by Paul Read
‘Probably,’ Denis replied.
‘What do you expect to be? You need to get some qualifications, Denis. You want to end up like your father?’
Denis flashed a look that said she’d crossed a line. ‘Shut up,’ he spat.
Mrs Roberts looked at Patrick as though she’d been slapped. ‘Is this how he speaks to you, Mr Owers?’ she asked.
Denis looked at the teacher, his eyes dulled by disrespect and boredom.
‘No. He’s very polite actually. Never had any problems like that, have we Denis?’
The boy turned away, fixed his eyes on Jenna. ‘No, sir.’
A brief moment of pride, or defeat, recomposed his mother’s face before she pulled her chair in slightly closer. By degrees she might have been warming to Patrick.
‘So, why doesn’t he work? What’s stopping him?’
‘Shall we ask him?’ Patrick turned to Denis.
‘You think you can make something of yourself without school, is that right?’ his mum accused.
‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘What’s the point of working hard for a shitty job selling burgers? Or so I can sit in front of a computer all day? Or what? Become a teacher?’
His mother indicated Patrick. ‘Mr Owers has got a decent job. He worked hard for this.’
Denis laughed, his point made.
Mrs Roberts inspected her chubby hands. ‘I don’t know what to do, Denis, I really don’t. You don’t help yourself.’
Had Patrick been expecting Denis’ mother to be a demonic version of her son, a genetic blueprint for his latent wrath? Or a simpering, weak-willed subservient, unable to control her raging child? She was neither. She was exasperated and powerless, jilted by her own son. A normal parent. When he’d first caught a glimpse of her fierce face opposite, he’d almost, unimaginably, expected to come away feeling sorry for Denis, but she was no more overbearing than any parent of a child like Denis might be. She wasn’t the explanation for his character. It wasn’t her fault.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘Mr Roberts couldn’t make it this evening, I guess?’ He sensed he was in dodgy territory.
‘Not tonight, or any other night,’ she said. ‘And in a way I’m glad.’
Denis rounded on her. ‘What are you…?’
‘If he could see you… He’d be turning in his grave if he was still alive…’
Denis stood. ‘Bitch.’
They both watched him walk purposefully towards the hall doors. His mother’s lip wobbled.
‘Take a moment,’ Patrick suggested. ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea. I shouldn’t have…’
‘No, no. It’s fine. You didn’t know.’ She dabbed at her eyes, disregarding the looks of nearby parents. ‘Denis and his father… It was complicated.’
Perhaps Denis might have turned out differently had the events of his thirteenth birthday not occurred. Maybe they made no difference in the long run. Maybe they changed him completely. Patrick could never know. He’d known him before and he’d known him afterwards, and he appeared, on the surface, to be the same.
Denis’ father had died when Denis was five years old and Denis had always been led to believe that a traffic accident had taken him. For some reason, his mother decided that he would be told the truth when he turned thirteen and so the whole sorry lie came out. He was deemed old enough to know the facts; his father had been murdered. Happy birthday.
His father had been part of a crew in the estate, had sold drugs, handguns, anything. He’d hung out with known fascists and violent criminals. Nice people. On the afternoon of his death he’d been due in court over the armed robbery of a corner shop, but instead had decided to go for a drink at a pub only four streets from the courthouse. There, he become involved in an altercation with a couple of men over some cocaine he’d sold them some time ago, which resulted in Roberts Senior throwing off his coat and challenging both men to a fight outside. They duly obliged and, one single punch later, Denis’ dad was dead of a brain aneurysm.
‘His dad was a hero to him,’ his mother snuffled, a queue of parents now building up behind her. ‘I mean, I guess a kid eventually forgets the beatings and the drunkenness… But once Denis found out how he died, he lost that respect. He told me. I mean, it was something he talked about only once, but I got the sense that it hurt him. Like, right after his thirteenth birthday, he had a growth spurt, became bigger, taller, and closed himself up. But, one day, he came home looking like he’d been crying – of course he would never have admitted this – and I noticed he had a bruise on his face – fresh-looking, y’know – and I asked him about it. He told me he’d been jumped in the playground by a boy, that it was a long-standing argument between the two. He told me that this particular boy had learned about his dad in some old newspaper cuttings and was giving him grief about it. I think most of his fights are about his dad. We talked a bit about it. The way he looked at me and said, ‘One punch…?’ told me the way his dad died hurt Denis more than him not being around did.’
Patrick nodded. He could imagine that the conflict between defending his father’s honour and the shame caused by others knowing the truth about his murder would tear at the boy. He was struck by memories of his own father’s death, his conflicted feelings regarding his demise, and it occurred to Patrick that he had something in common with Denis after all.
‘Of course, thirteen-year-olds don’t like their parents anyway,’ she continued, ‘but this didn’t add, you know, gold or whatever to the myth of his dad and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he hates me too, after my attempt to tell him some truths about his old man backfired. But he’s a good boy, deep down. He wouldn’t do you no harm.’ She looked at her appointment sheet. The entire queue behind her had given up and moved on. ‘I’m late for Maths.’
She stood, and left.
Patrick waited a while, looked around him, then stood and took his coat from the back of his chair. He was done.
And Christophe, still watching him between the heads of pupils and parents, revealed nothing but disappointment in those tired Gaelic greys.
Patrick was on his way to the bus stop when he saw him.
The bus sailed past and the shelter display mocked him by announcing an eleven-minute wait for the next. He was following Denis before he knew what he was doing.
Denis was ambling at a narcotically lobotomised pace, with little or no sense of time’s scarcity, his expression set in its usual irate mask. He stopped at a privately owned garage a couple of streets south before turning back on himself. Patrick froze, unsure whether to dive for cover.
But Denis was too busy checking out the garage forecourt to have seen him. The boy stopped again, took another walk past, then loped calmly into what looked like an unoccupied service area to the left. He was gone about ten seconds before reappearing with his jacket bulkier than before. The robbery had been unambitious and obvious but no one except Patrick seemed to have observed it.
The boy doubled back, head down, faster.
Patrick quarried him from the other side of the street, past torched bins set like improbable jellies on the kerbside, boarded shop windows. From the doorway of an arcade the tinny squeal of simulation racing games and one-armed bandits hollered for attention over the sugary aroma of junk food. A snooker hall sign, shiny reds and greens now faded to pink and lime.
Denis stuck to the main road before ducking up an alleyway into the estate.
Patrick peered after him into a corridor of sweet wrappers. There was no sign of the boy.
He took short, hesitant steps across jagged droplets of glass. At the end of the passageway, several walkways bloomed above his head and a concrete maze of straight lines – the tangible outcome of a nineteen-fifties’ vision of the future, now exposed as impossibly ill-conceived and dystopian – presented him with four potential directions. Finally coming to his senses, he began walking back the way he’d come.
Swung into the wall, a guttural thud was torn from his lungs.
‘You follow
ing me?’ the boy demanded, his voice storm-raged, demonic. There was madness in Denis’ eyes. The smell of gasoline was strong.
The teacher tried for indignity and affront but couldn’t muster either properly and instead squealed, ‘I was on my way home.’
Denis had a forearm across Patrick’s chest. ‘I saw you following.’
Something sloshed under the boy’s jacket as his right arm was removed and flashed a thin slice of gunmetal sky.
Denis teased the blade across Patrick’s neck. It was cold, watery, the itch of a needle before the injection. The wall behind Patrick was unyielding and damp.
Whatever passed for a grin on Denis’ face didn’t convince Patrick there was anything rational sparking in the muddied neurotransmitters inside the boy’s head. His cleft lip scar was livid and scarlet. His teeth were bared. ‘I want you to beg,’ Denis hissed.
‘What?’
‘Say “Please don’t stab me”.’
Patrick had one, proud thought: so far, he’d failed to soil himself. ‘Please don’t stab me.’
‘Say it like you mean it, pussy.’
‘I do mean it, Denis.’
‘Say it in a girl’s voice.’
Patrick remained silent. A very small part of him was still this boy’s teacher. He would have to look at him the following day through chalk dust spinning in beams of morning sunlight. Denis’ mother was still at Highfields, suffering the parents’ evening from which they’d both recently escaped. ‘This is…’
Denis edged the knife a little further into Patrick’s neck. As the weapon pricked skin and he felt the warm liquid run, he saw a kind of stalemate had been reached. Something had flickered briefly in Denis’ chasming pupils. Something like fear.
Patrick turned to follow Denis’ eyes, saw a shadow behind them at the end of the alley.
‘Swear down. I got plans for you,’ Denis sneered. ‘I’m keeping you a little longer.’
He stashed the knife back in a pocket and, as Denis released him, Patrick caught another potent whiff of petrol.
‘We ain’t even yet, sir,’ the boy called before he rounded the corner and, wasted, wild-eyed, was gone.
Patrick shrank, gasping, to the ground. The shadow reached him.
‘You okay?’ a bearded man in his late fifties asked. He smelt awful, his hair matted into natural, grey dreadlocks.
‘You just saved my life.’
‘Did you get a good look at him?’ It was asked without excitement or disbelief, just a dull disaffection that suggested the homeless bum saw such violence on a daily basis. Patrick wondered why he didn’t take his cardboard boxes and sleeping bag five miles down the road. Surely he was freer than some of Union City’s residents.
‘Never seen him before,’ Patrick shrugged, touching his fingertips to his stinging neck and bringing them away sodden with blood.
SIX
He was led to a seat at the kitchen table, where the wound was tended with biting antiseptic. The blood was slow to cease and Sarah replaced the first bandage almost immediately, the used dressing sporting a dark red smear at its centre.
Patrick tried to keep his voice temperate. ‘I slipped on the way out the school gate.’ He knew he wasn’t pulling off a capable performance and to avert discovery of his trembling hands he palmed them together and thrust them between his thighs. ‘A patch of ice,’ he added.
‘And there wasn’t anyone at the school who could have helped?’
‘The school nurse leaves at four. As I say, I was in the area.’
She wasn’t convinced, pushed a mug containing a bobbing teabag towards him. He reached for it with tremulous, dirty hands, his fingernails containing half-moons of Art teacher grime. Sarah’s hands closed around his.
‘What’s the matter?’
He stilled himself with short, shallow breaths. His back was a mess of knots and pain tore up his spine. This superlative stress and exhaustion, last experienced in the nuclear fallout of his marriage, had returned for another bout. He’d never been threatened with a knife before. The look in Denis’ eyes had been supernatural, psychopathic.
Jenna swanned past the kitchen wearing more make-up than Ronald McDonald.
‘Hold on, young lady,’ Sarah shouted, but her daughter’s feet were already a drum roll on the steps outside. Sarah flung an apology Patrick’s way then hurried out after Jenna.
Realising his opportunity, Patrick darted to Jenna’s bedroom.
It was messy, cold and smelt of cheap perfume. The mirror on her dresser featured blu-tacked photos of familiar classmates: Marie Rallings from 11B; Rochelle McNamara from 11F. The room contained a TV and DVD player, some maths books and – in a touching display of childhood fighting valiantly against adolescence – a small collection of teddies. An unknown rapper was crucified to her wall, topless and bejewelled with thick, gold chains and sovereign-encrusted digits.
He lifted the mattress to find a plethora of magazines and clothes in bin liners. The smell was musky, damp.
Upon spotting the shoebox, he slid the bedframe from the wall and, flipping the lid, found nothing but papers and notebooks, a black, spiral bound diary.
He flicked through it, disappointed that was all she’d been hiding. The majority of it was unreadable, like her sketchbook annotations over the last eighteen months. Patrick wondered if there was much about him in the journal, the way he’d muscled in on her mother and moved from her classroom to her home in no time at all.
The papers the diary had been sitting on weren’t lying completely true and Patrick lifted them as the sound of feet echoed from the steps outside.
The moment he saw what lurked underneath he dropped the bed and slammed it back against the wall. On his flight from the room he noticed the window was open about two centimetres, an unaccountably risky lapse considering what he’d just seen beneath her bed. He was back in the kitchen just as Sarah and Jenna emerged from outside.
‘Did you forget our curfew, young lady?’ he heard Sarah yell. ‘And where did you think you were off to dressed like that? Haven’t you got homework to do?’
‘Yeah. Your boyfriend’s.’ The teenager crashed herself into the house. Anger, like ambition, was a quick-fire, youthful emotion, Patrick reflected. Injustice required longer and longer run ups as he zeroed in on middle age. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slammed a door.
‘I told you. Nothing’s going on.’
‘Oh, right. So you just fucked him. That’s disgusting.’
‘Actually we haven’t even…’
‘Why not? He got a small dick or something?’
‘You do know I’m standing here, right?’ Patrick interjected.
There was a moment’s silence, then mother and daughter went out into the living room and whispered in urgent, angry voices. He finished his tea as Sarah re-entered.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
‘It’s a bit delicate. I’m very attracted to you, Patrick, but my daughter comes first. It’s an important year and I don’t want her distracted.’ It was a rebuttal that informed Patrick she still protected Jenna, that he was, naturally, in second place.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I like you…’
‘But?’
‘…I just think we need to tone things down a bit.’
‘Tone things down?’
The hands snaked back. ‘Look… I do like you. It feels right. It’s just that I don’t know that Jenna seeing us together is such a good idea. I told her…’ She tailed off.
‘That there was nothing going on? That you dumped me? That I was a mistake? What?’
‘More or less all the above.’ Her index finger hooked his left thumb. ‘The bottom line is: if – if – we decide we do want to see each other again, and she finds out about us, it’s over.’
‘And do you want to see me again?’
She waited until he was looking at her. ‘Yes. Do you?’
‘Yes.’ The word surprised him. But he’d me
ant it.
‘In which case, you should go.’
Patrick walked silently to the front door as appalling music blasted from Jenna’s bedroom. On the welcome mat, he turned.
‘You remember that business with Jenna and Denis,’ he mumbled. ‘Has she mentioned it since?’
‘No. Why?’
Patrick and Sarah had never mentioned ‘that business’ either. She clearly assumed the matter was over with, that he’d dealt with it through the proper channels. ‘It’s just that… I’ve seen them hanging around a bit.’ Sarah’s mouth fell open. ‘I mean, it might not be anything to get worried about. It may just be something that blows over…’
‘I… I can’t believe she’s hanging out with someone like… like him. After he…’ She collected herself. ‘I’ll have a word with the little madam right away.’
‘Please don’t. Not yet,’ he whispered. ‘It must be weird enough that a teacher’s in her home. I don’t want her thinking I’m sticking my beak in any further than I should be. I’m just letting you know. I really wouldn’t mention it. Please.’
She wasn’t happy, but had to concede his point was valid. He shouldn’t be abusing his position.
‘She’s all I have left,’ she said, defeat in her throat. ‘Keep an eye on her for me, Patrick.’
He already had been. But how could he tell Sarah about the goods under Jenna’s bed without admitting he’d been rummaging?
‘Sarah. I don’t know how to say this…’
He watched her brace herself. The hardening of the nostrils, the sudden deadness behind the eyes, publicised her expectation of another betrayal.
‘…I have reason to believe Jenna’s hiding cannabis in her room.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘How do you…?’
‘I can smell it. When she opens the door.’
Sarah bounded to her daughter’s room, rapped upon the wood and sniffed the air. Without waiting for a reply she pushed her way in, then yelled out Patrick’s name.
He raced to join her and found her desperately rifling through her daughter’s dirty laundry. He turned off Jenna’s CD player.