by Stuart David
I struggle into a sitting position and wait for the brain fog to pass, and then I follow him. By the time I sit down, he’s taken out this strange mechanical contraption and he’s feeding one of his cigarette papers into it, dropping tobacco into the top. He turns a handle and the paper sort of shoots out, all crumpled up. Then the tobacco falls onto the table.
“Crap,” he says, very quietly, and he reaches for a new cigarette paper.
“What are you whispering for?” I ask him, and he pokes around in his tin for another bit of tobacco.
“Am I whispering?” he asks.
I nod.
“Sorry,” he says, but he continues to whisper anyway. “I just don’t want your mum to hear this.”
“She’s at the shops,” I tell him. “How can she hear you from the shops?”
“I’m not taking any chances,” he says, and has another go at turning his little handle. This time a cigarette drops onto the table. It looks kind of fat, and the tobacco doesn’t nearly fill it, but it’s still recognizable as a cigarette.
“Ta-da!” Dad whispers. “How about that?”
He puts it in his mouth and lights it, and a huge flame shoots up toward the bit of hair that covers his brow.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouts, loud enough for Mum to hear wherever she is. He drops the cigarette on the table and starts slapping at his head, then picks up his tobacco tin and starts hitting the cigarette with it. Eventually the cigarette goes out, and his hair stops smoldering. He picks up the tin and tries to see his reflection in it. Then he puffs up his cheeks and sets about rolling one of his tight little cigarettes in the normal way and lights it up. His burnt hair smells kind of weird.
“Is that what you wanted to show me?” I ask him when things have calmed down.
He puts the contraption away in his pocket and shakes his head. “That’s just something I’m trying out,” he says, whispering again now. “Takes a bit of getting used to.”
He taps some ash off the end of the handmade cigarette, then holds it up and looks at it in a satisfied way.
“All right,” he says. “Now. Back to business. By the way, don’t mention any of this to your mum.” He looks about the room, as if I might have been lying to him and she’s really hiding behind the door or underneath one of the armchairs.
“The fire?” I ask.
“Not the fire,” he says. “The thing I’m about to tell you. Anyway, it wasn’t a fire. Just a minor mishap. Teething problems.” He rubs his hair and puts the pieces of the disaster cigarette in the ashtray, then picks at the mark its flame has left on the table. “Come to think of it,” he says, “don’t tell her about the fire, either. She’ll kill me if she sees that burn mark.”
“Okay,” I say, “I won’t. I’d better go upstairs now and get on with some things, though.”
It’s a good effort—quite inspired, I think—but it doesn’t work. Dad shakes his head.
“Stay here,” he says, then he gets up, goes out into the hall, and comes back holding a piece of paper. He drops it in front of me and sits down again.
“I had a word with Frank Carberry,” he says. He’s speaking so quietly now, I have to lean a bit closer just to hear him. “There’s something on the go right now. In the warehouse. He said to send you in and they’ll give you a good hearing.”
The room starts to spin uncontrollably.
Dad stretches across the table and puts his finger on the piece of paper. I haven’t dared to look at it yet; at first I thought it might be something bad from school. Now I wish it was.
“Everything’s on here,” Dad tells me, and he runs his finger along the words as he reads them out, upside down for him, the right way up for me. It’s as if he thinks the stories about how little attention I pay in class have been undersold. He seems to think I can’t even read.
“Nine thirty a.m., Tuesday morning,” he whispers. “The admin office. Mrs. Mary McGowan.” That’s all it says on the paper. He stops reading and sits back in his chair again, while I stare down at the page. “Mary McGowan,” Dad says. “That’s who’ll be interviewing you. She knows you’re my boy, so just be yourself and everything’ll be fine. And don’t tell your mum about it—you know what she’s like. She’ll put the kibosh on it before you even set foot in there.”
“I should bloody hope so!” I shout. Inwardly. Outwardly I just say, “But I’ll have to tell her.”
“No you won’t,” Dad says.
My brain flaps around as if it’s a fish stuck on the beach, trying to get back into the water.
“I’ve got school on Tuesday morning,” I say. “She’ll find out if I don’t go.”
“I’ll write you a note,” Dad says. “Don’t worry too much about your mum.” He glances toward the door again and has a quick check underneath the armchairs. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions now.”
“But what if I get the job? How can I hide that from her?”
“We’ll tell her about it when you’ve had the offer,” he says. “Once the job’s yours, she won’t make you give it up. We just have to make sure she doesn’t find out before then. You don’t want to end up working in a place like hers, do you?”
I shake my head.
“That’s settled, then. You’re my boy. You need to follow in my footsteps, like I followed in your grandpa’s. Memorize what’s written on that piece of paper and then swallow it.” He notices his tiny cigarette has gone out and makes a few attempts at trying to light it again. “Don’t look so worried,” he says, “I’m only joking about swallowing the paper.”
I’m pretty sure I was looking worried, but none of it had anything to do with eating his note. It’s what’s written on the note that’s giving me the fear.
“Borrow a suit from one of your cousins,” Dad says. “I’ve got a couple in the cupboard, but they’re too big for you. I’ll give you a tie. Make sure you look smart.” He gives up on the remains of the tiny cigarette and starts rolling another one. Then he tells me he’s got some work to do in the garden, tells me to remind him to give me that note for school, taps the side of his nose, and leaves me sitting alone at the dining table in a severe state of hypertension.
None of this helps in any way with the brain freeze. In fact, it makes it about a hundred times worse. I find it almost impossible to concentrate on the problem of the iPad after that—all I can think about is how to get myself out of this horrifying interview, and I’m pretty sure that’s all the back bit of my brain can think about too. I stumble around my kid room for a while, doodling on the wallpaper, trying to stop my mind racing, and checking my profile from time to time to see if there’s any response from Elsie Green yet. Somehow, the iPad problem fighting with the interview problem results in me only being able to think about the Elsie Green situation, and I become convinced that she really is dead.
This leads on to a dark vision of me applying sticky labels to millions of whiskey bottles for the next fifty years, and eventually I can’t take it anymore and I have to get out of the house. Walking sometimes helps to get the ideas flowing, and it’s the only strategy I haven’t already tried over the weekend. I decide to walk out to the place where Elsie Green lives and kill two birds with the one stone. If I can get a glimpse of her, I can stop obsessing over the idea that she’s gone belly-up. And it’s quite a long walk, so all the pavement pounding should get my mind turning over on the problems of the iPad and the interview. I check the computer one more time, see the familiar absence of the red rectangle, then grab my coat and put my desperate plan into action.
It turns out to be not too shoddy a plan after all. I’ve only been walking for about ten minutes before I’m quite at peace with the whole interview thing. It starts to amaze me that I even got into a state about it. All I have to do is tell Mum it’s been lined up and then think of a way to smooth that out with Dad. He’s right: there’s no way Mum’ll let me go through with it. Not before the exams. Maybe I can just tell him she found the bit of paper or something. Try
convincing him it’s really his fault for having written it all down in the first place. Then it’ll just be a case of putting up with the Regular Madness for a day or two, which is a small price to pay in the circumstances. And with that settled, and the Greensleeves situation currently in hand, my CPU will be free to get back to work on the question of the iPad again.
Here’s how I lost Harry’s iPad in the first place.
I’m in the dining hall one lunchtime, sitting with Sandy Hammil and a few randoms from his homeroom class who I don’t really know. There’s this one guy, Gary Crawford, whose dad works with my dad, so I know him a bit because of that. But the rest of them I don’t know at all.
So this Gary guy, he starts going on about an attempt he’s going to make on the school record for stuffing people into the wheelchair lift over in the new block. That’s something we do sometimes, and Gary claims he’s got a system to get fifteen in there. That seems pretty insane to me, but none of the randoms are saying much, just going along with it blindly. I think he probably has charisma or something like that. So eventually I say, “Fifteen can’t be done,” and they all kind of turn on me. “I was in the last one,” I tell them. “Eleven of us. If there had been one more, I would’ve died. I’m still not sure I didn’t die.”
“That plan was weak,” Gary says. “Jennifer Campbell’s diagram was old school. My schemata’s totally porn. Look.”
It turns out his method of getting them all in there is as insane as his decision to go for fifteen in the first place. He’s planning to put five face-down on the floor, and then another five face-down on top of them, at right angles. After that, all he has to do is squeeze five more round the walls, standing up, and he’s got it made. According to him.
“What about the weight, though?” I say. “The rope was creaking with eleven. It won’t hold fifteen.”
But he tells me the recommendation written on the lift is just for regulations.
“It’ll take ten times what it says,” he insists. “They have to do it like that.”
I don’t disagree. It’s designed to hold one person in a wheelchair, and one person helping them, and the weight it says is based on that. Obviously it takes more, since we managed to get eleven in there. But it was swinging quite a bit when we went up, and I’m certain the cable won’t support fifteen.
“You should try for twelve,” I tell him. “Twelve might work if you’ve got a new system. Fifteen is madness.”
“If I do twelve, somebody will come along and break the record,” he says. “If I do fifteen, it’ll stand forever. No one will ever beat fifteen.”
“Only because fifteen can’t be done,” I say.
He puts his fork down on his plate then and looks at me steadily.
“Do you want to put some money on it?” he asks.
I nod.
“Fifty quid,” he says. “How about that?”
I don’t have that kind of money or anything like it, but I know he’s got no chance of doing it, so I agree without even thinking it over.
“Let’s see your money,” he says.
“Let’s see yours.”
He goes into his pocket and takes out his wallet. A wallet! Then he opens that up and counts out five ten-pound notes. He holds them up in front of my face to show me.
“Where did you get all that?” I ask him.
“What are you talking about?” he says. “Where did you get yours?”
“I haven’t got any,” I say. “Where would I get fifty quid?”
He looks at me sadly, as if I’m just a loser wasting his time.
“No money, no bet,” he says, and he puts the notes back in his wallet and folds it up. Then, just as he’s tucking the wallet away in his pocket again, he sees Harry’s iPad lying on top of my books, next to my plate of half-eaten gruel, and he looks at it approvingly.
“I’ll take that,” he says. “Put that up against my fifty and we’ve got a deal.”
So I put it up.
There was a point, about halfway through the wheelchair lift’s journey, when I thought I’d won. I was standing up on the first floor, in amongst a crowd of pretty overexcited randoms, when there was this horrible crunching sound from the metal cable, and the sound of screaming from inside the car. It didn’t stop moving, though. A few seconds later, it came into view and we could see two faces pressed hard up against the tiny window in the lift door, which was all steamed up with condensation. Then the doors opened and they all started spilling out.
Only Gary stayed in. He’d volunteered to be one of the bodies on the bottom layer, and we couldn’t tell at first if he was dead or just milking it. He was just lying there, face-down and unmoving. But then the cable made the crunching sound again, even louder than the first time, and then there was this big kind of bang. There was no doubt then about whether he was all right or not. He sprang out of the lift without even sitting up first, and landed on his feet out in the corridor. There were a few sparks and things, then another bang, and the lift car sort of tilted sideways and the lights inside went out. It didn’t fall or anything, just hung like that, and when it was clear that nothing worse was going to happen some randoms started to cheer, and a bunch of them rushed toward Gary and started banging him on the back. He only seemed to have eyes for one person in the crowd, though. Me. He walked straight up to me and grabbed my shirt.
“Give me the iPad,” he said, and I had no other option except to give it to him.
The lift is still hanging like that now. After it happened, this girl Irene, who’s in a wheelchair, went to see Bailey with one of Gary’s pals, and they told Bailey they were just going up in the lift when it went weird. And Bailey bought it. He didn’t buy a new cable for the thing, though. All the classes with pupils in them who need to use the lift have been moved down to the ground floor now, and Gary keeps boasting that his record will stand forever, because the lift will never get fixed. Every time I pass it on my way up or down the stairs, I feel kind of sick, and I try my best to come up with a fail-safe trick to get Harry’s iPad back off Gary.
But I never come up with anything.
12
For almost an hour I sit on a wall across the road from Elsie Green’s house, watching closely for a sign of life. The curtains are all open, and there’s a car in the driveway, so I sit and watch for movement in the rooms at the front of the house. It took me ages to find the place. My friend Paul Glover is always going on about Elsie Green being his neighbor, so I found his house first and then studied all the nameplates on the doors round about, looking for Green. It turns out she’s not his neighbor at all. She lives down at the other end of the street, so far away that I’m surprised he even knows she’s there.
After about twenty minutes, a man comes out of the house and approaches the car, without closing the front door behind him. I lean forward on the wall and start thinking I’m about to catch a glimpse of Elsie. I decide he must be driving her somewhere. He opens up the car and takes something off the passenger seat, then carries it into the house. When he comes back, he’s on his own, and this time he closes the front door. Then he gets into the car, adjusts the mirror, reverses out onto the road, and drives away. I slump back into my original position on the wall and start watching the windows again, excitement over.
I decide the man must be Elsie’s dad. He didn’t look much like a normal dad. He had a green jacket on, sort of furry, and his hair was kind of weird, all floppy and puffed up. I’m pretty certain that’s the kind of dad Elsie would have. And the good thing is, he didn’t look bereaved or in grief or anything like that. He wasn’t crying and his eyes weren’t rubbed red. He didn’t even have a black tie on. So I take all that as a good sign. If only I could see her . . .
Half an hour later, there’s still been no movement in any of the rooms. The car doesn’t come back, and the front door stays closed. I’m just starting to drift off into thinking about the iPad, losing some of my concentration, when someone creeps up behind me and grabs me by the wrist.
“What are you doing?” a voice asks, and I almost jump out of my skin.
I turn round and there’s an old man standing there, gripping me tightly, and staring at me with bulging eyes.
“I’ve been watching you,” he says. “Get off my wall.”
I stand up, but he still doesn’t let go of my wrist. I’m pretty sure the way he’s holding it is against my human rights. His hand feels horrible, all bony and cold, like a witch’s hand.
“What are you doing here?” he asks me, and I try to tug my wrist out of his grip.
“I’m waiting for my friend,” I say.
“Which friend?”
“Paul Glover. He lives down there. He went back to get his jacket.”
“An hour ago?”
I try to think of some explanation for that, and then I just nod.
“I don’t think so,” the old man says. “I think you’re casing the Green joint. You’re part of a criminal syndicate.”
“A what?”
“A heist gang. I’ve been watching you. I know what’s going on.”
“I’m only fifteen,” I tell him, and struggle with my wrist again. It feels like he’s going to break it. There’s no way that’s not against my human rights.
“Fifteen!” he says, in that way, without laughing but sounding as if he is. I realize I should’ve used that myself. Right back when he said “casing the Green joint.” Or I could have said, “A criminal syndicate!” Or, “A heist gang!” Now it’s too late. He’s beaten me to it. I really need to get on top of that thing.
He starts trying to drag me along the sidewalk and into his driveway. He’s still on the other side of the wall, in his garden, and he grits his little teeth as he pushes and pulls. They look all thin and sharp, like white pins or something.
“Come on,” he says, “I’m calling the police. You’re waiting in here till they come. I’ve had enough of you.”
“I’m only waiting for my friend,” I tell him again, and tug and tug against his bony fingers. He screws his face up, exposing more of the little needle teeth, and then he starts to grunt. I reach out with my free hand and try to pry the bony witch fingers off my wrist.