Screen of Deceit

by Nick Oldham

  Mark Carter was on his own.

  ‘Can I go now?’ he asked.

  The Hyenas cackled with laughter, more like a coven of witches than a gang of hoodlums. It was like Oliver Twist asking for more.

  Not a hope in hell.

  Sparks released the bike’s handlebars, sort of eyed Mark as if weighing him up and, amazingly, said, ‘Yeah, sure you can go, Mark, mate.’ But he didn’t move. The front wheel of Mark’s BMX stayed firmly trapped between Sparks’s legs. He was lying, surprise, surprise; obviously there was a condition to Mark’s release. Mark didn’t even try to cycle away. Jonny Sparks did not just let people off the hook. He looked at the BMX, leaning from side to side, admiring it. ‘Nice bike.’ He winked, creasing his whole face as he did so.

  Mark remained silent. His heart was slamming in his chest.

  ‘You can go, but the bike stays. Like a pressie, from you to me.’ He arched his eyebrows, licked his lips and eyed his gang members, Eric King, known as The Kong, and Sam Dale, known, without explanation, as Rat-head. They were Jonny Sparks clones in the way they dressed, spoke and treated folk; nasty devils, but with no independent thought processes of their own. They relied on Sparks to lead the way and jumped at his command.

  ‘Nice one,’ The Kong said enthusiastically. He had a lazy left eye and sometimes it was hard to know which one was looking at you. It didn’t stop him being a hard swine, though. He took a drag of the rolled–up ciggie he always seemed to have dangling from his bottom lip, hacked up and gozzed revoltingly on the ground. Then he sniffed up disgustingly.

  ‘Yeah, we can get a few quid for it down at Tonno’s,’ Rat-head piped up. He was a broad-shouldered lad, good-looking, with a shock of blond hair, but he had even less up-top than The Kong, which was saying something. Sam Dale was Jonny’s powerhouse. The guy he could wind up and set off to do the heavy battering. He had big fists with lots of scrapes on the knuckles, and he used them well. When he talked about Tonno’s, he was referring to a second-hand shop in town through which most of the estate’s stolen goods ended up being sold on.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Jonny asked Mark.

  ‘It’s my bike and you’re not having it,’ he said, feeling a tightness across his chest. Things, he thought, are about to get out of hand.

  ‘Whoa! Tough words from a soft kid,’ Sparks spat. ‘Tell you what, then – you pay me for your bike and I’ll let you keep it. Ten quid now, ten at the end of the week. That’s fair, innit?’

  ‘Like I said – it’s my bike.’ Mark was fiercely proud of the Diamond Back. He’d worked hard on a double paper round in the mornings before school, one after school and a Sunday round for nine months to get the dosh together. In fact, he thought it was probably the only bike on the whole estate that wasn’t stolen, or didn’t have any knocked-off bits on it. ‘You’re not having it, Jonny,’ he squeaked.

  The ‘look’ came down on Jonny Sparks’s face. The look that didn’t need words, that itself said, ‘Game’s over, business is just about to begin.’

  Except this was no game – not for Mark, anyway – and the business was violence.

  Mark braced himself. As frightened as he was, there was no way he was going to let go of the bike – they’d have to prize it out of his fingers; nor was he going down without a fight.

  Sparks flicked his head at his two mates. They stepped forward menacingly, but halted suddenly as Jonny’s mobile phone rang. He held up a hand to stop the attack, looked warningly at Mark and said, ‘Don’t move, or else. I need to get this.’ He shuffled the phone out of his trackie-bottoms pocket, the polyphonic ring tone being Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, which Mark recognized instantly. Green Day was his favourite band and that was his favourite track. It made him feel sick that scumbag Sparks liked it too.

  ‘Me,’ Sparks said into the flashy phone, his eyes still intently on Mark. ‘Yeah … yeah … understood …’ He adjusted his position slightly as he talked, his feet moving a couple more inches apart so that the wheel of Mark’s bike was no longer trapped between his legs. He probably didn’t even realize he’d done it – but Mark did. ‘Yeah, so it’ll be there? I’ll sort it … yeah …’

  To Mark it sounded as though the conversation was coming to an end.

  This was his chance.

  He took in the scene: Sparks standing dead ahead of him; Eric and Sam a couple of feet either side of Sparks’s shoulders. Mark could tell they were interested in the phone call, trying to earwig. He realized this would probably be the only opportunity he’d get. His fingers tightened on the handlebar grips. He tensed up.

  ‘How much?’ Sparks asked down the phone, listened to the answer, his eyes still fixed on Mark. However, when he got what was obviously a good reply from his question, he could not resist looking around at his chums with a big snigger on his face and a thumbs-up with his left hand.

  Now!

  Mark yanked the front wheel of the bike upwards. He knew the bike well, intimately, could reel off every fact about it, including its weight, and because he spent so much time playing moto-x in the fields behind his house, knew exactly how much effort was needed to yank the wheel upwards to best effect.

  Which he did.

  He caught Sparks off guard and rammed the wheel up into his unprotected groin.

  Sparks emitted an unworldly howl of pain, dropped his mobile and staggered backwards as both hands went instinctively downwards to cradle his nuts. The surprise attack also caught the other two off guard, giving Mark the fraction of a second he needed.

  Without a pause, Mark did a quick reverse, dropped his left leg and skidded the bike round spectacularly, making grit shower the three lads like a hailstorm. With as much power as he could muster – that’s to say, every ounce of it – he drove his right foot hard down on to the pedal, rose high on the bike and shot away from the scene, leaving the two goons clucking fussily around their wounded ringleader like mother hens.

  Mark pedalled like hell, head down, bum right up in the air, and aimed for the narrow alleyway that ran behind the old Spar shop. Just before he reached the gap, his head flicked round to get one last look at the three troublemakers.

  If it hadn’t been so scary, it would have been hilarious.

  The Kong and Rat-head had been brushed roughly aside by Sparks as he stomped around, doubled over, cupping his most precious assets. Mark’s wheel had hit him slap-bang on target and the agony was clear to see on Sparks’s scrunched-up face – but he did manage to look up at the same moment Mark glanced back over his shoulder and, though the two lads were fifty metres apart by then, their eyes locked.

  ‘You’re dead!’ Sparks screamed furiously. ‘You’re gonna get …’ But Mark skidded expertly into the narrow ginnel and heard no more of what was a long bout of ranting, raving, effing and blinding, and threats by Jonny Sparks.

  Mark pushed himself hard, head down, face up into the wind, the air pounding his eardrums, his lungs hurting with the combination of relief and escape.

  He stopped for nothing, emerging at the far end of the alley on to the road, not even pausing to check for traffic. He just shot across – fortunately there was nothing coming – avoided a couple of little kiddies on their bikes, though he did manage to drench them as his BMX cut through a dirty puddle. He went on at this relentless pace until he reached home on the far side of the estate, an end quasi-semi council house that had recently been partly renovated by the council.

  He rode up the garden through the non-existent front gate and up to the front of the house, where he applied the brakes for the first time and screeched to a swervy halt. He sat astride his machine, panting, desperately out of breath. It took a couple of minutes for him to come back down to earth from his exertion, but even then he was sweating like a demon.

  The bike was kept in the hallway, together with loads of other stuff. There was an old coalbunker at the side of the house, big enough to walk in, and though there was a lock on it, it had been broken into so many times that nothin
g was kept in it at all. Now it was just a den for Mark and his mate Bradley. The inside of the house was the only safe-ish place for the BMX and he kept it there despite the occasional outburst from his mum and sister when they tripped over it. But it was too valuable to lose, as had just been demonstrated.

  He bounced it up the front step, in through the front door and rested it against the radiator in the hall. The house seemed quiet, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was no one home. He didn’t bother shouting ‘I’m home’ or anything like that, because nobody really cared if he was, or wasn’t.

  Instead, he went into the kitchen, found some bread without mould on it and made a jam butty. With a glass of orange squash and a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch, he ran up to his room, locked himself in, sat on his creaky wire-framed bed and swigged down the drink in one.

  He was parched after his little adventure.

  Just then, as he placed his cup down on the old TV stand he used as a bedside cabinet, it dawned on him what he’d done.

  He’d basically kicked the hardest lad on the estate in the knackers. Well, not kicked, but ‘wheeled’ – yes, ‘wheeled’ the hardest, baddest, meanest, cruellest lad on the estate in the goolies and in so doing he’d converted Jonny Sparks from someone who had been just ‘after him’ in a fairly leisurely way into a deadly enemy with a grudge.

  Nothing was more certain. Jonny Sparks had been humiliated and he would want revenge. Lots of it. With icing. And cherries.

  Mark’s hot sweat turned into a cold one as he realized the enormity of what he’d done.

  Two

  Mark liked his room, his refuge from the real world. It was lockable from the inside and he could go into it, close the door behind him, slide the big bolt across so no one else could get in, and retreat to his own inner space.

  Everything in it was his. Whilst he knew that some of the things might have been a bit ‘iffy’, he’d paid good money in good faith for most items and found the others.

  His bed had always been there. Everything else in the room he’d got for himself. He’d painted the walls a sort of grass-green from a tin of paint he’d found dumped by the roadside, using a brush he’d also found. It was a good colour, like the Man U pitch. The old TV stand that doubled as his bedside cabinet had been chucked out by a neighbour, literally dumped on the street outside, and Mark had helped himself to it. Someone else had dumped a three-piece suite (people on the estate didn’t usually bother with council collections if it meant it might cost them something) and Mark had snaffled one of the armchairs. With Bradley’s help he’d managed to squeeze it up the stairs into his room. It had taken ages and both lads had struggled to see how the chair could even get into the room, but they’d done it with much huffing, puffing and muscle.

  The desk was just a decorator’s pasting table he’d bought from a cheapo DIY shop in town, then strengthened with a few extra lengths of wood to make it more substantial. He still needed an office chair, which was on his ‘to get’ list.

  He had a PlayStation games console and loads of games for it that he’d got through trading at school, but he wasn’t really happy with it. The graphics were rubbish and dated and the games too easy. He wanted an Xbox 360, but they were hellish expensive and the cost of the games was scary. Nevertheless this piece of kit was also on his ‘to get’ list. He was saving for it now. His TV was an old portable with an inbuilt DVD player, given to him by his brother Jack when he left home years before. It was OK but needed upgrading too.

  So that was Mark Carter’s room.

  He had few toys, but loads of books. He loved reading because that was truly an escape to a different world. Books set his mind going, unlike computer games, which just numbed it. He was always at the library and always scouring the second-hand book stalls on the market for bargains.

  His favourite book, even though it was written in an old-fashioned way, was Treasure Island. He’d read it a zillion times.

  Mark’d been home about an hour and his guts were rumbling. The jam butty and crisps had not been enough to satisfy a growing lad and he was wondering what to do for his tea.

  There was not much chance of his mum making it. She was either out gallivanting or at work, Mark didn’t know which. Meaning he’d have to fend for himself. His elder sister, Bethany, who was seventeen, was in, but she was slobbed out in front of the telly in the living room and Mark couldn’t even remember when she’d last cooked anything for anyone other than herself.

  His mind’s eye was working through what he’d seen in the cupboards earlier. Lots of beans, spag hoops and stuff like that; a couple of eggs, Pot Noodles … now that was an idea – Pot Noodle – something he loved, though he did blame it for making him a bit spotty in the chin area.

  As he thought what best to do, there was a knock on the front door.

  Mark tensed immediately, listening hard. He paused his computer game. He was pretty sure Jonny Sparks wouldn’t come near the house. Like the hyena he was, Sparks hunted in the open spaces of the estate, where he tracked and brought down his prey with his pack. But you never knew.

  More knocking.

  ‘I’m bloody coming,’ he heard his sister yell, then heard her stomp out of the lounge to the front door. There was a loud crash, then a, ‘Bloody soddin’ bike!’ as she caught her shin on the pedal. Mark smiled. She always seemed to be able to trip over it, even though she knew it was there in the hallway. The front door was opened, there was a short conversation followed by the door slamming and the sound of footsteps running upstairs.

  Mark relaxed, resumed the game, shouted, ‘It’s open.’ He had recognized the footsteps.

  Bradley Hamilton, Mark’s best mate, poked his head round the door.

  ‘Hey!’ he called.

  Mark beckoned him in, pretended to be concentrating on his game and jerked a thumb in the direction of the bed. Brad sat quietly down, watching Mark on the old armchair, playing the game, ducking and diving with the character on-screen as he negotiated the tortuous route.

  Bradley was in Mark’s class at school. They had known each other since they were little kids and got along really well. Both lads lived on the perimeter of Shoreside and had managed to keep their noses clean, even though it would have been easier to get involved with the bad crowd on the estate. Not that either of them was a saint. Far from it. But both saw what they called ‘the dark side’, after Star Wars, was ultimately not worth the hassle. It had been a hard choice with much temptation. Everyone stole. Everyone cheated. Everyone fought and everyone hung around in gangs harassing everyone else – or at least it seemed that way. But Mark and Bradley had realized that if they got dragged into that, their lives would be screwed up for ever.

  The hardest thing was that the temptation was always there, always dangling like a carrot. Always.

  Thing was, though, Mark had a good role model – his brother Jack. He had a dad somewhere, obviously, but he’d done a bunk a long time ago, leaving Mum, Jack, Bethany and him to fend for themselves and Jack, being older than them by quite a few years, had done well for himself. He had an apartment overlooking the marina at Preston docks; a Porsche Cayenne, one of those four-wheel-drive ones with darkened side windows; he had a cool bird for a girlfriend; had a great job selling computer software and had loads of dosh. He was Mark’s hero. Showed that it could be done, that getting out of the gutter was possible for anyone if they wanted it enough.

  ‘Finished!’ Mark announced with a flourish as he triumphed on-screen.

  He gazed round at his tolerant friend who, like Mark, had a short haircut – a grade four and a two – with train tracks zigzagged across the side of his head rather like a swastika, though unintentionally so. There was something in Bradley’s expression that made Mark say, ‘What?’

  Bradley shook his head in disbelief. ‘You’ve really done it now.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘I think you know. It’s all round the estate. Jonny Sparks says next time he sees you, you’re dead.’
>
  ‘Oh, that,’ Mark said glumly. He exhaled. ‘Has he said anything more?’

  ‘Does he need to? I think it’s all pretty well summed up in that phrase, don’t you? “I’m gonna kill Mark Carter.”’

  ‘Mm, possibly,’ Mark conceded.

  ‘I mean, what the hell made you ram your bike into his goolies? Have you got a death wish, or summat?’ Bradley’s astonishment was obvious. ‘You made him look a fool and now he’s out to get you.’ Bradley’s lips were curled into a kind of unbelieving sneer. ‘And he will, y’know. Get ready for your head to resemble a crushed tomato.’

  ‘You think I don’t know all this? It’s been on my mind ever since, strangely enough.’

  ‘You’re going to have to watch your back, pal. What on earth made you act like such a plonker?’

  ‘Two things – right?’ Mark stood up and counted on his fingers. ‘First off he called Beth a slag.’ He paused, waiting for some reaction from his mate. All he got was a blank look that could have meant agreement or disagreement with the statement. Mark didn’t push it, mainly because he knew that Beth’s reputation around Shoreside wasn’t exactly squeaky clean … all the same, it didn’t mean someone could say it in public, to his face. ‘And second, he wanted me to give him my bike, or twenty quid.’

  ‘Ahh,’ Bradley said, beginning to understand. That was a different matter.

  ‘And there was no way I was going to give him either.’ Mark rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Shit!’ he said.

  Bradley was nodding, scratching his head, thinking. ‘Can’t you find twenty dabs? Might get you off the hook … maybe.’

  Mark shrugged helplessly. ‘Even if I could, which I could, and I gave it to him, he’d still bother me. He’s got a downer on me and that’s that. I’m just gonna have to keep me head down for a while.’

  ‘A lifetime, don’t you mean?’ Bradley corrected him.