Graffiti My Soul (17 page)

‘What were you trying to prove? Can't you see that there's nothing wrong with him? That all that shit was made up?'

‘Well, yeah.
Now
I can. I mean, there's no way you'll ever really know, but he does seem all right once you've spent a few hours with him.'

‘That's what I've been telling you all this time!'

It's a minute or two before one of us speaks, both of us lying there listening to the other's breathing. If this were any other time, I'd be thinking something else about Jase and his breathing, not the anger that is wringing my guts inside out. I clamp my jaw so tight my teeth feel like they're about to shatter. I feel wired and gritty, like those people on the ECT tables, when they're being tortured for wanting to hold everything in.

‘Why would you want to hurt someone good? What possible satisfaction can you get from it?'

‘We bus' people up all the time, V. I never hear you say anything then.'

‘But not people that mean something to us! There's got to be a line. Otherwise . . .'

‘Otherwise?'

‘Otherwise . . . we're animals. We're council-house-and-violent. We're nothing.'

‘We're not nothing. We're not
worth
nothing.'

‘Where the hell do you get pictures of naked twelve-year-olds? It's not like you've joined one of those Camera Clubs.'

‘The guy in the photo department. He has to hand over any dodgy pictures he develops to the police. Always manages to make a few copies first, though.'

‘What a sick fucker. And you think Casey's weirder than that?'

‘He said I could do what I wanted with them, so long as I didn't post them on the web.'

There's another pause for more breathing space. Jase's pulse is fast and shallow, either because of the panic or because he's looking for a way out. I keep my breathing even and deep, breathing techniques designed to help through anything. Lion power. Have to focus on summat, else I go round Jase's and bash his head in with a lead stick.

‘I didn't leave them in his face, so there's a chance he might not have even seen them yet.'

‘Don't give me hope like that, 'cos if it isn't true I'm liable to start throwing things.'

‘Put it this way, I didn't put them some place he'd find straight away.'

‘This isn't the time to be talking in riddles, Jase. If he ain't seen them, I want to get them out of there.'

‘He can't have seen them. He could have called you, wouldn't he? He would have said
something
.'

‘S'true. He's never one for holding anything back when it's on his mind.'

‘His bedroom.'

‘What?'

‘I left them under the mattress.'

‘Jesus, Jase. You're all for originality.'

‘I thought it was a good place. Funny. He'll see them when he changes the sheets.'

‘He never changes the sheets. I mean, didn't you see the state of the place? He's a pig.'

‘But he's your pig.'

‘Yeah. I guess he is.'

You can only make statements like this at one a.m. when the person on the other end is mashed and unlikely to remember your blatant sentimentality.

45

It's hard to make a loaded call sound casual when it's been playing on your mind for most of the night.

‘What are you talking about? It's Sunday morning. Haven't we seen enough of each other so far this weekend?'

Even though it was early, I'd made it down to the kitchen and had the TV on, trying to keep everything sounding up and laid-back. If he even sniffed the mechanics behind every
hey, yay
and
yeah
, I'd be done for.

‘It's out of the question, young Turk. I have church, and then I'm giving a talk to the youth group.'

‘Your church has a youth group? How many kids are in it that aren't disabled?'

‘If you got your head out your arse every once in a while, Jesus pardon my language, you'd see that the church is an active and vibrant place to be a teenager.'

‘That still doesn't tell me how many kids you've actually got there.'

‘We've got enough.'

‘More than ten? Less than ten?'

‘I haven't got time to have this conversation, young sir. I've got to get ready.'

Casey's tone wasn't so much busy as exasperated. Most mornings you couldn't get anything out of him until I'd run at least 800m. Why should Sunday be any different?

There needed to be a window, day, evening, anything. The subsidence of the rot I was feeling in my guts hinged on me getting in there and performing my magic spook trick: thirty-second wonder. Blink and you'd never know I was there, in your room and hunting under your bed.

Casey hemmed and hawed for infinity. Off the track, where indecision rules, he could be a champ at it; greater than anything he ever achieved on the field. He was sensitive about being spied upon, but that couldn't be helped. He could be in the most secure and non-judgmental environment ever and still feel the paralysis of paranoia. We could discuss the pitfalls of the Surveillance Nation we have become until we were both blue in the face, and he still wouldn't accept my argument, that the cameras actually give you more freedom rather than repress you. He wouldn't have any of it. He's the kind of guy who's going to spend his old age living off tins in a nuclear bunker somewhere.

My voice crackled with an enthusiasm I wasn't feeling, cranked up to warp speed like some kids' TV presenter who's spent half the night hopped on coke but still manages to turn it on once he sees the red light. Anything for Casey to think that I was in need of his mentoring presence. Hell, I was even prepared to sell Mum down the river if I thought that would do the trick.

I didn't have to. He gave in once I started going on about how I thought that whilst church was probably a good thing, what was really important was the church that people carried within them in their everyday lives. He laughed for a full five minutes over that one.

‘You're full of shit, young sir. You know that, right?'

‘You're not the first person to have come to that conclusion.'

He said he could spare me some time late afternoon, a period of around an hour or so, before heading over to his evening session, Café Worship.

‘What the hell's Café Worship? Do they make a devilishly good cappuccino?'

‘It's the informal setting for our evening services, boy. And let me tell you, the coffee's pretty good. You're welcome to tag along to that too, if you like.'

I assured Casey that I'd spoken all the church I was liable to for one day, if not for ever.

I felt so relieved I could have smoked a fag. I rang Jase's mobile about five hundred times before he rose from his Produce-influenced coma. There was no point calling the house phone, neither he nor Billie would answer it. He isn't good on details generally, so that time on a Sunday morning, with weed buds performing all manner of power-tool excavations in his head, his directions were woolly and to be taken with an unhealthy pinch of salt.

Much of what we argue about, then and later, will stem from Jase's inability to distinguish between top, middle and bottom.

‘It's under the mattress, man. Who gives a shit about the exact location?'

‘I'll be bothered when I'm having to dive into Casey's room under the pretext of going to the bog.'

‘It's a small bed, cousin. It'll take you less than twenty seconds to find them.'

‘I might not have twenty seconds, dumbass. It's a secret mission. Every second can be crucial.'

Jase offers to come with me to provide diversion services, but I knock it on the head. Casey'll take one look at his face and clock that something's up.

I shouldn't get complacent, but I do. After the calls have been wrapped up, I get my feet on the sofa and keep the blueberries on tap. MTV Base on blast, with some X Box to vary the mood. I sleep
a little. I could keep my mind clear until I got to Casey's at four. He was out all day, so there was next to no chance of him finding something he shouldn't have. Where's the fire? It comes at just after one when Casey phones to blow me out.

‘You won't believe it, kiddo, but my church buddies hadn't forgotten my birthday after all. They're throwing me a party!'

‘You're getting two parties, at your age? How spoilt are you?'

‘So we're going to have to take a rain-check on our coffee later, unless you'd like to come to the church hall, and meet my friends.'

‘I've already told you, I'm not setting foot anywhere near that place.'

‘Suit yourself, young sir, but I know everyone would love to meet you.'

What I experience is the battle of extremes, a very real panic over the prospect of not getting into that flat, versus a flush of pride that he wants the church goons to meet me. You wouldn't make an offer like that unless you really meant it.

I sweat out a third anxiety: the possibility that I have a more permanent place in Casey's family-free family.

‘There's got to be some time when we can hook up later, kick back. I could come round after your café thingy, if you like. Watch
Match of the Day
.'

‘The only time I've got is at this party, Mr Prendrapen. What a whirlwind social life! Check me out!'

‘But I . . .'

‘What's the big deal with you wanting to come by my place, kiddo? Anyone would think you were desperate to get into that dump.'

It wasn't the muted laughter in the background that told me he was making a big show for his church goons, more to do with him calling me kiddo all the time, like he was some big carefree guy who never worried about anything.

I'm at a loss. I have no idea what to do, short of coming clean and dropping Jason in it.

‘A church rave sounds great. I'll see you there.'

46

Casey lives in a big fat circle. He starts and ends with the crucifix. Everything else is gaseous, insubstantial. Inside the circle he's as safe as anything, paranoia banished and fears displaced. He becomes the person he always wanted to be, if you push aside the tracks and the medals: impenetrable,
an example
, so long as he stays in the circle.

His sense of humour is reborn. It's like I'm witnessing the fucking resurrection, God pardon my language and blatant blaspheming.

The church hall rave sounded like it was going to be stuffed with a busload of spastics, but they turn out to be a really racy lot. Women outnumber men by 3:1. Single women outnumber men by 2:1. No one dresses like Lil' Kim or anything, but there are calves on display, and cleavage, drop earrings and plenty of big hair. I ask Casey if they are like this because of the party, but he tells me that they look like this pretty much all the time.

The men give me discreet cups of punch and tell me to keep it under my hat. About five of them do it, so I'm near pissed within an hour. The women take me outside whenever it gets too stuffy and slip me contraband cigarettes. Everyone asks me whether I have a girlfriend.

Inside the circle, Casey is the bloody funniest person to have ever walked the streets of North East Surrey. The way the men and women laugh at him, you'd think he was channelling one of the old boys like Tommy Cooper or Eric Morecambe. Put the exact same act in a different kind of church and it would have been like a one-man séance.

I call the numbers for the raffle. I dance with the married ladies to S Club. I am the perfect guest of the guest of honour.

I am seduced by the wisdom of the circle. I share their
joy-without-agenda, putting aside the J-word, and the crosses that decorate every available wall space. I forget I am here with an agenda of my own. I forget the anxiety that filled me as I ran to the hall. Too many hugs from smiling Christian strangers. I see the fellowship. Makes me wonder what the hell I was worrying about.

It's a different story when the punch runs out. My buzz, alcoholic and spiritual, evaporates, and I remember the reason why I'm here: to create my own lull, a Jew–Tamil special, my own homegrown illusion of security. It's a case of flattering my bollocks off – the women, some of the men, Casey. Anyone within my line of vision gets it. If you were looking in, you'd think I was the most polite and charming young man in the world. That the future would be safe if all the young people were as centred and loving as me. They wouldn't believe that I could be the King of the Switcheroo, leaving the party early and breaking into Casey's flat and pulling the pictures from the bed.

The only person in that room who'd believe it would be Casey, and he was all for acting upon his beliefs. He catches me as I'm trashing the place in a bid to make it look authentic. He only looks at the first picture in my hand. He doesn't wait to hear about the rest.

P
ART
5

 

 

47

Three things.

He thinks of manners before himself. Casey pops a note through the door, getting his arse out of bed extra early, as I find it on the mat before I leave the house for training. I wasn't expecting him to be there, but I was getting ready anyway. I can't stop training just because I think he's gonna be a no-show. Who knows what's gonna happen to me? I may have to go through twenty more trainers before I reach Olympic level. The note tells me to go back to Harriers. The C scrawled at the bottom is so wispy and random, it's like the note isn't really signed at all, the C itself looking like a scribble someone does to check whether there's any ink left in the Biro. Left-handed, careless business. Block lettering, brown envelope. It could have been a Paki Go Home note if I hadn't read it properly, or if we were in the 1980s.

In the fold of the letter is the 9-carat St Christopher I'd spent most of my cash on. I wasn't trying to be sentimental when I gave him that gift, more that it was the most appropriate thing I could think of. If it forced him to think about me each time he wore it, that would be his lookout, not mine.

Now it sits in my hand uselessly. I'm not feeling anything. Just static. There's no point in going to the flat and pleading for anything, as I know what I'll find there: a clothes rail cleared of tracksuits, Bedingfield CD packed up and away. He didn't say much when he found me, but what he had said sounded final. The look on his face only seemed to back that up. Softness over anger, but still incredibly resolute. I knew when I left the flat that there was no reverse decision. When it comes to disqualification, all decisions are final. I've been trying to run all my life, but I'm never going to run the way Casey does. I'm not scared enough.

It takes Jason a couple of days to say it, but he manages it eventually. No longer feeling so fucking clever. That only three of the five pictures I gave him were the ones he originally left under the bed. Either a magic trick or something we don't want to voice an explanation for. When Casey started shouting, I thought it was because he was shocked at the pictures, I didn't think about
which
pictures.

I move on because I have to. Driving yourself mad because you're missing your mentor is only going to fuck with your head. Trus' me, I've been there.

48

I'm a bright boy. Pearson's bullshit keeps me off the streets a little. Yid graffiti follows me about the school. Hey, replaced with Shalom. Simple things.

Simple doesn't bother me. Simple is the easiest thing to handle, but I keep myself to myself only 'cos I don't want to waste my energy, or pull a muscle. I train with Brendan. I go to school. I come home. Strict routine. Mum twigs after about three days. She isn't stupid.

‘Are you on drugs? Is that the problem?'

Then again.

Mum wants to know everything all of a sudden. Doesn't like that I'm always in heavy fight mode on X Box or scrubbing myself in the shower. Outside of training and school, I haven't left the house for nearly a week. Won't even go with her to Tesco.

‘Are you being bullied?'

‘No!'

‘Then what's the matter? I don't understand. You shouldn't be indoors all the time like this.'

‘Teenage stuff,' I say. ‘Growing pains. Nothing I want to discuss with my mother.'

49

Jase on
his
mother – this came last Christmas when he stayed over one night. A stayover sandwiched between my first two times with Moon, so I was feeling manly and all-knowing. We'd played on X Box until we were virtually blind, but still unable to sleep. It was one of those three a.m. conversations that adults are so fond of having.

‘Her sticking her fingers down her throat is the only happiness she gets. It sounds fucked up, but that's how it is.'

‘I get it. It's like her high, right?'

‘You should see the look on her face before she locks herself in the bathroom. And then the look she has when she comes back downstairs. It's the closest thing I've seen to contentment. Since Sophie, anyway . . . Why would I want to take that away from her?'

‘Don't say any more,' I go, but not for the reasons he was thinking. More to do with me looking at him in his boxers on my floor and thinking things I shouldn't.

Everyone pretends they don't have a gay phase, but they're all liars. This was mine.

50

The nights when we meet are when she practises sex with me. All socialising has gone out the window. I'm banned, thanks to the volleyball idiot and his Surrey fatwah.

She'll turn up at eleven when Mum is doing a night shift and Pearson is safely tucked up in bed, saying things like, ‘I need to try
it out with you laying on your back tonight,' or ‘Let's see if I can get you off in five minutes without taking my clothes off, and by neither using my hands or mouth.'

She says these things before she's said hello.

Having Moon this way, in secret, is better than not having her at all, even though I know that the next time I see her, outside her house, or in the school corridor, she'll be looking at me like I'm some deranged dependent muppet who can't let go.

If I wasn't so angry, I'd find the urgency in her voice, the hot hot heat of her breath, fucking sexy.

‘This is sick,' I tell her, usually when she's on top of me. ‘You're just trying this stuff out like it's a recipe you're perfecting for a dinner party.'

‘That's exactly what it is.'

‘Why don't you just do this with Pearson in the first place? Forget the dry run. It's not about making mistakes, sex. It's about the moment, the connection, or something.'

‘Like you're the big expert all of a sudden. I suppose we have Kelly Button to thank for that. I'm not interested in the unknown, Veerapen. I'd rather get the new stuff or the tricky stuff out the way with you, so that when I'm with him I'm in control.'

‘That doesn't sound too healthy.'

‘Well, it's either this arrangement or exercise control over food. Which would you prefer?'

Moon had a problem with food for a couple of years when she was about eleven. It's kind of common round here. Everyone looking for perfection and not finding it, having to keep it all in their head and out of their bellies. Her parents had to get outside help to sort it. It's why they always go crazy at the first sign of trouble because they never know if she'll cave in and pull the inner trigger. Wheel out the crutch when things aren't going her way. It's also why they don't like having the computer on in their house, after she tried to make her own proana webpage, sending a hyperlink to her dad instead of saving it.

It's like living with a suicide bomber who'll never take his coat off.

I hate her. Right now, I hate her, but there's no way I want her going back to how things were before she got help; a skinny unsatisfied undernourished hell.

‘No, it's fine,' I say. ‘Keep fucking me 'til you think you've got it right.'

We carry on, silently, like Scientologists.

51

Stoicism is bollocks. I'm no good at letting go. Ask anyone. When Dad left, I'd creep downstairs after Mum had gone to bed, and sleep in the garage, pulling down his old sleeping bag that he'd used about three times on a fishing trip and then forgot about, and the cardboard boxes from the Christmas stuff that no one had got around to chucking away. (Mum was never very good at getting rid of clutter, maybe that's why he went.)

I slept in the garage every night for two weeks, thinking that he was going to find me, or that I'd wake and find his car towering over me and realise that it was all a bad dream. Kids are so stupid. No wonder people lose patience with them. First sign of trouble, and they start doing rubbish like that. Like that's going to solve anything, retreating back into your shell, regressing to toddlerhood.

Looking back now, I get it. It wasn't so much that I wanted it to be a dream, I just wanted to be near him. The garage was
his
place, it had his stamp all over it. He wasn't a practical person, the only things he knew about were books, food and screwing opticians, but he liked gear. He liked having the kind of stuff all dads have, even if he wasn't ready to use it: tools, nails, tins of paint, ladders of varying sizes, lampshades, varnish, off-cuts from the old carpet, stacks of old magazines. Wonder why Mum never noticed.

She didn't notice a lot of things. Too fucked up at the time to
notice that her kid had stopped speaking. She was taking a few pills to get her through the day, pills that made her rabbit on. She talked to me, to herself. All the time, yak yak, trembling tone, everything's rosy, what are we having for dinner, yak yak. Never a comment to register that no sounds were coming from my mouth, that I'd become Dad's unwilling counterpart, the silent ghost. It took the same amount of time, a fortnight, before I started talking again, when I realised that Mum needed more help than I did.

Not sleeping in the garage, making myself not do it, was the biggest hurdle. I tried tying myself to the bed, but it didn't work. I had to rely on willpower. It was like I was being operated on without any anaesthetic. Doctors ripping my guts out and me feeling every second of it. Knowing that I could stop feeling so empty in a minute, if only I'd get my ass downstairs and meld my body into the concrete floor, the site of multiple botched DIY attempts and car repairs. A place where it was just the two of us. But I didn't. I gritted my teeth until I felt my incisors sinking into my gums, and I stayed in bed. You can't always be a baby. You have to grow up eventually.

52

Mum's moved the computer from the bottom of her wardrobe, where it's been confiscated, to the dining room, and creates her own tech area. Whilst I'm at school, she clears out some of the crap and pushes the desk right into the far corner, next to the piano that nobody uses. It's all for Mike, of course. She and him get online and swap instant messages on the nights when they're not on dates.

I've got so much going on right now, I've forgotten about being a cyber-geek. It's the real world I want, not the one that comes in a flat screen, but Mum's taken the baton and is pegging it for all she's worth. She's hooked. You know it's getting serious when you start eating in
front of the thing. Mum says she's got a strong mind, that it's hard to pull the wool over her eyes. She isn't. She's putty. Three days in and all her snacking time is at the keyboard instead of during
EastEnders
.

‘What's a grown man doing cruising the internet all night? Doesn't this strike you as odd?'

‘He's not
surfing
anything. I thought you were supposed to be one who knows everything about the internet.'

‘That's how I know about the cruising.'

‘Veerapen, he's chatting to me, nothing else. There's nothing very strange about that.'

‘Why doesn't he just pick up the phone like normal people?'

‘Online is better. Cheaper, for one thing, and he likes to mix it up a little.'

‘“He likes to mix it up a little”? Mum, that's what young people say.'

‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Your generation invented everything, including, it seems, the English language.'

Mum's a proper joker when she wants to be. It still doesn't make me trust whatsisname. I don't know anything about him. He could be the world's biggest internet pervert, for all we know. These legal people are very good at hiding their sick sides. Best alibi in the world.

53

Like all couples, they have their places: Yates' Wine Lodge if one of his older mates is riding with them, or up the Bowl if he isn't.

Bowling's different. It isn't about the booze, it's open to anyone. You can just bump into people by chance. There can't be any talk of following or creeping about when you're down the Bowl. You have as much right to be there as anyone.

Jase's idea, the bowling.

‘Nothing else to do round here, unless we want to watch some shitey film, so we may as well show our faces.'

Also, the place stays open until one.

Double also, the new guy behind the bar used to do security at Tesco. Means we get our beer poured discreetly into Pirate Jack kiddie cups without having to drop our voices to baritone or flash the fake ID, which looks ropier and more bogus by the day.

‘Yeah, Keith's a good bloke. He'll get us loaded, and if we're lucky we won't even have to pay for it.'

What could be better?

The Bowl kids itself that it provides entertainment for all, but in reality past nine o'clock the only people you find here are the fifteen-year-olds. Every so often you come across a group of twenty-something couples, the men usually being lardy meatheads with Alpha-male competitive streaks, their girlfriends with fat asses in their ponchos and bootcut jeans, who spend more time deciding on which size ball to use than actually throwing the thing.

You see, this lot still have these phases where they kid themselves that they're young, and that's when they start hanging out at our places and getting under our feet. Mate, you're over the age of twenty, forget it! Unless you can buy us a proper drink, or find us someone who sells decent weed, you're redundant. Stay out of our faces and we'll stay out of yours, yeah?

Just sending out the signals does the trick. Crossed arms, the kind of stares they shy away from returning. They stay mostly on the outer lanes where they're out of harm's way and near-invisible.

The staff are acting like we're a pair of dorks without dates, but we're not actually here to play bowling. That'd be ridiculous. We're just here to hang out and take the piss out of everyone else. If we bump into certain people, we bump into certain people. No need to make a whole song and dance about it.

Jase doesn't tell me that the guy behind the bar is a Sri Lankan. Birthname Roospen, stage-name Keith.