Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  You’d think I’d just said why don’t you become a drug dealer. ‘That was a long time ago,’ says Danny. ‘A really, really, really long time ago.’

  ‘But couldn’t you still—’

  ‘No. I couldn’t. For about a hundred reasons.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like we can’t afford it. I wouldn’t be any good at it and we can’t afford it.’

  ‘I just thought you wanted to do that one day.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things I wanted to do, but life’s not like that, as you’ll probably find out.’

  ‘Danny,’ says Nick, and Danny doesn’t look at him.

  For a while there’s just the sound of forks scraping plates. I try and change the subject. ‘There’s a big thing at school because the head of French is pregnant and she’s not married but everybody says she’s having a fling with the head of drama,’ I say.

  ‘How do they know that?’ says Nick.

  ‘It’s just a rumour.’

  ‘Maybe you should leak it to the press,’ says Danny.

  Nick almost laughs at this, but he chokes it back and coughs for a while. We all finish eating in silence.

  FORTY-ONE

  Sirens keep waking me up that night, and I’ll sit up for a moment, confused, and then fall back asleep. There are always sirens around here but most of the time you can’t hear them that loud from the fourth floor and you get used to it, anyway.

  The sky is grey when I wake up for the last time, half-past five and too early for anything, but I can hear voices and movement and I realise that what woke me up was the phone ringing.

  I get out of bed and pull on my hoodie over my pyjamas and go into the living room.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Nick is dressed already but his hair’s a mess and his eyes are creased like he just woke up. Danny is barefoot in jeans and still buttoning up his shirt and saying, ‘For god’s sake, just wait a minute.’

  ‘I’m going,’ Nick says.

  ‘Wait,’ says Danny.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I say again.

  ‘There was a break-in at the shop,’ Danny says, as Nick is tying his shoelaces.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The police just phoned us.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nick, would you just wait,’ says Danny, grabbing his own shoes from next to the door. He has buttoned his shirt on the wrong buttonholes. ‘You realise you’re too late to actually apprehend anybody, don’t you?’

  ‘Do what you like, but I’m going right now.’

  ‘I’m coming, just let me get dressed.’

  Nick is at the door now, with his hand on the handle, looking at Danny impatiently.

  ‘Lena, we’re just going to go and see what the damage is,’ Danny says to me. ‘We’ll be back before breakfast. Or I will, anyway.’

  Nick has opened the door and is standing in the corridor. ‘I’m going,’ he says.

  ‘OK, OK,’ says Danny. He looks at me. ‘OK?’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Don’t do anything. Stay here. Go back to bed.’ Danny follows Nick into the corridor. He is still barefoot and is holding his shoes in his hands.

  ‘Maybe I should go with—’

  The door closes before I finish the sentence.

  I don’t go back to bed. I go back in to my room and look out at the grey morning, wishing I’d gone with them and also not, because if it’s anything like the last times when the windows got smashed, it’ll just make me want to cry, looking at it. Then I go back in to the living room and make some tea and put the TV on, early morning cartoons, and curl up under the blanket from the back of the sofa to watch.

  I send a message to Nick, Is the shop OK? but I hear his phone buzz and see that he’s left it lying on the kitchen counter.

  Danny gets back before breakfast. He’s bought a bottle of milk. Nick isn’t with him. ‘It’s bad,’ he tells me, rubbing his eyes. He sits down next to me, still holding the milk. ‘It’s really bad. They wrecked the place.’

  My stomach twists. ‘What does wrecked mean?’

  ‘Like.’ He looks too tired to answer the question. ‘Just, wrecked.’

  It could mean anything. Danny calls my room a wreck a lot of the time.

  ‘Where’s Nick?’

  ‘He’s still talking to the police.’

  ‘Is he going to open today?’

  ‘Lena, it’s really bad. It’s wrecked. He’s not going to be able to open for a while.’

  ‘A week?’

  ‘Longer than that.’

  ‘Why? What did they do?’

  ‘Broke the windows, smashed up both the fridges, ripped up some of the flooring. Then it looks like something caught fire.’ He shakes his head. ‘A couple of other shops on the street got broken into too last night. The newsagent and the photocopy place. Ours is the worst. Looks like a bomb hit it.’ I see him flinch after he says this.

  Why would you smash the fridges? I think. That Nick carefully cleans every morning. Why would you do it?

  ‘Were they trying to steal something?’ I say.

  ‘Like what?’ says Danny. ‘Soy milk?’

  ‘The float or something. Whatever’s in the safe.’

  ‘They didn’t steal anything. They just trashed it for the sake of it.’

  I bite my lip. ‘So it’s worse than the other times.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danny says. ‘It’s worse than the other times.’

  ‘Oh.’ I want to ask if I can go and see it but I know Danny will say that no, I have to go to school. ‘Nick left his phone on the counter,’ I say, because I don’t know what else to say.

  ‘I know. I’m going to go back. I’ll take it with me.’

  We both look at the TV screen for minute, where there’s a cartoon dog dressed as a policeman.

  ‘Why does this keep happening?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know, Alena. It’s a bad area. We should move.’

  He always says this. We should move because of the East End Bomber, we should move because of the traffic, because of kids smashing the windows. But we never do. Maybe he’s just saying it but he knows there’s no point. He thinks bad luck would follow us.

  ‘When I was little and Nick got hit by a car,’ I say, ‘Marie told me that he’d used up all our family’s bad luck and we wouldn’t have any more. Do you remember that?’

  He is silent for a while. Then he says, ‘She was lying.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m working that out.’

  Then he puts the milk down, and puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands for a long time, staring at the carpet.

  The sun breaks through the grey morning and then it’s warm all day, and at school everyone is lazy and distracted. At lunchtime I sit in the quad and try to read a book, but my mind is empty and loud at the same time, like radio static, and I can’t concentrate on anything.

  I get off the bus early on the way home and walk to the coffee shop. You can tell from up the street that something’s wrong. The windows are boarded up and there’s yellow tape across them. The glass from the door is gone but hasn’t been boarded so there’s just the frame hanging there like a skeleton. It looks like some abandoned place that no one cares about which makes me feel sick because I care about it more than any other place I know.

  I take a picture on my phone, anyway, since that’s what people do, and then I send it to Teagan, who was still off sick all day. Coffee shop got smashed up last night, I write, and then a sad face, and then I delete the sad face because a sad face is for when you fail your homework or something, and this isn’t like that. I can’t think of anything else to say, but I feel like she should know. The coffee shop is her place too.

  Someone has propped the skeleton-door open and when I get close I hesitate, not sure if I should go in, if it’s a crime scene or something, but I do. It’s very dark inside.

  ‘Lena, you shouldn’t really come in here,’ says Nick from out
of the gloom, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I say. ‘Don’t do that.’

  He’s sitting in the corner of one of the booths, a pen in his mouth and a folder and a bunch of papers on the dusty, blackened table in front of him. I put my bag down on the floor. I got a bunch of horror novels out from the library in the afternoon and my bag is weighed down with them. ‘Nick,’ I say. ‘Nick, this looks horrible.’

  He doesn’t answer. He takes the pen out of his mouth, puts it down, rubs his face with both hands.

  ‘Can you even see what you’re doing in here?’ I say. ‘Is it even safe in here?’

  I look at the floor. All the broken glass has been swept into neat piles. It makes you realise how much glass there is in a place like this.

  ‘No. It’s not. There’s glass and nails and god-knows-what everywhere. You should go home.’

  There’s a weird smell, as well, like burnt plastic. I look at the counter where the till is and I can see that someone has smashed the blender, which was just new last week.

  I wait for Nick to say something reassuring but he doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you need any help?’ I ask him. ‘Do you want me to do something?’

  ‘No. We can’t do anything right now.’

  ‘Are you getting people in to fix it? How long do you think it’ll be closed?’

  I can hear sirens again, somewhere far away. But it’s still a warm afternoon, and it’s quiet. The brightness outside makes it seem darker in here.

  He looks down at the papers in front of him. ‘The insurance company are only offering a limited payout,’ he says in a dull voice. ‘They say we didn’t take adequate security precautions.’

  ‘Oh.’ I scuff the toe of my shoe against the floor. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What does it sound like it means? It means I have no idea what I’m going to do.’

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to this.

  The map of the world that was on the wall has been torn down and I can see a few charred pieces of it on the floor.

  I pick up my bag again, twist the strap round my hand. ‘Maybe I could help with something,’ I say.

  ‘No. Come on, go home. I’ll be back in a while. Go home. Please.’

  ‘Nick—’

  ‘Alena,’ he says. ‘Go home. Please.’

  I don’t recognise the tone in his voice and it makes me take a step back, stare at him and wait for him to apologise for snapping at me. But he doesn’t, so I go.

  I walk as slowly as I can towards home, and look at the afternoon sun glinting off all the cars parked down the street. There’s a cat sitting on the roof of someone’s old Ford and I watch it for a while as it cleans its paws.

  For a moment I feel a little bit like breaking something myself, a car window or something, just smashing something that doesn’t belong to me so someone else can see how it feels.

  It passes through me and then it’s gone, that feeling, and then I just feel very tired.

  I check my phone. Teagan hasn’t replied. Then, scrolling back, I realise I never replied to her last message either, that I haven’t bothered to text or call her all day even though she’s ill, except to tell her about the shop, to tell her something about me. I’m a bad friend, I think. I’ve turned in to a bad friend. I send her a message, Hope you’re feeling better xxx, and then I remember that I even called Ollie yesterday afternoon, but not her.

  We haven’t said anything about the fight we had. It’s nice to pretend you don’t have to, but now I think maybe Teagan is still unhappy with me. It’s like being friends with Ollie has thrown us off balance. The two of you have so much in common all of a sudden, she said to me. But we don’t have anything in common compared to me and her, to all the hundreds of hours we’ve spent together, sitting around the coffee shop doing nothing.

  Opposite our building there’s a little communal garden that nobody hardly ever uses unless it’s a really hot weekend, when all the art students suddenly turn up and lie in the grass smoking and drinking cheap wine in plastic picnic cups. It’s supposed to have a lock where only the residents have the key, but it’s been broken for ages, and when I push the gate it swings open. I cross over to the corner that gets all the sun at this time of day and I lie down and put my bag under my head and close my eyes and feel the long grass prickling the backs of my legs, probably staining my white school shirt.

  There’s a bench in the garden which has a little plaque that says, In loving memory, Kathleen Clay, 1936-1998. She loved this garden. Sometimes I think about Kathleen Clay, whoever she was. I think it’s nice that somebody would put her name on a bench. I think it would be nice if somebody had done this for my mother. I don’t think she’s the kind of person who would have got sentimental about a garden, but it could say something else. If there was a bench somewhere that said Heather Kennedy, 1961-2004, Viva la revolución! or something. If there was some evidence that she existed.

  If I don’t go home, I wonder how long it will be before somebody notices. Not long, based on previous experience. But I let myself imagine, for a moment, that nobody realises for hours, and then they can’t find me, and they have to ring the school, and then the police, and then they will be sitting in the living room thinking, How could we not have noticed? And then I will come through the door and they will both be so happy to see me.

  Maybe I fall asleep: but when I open my eyes, there’s a shadow, a black silhouette of a person standing in front of the sun and looking down at me.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ Danny says.

  I sit up.

  ‘I wanted to sit in the sun for a while.’

  ‘I called you three times. You’re supposed to come straight home. Grounded, remember?’

  ‘I went to the coffee shop. I wanted to see what it was like.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I wanted to sit in the sun for a while.’

  He shakes his head. ‘You know you can see this garden from our flat? If you’re trying to hide out, you need a better plan.’ I don’t answer. Danny sighs. He steps round me and goes and sits down on the bench, presumably to wait for me to get up. Slowly, I stand up and dust the grass off my school uniform.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to hide.’

  ‘Whatever, Alena. It’s not safe out here on your own, OK? In case you’ve forgotten there’s still some guy running around leaving bombs all over East London.’

  It’s nearly a month since the last explosion. A lot of people have forgotten, it seems like. But not Danny.

  ‘He’s not leaving them in parks,’ I say.

  ‘Not yet,’ says Danny.

  ‘And it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. There’s like a hundred people around.’

  There’s actually nobody else around. But there are windows open in all the houses, and you can hear somebody’s radio playing.

  Danny looks past me across the overgrown grass. There are black shadows under his eyes. He is pale, like me. We will both probably burn in the sun.

  I go and sit down next to him.

  ‘The shop looks awful,’ I say.

  ‘I know. I know. It’s really bad.’

  ‘Something’s wrong with Nick.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just saw him in the shop. He’s just sitting there in the dark. There’s something wrong with him.’

  ‘Well, he’s upset about it.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  Don’t go back home, I think. Don’t sit on the sofa and watch TV. Don’t have a cigarette. Don’t open a bottle of wine.

  ‘What am I going to do? What do you want me to do?’

  ‘He wasn’t being like Nick,’ I say. ‘He didn’t even want to talk to me.’

  ‘His business just got trashed. He’s entitled to be upset.’

  ‘But he doesn’t get upset about stuff like this. He just gets on with it. He’s supposed to be, like, Hey, what a great opportunity to get new wind
ows.’

  ‘He’s not indestructible, Lena.’

  ‘I know that. I’m not stupid. He got hit by a car, remember? I’m just saying.’

  ‘He didn’t get hit by a car. He was beaten up.’

  Danny’s not looking at me. He’s staring out towards the road, his hands clasped together.

  I think that I haven’t heard him properly.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘He wasn’t hit by a car. That was a lie. We lied to you.’

  ‘What?’ I say again, in a very small voice.

  ‘He got beaten up walking home from work. We lied to you.’

  I think: Nick got hit by a car. I remember it happening. I remember everybody saying, These roads are so dangerous. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It was just something we said at the time and then it just stuck and we never got around to telling you the truth. We didn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘So you told me he’d been hit by a car.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know. It seemed better at the time. You were seven years old. It wasn’t like – it was hard to explain things to you.’

  ‘But that was years ago and you’ve still never told me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Danny says. ‘Well. I’m a terrible parent.’

  ‘Why did he get beaten up?’ I whisper.

  ‘Because like every other person in my life he’s an idiot who can’t keep his head down and stay out of trouble and stay safe like a normal person. Because he has to have five thousand stop the war gay pride save the whale posters in the window of the shop when it’s not like that’s going to attract any unwanted attention when he’s locking up in the middle of the night. Because the world is a nasty, careless, randomly violent place. All right?’

  He looks at me, then, and probably he can see that I’m about to cry or something: there’s a painful, hard lump in my throat. Everybody must have known this but me, I think. Nick’s whole family and Zahra and everybody. That somebody beat him up, which is such an easy thing to say but which I don’t even want to think about, except obviously I start imagining it.

  ‘Who was it?’ I say. ‘Who beat him up?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says.

  ‘It matters to me. Did they get arrested?’