by Kim Slater
There was a man standing at the back, near the drinks hatch. He was dressed in a security uniform. He looked like he might be in charge. He watched me as I walked around.
‘What are you doing here?’
I turned and there was Jean. She was slumped on a wooden chair, slurping a mug of tea.
I sat down next to her on the wooden floor and got out my notepad and pen.
‘I need to ask you some questions about Colin,’ I said. ‘I’ve promised him I’ll find out who killed him.’
‘Promised who?’
‘Colin,’ I said. ‘His dead spirit that lives in the river.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Jean.
Jean didn’t know the answers to most of my questions.
What time was he last seen? Did he have anything valuable on him? Had he got any enemies?
‘No idea,’ answered Jean to each one.
I shut my notepad.
Then she said, ‘You could ask Old Billy, over there.’
She pointed towards the far wall, where an old man was sitting on his own in the corner. He had the longest beard I had ever seen apart from in books.
We did about the Amish religion in RE. After they are married, Amish men have to let their beards grow. They have no choice. I wondered if Old Billy was Amish.
When I asked him, he roared with laughter, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
‘Oh aye, that’s me allreet.’
Old Billy was Scottish. Once he started talking you couldn’t shut him up and his accent was difficult to understand.
‘Ken ya go git me another nice cuppa from oo’er there, wee laddie?’
I got him the tea. He wanted THREE sugars in it, which was mad. No wonder his teeth were rotten.
We had a lady come into school to talk to us about keeping your teeth healthy. She wasn’t a proper dentist, but she still knew stuff because she was a Dental Hygienist.
People think you just need to clean your teeth and that’s it. But you are supposed to floss them and rinse them with this mouthwash stuff that smells like sink cleaner. You have to do it every day if you want your teeth to stay really good and last you until you are very old. We all got to keep our bit of dental floss, which I still have on my bookshelf in my bedroom.
I told Mum about the special things we needed to get for our teeth but she said she had enough to worry about and money didn’t grow on trees.
Old Billy laughed and laughed when I told him about what sugar does to your tooth enamel.
‘Och, I’ll get the special tooth equipment when I nip oot to git me nails manicured, bless ya, laddie. Bless ya.’
I didn’t want to write all his Scottish words down in my notebook. The way he spoke made my head ache and it would take too long to write it all down, so I decided to just turn what he said back into English words.
‘Translate,’ Miss Crane had said, when we’d done the same thing in French class.
Old Billy knew Colin well. They used to sit together in the hostel.
Old Billy laughed after everything he said, like it was all a big joke. Which it wasn’t.
‘Did Colin have any enemies?’
‘How do you mean?’ said Old Billy.
‘Was there anyone he knew who didn’t like him?’
Old Billy stopped laughing.
‘He was scared of someone,’ he said with a frown. ‘But he wouldn’t tell me who it was.’
I raced home and pulled out my sketchpad.
I drew all the people I’d seen at the hostel. I even drew the security guard and the woman at the entrance desk. You never knew who people might turn out to be.
I didn’t draw Jean because I already had her in lots of the evidence sketches. Nobody was totally in the clear until Colin’s killer had been found.
There are two ways of drawing people. One is to sketch their faces like a photograph, so it looks exactly like them in real life. People think you are a genius at drawing if you do it like this. The other way is even cleverer and it is the way that Lowry drew faces, including his own.
You have to look at someone and really see them. Not the size of their nose or colour of their eyes, but what lies underneath their features.
Say you spot a man on the street. When you first glance at him, you might not see anything at all, just a regular face. If you look closer, it could be that you notice deep, scrunchy lines all around his mouth, from years of being sad. His eyes might look OK at first, but then you see they are red and staring and although he is looking at you he isn’t seeing you at all. He is lost in a world of his own.
Another day, you might spot someone who looks mean and nasty but when you get close they smile and kindness shines out. This one doesn’t happen very often.
When you draw faces the Lowry way, you are drawing their whole life, not just what they actually look like on the surface.
When I finished drawing, it was nearly time for Mum to be back from work. I started to go downstairs, but I heard talking in the kitchen. I went back into my room and looked out of the window.
There was a car outside. After a few minutes, two men came out of our kitchen and drove away.
When I went downstairs, Tony and Ryan were fiddling around with some plastic bags near the door.
‘Christ almighty!’ Tony’s hands jumped when he saw me. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘I just came downstairs,’ I said.
‘Well, DON’T come downstairs again when your mum’s out. You aren’t welcome down here. Understand?’
I didn’t say anything. I ran back upstairs and huddled by my window, waiting.
I tried to do a bit more sketching but my arm felt stiff. It’s very important to keep your arm and hand relaxed when you are drawing or it doesn’t turn out right.
In the end, I just did a bit of shading, backwards and forwards, so it looked dark like one of Lowry’s seascapes at night. After a while, I felt relaxed again.
At 8.25 p.m., I saw my mum coming down the street. She was carrying a bag from the chippy. My tummy was really rumbly – I was dying for my tea. I waited until I actually heard the back door open and close and then I ran downstairs.
Mum was in the kitchen with Tony and Ryan. They were sorting out the chips.
‘Hello, Kieran, love,’ she said, looking over Tony’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’
I nodded and looked at the worktop. There were only two plates out.
‘Is there enough for him to have a bit?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘There isn’t.’
‘Do you want me to do you a slice of toast?’ Mum said.
I had three slices of toast.
I was still hungry.
Mum had gone upstairs with Tony. He must have been really tired to want to go to bed that early.
I buttered some more bread and took a slice of ham out of the fridge. I took it up the garden and shoved it under the gap in the shed door. Tyson loved it.
‘Good boy,’ I said.
Dogs aren’t really allowed the same food that humans eat. It can make them proper poorly. You should buy dog food that has the special minerals and stuff in that they need. But human food was better than no food so the rules could be changed for Tyson.
Dogs also have different intestines to us. Theirs are much shorter and are better at digesting meat.
Their teeth are all sharp and pointy; they hardly have any flat ones at the back like we do. God made them like that so they can tear meat easily. Humans just use a knife and fork. Really posh people even have special knives just for cutting steak.
I went back inside and stood outside the living-room door. I prayed and prayed that Ryan would turn his game off and go out, but he hardly ever did that any more.
It was because he was addicted to his Xbox. There was this programme on television about it. People don’t just get addicted to drugs or drink, like you might think. Other stuff is addictive too, like playing war games.
On the programme, two American boys j
ust sat playing all day and all night, like Ryan. They even slept in their gaming chairs. When they needed a wee, they had plastic bottles to do it in so they didn’t have to stop playing. It was the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.
CSI re-runs on Sky would be on the Crime Channel now. When one ended, another one started. It was ages since I’d seen any. I used to watch them on Grandma’s telly, even though it was really small.
Tony’s telly was massive; it covered the whole corner of the room. Him and his friend carried it in one day. They didn’t even have to pay for it. They laughed and said they found it when it fell off the back of a lorry. There were speakers in each corner which made a massive booming sound when someone got shot. I wished I could watch stuff on it, but I wasn’t allowed.
I waited in the kitchen for a bit to see if Mum came down, but she didn’t.
At 9.23 p.m. I went up to bed. I sketched a picture of me and Grandma sitting in a big room with a chandelier like the Queen has. There was a coffee table with loads of snacks on it, even fish and chips. Tyson was lying on a rug near the fire. He was soft as grease and his back legs weren’t stiff any more.
There was a massive telly on the wall, and me and Grandma were watching CSI, Episode 5, Series 10.
I even had the remote control next to me. It felt brilliant.
I was sitting in the monkey-puzzle-tree corner of the playground with my sketchpad, watching the others before the bell rang.
The three big boys who’d thrown oranges at me by the river came over. The boy with ginger hair was called Gareth. I didn’t know the names of the other two.
Gareth spat near my foot. I shifted back a bit so the spit didn’t go on my shoe.
‘Why do you come to this school? It’s for normal people,’ the boy with the baseball cap said. ‘Shouldn’t you go to the special school in Clifton?’
‘Yeah,’ said Gareth. ‘You should go on the special bus with all the other window-lickers.’
They laughed.
The black boy kicked out at me and I backed up a bit more. They were getting too close to my personal space.
‘What’s actually wrong with you, Downs ?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, and carried on sketching.
‘Nothing a bullet wouldn’t fix,’ said the black boy.
‘Or a knife between the ribs.’ Gareth laughed.
They came a bit closer.
The sea sound was going to start – I knew it. I looked up high into the monkey tree’s branches. I imagined I was up there, where they couldn’t touch me.
Somebody came over to talk to Gareth and they all turned round.
I imagined flicking a switch in my mind so I could think in a special way. They hated me, even though I’d never done anything bad to them.
What do they like? What do they love?
My brain was just coming up with nonsense.
I carried on sketching, my drawing hand was working super-fast.
After a few minutes, gravel showered down on to my pad.
‘What you drawing, spaz?’
Gareth snatched the notepad from my hands. My heart lurched. All the murder evidence was in there. They could destroy it and then I’d be back to square one and Colin’s killer might never be found.
‘Give it back,’ I said.
‘You forgot to say please.’ The boy with the baseball cap laughed and waved the pad above his head.
The pages started to flutter, trying to break free. Soon, all my precious evidence would be scattered all over the playground.
‘Rip it up, man,’ the black boy said, laughing.
Gareth reached up and took the pad in both his hands.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Don’t you want me to finish it? You can have it when I’m done.’
Gareth scowled and held the top sketch up in front of his face. The others craned their necks to see.
‘What’d you draw that for, dumb-ass?’ said the boy with the baseball cap. ‘You having a laugh?’
The black boy whooped. ‘It’s the Three Gangsta Boys, man!’
That’s what they liked to call themselves.
‘It’s wicked,’ said Gareth. ‘You’re not as stupid as I thought, Downs.’
He handed the pad back to me.
‘Finish it and give it me tomorrow.’ The bell went and they swaggered off. Gareth turned round to shout to me. ‘Put me a couple of busty babes on there too, man.’
I looked down at the sketch.
I’d drawn Gareth and his henchmen standing, arms folded, looking menacing and hard. A crowd of skinny boys stood and looked up at them, like they were heroes.
I’d made Gareth’s biceps about three times bigger than they really were and given him tattoos and lots of bling round his neck and wrists.
I’d sketched what they wanted more than anything else. To be admired by everyone at school. They liked people being scared of them.
A couple of pages under that, I’d sketched them when they were down at the embankment. I’d made them look even skinnier than they actually were and covered their faces with oozing acne.
I let out a big sigh of relief that they didn’t see it, but I wasn’t sorry I’d drawn it.
‘The Three Loser Boys,’ I said out loud.
I looked around. I was the last one out, so I said it again, a bit louder. They thought I was thick but I had won.
I was still laughing when I got to class.
We had a free period first, so Miss Crane let me choose what I wanted to do. I asked to go on the library computer. I got to sit at the brand-new one with the thin screen, near the window. It was great.
While Miss Crane did her planning, I looked up hospitals in Mansfield and found a telephone number for Ashfield Community Hospital.
I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it in my pocket to record in my notebook later.
Google Earth is the best thing ever. You can type a road in and the special camera finds it from where it sits, right up in space. It can see the whole planet.
It zooms down and down from space until it gets to the UK. Then it whirls further down into the exact street you want to look at. It makes you feel like you are swooping down from space with it.
I put in ‘Oakham Street, Mansfield’ and watched it zoom in.
The camera stays in the air until you click on the little orange man and go down on to the actual street. You can even walk him up and down the road and have a look around.
Soon as I got the little man down there, I saw Grandma’s house. I remembered it. It made me feel sad, because it looked just the same as it used to, but Grandma wasn’t there any more.
I looked at the front door. I remembered how the taxi driver would leave the food shopping bags at the door. We had to keep going backwards and forwards from the kitchen to fetch them in. It wasn’t like a chore – it was great. It used to make me feel all warm inside, like me and Grandma were a team.
First job after that was always for Grandma to put the kettle on. Then we’d have our blackcurrant and cream tarts from Gents, even before we’d had a normal meal at teatime. We made the rules and nobody could say anything.
While Grandma tidied up, I sat at the kitchen table sketching. People think art is about big things like nature and important people. But there was beauty at Grandma’s kitchen table because it’s where we laughed and talked and made plans.
Lowry painted family scenes where nothing much was happening. The parents and children just stood there. They were held together with a special bond you couldn’t see, living their lives. Their faces just said that they understood one another like nobody else outside their family could.
It was just a feeling you got when you looked at his paintings. Lowry painted a little window into people’s souls.
I drew me and Grandma sky-diving and climbing up mountains. Grandma loved it that I always drew her wearing her apron in everything, even though you’re not allowed to sky-dive in one in real life.
When I looked up, Miss Crane was watching me.
I felt like she knew what I’d been thinking. I didn’t like that because it was private.
I am in charge of my thoughts. Tony and Ryan and the older boys at school can’t say what happens in my head.
I didn’t even smile back at her.
When her eyes went dull, I felt bad, so I said a polite thing to make up for it.
‘Thank you for helping me with my work.’
She did a smile with teeth and her eyes turned sparkly again.
‘You’re very welcome, Kieran,’ she said.
I looked back at the computer screen and hummed ‘Who Are You?’, which is the theme tune to CSI by The Who. Roger Daltrey is brilliant, even though he is massively old.
When I looked up again, Miss Crane was still watching me.
I went straight home after school.
When I opened the kitchen door, Ryan jumped out from behind it and did a really loud, high-pitched scream right in my ear.
Noises that loud always made me feel sick.
He went into the sitting room and sat making up the little plastic bags, packing them into the toolbox, even though Tony wasn’t there.
‘Make me a cup of tea, freak,’ he shouted.
I put the kettle on and went upstairs.
The dirty wash basket in the bathroom was overflowing on to the bathroom lino. Mum was always at work and Tony never put the washer on.
I took my school clothes off and put on my tracky bottoms and a T-shirt. I had to put a jumper on too as my room was freezing.
I went back downstairs and made Ryan a cup of tea.
He took a sip.
‘No sugar, dumb-ass,’ he said and spat it on the floor. ‘I’ll have a cheese sandwich while you’re in there.’
I took it back and put the sugar in. I did a bit of foamy spit and stirred that in too. It was a brilliant way to get Ryan back.
I got out the bread and butter and cheese. I took the tea and sandwich in. He took the plate off me and looked at the sandwich.
‘What the hell is this? The filling is supposed to be inside the bread, you bleeping idiot.’
I wasn’t going to stick around and put up with Ryan’s bad mood. I had a better idea.