or wonderful noises, that figures had flitted through my room, that sometimes creatures spoke in the dark, that objects flew and flashed in the skies outside my window. I didn’t want to have to tell her that stuff was normal for me – nothing out of the ordinary – that it had been the case since I was four and she’d never bothered to find out then. She would have gone off on one, like she did when the school first phoned to say they were worried I was looking distracted and ‘lethargic’. Their word. What on earth did that mean? Lethargic?
Just like the teachers, Mum’s solution was to nag me so hard the problems felt even worse.
I stopped talking about either my mum or my dad, positive or negative, to anyone but Gaby, after that – and only if she brought it up. That was because she, for some mad reason, kept claiming to admire the guys. Also, since we only really chatted outside of school, it kept a nice, safe wall around the subject during the ‘working day’.
But the other stuff? The loosening of my head and the waking in the night? The pounding chest and sore shoulders? That had to stay with me and me alone. No one would understand that, anyway. The easiest thing was to let Mum think all was hunky dory, and to let Gaby think I had a bit of a problem with my old man. Apart from that, the other stuff would go away some day, I reckoned. Like it did for the YouTubers who boasted about it to get subscribers, but who were really these super confident hipsters with no such problems in real life.
‘Chill out, Luca,’ Gaby insisted, time and time again whenever I failed to prevent Mum or Dad bumping into her, or coming up in conversation. ‘Your folks are so cool you don’t even know it. You’ll realise it one day, though. I bet you do. Trust me.’
That one day, I wanted to tell her, was nowhere near. I’d turn to stone first. I was determined.
Chapter 10
Dad was wearing his charity salesman-style yellow jacket when he came to fetch me at break time for our adventure to Jeff’s jewellery den.
‘I’m not crazy about this idea,’ Mum had said the night before. ‘But if it’s got to happen then Luca Lincoln-James is attending school first. Needs to get his mark. I’ve promised Mr Kleener.’
‘Aw, come on,’ said Dad. ‘He should have his mind on the experience. Plus he can sleep on for an extra hour then.’
‘He’s sleeping the right times for school and it’s staying that way,’ my mum ins
isted. ‘Another promise I made Kleener. Luca has to learn to get up five days a week. And if you’re not going till eleven, and Luca’s up anyway, then he’s going to go in and get his mark.’
‘Fine. He can walk, though.’
‘He usually does,’ said my mum. ‘You only drop him in like once a week anyway.’
‘It’s more than that.’
‘No it ain’t!’
So that was that. With no real role in the decision myself, as per usual, I was sent strolling at the gates, Bunny wailing in my ear. This time though, I was armed with a note to excuse me for the rest of the day after break because I was apparently going to get interviewed ‘for an apprenticeship next year’.
The excuse would have been funny if it wasn’t for the fact Dad half believed there was some truth in it. ‘It’s as good as an apprenticeship, going to places like this, and making the sorts of contacts you’ll find there,’ he said.
We still had the supply in for Reg, the same woman who’d mishandled Gaby’s antics in PSE and who we were all in a standoff with over names. She wouldn’t learn ours, so we wouldn’t find out or notice hers.
‘Er, Miss, I got a note from my mum… about this afternoon,’ I told her. ‘Can you read it and give me a mark?’
The reply was slow and sceptical, after sniffing through the letter in exactly the same manner:
‘Hmm… Aren’t these supposed to get signed off by Mr Kleener himself?’
I wanted to reply ‘How would I know, since it’s your job’, but didn’t.
‘Not sure, Miss,’ I said.
‘Well, Mr Kleener’s at a conference today, anyway. Plus I’ve only got the rest of the week left before your form teacher has to come back. So fine. What does it matter? I’ll authorise.’
And so it was that I walked clear of the gate and the gate-keeper, and Skunk, and Joe Poundes and Art teachers wanting projects and Kleener wanting attendance stats and Gaby wanting to ignore me.
Only to jump into the middle seat in the cockpit of Dad’s Fiat, sandwiched between him and Jeff for the long journey across the Marshes, onto the motorway and over to Birmingham – where nothing like an apprenticeship interview was going to happen at all.