‘That’s the way it is sometimes. The survivors feel guilty just for surviving.’
‘Yes, that’s what Abby said.’
‘Who’s Abby?’ said Dad, giving me a toe-curling parental wink. ‘Not this mystery girlfriend your mother’s been telling me about?’
‘Trust me, she’s not my girlfriend.’
Dad joined me at the window. ‘He was so much calmer after he’d told me. He said he was ready to die.’ Dad laid his hand gently on my shoulder. ‘There was one thing that was worrying him though.’
‘What was that?’
‘You, Sam. He said you were upset about something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he thought it probably had something to do with school. Was he right?’
I still didn’t want to tell him. Even after all I’d been through, it felt as though I’d failed somehow. But if Granddad could do it, I could too. So I told Dad everything, starting with my cyber-murder and the Chickenboyz website, right through to finding out that one of my persecutors was also my so-called best friend. And after I’d finished, I actually felt a lot better.
I wish I could have said the same for Dad. He looked like he was about to spontaneously combust. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’
‘I knew you’d be angry. ’
Dad shook his head in disgust. I really wished I hadn’t told him. ‘Why should I be angry?’
‘Because you warned me about it, didn’t you, Dad, about showing my feelings in public? But I turned out to be just like that boy at your school, you know, “the boy who cried”?’
‘Oh Sam, I’m so sorry, I should have told you.’
‘Told me what?’
‘It was me,’ said Dad. ‘I was “the boy who cried”. And I hated the idea of the same thing happening to you. We might not have had the internet back then, but they still managed to make my life a misery – some hard man, eh, Sam?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’ve never told anyone,’ said Dad softly.
‘Not even Nanny and Granddad?’
‘Of course not. I can see now how stupid it was, but I thought they’d be ashamed of me.’
And then Dad did something he hadn’t done for ages. He pulled me towards him and gave me a sweaty cuddle. ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll sort it out, I promise.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Right,’ he said, taking a last lingering look around Granddad’s old room, ‘let’s get the hell out of here!’
‘I’M BEGINNING TO
SEE THE LIGHT’
Petal did a beautiful unaccompanied version of this 1945 Ellington standard at the funeral, which would have pleased Granddad. And I spotted a misplaced apostrophe in the order of service, which would have pleased him even more.
It’s been nearly a year now since he died, and I still miss him like crazy. But the funny thing is, every so often, he pops up at my side: whenever I smell burning leaves, ride the underground, swim underwater, watch The Weakest Link, eat a Mars Bar or listen to hot jazz, I can feel Granddad enjoying it too. Like he said, ‘We share the same genes.’ I suppose he’ll always be a part of me till my dying day.
And what about school? You probably want me to tell you that things got better straightaway. It was a bit more gradual than that. Mrs Baxter, the head of Year Eight, assured us that St Thomas’s Community College took all such incidents very seriously, and Dad, who was almost as nervous as I was, said that in his day the only people with bullying policies were the other kids.
Alex spent an afternoon in the isolation unit, and Abby was excluded for a week. When she came back, they’d made up this stupid song called ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Pete Hughes kept calling her the Psychotic Penguin, so it was probably a relief when her mum dumped Alex’s dad and they went to live in Manchester.
I was given a student mentor and a couple of leaflets about anti-bullying websites, which didn’t stop them putting chicken feed in my rucksack or calling me Bernard Matthews, but it still felt much better to have it out in the open. Little by little, they began losing interest. Callum Corcoran even started laughing at my jokes again, until, last term, the chicken noises stopped altogether (apart from Animal of course).
Granddad always said there was nothing worse than a story with a fatuous moral at the end: ‘Always believe in yourself, you can do anything if you want it badly enough – that sort of gumph.’ But even if there isn’t a moral to my little tale, I’d like to think that at least we’ve all learned something.
Mum took down the photo of little Harry Potter in her office. She said she’d never forgive herself for failing to spot the classic symptoms of ‘the peer persecution scenario’, and my best mate, Steve, made a joke about the child psychiatrist’s kid always being screwed up. I don’t call him Dimbo now – he doesn’t like it.
Dad decided he didn’t want to be a Hardman any more. He said he was tired of pretending to be something he wasn’t. Me and Mum were delighted. But not quite so delighted when he told us he was going back to his ‘first love’. A few emails later, three out of four of the original band members were reunited and the Kitten Drowners started rehearsing in our garage every other Sunday. It’s not what I call music, but they seem to enjoy it, so where’s the harm?
And what about me, what have I learned? Well, I’ll tell you one thing for a start – if my grandchildren ever ask me how I came by the cool, five-centimetre scar on my forehead, I won’t tell them it was fighting the forces of evil or masterminding an undercover mission for MI6. I’ll tell them I got it running away from a twelve-year-old girl.
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