by Kim Slater
I hoped the police wouldn’t find it in her bag if she died.
Jean was quiet after they had gone. We both wanted to be on our own.
‘I’m going to the hostel,’ said Jean. She looked even older than usual.
I wished I could go to the hostel with Jean. I walked over there with her once and sat outside watching.
Loads of homeless people shuffled in through the door. They all looked the same; it didn’t matter if they were men or women. They walked the same way. Slowly, like their whole bodies hurt.
Their shoulders stooped like the people in Lowry’s crowds. It seemed as if they were all one great big miserable person, they looked so similar.
When you’ve been living on the streets for a long time, everything about you turns grey and dark, even your lips. Only your eyes stay coloured.
I walked up the far end of the embankment and sat on a bench.
I thought about Colin and how he’d saved the children from the fire. There had been nobody to save Colin from the killer. Now there was nobody to find out what had really happened to him because the police weren’t bothered.
I didn’t want to go home. I wished Mum was there. I wasn’t allowed in the Spar shop when she was working. It was staff rules they couldn’t talk to people they knew.
There wasn’t anyone else around, even on the other side of the river. I wasn’t on my own because there were ducks and coots on the water. You couldn’t see them, but under the water were loads of fish, swimming about in their fish families. If you had a magnifying glass, you might even be able to see tiny creatures with one cell, called ‘amoebae’.
The ducks and the coots and the fish didn’t hurt each other like people do.
Anoraks are good for keeping out the rain but not for staying warm. I started to shiver but I still didn’t go home.
I got up from the bench and walked back down to Colin’s grave.
If you talk to yourself, people think you’re cuckoo. But I wasn’t talking to myself – I was talking to Colin’s spirit. When you die, you leave your body and become a spirit, like in Paranormal Activity. Colin wasn’t a scary spirit that haunted people. His spirit just lived in the water now.
‘I promise I’ll find out what happened, Colin,’ I said out loud.
If you say something out loud, it means you are really going to do it. I looked down when I said it. If somebody was secretly watching, they might see my mouth move and think I was cuckoo.
I started to walk back home. I cut up through the estate, on Arkwright Walk.
Arkwright Walk is a big, wide path that goes right through the Meadows. It twists and turns like a river without water. It takes you from one side to the other. It has trees dotted along it and if you make a noise when you’re walking on there people in the flats open their windows and scream ‘Eff off, you bleep’ at you.
It’s OK to walk along there when it’s light or maybe even dusk. At night all the gangs come out and bring their guns and knives. I’ve never seen them because kids aren’t allowed on here. Carlton Blake said you’d get minced up by blades and they’d put you in a skip where you’d never be found.
As I walked, I looked all around me for clues, like bloodstains on the concrete. If it was dark and I had a UV light, it would be easy. It was going to be hard to find Colin’s killer because there wasn’t any blood on the ground where he died. Blood is a massive clue that helps the detectives to catch the murderer on nearly every episode of CSI I have ever watched.
Halfway down Arkwright Walk I turned left into the estate. I could see the Spar on the corner. There was a bin outside that was full of rubbish that wasn’t even from the shop. Someone had propped up an old pushchair without any wheels against it.
The Spar windows were covered in massive food picture stickers, so I had to walk right up close and look in between the gaps.
I saw Mum standing behind the till. She was right next to the window. If I tapped on it, she might wave. Then I remembered the staff rules and what Tony might do if I was to blame for Mum getting sacked.
It would have been perfect if she was at home when I got back, but at least I got to see her through the window. She had put the thick brown stuff on her face to cover up the bruises but you could still see them a bit.
Her polo neck covered up the red marks. Apart from that, she was just like my normal mum.
She was talking to a lady customer. You could tell Mum liked her because she was smiling, showing her teeth. When Mum looked down at the till to get her change, I saw the lady secretly look at the bruise on Mum’s jaw.
Mum looked smiley but I could tell that her eyes were still sad. You can easily see it when you know somebody really well. It’s harder to do with strangers.
When I got back to our street, I decided to practise my covert-operation techniques. The SAS are always going out on practice jobs where they have to abseil down from helicopters or approach remote farmhouses without being seen. It’s the only way to keep sharp until a real emergency situation happens.
I was going to practise my stealth skills on Tony and Ryan.
First, I put my back flat to the wall of the alleyway that runs up the side of the house. I crept along the wall until I was right where the settee is located on the other side. I pretended I had a laser gun that could shoot through walls, but silently, so the police didn’t come.
I blasted Tony in the back; then I aimed a bit higher to get Ryan over on the other side of the room, where he sits in his Xbox chair.
Tony bought him the special chair last Christmas. It is made of black leather and has pouches in the arms where you put your Xbox controls. You can even put a mug of tea or a can of beer in a specially made holder in the arm.
I’m strictly not allowed to sit in the chair.
On Christmas morning, Ryan said, ‘If I find your stupid ass anywhere near it, I will seriously rip your head off.’
You can’t rip someone’s head off, not with your bare hands, anyway. There are thick tendons and bones in your neck that hold your head on. Ryan doesn’t know anything.
When he kicked the bus shelter glass in and broke his big toe, Tony had to take him to casualty. Mum went upstairs to have a bath and I sat in Ryan’s Xbox chair. I could smell the new leather and the back was all cushiony and comfy but I still didn’t like it.
Before I got up I did two big farts on it and put a bit of spit off my finger into the bottom of the cup holder. It meant I had won.
I wrote it in my notebook so it was definitely real.
Mum couldn’t buy me a big present like Ryan’s chair because she had to give Tony all her work money and he didn’t give her any back. But it didn’t matter because Grandma bought me a great big, hardback book, all about CSI.
It tells you all about the series, the forensics and everything. I like every bit of it, except the pages where it gives you the actors’ real names and tells you about them in real life. That spoils the book a bit because it’s saying that CSI isn’t about the real LVPD, which stands for ‘the Las Vegas Police Department’. It’s just pretend.
After I had shot Tony and Ryan through the wall, I slipped in through the side gate.
Tyson used to bark when anybody came in the garden but he doesn’t bother any more. Tony hardly ever takes him out for a walk since he finished his job at the council. He used to walk around the estate with Tyson every day, but since Tyson bit Ryan and Mum he’s lost interest. I think he’s scared Tyson will bite him too, which would serve him right.
Mum feeds Tyson when she gets home from work. Sometimes, it’s too dark to see up the yard and then he has to wait until the next day. She doesn’t really like him because he is a big dog and she is nervous he might bite her again. When she opens the shed door, he gets up but his legs are all stiff. Mum has to hold a tissue to her nose because it stinks in there.
The sitting-room curtains were closed even though it was still light. Ryan always does that so he can see his game better.
I went up the garde
n and sat down outside Tyson’s shed. I heard him moving about inside.
‘I wish I could let you out, boy,’ I said.
You can call dogs ‘boy’, even if you’re not an adult. It means you like them.
Tyson is big and mean but he whimpered like a little baby behind the door. You are supposed to look after animals. They don’t like being on their own all the time or being shut in a small shed without a window. You are not being a good owner if you leave them to sort themselves out.
‘It’s called “neglect”,’ Miss Crane said, when I told her at school one day. She hardly ever looks mad, but she did when she heard about Tyson living in the shed.
I do like Tyson, but I don’t trust him. You should never trust dogs like him because they can snap at any time and attack you. I heard on the news about a little girl who was brought up with two Rottweilers. They were like babies, normally. The man who owned them said they were ‘soft as grease’, when he was interviewed on the TV. One day, when her gran was out of the room, the dogs attacked the little girl and she died. The dogs had to be put down, which means they were killed by the vet with an injection.
In America, they have the death penalty, which is awesome but still makes me feel a bit sick. Murderers and other really bad criminals can still be killed by the electric chair, but usually a doctor kills them with a needle. It is called ‘Death by Injection’.
Death by Injection is supposed to be a better way to kill someone than electrocuting them until smoke comes out of their ears. But they still die either way, so I don’t see the difference.
I left Tyson and sneaked into the kitchen through the back door. Then I stopped still and listened at the hallway door. I imagined I was a policeman, about to do a drugs bust on the house. I could hear the roaring of Ryan’s game from the living room. I opened the hallway door a bit and put my head through. When I could see it was all clear, I slipped through and inched along the hall with my back to the wall.
I crept upstairs and shut my bedroom door.
There was a little plastic plug in the belly of my piggy bank. I could hear some money jiggling around inside him. It took me ages to get the plug out. I had to use a pen to get under the top of it.
Monkeys and apes are the most similar animals you can get to a human. I know this because:
a) David Attenborough has filmed them making tools out of sticks to do a job, like reach something in the water or get honey out of a bees’ nest.
b) They can touch their first finger with their thumb, which is a very useful thing to be able to do, even though you might not think it is.
An ape or a monkey still couldn’t have got the plug out of my piggy bank, though; it was too hard.
When I finally got it out, I stopped and listened for a second. If Ryan burst into my room now he would steal my money and I wouldn’t be able to ring Grandma. But I could still hear his game booming through the floor.
I rattled the piggy bank so the coins dropped through the hole. I shook out lots of different coins, all in different amounts.
‘Denominations’, Miss Crane calls them.
I put the different denominations in my pocket and put the plug back in the pig, only this time a bit looser. Then I hid him behind my KerPlunk game at the back of my wardrobe.
I tucked my notebook and pen inside my anorak and went back downstairs. I peeped through the living-room door. Tony and Ryan were in their usual places. Tony looked like he really had been shot through the back. He had fallen asleep on his side with his mouth wide open.
He looked like he was dead.
The kitchen clock said 5.30 p.m. It would be at least another three hours before Mum got home. She had to go to her cleaning job after working at the Spar shop.
When I got on to the street, I said, ‘Tony, you are a lazy stinking pig that wants castrating.’ I said it out loud but still a bit quiet . . . just in case.
When I got near the phone box, I could see some lads in it. I said a prayer that they weren’t breaking it so nobody else could use it.
‘Vandalism,’ Miss Crane had said, when someone ripped my art off the wall at school, ‘is a completely senseless crime.’
Older boys from my school liked to do vandalism. I don’t know why. If they saw something nice, like flowers in Mrs Denman’s garden, they wanted to spoil them so nobody else could enjoy them. They didn’t care that Mrs Denman had worked hard to make her garden nicer than the scruffy ones on either side.
If you don’t look after your house, it starts to go derelict. Bits fall off and the paint peels away. Houses can look sad, like people. When Lowry felt lonely and sad, he painted abandoned houses and boatyards. When you look at the paintings, you don’t just see the lonely places, you feel sad and alone deep in your guts.
Ryan kicked the bus shelter glass in just because he felt like it. A few days later, two council men came and replaced the glass with a special, thick plastic that’s much harder to break. They swept up all the broken glass pieces that looked like diamonds on the dirty concrete.
The police didn’t attend the scene to try to get fingerprints because all the people who catch the bus would have touched the metal seats, so they wouldn’t be able to tell which prints belonged to the perp. You can say ‘perp’ instead of the full word, ‘perpetrator’. It shows you know what you’re talking about.
I got my watch out of my jacket pocket. I can’t wear it because the plastic strap has snapped.
At 5.50 p.m., the phone vandals left. I waited until they’d turned the corner before I went inside the phone box.
There was half a can of lager on the little shelf and half a bag of crisps. My tummy was grumbly hungry so I ate them, even though they were prawn cocktail flavour and not my favourite, which is cheese and onion.
One of the boys had done a big spit on the phone handle. I could tell it was them because it was still dripping wet with foamy bubbles in it.
I was careful not to touch the spit in case I got a disease. I read the phone instructions three times to get them in order, in my head.
Then I dialled Grandma’s number.
Brr Brr. Brr Brr.
I listened to the ringing. I imagined Grandma getting up off the settee and coming into the hall to answer it. She always had her apron on, even when she wasn’t baking.
My throat felt all swollen up but when I actually touched it, it was still the normal size.
Brr Brr. Brr Brr.
‘Hello?’
It wasn’t Grandma’s voice. I tasted a bit of sick in my mouth.
‘Who is it?’ I said. Then I remembered what Miss Crane said about manners and how people like you more if you use them.
‘I need to speak to my grandma, please,’ I said. ‘Her name is Gladys.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number, pal,’ said the man and put the phone down.
You had to put the money in before you dialled the number. I still had some coins left in my pocket. I put them into the metal slot.
Brr Brr. Brr Brr.
‘Hello?’ The man sounded annoyed, like he knew it would be me again.
‘Is my grandma there, please?’
‘Are you deaf? I just said, you’ve got the wrong number.’
‘Where is she?’
The man sighed.
‘How the hell do I know? The council said the old woman who used to live here was in hospital.’
My thoughts were all tangled up but I didn’t have time to separate them out. I imagined I was a detective in the LVPD. I needed more information.
‘What’s your address there, please?’ I asked.
‘Five, Oakham Road,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know your own grandma’s address?’
It was a rhetorical question because the man put the phone down before I could answer him.
I leaned on the metal shelf and wrote down everything in my notepad. I recorded every word of the conversation and wrote ‘5, OAKHAM ROAD, MANSFIELD’ in block capitals because that bit was extra important.
There was a little card on the shelf with a rude picture of a lady on. She did massages. I put the card in my pocket and picked up my notebook and pen.
I went for a walk down the embankment so I could think straight.
I wanted to tell Mum that Grandma didn’t live in her house any more. I wanted to tell her that she might be in hospital. Mum would know what to do.
Then I thought about Mum’s face when she was scared of Tony. I thought about the bruises on her face and neck and how she never wanted to talk about Grandma any more.
If I could find out where Grandma was on my own, maybe Mum might secretly come with me to see her, without telling Tony. If I told her tonight, before I knew where Grandma was, she would say I had to forget about it. I didn’t want to make Mum’s eyes sadder than they already were.
It was 6.15 p.m. Still ages until Mum came home.
Time for some murder investigation.
I walked across the bridge and up towards the hostel. The best thing to do when you were trying to find stuff out about someone was to talk to the people that knew them.
The hostel was on London Road. It took me twenty minutes to get there.
A group of men stood outside. They weren’t as old and scruffy as Jean and Colin. They still looked a bit scruffy but they were a lot younger and a couple of them had cans of beer.
They didn’t even look at me when I walked by them, into the open doorway.
Inside it smelt of cooked cabbage, like the dinner hall does at school, even after all the food has been cleared away. A woman sitting at a desk looked up.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
‘I’m looking for Jean,’ I said. ‘Or anyone that knew Colin.’
The woman looked at me.
‘Jean used to be a midwife until her son got killed and she had a breakdown. And Colin was murdered,’ I said.
She shook her head and looked back down at her papers.
‘Just have a look round if you like, see if you can spot anyone.’
It was a big room and there were a lot of people in it. Most of them looked like Jean from a distance – you could tell they were homeless. They were all different ages. I walked round the edge. People looked at me but nobody said anything.