by Stuart David
“Well . . . he’s about to be expelled from school, for kicking this guy’s head in, and I think I’ve come up with a peach of an idea for getting him off the hook.” But I only said that inside my head, while I was waiting for the arrival of the right thing to say.
“It’s about the school trip,” I told her, and she disappeared again. That worked a charm. It was Yatesy himself who came to the door this time, not really smiling or anything, but I could tell I’d got his attention.
“What’s the story?” he asked me, standing with the door kind of behind him and mostly shut, so I knew I still wasn’t coming inside yet.
“I think I’ve solved your problem,” I said. “I think I can help you.”
He stared at me quietly for a minute. “What’s in it for you?” he said. “Are you after something?”
I nodded.
He thought for a while, then stepped back in behind the door and opened it wider.
“Come upstairs,” he said. “You’d better not be wasting my time, Dawson.”
“Call me The Jackdaw,” I said.
“Whatever,” he muttered, and up we went.
Yatesy has a kind of minikitchen bit in his room as well. There’s a kettle and a tiny fridge up on the wall, and a few cups and bottles lying about.
“Want a Coke?” he asks me, and I nod. He opens up the minifridge and tells me to sit down. It’s a bit weird. Nobody from school has ever told me to sit down before when I’ve been in their room. I look about and then go for one of the armchairs. He brings the Coke over in a glass and hands it to me. There are ice cubes in it. I’m not sure if there’s something in particular I’m supposed to say.
“Cheers!” I tell him, and he nods. Then he sits down in the other armchair.
I spin the ice cubes round in the glass and listen to the noise they make.
“Do you know Drew Thornton?” I ask him then.
He does the staring thing again for a while.
“He goes out with my sister now and again,” he says.
I take this as quite good news. It means Drew probably won’t misunderstand my friend request and attempt to become my boyfriend. It also might help my plan a bit. I’m not quite sure how yet, at this early stage, but while I’m talking after that I keep it ticking over.
“Is he weird or anything?” I ask Yatesy.
“Weird?” he says. “What are you, Jack? Like, six?”
I think of asking him again to call me The Jackdaw, but I decide to leave it for later. Besides, what he’s said is probably good news. It probably means Drew isn’t too weird and I don’t need to worry too much about having become his friend.
And I keep ticking the thing over about Drew going out with Yatesy’s sister.
“So what’s this all about?” Yatesy asks me, and I notice the kettle is starting to boil. He gets up and makes himself a cup of tea. Or maybe coffee. He doesn’t ask me if I want one. I keep spinning the ice cubes round in my glass.
“I think I might be able to get a stand-in for you,” I tell him. “I think I can maybe get someone else to say they were fighting Cyrus McCormack.”
He changes a bit then. He brings his cup of tea or coffee back over to the armchair, and I can tell he’s looking at me in more of a friendly way.
“Are you serious?” he says, and I tell him I am. I think of quoting Elsie and telling him I’m always serious, especially when it comes to my schemes. But the idea starts to crease me up on the inside, and I have to struggle to get a grip on it again.
“I’m finished if I get kicked out of school,” he says. “If that happens . . .”
He trails off, and I tell him I know what he means.
“My parents would kill me if it happened to me,” I say.
He looks at me as if I’m an idiot.
“Who cares what my parents think?” he says. “They’d probably have a good laugh about it. It’s art school I’m worried about. If I get kicked out, I don’t get in. I need my grades.”
I look over at the work part of his room for a while. There’s a big easel there, with a blank canvas propped up on it. Hundreds of tubes of paint and a load of brushes sit on a table beside it. There are drawings lying all over the floor, and lots of other canvases stacked up against the walls so you can only see their backs.
“I wish I was good at drawing,” I say.
“Drawing!” Yatesy replies, in exactly the same way my dad said, “An idea!”
I need to start using that myself. It works good.
“I saw the paintings you did of Drew on your profile,” I say. “They were good. They look like him.”
Yatesy snorts, and then he seems to remember what I’ve just offered to do for him. He wipes his nose and tries to pretend the noise was an accident.
“It’s more about how the paintings feel,” he says. “I’m not too worried if they look like him or not.”
I nod.
“They feel good,” I say. Then I decide it’s time to ramp it up. I try to remember the phrase I found on the Internet earlier, and I make my voice sound as mature as I can, in case he asks me again if I’m six.
“Have you ever used a life model?” I say. And what I’m really asking him is, “Have you ever painted anybody in the nip?”
He doesn’t seem fazed.
“Of course,” he says. “All the time. Come and look at this.” He stands up and waves his hand for me to follow him. We walk over past the big easel, and he kneels down and hunts about amongst the stacked canvases. Then he stands up and holds one out in front of himself. I can’t see it from where I’m standing, and when he turns it round I wish I still couldn’t see it. It looks like his mum. I’m pretty certain it is his mum. And she’s totally naked. Before I can move my eyes, I’m aware of lots of crinkles and bumps, and sagging bits. It takes me about fifty-three milliseconds to manage to attach my gaze to her feet and nod slowly, but it’s much too long. Part of my brain is already ruined forever.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Yatesy says, then he drops down onto the floor and starts digging through the canvases excitedly again. This time it’s much worse. He brings out a painting of what is probably his dad, and he holds it up in front of my face. “Look at those lines,” he says, running a finger up and down the craggy old chest. Then he points between the legs and traces a shape with his fingernail. “Isn’t that exquisite?” he asks. “We could never invent the lines we find in nature.”
“Yes,” I say. I try to say it like the bookshop bampot, and then I head for the safety of my armchair. Yatesy turns the painting so he can see it properly again and holds it at full stretch for a while, smiling contentedly to himself. Then, thankfully, he tucks it back where he found it and comes over to his armchair.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” he says. “Let’s get it over with. I’ve got an essay I need to finish for the morning.”
I lean forward in my seat and do everything I can to block the horrendous image of Yatesy’s dad out of my mind. This is it. This is my moment. I reach for the edge of the plaster. One quick move.
“Do you know Elsie Green?” I ask him.
“Greensleeves?” he says, but he doesn’t laugh or have that expression on his face most people do when you mention Elsie.
“That’s her,” I say, and he nods.
“She’s quite eccentric,” he says. “Quite intriguing.”
I let the dust settle, mainly inside my own head, then tell him how I need her to do some programming for me. And about how she’s obsessed with Drew. I tell him my project means as much to me as art school does to him, and then I tell him the price Elsie is extracting in payment for her services.
“So you want me to paint a nude portrait of Drew for her?” Yatesy says, as if he’s grasped everything without any problem.
“Not exactly,” I tell him. “She says that’s no good. She says it has to be the real thing.”
Yatesy chews his lip.
“So how can I help?” he says.
“I want you t
o paint Drew in the nude,” I say, “and I want Elsie to be there while you’re doing it, hidden away. With a good view of everything that’s going on.”
I hold my breath. Yatesy picks his cup up off the table and looks down into it. Then he takes a long drink, looking at me while he swallows.
“You’re a devious bastard,” he says when he’s finished. He leans forward and puts the cup back on the table again and asks me what happens if he doesn’t agree.
“You don’t get to art school,” I tell him, and I say it out loud.
He sighs.
“Drew’s quite a shy guy,” he says. “I don’t know if he’d do it.”
I shrug, and then the results of the thing I’ve been ticking over since we started talking suddenly sail into view. “Tell him he should do it as a gift for your sister,” I say. “Tell him it would bowl her over. Something like that.”
His face goes kind of red, and I wonder if he’s going to take it badly, but then it passes and he smiles a bit. “Your mind is diseased,” he says. “It’s a sewer. But I think I’m starting to like you. You’re creative.”
He sits thinking quietly for a few minutes, and I leave him to his thoughts. I drink what’s left of my glass of Coke, even though it’s gone all watery from the ice cubes.
“Tell Drew it’ll be tasteful,” I say then. “Tell him you’ll do it kind of side on or something.”
Yatesy holds up a hand to stop me. “Don’t get involved in the artistic process,” he says. “You’re overstepping the mark now.”
I stand up. I decide it’s probably time for me to go. I’ve done all I can here for the time being.
“Just a suggestion,” I say. “Think the whole thing over. Let me know what you decide.”
I put my glass down on his sink, then start heading toward the door. He gets up and follows me.
“Who’s the fall guy?” he asks. “Who’s going to stand in for me? Is it you?”
I shake my head. “I’m close to a final warning myself,” I tell him. “If I get kicked out, I’ll end up sticking labels on whiskey bottles for the rest of my life.”
“Brutal,” he says.
“I’ve got a few people in mind,” I tell him. “Don’t sweat it. Just don’t tell Drew what’s really going on, and leave everything else up to me. It’ll all work out.”
He tells me that I’ll have saved him from a handful of sleeping pills if it does, and then asks me what it is I call myself again.
“The Jackdaw,” I say.
“All right,” he says. “The Jackdaw it is.”
He reaches out to shake my hand and I give his a quick slap, then get out of there before he starts showing me any more traumatizing paintings, of his grandpa or something.
Back at home, Mum is sitting at the table just getting started on her dinner. From the kitchen door I can see it looks a lot better than what I had, so I go in and try to steal a few chips off her plate. She holds up a hand to fight me off. She defends them well.
“Where have you been?” she asks me. “Dad said you were only going to the shop.”
“That’s what I told him,” I say. “I was really round at Chris Yates’s house, getting help with my studies.”
“Really?”
She’s so impressed, she lets her guard down and allows me to grab a few chips.
“Good for you,” she says. “I’m glad you’re starting to take things seriously. There’s not long now.”
“Yes,” I say. Just like the bampot. And this time I get it right. She can’t think of anything else to say.
I take a few more chips, and she tells me that’s enough.
“I thought Dad already made your dinner,” she says.
“He did,” I tell her. “But it wasn’t very good.”
“What did he give you?”
“Cold pizza and boiled-up peas. I’ve got a blister on my tongue.”
At that moment Dad wanders into the kitchen, looking quite pleased with himself.
“I thought I told you to make Jack a proper dinner,” Mum says.
“I did,” Dad replies.
“What did you make him?”
“Pizza and peas.”
“But that’s not even a thing,” Mum tells him.
“It is now,” he chuckles, and goes over to the fridge to take out another beer.
“Be serious,” Mum says. “You can’t just feed him rubbish, Andy. He’s growing. When I say make him a proper dinner, I mean make him a proper dinner.”
“Here we go,” Dad says, and I slip out of the kitchen and head upstairs to my kid room, as the Regular Madness gets going all over again.
I lie on my bed and listen to it for a while, quite enjoying the normality. It seems preferable to living in a house where it wouldn’t be unusual for me to paint both of them in the nude. I listen until they get onto the topic of my job prospects again, then filter it out and start thinking about Operation Yatesy’s Stand-In.
I lied when I told Yatesy I had a few possible randoms lined up to take the blame for him. I didn’t want to give him any reason to believe it was going to be easy for me. I want to have him thinking that it’s going to take everything I’ve got, just to make sure he thinks it’s a fair trade. Over the next few days, I might even make up some stories to tell him about how hard it’s turning out to be. But the thing is, in reality, I know exactly who I’m going to ask. It’s all under control.
9
All the time I had spent looking at Drew’s and Yatesy’s profiles earlier in the evening gave me a little mini-idea later on, once the Regular Madness had settled down and I was getting ready to put myself into hibernation mode. It occurred to me that if I could deal with Elsie Green online, especially when it came to working on Objective-C, I might be able to avoid her altogether in the real world and narrowly escape ending up in an insane asylum. So I got out of bed again and searched about for her crazy profile, then zoomed off a friend request. Elsie wasn’t anything like Drew, though. I checked for the red sign a few times before I fell asleep, and I checked it once or twice before I went to school in the morning, I even kept an eye out using my phone in between lessons, but each time there was nothing. I didn’t see her anywhere at school, either, and the longer it all went on the more my mind began to play tricks on me. I started to imagine that she’d found out about Drew being Yatesy’s sister’s boyfriend and she’d done something drastic. Swallowed one of those lover’s draughts I’m always hearing about in English or something. It seemed like the typical thing to happen just when I had everything sweetly lined up and ready to go. The perfect way for my big idea to go up in smoke.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I was probably just winding myself up. And I decided she probably just had a cold or something.
But guess who I did see! Or rather, guess who saw me. I was making my way from geography to English, just getting ready to send a text to my potential stand-in for Yatesy, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder and nearly knocked the phone out of my hands. I turned round completely off guard, and Drew Thornton was standing there.
“Hi, Jackdaw,” he said, with a big friendly smile on his face.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi, Drew.”
“Thanks for the friend request,” he told me. “I just thought I’d come and say hello. What’s up?”
That again.
“Not much,” I replied. Then something occurred to me. “I was over at Chris Yates’s last night,” I told him. “He showed me some paintings he’d made of you. Looked good.”
Drew nodded. “Chris is a genius,” he said.
“Anyway,” I went on, “Chris told me you were quite a cool guy, so I sent the request. Just on the spur of the moment. You can delete me if you want.”
Drew shook his head. “No problem,” he said. “One of my friends said you were probably trying to scam me, though. He says you always do that kind of thing.”
I gave him a little smile. “Your friend might be right,” I said. “I’m usually
in at something or other. You should delete me to be on the safe side.”
He laughed. “That’s funny,” he said. “What have you got now, Jackdaw?”
“English,” I told him. “Hands Anderson.”
“I don’t get him,” Drew said. “I get Larkin. I’d better go. Arithmetic with Nelson. See you later.”
Then he ran off, doing a strange little skipping-type run. He’s quite a small guy when you’re standing beside him. And pretty weird and boring. It doesn’t really compute that a little unnoticeable guy like that could lift Greensleeves to such a bonkers state of medieval passion, so much so that she might even throw back a lethal dose of the hemlock because he’s going out with another little third-year. I shook my head and checked the time on my phone. I was running pretty late for English now, and late is something you don’t want to be when you’ve got Hands Anderson. So I stuffed the phone into my pocket, forgetting about my text for the time being, and I made a sprint for it.
The stand-in I have in mind for Yatesy is my cousin Harry. I think he’ll do it, too. The only problem is, he hasn’t been talking to me for the past week or so. He hates me at the moment. I kept texting him all day, but he didn’t reply. At break times and between lessons I scoured the corridors and playground for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I know if I can get hold of him, I can talk him round. The whole falling-out was based on a misunderstanding, anyway, and I know that once I have him face to face I can get him onboard with the scheme. But he’s a couple of years above me, and I don’t know his movements. By the last lesson of the day (French) I was checking my phone almost constantly, looking for my acceptance from Elsie and a reply from Harry.
Eventually, Mrs. Peterson caught me at it and confiscated the phone till the end of the period. I felt pretty jumpy without it. By the time I got it back I was having major palpitations, and I turned it back on and checked up on things as quickly as I could. Still nothing. From either of them. So instead of going home, I decided to go straight round to Harry’s house, to see if I could sort things out.
He lives in the new builds, over the bridge and down past the roundabout. I always have the feeling I’m walking into a toy town or something when I go down there. The houses don’t seem real to me. It’s kind of strange.