Writing On the Wall

by Lynne Reid Banks

  We looked at each other. I can’t describe that look. His eyes were shocked, a bit like my father’s eyes. He didn’t touch me, not with his hands. But his look was like – well, this sounds silly, but it made me feel like the night I came home all frozen from the Music Mill and climbed into bed and found the hot blanket on. Only more. I think even if I hadn’t had that injection, that look Michael gave me would have calmed me down. He didn’t speak – I don’t think he could, any more than I could – but his eyes said two words: “I’m here.”

  They took us outside into the street and there was a car waiting. A police car. We got in the back. A policeman and a woman was in front. Our stuff was put in the boot, except our bikes. I couldn’t have cared less. I felt so tired I nearly dropped off the minute I sat down. Michael didn’t talk, but he put his arm round me and held my hand. I leant against him. I had no thoughts in my head.

  They drove us through the streets, I suppose, though my eyes were closed and I think I dozed off. Next thing, Michael was helping me out. There was a police station. Up the steps, into a sort of waiting-room. Questions. Now I remember there were a lot of them before, while I was in that funny blank state – and even now I couldn’t say much, just my name and that I didn’t know anything about any drug or how it could have got in my pump. But even through whatever that doctor gave me, through the shock, something was starting to move in my head, beginning to click. I’d have to start thinking soon. I didn’t want to, but I’d have to. I knew it.

  The first part I couldn’t put off thinking about was Dad and Mum. Because the police were going to phone them. They’d even got the name and phone number out of me before I’d gathered my wits. It seemed they couldn’t charge me, or whatever it is they do, until my dad was with me, on account of me being under age. So far, Michael’d stood in for him, but for the formal bit he wouldn’t do.

  At the thought of what Mum’d feel like when that phone call came (Dad wouldn’t even be at home, it was still shop-hours) some of the fog cleared. I grabbed Michael, who was sitting beside me.

  “Michael, don’t let them phone! You go. You tell them.”

  He looked at me. His poor face! I saw what he was thinking. He undertook us, we were his responsibility. Now I was asking him to knock on our door and face Dad and tell him I’d been arrested, that he’d got to come and bail me or I couldn’t come home.

  I thought of course he’d say no, that he’d say he wanted to stay with me. And I wanted him to – how I wanted him to! The thought of being left there by myself was so awful I could hardly stand it. But after a minute or two of looking at me, he gave my arm a squeeze and stood up without a word. He turned away and started to walk towards the door. I felt myself wanting to scream out to him, “Come back! Don’t leave me!” I didn’t, but as if I had, as if he’d heard my thought, he stopped and came back and bent over me, holding my shoulder.

  “Be brave,” he whispered to me, so soft I hardly heard. Then he kissed me, the side of my head. Then he walked away again. This time I didn’t want to call him back. I felt strong inside, for the moment anyway. He was so strong he made me strong.

  *

  They were quite good to me in that place. They took me into a room with ordinary furniture in it, a settee-thing and a couple of hard chairs. The woman let me sit on the settee. I was shivering again so she brought me a blanket to wrap round me, and a cup of tea, and a sandwich. I drank the tea. It was in one of those squudgy throw-away cups. I kept biting pieces out of it, my teeth were chattering so much. I spilt a lot of tea so they brought me another cup. I couldn’t eat the sandwich.

  There was a policewoman with me now. She came and sat beside me and put her arm round me.

  “Tracy, would you like to talk to me?”

  “What about?”

  “They found drugs on you. Do you really not know how they got there?”

  Crafty cow! I pulled myself away from her. I curled up in a corner of the settee with my back to her. I couldn’t think straight, and I knew better than to say anything while I was in that state.

  The woman went and sat in her chair again. When I took a peep at her, she wasn’t even looking at me, she was reading.

  I uncurled a bit. There were things I wanted to know, too.

  “Where’s my friends?”

  She looked up again. “They’ve gone back to London.”

  I suppose she saw my face, because she added quickly, “They had to, Tracy. They didn’t want to leave you – especially the little dark one, Connie is it? She wanted to stay with you, but it’s not allowed. When you’ve finished here, you’ll go to London too, with your dad. And then you’ll be able to see your friends again.”

  “Am I arrested?”

  “Well, yes, sort of. I mean, yes. But there’s no need to be frightened. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  I wasn’t bothered about that. All I could think of was what Dad was going to feel like. Hurt? Not the word for it. And Mum. And Vlady. . . . When I got down to what Lily would feel like I felt myself starting to thaw out inside, and the tears pushing behind my eyes.

  But just before I started blubbing, feeling so sorry for everyone, I thought of someone I didn’t have to feel sorry for. And the tears stopped.

  That rotten, lousy, shitty, stinking Kev! What a bastard. What a rat! Of course! It was clear as daylight now I’d got round to thinking about it. He’d pinched my pump, that night they all went to the nightclub. Those two creeps had told him to. They’d hollowed it out and put the stuff in and he’d brought it back, all innocent, and lumbered me with it to bring in for him. Once I’d been through customs with it, he’d’ve made some excuse to get it off me, or he’d have pinched it again, and passed the drugs on to whoever it was in London. And got God knows how much money for it.

  Money. . . . Here, hang about. He hadn’t been too badly off even before. I’d had my suspicions about how he’d earned that lot, too. What if it had all been a put-up job, right from the beginning? From the London end? What if – now I was using my head and wasn’t everything clicking into place! – what if that was why he’d wanted to go to Holland from the off?

  “Do you catch a lot of people coming from Holland with drugs?” I asked this woman.

  “Goodness me, yes! At least once a week. Amsterdam’s a very big centre. Our Chief Inspector recently caught two men bringing in enough heroin to fill a whole suitcase – about five million pounds’ worth. They’ll probably be sent away for fifteen or twenty years.” She seemed proud of that. Then she looked at me and her face got softer. “Oh, but don’t you worry. Yours is very small beer by comparison. I expect you just brought cannabis, didn’t you? Not hard stuff?”

  At it again – trying to get me to confess. I said, for about the tenth time, “I don’t know anything about it. I never even saw it.”

  “I have. Packed down your pump in long thin tubes. Quite ingenious really. Was it you who thought of that?”

  No. It wasn’t me. It was my lousy boyfriend, that’s who it was. It was him let me in for this. That horrible search they did on me, and all. I’ll pay you out, Kevin Blake; don’t you think I’ll shield you, don’t sit there on that train thinking “She won’t peach on me” because she bloody will, first chance she gets!

  Well, here was a chance, wasn’t it? Why didn’t I turn nark and tell this woman, with her hungry eyes, all about it? I opened my mouth, and closed it again. No. Better wait for Dad to get here.

  After a while I fell asleep, sitting up. I felt the woman kind of spreading me out on the settee, putting my feet up. She was quite gentle, putting the blanket over me and tucking me in. I wondered if Mum would do that tonight. Then I dropped down and down into blackness.

  22 · Dad

  Dad came. It took him about five hundred years, but he did come at last.

  I’d only slept for about half the five hundred years. The rest of the time I was awake. Waiting. Thinking. I swear I never did so much thinking (or feeling) in all my life till then.

&nb
sp; They brought me dinner on a tray, and it didn’t look bad, but when I tried to eat some I nearly choked. Honest, my throat closed up, I’d have been sick if I’d forced myself. More tea went down though, and I didn’t bite the cup this time (maybe because they brought me a proper china one). The policewoman didn’t ask any more questions. She did try to chat me up a bit, asking about school and our trip and that, but I didn’t trust her so I just grunted answers. I’d have liked to be nicer, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t even there, really. I was on the London-to-Harwich train with Dad.

  Remember how I said I could never practise things beforehand, like Karen? How I just let them happen? Not this time. This was too horrible just to let it come on me without getting ready as much as I could. I tried every way of telling him. I imagined him taking it every way I thought he might – being angry, being sad, being kind. Being quiet. That was the one I dreaded worst, but they were all bad. Sometimes as the hours (years I mean) went by, I imagined the scenes so clearly, I cried.

  At last the door opened, and there he was.

  A policeman let him in, and signalled the policewoman. She got up without a word and went out and they shut the door.

  Dad didn’t notice anything but me. He came straight across the room and took me in his arms and held me there, tight to his little round stomach, the safest place I knew in the world – safer than rolled up in bed, safer than Michael’s arms even. If I could have just stopped there forever, with my face hidden on his shoulder! But it couldn’t last long. He held me away and looked in my face and then we sat down on the settee together.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything. In detail. Leave nothing out.”

  I told him everything. Well. Not everything. Not the whips. I couldn’t, somehow. And not me getting drunk on Tracy’s Multicoloured Gobstop. But I told about Neils and Yohan and that they took dirty pictures and that Kev went out with them and left me, and that Michael’d done all he could for me, including warn me not to go with Kev alone, not to leave the group.

  “Also I warn you that.”

  “Yeah, Dad. I know.”

  “Why you always go your own way, Tracy.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. So far it wasn’t going like any of the ways I’d prepared. Does it ever?

  “You have told the police all this?” he asked next.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wanted to tell you first.”

  “What you mean, perhaps, you don’t want to shop your friend.”

  It always sounds so funny when Dad uses slang, but this time I didn’t laugh. “I hate him,” I said. “I want to shop him!”

  “So why you didn’t?”

  “I told you! I wanted to talk to you first.”

  He gazed at me with his sad pale-blue eyes.

  “You still like him very much?”

  “Dad! Are you listening to me? I hate him, he’s horrible! You don’t know what I been through because of him!” Remembering it myself, I began to cry, but he stopped me by not being sympathetic.

  “There’s no use to that,” he said. “I’m sorry for your bad time, my girl, but it is no point to cry. Now we go through the formality, and then I take you home. On the train we talk. We talk about Kevin.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him!”

  “I want to talk about him,” he said, very firm.

  They booked me, or bailed me, or whatever they do. I let Dad do everything. They said they’d got to have the stuff in the pump tested and then I’d have to appear in court in Harwich. It might not be very soon, they said, a matter of weeks.

  “Weeks!” I said. Think of waiting weeks with that hanging over you!

  “The wheels of the law grind small, but they grind exceeding slow,” said the policeman, as if it was some kind of a joke.

  Dad said, all of a sudden, “I want to see it.”

  The man sat back. “No, I’m afraid—”

  Dad leaned over the desk. His fist was closed, trembling. “She brought it in this country. My daughter. I want to see what it looks like.”

  The policeman looked from Dad to me. Then he stood up.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “It’s a bit irregular.”

  While he was out of the room, Dad turned to me. He whispered, “Perhaps I can tell what is it. If it is cannabis, that is nothing so bad. But if it is heroin, we must get a good lawyer.”

  I remembered what the woman had said about the men with the suitcase, the five million pounds, the long sentences. “No, Dad!” I said. “It’s not heroin! It can’t be. It’s just pot, she said that’s all it was!”

  “Who said that?”

  “The woman! She said it was probably only pot!”

  “Probably? Then she doesn’t know.”

  The policeman came back with a box. He took the lid off and let us look inside. There were the long narrow packets. One had come open a bit at one end and a little white powder had spilt out. Dad stared at it. Then he looked up at the man. “What will happen to this?”

  He rolled his lips inside his teeth. “We send it to the forensic lab. They’ll tell us for sure if it’s what we think it is.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach. It was heroin. Dad didn’t say anything. He took my arm and led me out of the place. There was a police car to take us to the station. My bike was there waiting. The driver of the car helped Dad to put my rucksack and bike on the train. It all passed in a sort of mist. I was all – it’s hard to explain – I was living up in my head again, with thoughts, with pictures. Me in the court. Being sentenced to twenty years. Mum crying. Me in prison – Within These Walls, and no Googie Withers there to look after me, either. Shut up with delinquents. Thieves and prostitutes. Murderers. . . .

  But no. They wouldn’t. Because I’d shop Kev, and then they’d know. They’d send him down instead of me. Men’s prisons are worse of course, because men are worse, and more of them go inside so the jails are more crowded and far worse things happen there. I saw a programme once about American prisons; there was this big black criminal, telling young boys what was in store for them if they got sent in there. Terrible things. Dad switched off after a bit, saying, “That’s not for you to see. America is another world anyway, everything is better and worse than here. . . .” Still, Borstals were no holiday, and there was this new idea I’d heard about, something about giving young offenders a short sharp shock. Of course, that’s just what Kev needed, and maybe not so short, either. . . .

  We were sitting in the train and it was going. I hadn’t even noticed it pull out of Harwich, but now we were rattling along. It was nearly night. The countryside was flat like Holland, but not like it any other way. This was England and even in the dusk it couldn’t be anywhere else. I was home and Dad was sitting opposite me and I was in dead, dead trouble.

  “Now,” he said. “Kevin.”

  “Why do we have to talk about him?”

  “He is at the base of it all, that’s why.”

  After a long pause I heard myself say, “I can’t know that.”

  “What other?”

  “Perhaps,” I said slowly, “perhaps he didn’t know anything about it. Perhaps Neils and Yohan just made use of him.”

  Dad was looking at me. “You think so? Really?”

  “It’s possible. They were real operators, those two, you could see. They might’ve got hold of my pump, or pinched it themselves, and done a job on it, and just told him to give it back to me.”

  “Tracy.”

  “What?”

  “You are not using your head.”

  “Why? We can’t know—”

  “Think, my little girl. Think. So he gives you the pump and you get your bike through the customs. Then what?”

  Oh. Yeah. There was that.

  “Well—” I was thinking, frantically now, because somehow in spite of everything I wasn’t sure I wanted to drop Kev in the shit. “Perhaps someone would’ve contacted him – or just nicked the pump, it wouldn�
��t be hard – he wouldn’t need to know—”

  “Tracy, Tracy,” Dad said, shaking his head.

  More silence.

  “Why you are trying so hard to get him from the hook?”

  And then I was crying again, because, to say the true, I didn’t know. I didn’t like Kev any more, I was sure of that. But he was – I mean, when you thought of it – maybe he couldn’t help it. His home-life and that, with his dad always out of work and the family for ever short of money. . . . Easy enough for me to say he was a louse and a rat. . . . I mean, if you’d never had enough, if you’d even been scared because your family was so hard pushed . . . everything you are comes from your background, all the programmes say that. What I mean is, was Kev responsible for what he’d done? Even if he was as big a bastard as it looked, was it all his fault?

  Dad was sitting next to me now, holding me and listening while I tried to tell him all this. He lent me his hanky to blow my nose and when I’d said it all and calmed down a bit, he said:

  “So now let us talk about Michael.”

  I looked up at him. Startled really. I’d half forgotten it was Michael who’d had to go and tell Dad.

  “Tell me about that boy. What are his family situation?”

  “Oh, awful. His dad’s dead and his mum boozes—”

  I stopped.

  “So,” said Dad, quiet. “Yet he is a very good boy. And his brother?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Darryl’s okay.”

  “So it is not just families that decide,” he said.

  We sat in silence for a long, long time. Dad held my hand and I stared out of the window.

  “Does Mum know?” I asked at last.

  “They all know,” Dad said.

  “Is she in a state?”

  “She was. Perhaps now not so bad.”

  “Does Vlady hate me?”

  “Vlady could never hate you,” Dad said, but then he had to say that, didn’t he. “Why should anybody hate you? It was not your doing.”