Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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Epub ISBN: 9781448188901
Version 1.0
This edition published in 2017 by
Andersen Press Limited
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London SW1V 2SA
www.andersenpress.co.uk
First published by Macmillan Children’s Books, 2004
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
The right of Terence Blacker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Copyright © Terence Blacker, 2004
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978 1 78344 575 2
TO MARION LLOYD
If this story was a Doors song,
which would it be?
‘Strange Days’?
‘Ship of Fools’?
‘Take It As It Comes’?
Maybe ‘Wild Child’ would do it …
1
Matthew Burton
I need you to hold it in your head, this picture of Sam Lopez when he first arrived at my front door. Keep it there while later, prettier pictures appear – Sam in a ponytail, Sam teaching Elena and the gang American football in the playground, Sam singing in his precious girl band, Sam, the ultimate class cutie.
Because this, I want you to remember, is the real, the true Sam Lopez.
He stood there, a beat-up duffel bag slung over his shoulder, in a coat about three sizes too big for him, baggy jeans sagging on to the step. His face was a wisp of paleness behind a curtain of lank, shoulder-length hair.
‘Hi, Matthew.’ My mother, standing just behind him, wore the strained, I’m-not-panicking-really-I’m-not look on her face that I know so well. ‘This is your famous cousin Sam.’
As I muttered a greeting, my cousin pushed past me, close enough for me to notice a) how small he was and b) that he hadn’t had a wash for a while.
‘Let me take your coat, Sam,’ said my father, who had been hovering behind me in the hallway, but he was ignored too as the newcomer ambled through to the kitchen. When we followed him in, he was looking about, almost sniffing the air like some kind of rat.
‘So this is my new home,’ he said, his voice hoarse but surprisingly high-pitched.
I remember how once, when my mother was talking about Sam’s mother, my Aunt Galaxy, she had referred to Sam as ‘an accident’. I hadn’t quite understood what she meant at the time but now, standing in the kitchen, I saw it clear enough.
This was what an accident looked like – an accident in human form, an accident about to happen.
Mrs Burton
I have never been more glad to be back home. When I saw Matthew, trying to look pleased at the arrival of his American cousin, and dear David in the hall, his polite, social smile in place, I almost burst into tears.
It had been a terrible trip. The funeral, the meeting with the lawyer, the journey back across the Atlantic with a moody, traumatised thirteen-year-old. It was not going to be easy dealing with Sam, but at least now I was back with my own little family. Together, we would make this thing work.
Matthew
Eight days ago, life had been simple. The summer holidays had just started. I was kind of whacked out after the long term and was ready for many, many mornings lying in my bed, afternoons with my friends, evenings slobbing out in front of the TV.
Then the news came through from America. My mother’s younger sister, Galaxy, had been involved in a serious car crash. One moment she was in a bad way, the next she was in a coma, the next she was dead. Mum flew out for the funeral.
I knew I should feel upset about the whole dead-aunt thing but, since I had never met Galaxy and she had only been mentioned now and then by my parents in a slightly embarrassed and jokey way, she had never exactly featured in my life so far. In fact, all I knew was that she sounded decidedly weird.
Mrs Burton
My sister Gail became Galaxy at a rebirthing ceremony at the Glastonbury Festival when she was eighteen. She had always liked to be different from the rest of us.
A couple of years later, she went on holiday to America with a bunch of long-haired friends. When they came back, she stayed, having hitched up with Tod Strange, the lead guitarist of a rather unpleasant heavy-metal band called 666.
We lost touch with Galaxy until just after I got married and was pregnant with Matthew, when she sent me a postcard. Tod was history, she said. These days she was with a guy called Tony Lopez, a nightclub owner. Oh, and guess what? She was going to have a baby.
So we each started a family at more or less the same time – me in a house in suburban London, Aunt Galaxy, as she now was, roaming around America in a camper van. We received the odd card from her – photographs of her little boy, Sam, odd scraps of news. After a couple of years, she told us that Tony Lopez had left home ‘to go travel and find himself’, as she put it. Later we heard that he was in jail.
We kept in touch down the years, but the truth was that we had less and less in common; Galaxy living on the west coast with what we always imagined to be a rather undesirable crowd, us living our quiet but busy lives in London.
And then came the big, the terrible news.
I was surprised to find how upset I was. My sister and I had never been particularly close as children and, when she grew into this rather strange and irresponsible adult who was different from me in every way, I came to think of her almost as a stranger who had just happened to have been born into the same family as me by some kind of odd accident.
Now I realised that I would miss my sister and her weird ways. Flying out to America for the funeral, I thought not of Galaxy, the rock chick with her dubious friends, but of Gail, the little girl who was never quite in step with the rest of the world but saw that as the world’s problem, not hers. In spite of having my own lovely, close family, I felt lonely without her.
In San Diego, where she had been living most recently, I was met by a man called Jeb Durkowitz who turned out to be Galaxy’s lawyer. He told me that things were somewhat complicated. Sam, who had just turned thirteen, was alone in the world. In a letter to Durkowitz, Galaxy had made it clear that, should anything happen to her, the Burton family should look after him.
Poor Gail, poor Galaxy. Even in death, she had a talent for causing trouble.
Matthew
My cousin stank, and I sensed that he didn’t care
that he stank. It was as if smelling to high heaven was a way of showing right from the start that he just didn’t care what people thought of him.
He sat, slumped on one of the kitchen stools, gazing at his new family, his small, button-like eyes dark and glistening.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr and Mrs David Burton. At home. With their only son, Matthew.’
As he spoke, it seemed to me that there was more contempt in that American drawl of his than seemed exactly right or polite in a kid of his age.
I glanced at my parents, expecting some kind of cool put-down, but they both stood smiling at this hairball idiot as if he were the most special and adorable thing they had ever seen in their entire lives.
Eventually, my father turned to me. ‘Maybe Sam would like a juice from the fridge,’ he said.
‘Juice sucks,’ said Sam.
Dad smiled. ‘Fair enough,’ he said reasonably.
We soon discovered that everything sucked, according to Sam Lopez.
Driving around London to see the sights sucked. The meals that my father cooked for us sucked. All four of the Pantuccis from next door, who called in to say hello, sucked. British TV sucked big time (‘You got no cable? No digital?’ he said. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’). Going to bed at any time before midnight sucked, as did getting up at any time before midday.
By the second day, this attitude was beginning to get to me. ‘How come everything in your life sucks?’ I asked him over dinner.
He turned to me, his eyes wide and dark, and I realised too late that it had not exactly been the best thing to say to someone whose mum had just died.
‘Search me, cuz,’ he said quietly. ‘I ask myself the same question every day.’
Mr Burton
It was a difficult time. We have always been a family that likes to deal with problems by talking them through together, but Sam preferred his own company. He spent hours in his room, alone, listening to music though his headphones or he sat in front of the TV, staring blankly at the screen.
When he did speak, it was often in a harsh, angry tone of voice that tore through what was once the easy atmosphere of the house like someone ripping fabric. He had an alarming turn of phrase for a boy of his age too. Sam may not have had much of an education but, when it came to creative swearing, he was pretty near to the top of the class.
But the way I saw it was this: the silences, the moods, the outbursts, the bad language were all a cry for help from a kid in pain. It was the duty of the Burton family to help Sam through this dark, dark time.
Matthew
A word about my parents. To an outsider – Sam Lopez, say – they might have seemed kind of topsy-turvy. As long as I can remember, Mum has been the main wage-earner, working in an employment agency at a job which gives her a daily nervous breakdown.
My father works part-time from home, checking documents as a proofreader for a law firm, but his real love, his career almost, is looking after the home. Dad’s version of housework is not the quick, what-the-hell-it’ll-do version of most men – he really and genuinely takes pride in keeping things sparkling and clean. He is the true, official article: a house husband. He can spend a whole afternoon on a family meal. He has a special day for vacuuming. He can wear an apron without embarrassment. Now and then I watch him hanging clothes out on the line, carefully, slowly, the pegs between his teeth, and I just know that this, the family and the family home, are what matters to him more than any job or career.
Look at it this way. I have a mixed-up version of a so-called traditional family – not so much Dad and Mum as Mad and Dum.
Elena Griffiths
For me, it was not the summer of Sam Lopez at all. It was the summer of hope, of romance, of secrets, of planning for a new future. It was the summer of Mark Kramer.
At Bradbury Hill School, everybody knew Mark. The boys wanted to be him. They tried to grow their hair long and floppy like his. They wore his style of clothes, liked the brands that he liked. Some of them (truly, sadly, tragically) imitated his smile, his sleepy way of talking.
And the girls? Obviously, they just wanted to date him.
Maybe I was kidding myself – I was going into my second year, he was soon-to-be king of the Lower Sixth – but, when he started talking to me while we were both queuing for lunch during the last week of term, I honestly thought it meant something. He had been chatting to Justin, a friend of his, about the new Cameron Diaz film they were planning to see. As it happened, I had just seen a preview (my mum’s in the business), so I casually mentioned that the film was OK. In fact, it was almost good.
Mark looked at me in that gentle, aristocratic way of his, as if seeing me for the first time, and asked me how come I knew so much about a film that had not been released. I told him that my mum was a casting director. In fact, she had met Cameron a couple of times at showbiz parties (which is true). Cameron was really nice, I said – very, you know, normal.
‘Showbiz parties, eh?’ Mark laughed and his friend laughed too. He said he was going to see the film the following Saturday, and I mentioned I wouldn’t mind catching it again.
‘Cool,’ he said.
Maybe I read too much into that look, into that ‘Cool’, but at that moment it seemed clear. Something secret and magical had passed between us – something which made words sort of irrelevant. I was going on a date with Mark Kramer, the date he had just set up without revealing our plan to Justin.
It was big news, a socko moment of the major kind. Normally, I would share any secret with my best friends, Charley and Zia, but this was different. They would either make fun of me or they would be jealous.
I so didn’t need that right then.
Matthew
At that moment in my summer holidays, it seemed as if nothing was going to be good or simple or normal ever again. When our home had just been Mum, Dad and me, we had known where we were – like any family, we had our fights and rows and days when things were a bit rocky, but we had been around each other long enough to know, by instinct, how to straighten things out. We understood when you need to talk and when to keep quiet, when to say sorry – all the usual parent-kid stuff.
But when three became four, and the extra person had more rage and unhappiness in him than the rest of us put together, the whole balance became skewed. I would hear Mum and Dad having hissed, secretive conversations about Sam. Their smiles became forced and phoney. Everything they said and thought seemed to revolve around my cousin and how he was coming to terms with his new, motherless life.
Beside that great, throbbing tragedy, the everyday stuff of my little world suddenly seemed kind of puny and insignificant.
As for Sam, he had learned a useful lesson – being an orphan gives you power. So while my parents were around, he would do his silent ‘n’ moody act. Then, as soon as we were alone, he would set about winding me up.
We were sitting in front of the TV one afternoon, when he looked out of the window and noticed my father washing the car in the front drive.
‘What is it with that guy?’ he murmured, just loudly enough for me to hear.
I made the mistake of responding. ‘You mean my father?’
‘Always cleaning things and scrubbing and dusting. Has he got some kind of psycho hang-up?’
I stared at the TV, now determined not to be suckered into a row.
Sam turned to me. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’
I shrugged.
‘Because I was thinking, maybe your dad was a butler in a previous life. Or a cleaning lady.’
I clenched my teeth and said nothing.
‘Now my dad – he wouldn’t know what dusting was,’ Sam said suddenly. ‘He’s so cool that just hearing about him would blow you away. Your brain couldn’t take it in.’
I stared ahead in silence.
‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff we did together.’ Sam chuckled and shook his head. ‘Yup, he was a real father, you know?’
Without a word, I stood up, walked
out of the room and outside the house to join my father. I’m not crazy about car-washing, but it was the only way I could show Sam where my loyalty lay.
‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this,’ I told Dad.
‘He’ll settle down when he goes to school.’
I groaned. ‘I can’t believe he’s going to be in my class. It’s going to be a nightmare, Dad.’
My father looked over the car, a sponge in his hand, and said the words which made my heart sink every time I heard them.
‘Maybe it’s time Sam met a few of your friends.’
Tyrone Sherman
We were in the park, at our normal place by the shed, waiting for Matt’s famous American cousin.
He was late. According to Matt, he was late for everything.
‘Maybe he doesn’t exist at all,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe he’s Matt’s imaginary friend.’
‘I wish,’ said Matt.
Time passed. Jake kicked a football against the wall of the shed. Matt and I watched the world go by, just like we had done a thousand times before. This was our territory. It may have been just a shelter in a children’s playground, but the three of us had been hanging out here for five years or so. In the early days, we would come here to take cover if it rained while we were on the swings or the slide. Now, we just sat and talked. Even if we were given the odd cold stare now and then by parents in the playground or passing by on their way to the public toilets around the back of the building, we didn’t care. This was our own private place.
When we were kids, we had taken to calling ourselves the Shed Gang half as a joke and half seriously. Somehow, the name had stuck.
‘Here we go,’ Matt said suddenly.
I followed the direction of his eyes.
Turning into the park was a small, long-haired kid. ‘That’s him?’ I asked. ‘Bit of a titch, isn’t he?’
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