by Kim Slater
People think Lowry just painted matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs. There was even a song about it. But he didn’t. He painted all sorts of things and did fantastic sketches.
When I won the Best Young Artist competition, Miss Crane bought me a massive book called L. S. Lowry: The Art and the Artist, by T. G. Rosenthal. T. G. Rosenthal knows even more about Lowry than I do.
When Lowry’s mum died, he got very sad. He stopped painting people and dogs. He painted the sea but didn’t put any boats on the water. He painted houses that nobody lived in. They were falling to bits and sinking down into the ground.
When I look at Lowry’s An Island, it makes my tummy go all funny. In it is a big, old house that used to be grand, standing alone on a little island surrounded by water. Even though it is a house and not a person, it still looks sad and lost.
When I look at this painting, it feels like something is pressing down on my chest. I go all quiet inside, like when I’m curling up under my blanket, away from everyone.
That’s what Lowry can do to you without saying a single word.
I picked out a pencil and started to draw all the scenes of evidence from down at the river, like a comic strip, filling the page with little boxes. I drew Jean like one of Lowry’s matchstick characters. She got to be in every box.
Ryan’s video game was booming downstairs. I could tell if he had shot someone or detonated a bomb by the different noises. While I was drawing, I thought about Mrs Cartwright next door. She has ulcerated legs so can’t get upstairs. She even sleeps in her living room, which is joined on to ours, so she can never escape Ryan’s noise.
I wanted to draw some pictures of Tony and Ryan in the living room. Ryan would be playing on his game and Tony would be half asleep. Neither of them would see the pack of wild dogs sneaking in at the door. There would be Japanese Akitas, pit bulls and Dobermanns. The dogs would pounce on them both at the same time.
No one would be able to hear Tony and Ryan screaming because of the loud noise of the Xbox. Not even Mrs Cartwright.
The dogs would rip them both to shreds and eat them. Later, when the dogs were gone, I would sneak downstairs and clean up. When Mum came home, she’d be glad it was just me and her again, with no one to upset her. She wouldn’t even be bothered they’d both been eaten.
I saved the pictures in my head to draw another day, and concentrated on the murder instead.
I drew from when I first got down to the river and saw Jean crying on the bench, to the divers getting the body out of the water. It took up two full pages of my sketchpad.
When I was finished, I had very detailed notes and drawings.
I had remembered all the little bits of evidence. I packed matchstick people into the scenes, but I kept the background white like Lowry mostly did and just drew the river and close-ups of where the murder took place. This would make any clues much easier to spot.
Martin Brunt was going to be very pleased.
The gunfire sounds from downstairs cut off suddenly. That’s how I knew Tony had a visitor.
I went to my bedroom door and opened it a tiny bit. I heard Tony coughing and spluttering. I heard the kitchen door shut behind him.
I used to be allowed downstairs. Now people have started visiting, Tony says I have to stay in my room.
My window overlooks the road, so I can still see everything. Sometimes, I sit with my notebook at the window and write stuff down. It feels like I’m in charge of the street.
There was a red Ford Focus outside the house. The passenger window was down and I could see a man’s hand and arm flapping about to music that was booming out.
I got out my binoculars that Grandma gave me, from right at the back of my wardrobe. I hide anything I have that’s good, so Ryan can’t steal it.
You should never look at the sun with binoculars or you could go blind.
My binoculars are very good ones. I know this because the magnification is 10 x 50. The ‘10’ bit means that whatever you are looking at will appear ten times larger than with your own eyes. The ‘50’ bit means the wide distance across, on the lenses.
‘The diameter’, Miss Crane calls it.
When the diameter of the lenses is bigger, you get more light into your eyes and you can see stuff better. We learned this in science.
The binoculars used to belong to my great-granddad, who I never met. It’s hard to think of Grandma being a little girl and having a dad. Grandma told me he fought in the trenches in World War One. She said he got his binoculars long after that, but in my head I like to think he had them in the trenches to spy on the Germans.
When I saw the man’s hand ten times bigger through my binoculars, I spotted that his fingertips were all yellow and his nails were bitten. I wrote this down in my notebook and put an equals sign, like this:
smoker = nervous type
Sherlock Holmes always looked at the tiny clues that most people missed. These can tell you important things about someone. Holmes is old-fashioned now but people still love him.
When you notice little things about people, it is called ‘the skill of observation’. Not everyone is good at it.
I heard the back door slam and a man walked down the path. He had a grey hoodie and sweatpants on. The hood was pulled up and he looked left and right as he walked, then back down at the pavement.
He jumped in the car and zoomed off. I had to keep saying the number plate in my head until I had it written down because I only got one look at it.
It had nothing to do with the murder at the embankment but it made me feel good to record the information. I pretended I was on a special mission and it was my job. Tony might make me stay in my room but I am in charge up here. I can sit at the window and do my observation work and he can’t say anything.
I heard someone coming upstairs so I jumped on to my bed and hid my notebook, my sketchbook and my binoculars under the pillow. Then I lay down on top of my covers and looked at the ceiling.
There was a big bang as Ryan kicked my door open. It hit the side of my headboard and bounced back again. Ryan came in and stood in front of me pretending he was shooting me with a big machine gun. He made noises like on his game.
Noises can’t hurt me. Noises can’t hurt me.
I moved my lips but didn’t say the words out loud.
‘Yo, retard! Wassup?’
I didn’t answer him. I carried on looking at the ceiling.
Ryan kicked the side of my bed with his foot. He swept his hand across my bookcase and knocked everything off.
There was a bit of juice left in a glass and it spilt on my school trousers.
I stayed still. I didn’t even blink.
Ryan laughed and went into the bathroom, leaving my door wide open.
I wondered what time Mum would be back. Ryan usually leaves me alone when she’s around, but if Mum was on a late shift she could be out for hours more.
I grabbed my sweatshirt and ran downstairs and out of the house before Ryan came back out of the bathroom. It was past teatime, so the light had started to fall out of the sky.
I breathed the fresh air into my lungs but didn’t take a really deep breath. The air wasn’t properly fresh until you got close to the river. There are no cars down there.
I walked to the bottom of our road and turned on to Court Street. Mrs Denman was trimming her front hedge. The houses either side had messy gardens, one even had an old settee in it, but Mrs Denman always kept hers neat.
When you get to the end of Court Street, it feels like the world opens out. There are trees and grass and the river. The trees are nearly all still in leaf, even though it’s October.
Everyone round here calls it the ‘embankment’. In summer, girls sit on the grass next to the water, with short skirts and crop tops on. If you walk by slowly, you can sometimes see their knickers but you’re not supposed to do this.
When my class took their SATs exams in the summer, I had to do a project. It wasn’t sent away to be marked like everyon
e else’s work but it was still important.
Miss Crane said I should choose something I was really interested in to write about, but not Robin Hood because I always did stuff about him.
She made me an A4 booklet. I wrote ‘The River Trent by Kieran Woods’ on the front. I went on the computer in the school library at dinner-times and found out loads of stuff, which I kept in the working bit of my brain and out of my subconscious.
On the first page of my project book, I wrote all the facts I knew about the river.
It is 171 miles long.
It is a BORE river which means it is tidal, like the sea.
The beginning of the river is called the SOURCE.
The end of the river is called the MOUTH.
Part of it flows NORTH, which is unusual for a river.
People take drugs under the bridge, near the embankment where they think nobody can see them.
The council men put on protective suits and collect the used syringes once a month so nobody catches AIDS.
Miss Crane went mad about it. She said I’d done brilliantly, but to take the last two facts off because, even though they were true, they were about people and not the river itself. So I did, as it wasn’t really fair on the Trent.
When Tony or Ryan get in a bad mood for no reason, I go to the embankment. If it’s raining, I can stand just under the bridge, as the druggies don’t come until nighttime.
The ducks, coots, moorhens, swans and geese don’t care if it’s raining – they’re not like people.
Coots are my favourite. They’re awesome. For starters, they’re nearly all black apart from a pure white teardrop on their forehead. The second thing is, they dive down deep into the river to catch food and they can stay there for ages. You just start to think they must have drowned when they pop back up again. They are brilliant.
I like it that the river always tries to find its way back to the sea. It never gets tired or gives up; it just does it without even thinking.
There were people everywhere on the embankment, scurrying about like Lowry’s matchstick figures and talking to each other. Maybe some of them were trying to find out what had happened to the homeless man yesterday.
I stood and watched from the pavement across the road. I knew all the details about the body in the river and I liked knowing that I could help them if I wanted to.
I had written down everything in my notebook and drawn lots of pictures in my sketchbook. All the evidence was safe under my pillow.
Jean was not on her bench. Two older boys from school were slumped on it, smoking.
An old lady walked by. She was holding the hand of a little boy. They weren’t looking at the river, or standing at the edge of the embankment where Jean’s friend was murdered. They were talking to each other.
My grandma lives in Mansfield. It’s about ten miles away. She used to come to Nottingham on the train once a fortnight and stay over for the night. She slept in my bed and I had a sleeping bag on the floor.
It felt like she belonged to me because she stayed in my room. Sometimes, Grandma would light a little candle and we’d have a midnight picnic with crisps and juice, even though it wasn’t really midnight.
That was how me and Grandma used to be.
At first, when I got down the embankment, I’d felt proud I knew all the details of the murder. Now I’d started thinking about Grandma, it felt like my heart had a crack on it. Once your heart is cracked, it can’t be mended. It can never be all smooth, like before.
I won’t die or anything just because I don’t see Grandma any more. Sometimes, when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, I look like Lowry’s Manchester Man. His eyes are red and his face is sort of crumpling in on itself. My nose and mouth and ears are all there and look the same. But you can see my cracked heart when you look into my eyes. When this happens, you have to think about your favourite CSI episode or do a drawing to take your mind off it.
You can see people all around with cracked hearts. People just walk by one another in the street or in Poundland. They don’t look at each other, but if you use the skill of observation you can see that some people’s eyes look sad. If something happens to crack your heart, it makes your eyes go dull.
I couldn’t understand why all the police had gone. They should still have been investigating. It can take months to solve a murder. There wasn’t even any yellow tape with Police Line Do Not Cross written on it.
I crossed over the road to get a bit closer. Someone had put some flowers on the edge of the riverbank. If you put flowers at a place where someone died, it means you want to remember them and say you are sorry they died.
‘To show respect,’ Miss Crane had explained, when I’d asked her about some flowers tied to a lamp post near school.
People had tried to show respect to Jean’s friend but they hadn’t put them in the right place. They needed to be nearer to the bridge.
I walked over to the flowers and picked up both bunches. I started to walk down towards the bridge to put them in the proper spot.
‘Oi!’ Someone shouted. ‘He’s nicking ’em!’
I turned round and the boys from school were pointing at me. Some adults came over.
‘Haven’t you got any respect for the dead?’ a woman demanded.
‘They’re in the wrong place,’ I said. ‘Jean’s friend was further down there.’
‘He was just a homeless tramp,’ the boy from school said.
‘He still wanted his life,’ I said. ‘He didn’t want to die.’
The woman took the flowers off me.
‘I’m putting these back,’ she said. ‘Don’t let me catch you with them again.’
I walked down a bit and stood in the proper place the man died. It was still a grave, even though it was made of water. There was no headstone and no flowers, but the man had died there and that’s what counted.
I closed my eyes.
Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will . . .
Something hard hit me on my shoulder. I could hear people laughing but I didn’t turn round. Thud. This time on the back of my head. Someone was throwing oranges, hard.
I said I was sorry to Jean’s friend in my head, then turned my back on the river.
It was the older boys from school. There were three of them now. One held the bag of oranges behind his back but I could still see them.
‘I saw the dead body,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right,’ one said.
‘You liar,’ said another.
‘Prove it,’ said the boy with ginger hair.
‘His body was bloated three times its normal size,’ I said. ‘The police pulled it out on to the riverbank and laid him out on a plastic sheet.’
They didn’t say anything. I took a few steps towards them.
‘He’d been swimming and got pulled under by the current,’ I said. ‘He had maggots coming out of his eyes.’
One of the boys looked pale.
‘His intestines were hanging out. Sharks had eaten half his insides.’
‘Sharks? Not in the Trent, you bleeping spaz!’
They laughed and started throwing oranges again.
I carried on down to the bridge, like I wasn’t bothered. When the oranges had gone, they walked off, laughing.
Down near the bridge, it was quiet. There were no druggies. I stood in front of the statue of Sir Robert Clifton and looked up at him. His eyes looked a bit sad, like his heart might have been cracked too.
We learned at school he was a politician. He tried to make things better for the working people. At first he was pelted with rocks. Then he became a hero.
He died of typhoid in the end. Typhoid makes rose-coloured spots come on your chest and your nose starts bleeding. When you get a fever and diarrhoea, you are nearly dead. We don’t get it in Great Britain any more but people in Africa still die from it.
Jean’s friend didn’t get typhoid but he was still killed. There are a million and one ways t
o die in this life.
It’s best not to think about it.
When I got back home, Mum was in the kitchen making tea.
‘Here’s my big strong lad,’ she said as she chopped up salad. ‘Missed seeing you yesterday, love. Did you sort yourself some tea?’
She turned to look at me. Her eyes were bloodshot and her eyelids looked swollen and heavy, as if they were trying to shut out the light.
‘There was a murder yesterday down at the embankment,’ I said.
She stopped chopping tomatoes and looked at me.
‘One of these days your lies are going to get you in hot water,’ she said.
‘It’s true, Mum,’ I said. ‘I saw the body.’
She shook her head and went back to chopping.
I stood at the lounge door. Ryan wasn’t in the room and his game was on pause. Tony was lying on the couch.
‘There was a murder yesterday down at the embankment,’ I said again.
‘Course there was,’ said Tony, without opening his eyes. ‘There’ll be another one in here in a minute, if tha’ don’t get lost.’
I listened at the bottom of the stairs. Ryan and his spotty friend Reece came charging down, their arms full of Xbox games. They didn’t say anything as they pushed past but Reece threw a game case at me. It hit the side of my arm.
You spotty bleep, I said in my head. It’s not as bad as saying it out loud and, anyway, he deserved it.
I ran upstairs and shut my bedroom door.
I pulled out my sketchpad and drew the people I’d just seen down at the river, even though there wasn’t much evidence. It made the panicky feeling go away.
When I’d drawn the picture, I went back downstairs, into the kitchen.
‘What’s Grandma’s address?’ I asked Mum.
She looked at the doorway.