Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Ollie. ‘She’s fine.’

  There turns out to be a long, looping walk you can take from Ollie’s house to the coffee shop that goes by the canal. It’s pretty, in a grungey, littered sort of way, and the dog would like it, I think. I feel sad that we didn’t bring her. We stop and sit for a while, scuffing little stones from the gravel pavement over the edge into the green water.

  ‘This is probably murder central around here,’ says Teagan. She looks suspiciously at two men in suits walking past us on their way home. ‘I’m not sure if I’m allowed to go walking by canals. I think I’m not. I think my parents have some kind of rule about it.’

  ‘Mine too,’ I say.

  ‘Yours definitely do,’ says Teagan. ‘Danny would, anyway. Remember when we were little and he wouldn’t let us go to the corner shop because we had to cross a road?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What was wrong with crossing a road?’ says Ollie.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just my brother thought we’d be hit by a car.’

  ‘Me and Aaron used to skateboard by this canal all the time when we were younger,’ Ollie says. ‘Like ten and thirteen. Except one time these other kids came and pushed me off and stole my skateboard and then threw it in the water.’

  ‘What did Aaron do?’ says Teagan.

  ‘Nothing. He went home.’

  ‘That was nice of him.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything he could have done.’

  ‘Did you get your skateboard back?’

  ‘No. It sank. It’s probably still down there.’

  ‘OK,’ says Teagan. ‘Thanks for that depressing story.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I don’t have a brother or anything, but aren’t they supposed to defend you if you get your skateboard stolen?’

  Ollie is silent for a minute. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I guess.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Teagan.’ I give her a look. Neither of us knows anything about having brothers: she’s got no siblings and I’ve only got Danny who doesn’t count because he’s so much older. I can tell that she wants to say to Ollie that his brother is a creep, but honestly who understands how anybody’s family works.

  There’s low cloud hanging over us and it’s cold even though I’m wearing my coat and my scarf and my green gloves with stars on. Looking at the murky water, then, I have this heavy, anxious feeling, like everything is dangerous and the cold water is inside me, rising. It gets worse when I open my mouth to start to try and explain it to Teagan and Ollie and realise I can’t because I don’t know what it is. Instead I just say, ‘I’m cold. Can we go?’

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the chalkboard it says, Monday’s Special: Kindness!

  There’s a rack for flyers that stands in front of the till, and Ollie has taken one of all of them, so he has a stack of about twenty to read and doesn’t have to talk to anybody. There’s a post-work rush on and all the tables are taken so when my brother walks in at about six o’clock there’s nowhere for him to sit and he has to come and join us. He’s carrying a newspaper and when he drops it on the table there’s a picture on the front of the guy who was killed on Saturday. Danny sees me looking at it and flips it over.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I say.

  ‘I need to use the Wi-Fi. Ours keeps cutting out.’ He gets his laptop out and starts opening it. ‘I’ll be twenty minutes, Alena. Don’t look at me like that. Do you want to introduce me to your friend?’

  ‘Danny, this is Oliver. From school. We’re doing a science project.’

  Danny looks at our empty Coke glasses and Ollie’s stack of subversive leaflets and my notebook lying open with a drawing of a zebra wearing a top hat. I like drawing animals in formal clothing. ‘Uh huh,’ he says.

  Ollie is staring at Danny with an unreadable expression on his face, and when I see Nick come out of the back office, notice Danny and head toward us, I think, please don’t kiss – and then I’m immediately ashamed of myself but it doesn’t matter because they don’t, Nick just touches Danny’s shoulder, very briefly, and says, ‘Hey, guys, how are we all doing out here?’, all charming like he’s our waiter in a nice restaurant. Teagan immediately starts blushing and Nick smiles at her as he slides into the booth next to Danny. ‘You guys mind if I join you?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Teagan says, and I roll my eyes at her.

  There’s something a little bit wild in Ollie’s eyes once there’s five of us round the table and he starts folding up his leaflets and tucking them into his pocket. Danny tries to engage him in conversation but he goes monosyllabic and nervy and finally Teagan has to get up to let him out and he leaves, mumbling something about the dog. Honestly, I don’t blame him. Other people’s families can be stressful. Having dinner with both of Teagan’s parents always makes me exhausted. They are way too nice.

  ‘That kid needs a coat,’ Danny says, absently, watching Ollie leave. Then he turns to his laptop. Nick frowns at him. ‘Are you here to work?’

  ‘Yes. Wi-Fi’s dead at home. Sorry.’

  ‘Why don’t you give it a rest for the night? I’m nearly finished here. We could all go out for food or something. Or get a takeaway. Teagan, you want to join us for a takeaway?’

  ‘I told my mum I’d be home by seven,’ Teagan says, massively disappointed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Danny. ‘Because I have to work.’

  ‘I’ll have takeaway,’ I say. ‘Me. I don’t have to work.’

  ‘Danny, take a break. Whatever you’re doing can’t be that important—’

  ‘Right,’ says Danny. ‘It’s not important at all. Not like selling coffee, is it?’

  Both me and Teagan go very still. There’s a short, cold silence and then Nick says, ‘So what’s his policy for keeping us safe this week? Martial law? Capital punishment?’

  Teagan, who has probably never seen Nick in sarcastic mode, shifts uncomfortably, and says, softly, ‘I should really go home, then.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I tell her.

  ‘No, I should.’

  Nick and Danny both say, ‘How are you getting home?’ at the same time and then glare at each other, and Teagan says, ‘I can walk. It’s still light. I think I’ll walk.’ And you can’t blame her either, really.

  ‘I might go home as well,’ I say, when she’s gone, but neither of them are paying attention to me and I don’t honestly want to go home, so I gather up my stuff and go and sit at the counter and talk to Zahra who, in between serving customers, tells me about how she has been sleeping with a revolutionary communist she met on the Internet.

  Later, as me and my brother are getting ready to leave, somebody bellows ‘Danny!’ across the shop, and we look up and it’s Mike coming in for his evening espresso on the way home from work. Danny always says he doesn’t know how anyone can drink that much caffeine at night, and Nick says who cares, it’s good for business, which I doubt is true since half the time he doesn’t let Mike pay.

  Danny flinches at the sound, but then he gets up goes over and him and Mike do a complicated back-slapping man hug, and Mike says, ‘How’s life on the other side?’

  ‘Do not start,’ says Danny.

  Mike is tall and has grey-black hair and nice, kind eyes, and he once told me that he was the first Irish-Lebanese man to go to Oxford University, which for all I know is true. He’s been editor of the Hackney Standard for years. He gave Danny his first job, supposedly, so he’s known him for ever, and he likes sitting around and talking politics with Nick and Zahra.

  I like him a lot. He buys me overpriced Christmas presents and takes us all out to dinner with his wife, who loves me. If Nick and Danny are ever killed in a plane crash I hope that the Feghalis will adopt me.

  ‘Alena,’ says Mike. ‘Lovely Alena.’ Nobody calls me lovely apart from Mike. He says, ‘Will you tell your brother to stop working for that crook and come back to me?’

  ‘Stop working
for that crook and go back to Mike.’

  ‘Tell Mike to triple my pay and I’ll think about it,’ says Danny. I don’t know if this is a joke or not.

  ‘Lena, how would you like a job?’ says Mike. ‘I’ll take either of the Kennedy siblings.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I say.

  ‘Right, glad that’s sorted,’ says Danny. ‘We’re going home. Nick’s in the back office, go and bother him.’

  ‘You don’t call, you don’t write,’ says Mike. ‘You know Trevor’s wife just had a baby?’

  ‘Congratulations to Trevor,’ says Danny. ‘We’ve got to go.’ Like he realises he’s being rude, then he says, ‘How’s circulation?’

  ‘Down, down, down,’ says Mike. ‘You know how it is. East End Bomber’s been good for us, though.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ says Danny. ‘Well, send him a gift basket.’

  Nick comes out of the back office, then, shrugging into his coat, and he sees Mike and says, ‘Hey!’ and comes over for some more manly half-hugging.

  ‘Don’t you have to close up?’ Danny says.

  Nick glances at him. ‘Zahra’s doing it. Thought I’d walk home with you guys.’

  ‘Right.’

  They look at each other in silence until Mike gets uncomfortable and says, ‘Well, Zahra makes better coffee anyway.’ I’m suddenly sick of them both behaving like this in front of people who are our friends.

  ‘Right,’ says Danny. ‘He’s not Muslim so the only other option is that he’s a Nazi.’

  ‘I didn’t say Nazi.’

  ‘Yes you did. You just said Nazi.’

  We are walking home past all the locked-up shops, and on to the quiet residential street on the way to our flat. They both look tired and orange under the streetlights and their voices are loud and echo against the empty road.

  ‘My point was that all the bombs have been in ethnically diverse areas of London and it might be that this is some sort of white supremacist kind of—’

  ‘Every area of London is ethnically diverse.’

  ‘Yeah, but these areas are particularly—’

  ‘How do we know he’s not one of your lot? One of your eco-activist friends from the coffee shop?’

  Nick stops for a moment so that I almost walk into him because I’m trailing behind. He gives Danny a very hard look. ‘Since when is my lot not your lot too?’

  ‘You’ve had hundreds of stop the evil supermarkets posters up in the shop. How do we know the bomber isn’t back there right now drinking an organic black soy Americano and planning his next target?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a black soy Americano,’ says Nick. He starts walking again.

  ‘If he is a white supremacist,’ I say, trying to keep up with them, ‘it’s not actually a very good tactic, is it? Like there’s no white people in Tesco’s in Shoreditch.’

  Nick shakes his head. ‘Some people just want to burn things down,’ he says. ‘That’s all they really want. Whatever they believe in. Some people want to build things and some people want to burn things down.’

  ‘That’s really profound, Nick, thank you,’ says Danny, and I say, ‘Can we stop talking about it?’ and both of them say, ‘Yes,’ at the same time.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Danny was twenty when they met, and Nick was twenty-three. Or, Danny was nineteen and Nick was twenty-two. Or, Nick told me once, Danny was twenty-two and Nick was twenty-five.

  ‘Nick,’ said Danny, sitting next to him that time. ‘No. You’re getting senile. I was still at university. I was nineteen. Or twenty.’

  ‘Right,’ said Nick, looking totally confused. ‘OK. Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘Twenty-two and twenty-five are the ages you were when you got me,’ I said, and Nick said, ‘Right. Yeah. Of course,’ and still looked confused.

  I swear they have told me different ages every time I ask. They are both getting senile.

  ‘My parents are the same,’ Teagan says. ‘It’s because they can’t deal with being nearly sixty.’

  Teagan’s parents are twenty years older than mine. Teagan’s mum had her when she was nearly forty. She sometimes tilts her head to one side and says, sort of wistfully, how young Nick and Danny are. I have, on very rare occasions, heard her refer to them as the boys. They’d probably love this.

  My parents and Teagan’s parents are super nice to each other these days, ever since the celebrating diversity incident. Extravagantly polite, always sending each other Christmas cards and invitations to dinner, and then skilfully avoiding the actual dinners since they have nothing to say to each other except to talk about us.

  Teagan’s parents were both married before, to other people, and in fact her mum was still married when she met Teagan’s dad, although the details around this are all very sketchy and not to be talked about. But now we’re teenagers sometimes Rachel will have a few glasses of wine and start telling stories. I always listen. I love stories like this. I am starving for them.

  I think it’s romantic, actually. Like you’re already married but then you meet the person you’re really meant to be with: you’d have to really be in love to go through all the hassle of breaking up with the other person. I think of her parents’ relationship as a very deliberate thing. They didn’t just stumble into a relationship and stay that way for ever. They had to choose. Which I think is romantic although Teagan thinks basically the opposite.

  Nick and Danny met in a bar where Nick was working, and that’s all they can remember about it. I’ve tried for years to get them to tell me about this in some way that makes it a story. I’d like for it to be romantic and funny and brilliant. Or just important and deliberate in a way that makes it seem like everything that came after was important and deliberate and not just a series of accidents they couldn’t find their way out of. Instead, it goes like this: Danny walked in to a bar one evening – he can’t remember why he was there – and Nick started speaking to him – he can’t remember what about – and they exchanged phone numbers – they can’t remember why – and then the next week they met up in another bar – they can’t remember which one.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said to Nick once, rolling my eyes. ‘That’s really romantic.’

  ‘It doesn’t need to be romantic,’ Nick said. ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’

  ‘But you must have fallen in love,’ I said. ‘At some point you must remember falling in love.’

  ‘What do you want to hear, exactly? Candles and flowers and caught in a rainstorm?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said.

  ‘Our relationship’s not like that,’ he said, and I said, ‘No kidding,’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘But you do love each other,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but—’

  I said, ‘Don’t say but! There’s not supposed to be a but!’ and that made him laugh. Then he said, ‘I was just going to say that love isn’t necessarily romantic in the way you’re asking.’ He said, ‘Sometimes it’s more like—’ and then he paused for a while, frowning like he was thinking really hard, and eventually said, ‘I can’t think of the right word.’

  ‘Nick,’ I whined, and he said, ‘It’s just that it’s not really a romantic story. How I met Danny. It’s more difficult than that. It’s more complicated. It’s better. It’s more like—’

  He paused again. He was thinking really hard. One thing I will say about Nick is that he tries to take these questions seriously. Even when I was little, asking really stupid stuff. He tries to give serious answers.

  ‘It just changes you,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you meet someone and it changes everything. In a good way. And there was all this awful stuff that happened, your mum dying and everything, and we went through all of that together, and you just end up being changed by it all. Like you’ve broken a bone or something, and then it heals differently. The other person becomes part of who you are.’

  ‘So being in a relationship with my brother is like breaking a leg?’

  He grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘exactly. Except it’s not lik
e the breaking. It’s like the healing.’

  I said, ‘That makes no sense,’ and he said, ‘You’ll understand one day,’ which is absolutely the number one most infuriating thing an adult can say.

  When I told Teagan he’d said that to me she went starry-eyed and said it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard and gave herself a biro tattoo on her arm that said, It’s not like the breaking, it’s like the healing.

  I gave myself one that said, Teagan Esler is fucking ridiculous and Teagan said, ‘You’ll get in trouble for having the word fucking written on your arm,’ and she was right, I did.

  Whatever.

  TWENTY-THREE

  So now anyway, lately, I am thinking that’s not even the important story. The important story, the place where I start, is not Nick and Danny. It’s her.

  I’ve got my Greenham Common postcard propped up by my bed and I keep looking at her face and trying to find the place in my mind that recognises her, the place where all my memories are hiding. And I’ll watch the video sometimes before bed, or on my phone at lunchtime, her saying, I think they’re right, aren’t they? and her glance flicking to the camera at the end. She is really young. Not that much older than the girls in sixth form. She could almost still be at school but instead she’s in a green raincoat on an Air Force base, But I’m not the one populating this earth with weapons, am I?

  She has a baby. I keep thinking, There’s my brother and then I think, This woman is nothing like my brother and then I think how I ended up with Danny when for a little while I had her.

  Things we might have done together before she died.

  She might have taken me to a political protest, like you see babies at Pride sometimes, flags and banners unfurling from their prams. There might have been a walk through the wild, overgrown cemetery near where she used to live, me picking up dried leaves and interesting stones and showing them to her. Our faces both flushed from the cold. My first birthday, a badly iced cake that she made herself and was proud of. Her making up songs and putting my name in them. Sunday afternoons, just the two of us, at home. Toys. Colouring books. Maybe she accidentally left me in the car one afternoon when she went shopping. Maybe she accidentally dropped me down the stairs and I cried for a few minutes and then I was fine and she never told anybody because she felt so guilty. A visit to the London Aquarium on a Monday morning when it’s quiet. She held me up to the tanks so I could press my hand against the glass.