‘I am in soooo much trouble!’ Cat wails.
I shrug. ‘Your parents won’t be pleased, but they’ll get over it,’ I tell her. ‘Admit it, Cat – wasn’t there just a little bit of you that knew this might happen?’
‘No!’ she protests.
‘Come on,’ I argue. ‘When you run as close to the wind as you do, you’re gonna get caught sometime. They’ll forgive you.’
‘But you might not!’ she bursts out. ‘Omigod, I’ve ruined everything!’
‘Cat, shhh,’ I tell her. ‘We’re OK, aren’t we? We’ve got off with a police caution. And it sounds like the raid was a success too, and that’s brilliant news.’
‘But –’
‘No buts,’ I tell her. I slip my arm round her and pull her close, and she leans against me, her head on my shoulder, her vanilla-scented hair soft against my cheek. That’s how we are sitting half an hour later, when the door swings open again.
Cat’s mum comes in, anxious and tired, her face a perfect mask of dismay. Her eyes lock on to mine. ‘You!’ she says. ‘The boy from drama club!’
‘Me,’ I admit. ‘About that whole drama club thing …’
But I can’t explain, because before I get the chance, Dodgy Dave appears right next to Cat’s mum, his hair sticking up in clumps as if he just rolled out of bed. Well, he probably did.
‘Mouse,’ he says. ‘What the …?’
Cat’s mum flings her arms round her, and then, to my horror, Dodgy Dave does the same. That’s taking the whole social worker thing a little too far, I reckon. I take a step back, confused.
Dave puts an arm round Cat’s mum, and that’s even weirder. The super-keen white social worker and the sad-eyed black lawyer huddle together, like they belong. My head struggles to make sense of it all. Dave Thomas. Mia Thomas. Catrin Thomas.
‘I’m sorry I lied,’ Cat says huskily, and I realize she’s looking at me. She turns back to the adults. ‘To you too. We had a plan … and then …’ She runs out of ideas and shakes her head silently, eyes bright with tears.
Dodgy Dave glares at me over his glasses. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him look this angry. His hands are balled into fists, as if he’d like to punch me, and his voice trembles as he speaks.
‘Mouse,’ he says. ‘Just what in hell have you done to my daughter?’
I’m not just confused, I’m numb. I don’t understand what’s going on, and nor does Dave, by the look of it. He looks at Cat, shakes his head. ‘You’ve been hanging out with this – this delinquent?’ he splutters. ‘This loser?’
That hurts, coming from someone who is supposed to care about me. It hurts more than I would ever have imagined.
‘Dad,’ Cat says to Dave. ‘Please!’
Dad? Dad? I look at Cat and her eyes slide away from mine, and I realize that she was right. Everything is ruined.
There’s a whole lot of fuss and confusion before the police are ready to let us out of there. Dave manages to prove that he is my designated social worker as well as Cat’s dad, and finally, after about a million warnings of what might happen if we’re ever in trouble again, we are released into the thin, cold December morning.
Dave drives through the early morning traffic in silence, Cat’s mum stony-faced in the passenger seat. Cat reaches for my hand in the back seat of the car, but I pull away, my head a mess of anger and betrayal.
‘You lied,’ I hiss. ‘All this time, you lied. You let me think Dave was your social worker, when all the time …’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cat says again, but the words sound empty, hollow.
‘What was I, some kind of charity project?’ I ask softly. ‘Or were you just slumming it? Notching up some bad-girl kudos with your posh mates? Poor little rich girl, hanging out with the boy from the Eden Estate.’
She just turns her head away.
Back at the house, Dave marches us into the kitchen. ‘We need to know what’s been going on,’ he says. ‘Catrin was supposed to be spending the night with a friend. At six in the morning we get a call to say she’s in police custody, after a graffiti attack on the homes of known drug dealers on the Eden Estate! She’s just a kid, Mouse!’
‘We’re not kids,’ I snap back, defiantly. ‘We’re fourteen.’
Dave looks at me for a long moment, his eyes weary. ‘Fourteen?’ he asks. ‘Is that what she told you? Catrin is only twelve.’
Twelve? I sink down on to a wooden chair. Cat won’t meet my gaze. In her cheeks, two pink spots appear. ‘If I’d told you I was twelve, you’d have treated me like a kid,’ she says. ‘You’d have seen me differently. Like if I’d told you that Dave was my dad.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I admit. ‘Obviously.’
I’m seeing everything differently now. Twelve isn’t old enough to stay out all night on graffiti hits, or to stay over at your boyfriend’s place when your parents think you’re at a mate’s. Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t skive school or steal chocolates, and they shouldn’t kiss you the way Cat kisses me. Twelve? I rest my head in my hands.
‘You didn’t know?’ Dave asks.
‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘Even so,’ he says. ‘You must have seen that Catrin was an unhappy, vulnerable girl. You’ve latched on to her and dragged her down … she’s been totally out of control, these last few weeks.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Cat protests. ‘Mouse helped me.’
‘Helped you?’ Mia Thomas bites out. ‘Ha! He’s helped you to skip school, flunk your tests, stay out all night doing lord knows what …’
‘Two hundred quid went missing from my wallet a couple of months back,’ Dave tells me. ‘I couldn’t believe it was Cat, but … well, it makes sense now, doesn’t it? She’s been hanging out on the Eden Estate with you, spending it on drink and cigarettes and … and –’
‘No!’ I argue. ‘Nothing like that, I promise. I wouldn’t! I don’t smoke, or drink … or anything else!’
‘You want me to take the word of a boy who can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes at a time?’ Dave laughs. ‘I know too much about you, Mouse. You’re trouble. You always will be. Can’t you see that?’
I hang my head.
‘Dad, Mum, stop it!’ Cat cuts in. ‘Mouse is my friend. I don’t care if you believe me or not, but he has helped me – he’s taught me about right and wrong, about friendship, about love.’
‘Love?’ Dave just about chokes.
‘He cares about me,’ Cat ploughs on. ‘He really, really cares, which is more than you two do.’
I look at Dave. His mouth is opening and closing slowly, like someone underwater. ‘Catrin, that’s not fair …’ he says.
‘No, it’s not,’ she snaps back. ‘My life has never been fair, not since Josh.’
There’s a silence, a long, painful silence. Like an idiot, I try to break it. ‘Maybe things will be better now,’ I say. ‘Now that Josh is well again. Now that he’s coming home.’
Dave’s face pales, then flushes a slow, dark pink.
Mia Thomas blinks, and her face seems to collapse. She hides behinds her hands, sobbing quietly.
‘Josh won’t be coming home,’ Dave says icily. ‘He died, a year ago. Didn’t she tell you?’
My stomach turns over. Everyone has a dark secret, Cat once told me. Something buried, hidden, something that gnaws away at them, messing up their head, eating at their happiness from inside. I thought I knew the secret, but it was just another lie.
Cat won’t look at me. ‘It’s like our lives ended then too,’ she says to her parents. ‘We’re all in mourning for a little boy who’s never coming back. Never, OK? Don’t you see that?’
‘We’ve lost one child,’ Mia whispers. ‘We don’t want to lose you.’
‘You don’t even notice I’m alive, half the time!’ Cat flings back. ‘You’re so wrapped up in the past it takes something like this for you to see that I’m hurting too!’
‘You’ve been lashing out for a year now!’ Dave retal
iates. ‘We’ve tried to be patient. We’ve tried to be understanding –’
‘Did you ever try just being there for me?’
‘We’re always there for you!’
‘It doesn’t feel like that.’
‘Catrin, don’t punish us for what happened to Josh,’ Mia says. ‘We loved him, but we couldn’t make him better. Losing him has made you all the more precious to us, but you’ve been on a self-destruct mission for months …’
Cat takes a deep breath. ‘I felt like I didn’t matter,’ she tells them. ‘Then I met Mouse, and just for a little while, I didn’t feel that way any more.’
Dave sighs, sinks down on to a chair. He looks broken and defeated.
I’d like to tell Dave it’s OK, that it doesn’t matter that he just called me a delinquent and a loser, but I can’t. It matters. My head feels like it’s filling up with smoke and lies, splitting in two.
Cat reaches over, touches my hand, but I flinch. I don’t know what to think, what to feel. Should I feel sorry for her, or angry that she’s lied to me for so long? It’s like the last few weeks have been some elaborate game, designed to wind her parents up, catch their attention at last.
She’s more messed up than I ever imagined. All the good times, all the special times we shared were based on lies. Did I ever know her at all?
‘Cat and Mouse,’ I say, coldly. ‘That’s a joke – and the joke was on me, right? Well, good one, Cat. You had me fooled. You know what, though? Next time you start playing games, remember that other people have feelings too. Other people get hurt.’
‘Mouse, that’s not the way it was!’ she protests.
‘That’s the way it looked to me,’ I say. ‘You know what? Forget it. I hope things work out for you, OK?’ As I walk away, I can hear Dave calling my name, Cat crying, Mia comforting her. I don’t look back.
A cat-and-mouse game can only ever end in tears.
Mouse …
Don’t walk out of my life. You’re my best friend – more than my best friend, OK? I need you. I let you down and I lied, but I never meant to hurt you, I swear. It started off as a game, wanting to hang out with you – a cool way to wind my parents up. It didn’t stay that way. Pretty soon, you were the only thing that mattered.
I messed up, big style. I didn’t think you’d want to know if you sussed I was only twelve, or worked out that Dave was my dad. I was right too, I guess. Lying about Josh was different. I was trying to fool myself, really, make out that there could still be some kind of happy ending. Crazy, right? It’s just that I loved Josh, and I think you’d have loved him too, and I so, soooo wanted things to be different.
Sometimes, the truth just hurts too much.
Dad said he handled things badly, said things he shouldn’t have said. He won’t be your social worker any more, anyhow – he’s got a new job at a youth project up in Brixton, starting in January. Shorter hours, less stress. We’re going to family counselling, which is kind of weird, but Dad says we all need some help to get over the hole that Josh left in our lives. Maybe he’s right.
Mouse, I’m missing you like mad. Lucky too. Give him a hug for me, yeah? You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I let you down, stuffed up, lost you. I guess I only have myself to blame. Dad says it’s probably all for the best, because we come from different worlds, but I liked your world, Mouse. I liked you.
After Christmas, Dad’s taking us away for a few weeks, a proper holiday, somewhere hot and sunny. He says that’ll cheer me up, but I don’t think anything will ever cheer me up again. I feel so sad.
Please get in touch, Mouse. Please?
Cat xxx
That was four weeks ago. I tore the letter into tiny pieces and let the pieces drift into the waste-paper bin like snow. I wasn’t ready to get in touch, I wasn’t ready to forgive or forget, or even to understand.
Mum knew something had gone wrong between me and Cat, but she also knew me well enough not to ask too much. ‘Sometimes,’ she told me, ‘You just have to work things out on your own. Think it through.’
Maybe. Sometimes, though, it’s easier not to think about things.
Things are changing on the Eden Estate – it’s like the whole place can breathe at last. It said on TV that the police raid was one of the most successful ever – hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of drugs were seized, and a dozen arrests were made on the Eden Estate alone. The bigshot suppliers Scully led the police to were arrested and charged too – the guys who pulled the strings, masterminded the whole business. They didn’t live around here, of course. They had posh houses with swimming pools and triple garages filled with fancy cars, all bought with drugs money. These guys were running drugs all over the south of England.
I had to tell Mum how I got tangled up in it all, of course. If I hadn’t, she’d have heard from the social services anyhow – I figured it was better coming from me.
‘Oh, Mouse,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘No way!’
The colour drained from her face, and she was trembling as she pulled me close. ‘Of all the nights to go away. Promise me you won’t try anything like that again – it was dangerous, Mouse, way too dangerous. No more risks, no more vandalism, no more graffiti.’
I blinked and chewed my lip and finally I promised, and I’ll stick to it too. Mum needs me and I need her, and neither of us need any extra hassle. We’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime.
Scully’s trial finally came up, and Mum stood as a witness just like she said she would. Mrs S. stuck by her statement too, and a few other locals came up with evidence that showed Frank Scully hadn’t got everybody running scared. He would have faced a good long stretch inside, but you know what? The weasel turned traitor and grassed up his mates, giving evidence against the other Eden Estate dealers.
‘He did the right thing in the end,’ Mrs S. said. ‘My Frank.’
Well, maybe. Maybe he just wanted a lighter sentence, though, and that’s what he got, for cooperating with the police. Still, it was three years, so we won’t be seeing him around for a while.
‘I told him you’d be keeping Lucky,’ Mrs S. said to me, after her first prison visit. ‘He said that might be for the best.’
‘Frank Scully said that?’ I asked, amazed. ‘Really?’
Mrs S. looked shifty. ‘Perhaps not in those exact words,’ she admitted. ‘I told him, though, that it was time he grew up and took responsibilty for his mistakes. Lucky’s better off with you – he knows that. He still listens to his old gran!’
So Lucky became our dog, officially, or as official as anything ever gets around here, and that was one good thing.
Eden won’t ever be perfect, of course, but it’s better, for sure. Work started on the new community buildings just before Christmas – council workers came in diggers to break up the concrete courtyard, map out the new community garden. Mum was involved from the start – she got the garden centre guy, the one who brought the Swiss cheese plant, to do some designs and donate some plants. Our flat looks like a high-rise greenhouse, these days. The balcony is stuffed with twiggy fruit trees and trays and trays of budding daffodills and primroses just waiting to be planted out.
Jake has been hanging around Mum, lately, making her laugh with cheesy chat-up lines and offers of fancy dates involving nightclubs, cocktails and flash cars. She’s not interested. She’s spending more and more time with the garden centre guy, talking about hardy perennials and compost heaps and the best varieties of lettuce.
‘Women,’ Jake sighed. ‘They’re a mystery, Mouse, mate – every one of them. I’ve never figured them out yet.’
It’s not so hard to figure – Jake’s still up to his ears in dodgy car deals and iffy deliveries, and Mum’s not crazy about that. She prefers the kind of date where she can stay out late planting hedging all round the perimeter of the new community garden.
Me, I got wrapped up in the Green Vale Comp mural. Mr Brown wanted something cultural and uplifting, a landscape or a pretty rural scene
. I had other plans. I marched into his office on the first day of the January term with a folderful of designs that made his eyes open wide. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Not what I was expecting, but … well, you’re the expert, Kavanagh. I’ll leave it to you, shall I?’
He looked terrified when I turned up the next day with a box full of spray cans, but I promised this would be my last graffiti hit ever. It took me weeks, working in school time and out of it. I painted giant swirls of red and yellow and turquoise, silver stars and orange spirals and curling fronds of emerald green. I added a trail of little cat footprints, weaving in and out of the patterns, and Fitz spotted them and raised an eyebrow, smirking.
‘So you’re over her, huh?’ he said.
‘Over who?’ I asked.
Fitz just laughed. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it bad.’
It doesn’t matter whether I’m over Cat or not, though – by now, she’ll be over me. She’s had a chance to think, a chance to let go, a chance to move on. I had my chance, and I didn’t respond, and now it’s most likely too late. Who knows, maybe she’s better off without me.
I walk Lucky through the estate, hands in pockets against the cold. A couple of flakes of white drift past my face, swirling around in the wind, and I shiver and tug my beanie hat lower.
Cat was trouble, I know. She lied to me, used me, played games with my head, but there was another side to her too. The money she took from her dad’s wallet wasn’t for drink or ciggies, it was to pay a vet’s bill. She bought me neon stars, showed me real ones, stroked the tight, crumpled skin of my cheek and didn’t flinch. She wrote a letter to friends from the past I thought I’d never see again, and brought them back into my life. Cat cared.
Flakes of snow are landing on my fringe, stinging my cheeks. Lucky tries to chase the flakes, snapping at them as they fall. It never snows in London, or hardly ever. It feels like magic, like tiny, perfect stars, falling all around. A smile tugs at my mouth, my heart, and even though it’s cold I feel like I’m warming up, defrosting, after a long time of feeling numb.
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