How To Be a Boy (8 page)

Then I started thinking about my rep. I knew that if I backed down, I’d never get rid of them. My life would be fucked. Other lads would test me, thinking I’d gone soft. My head started spinning and I could feel myself getting wound up. Why did it have to be this hard? It was like being stuck. I didn’t want to fight, but what choice did I have? The shit was coming for me anyway. My brain felt like it was gonna explode.

All of those thoughts took maybe five or ten seconds. And then Anthony was on me, his face all twisted up.

“Pussy bwoi!” he spat.

He dropped a headbutt on me – right on my nose. Pain shot through my head. The next thing I knew, they were all over me, kicking and punching and dragging me onto the road, right in front of an oncoming bus. The driver slammed on his brakes and the tyres squealed, stopping just in time. I ended up face down on the tarmac but they didn’t stop battering me until the teachers jumped in. I was done by then anyway. I turned over and closed my eyes as warm, metallic blood trickled its way down my throat.

I heard Lucy’s voice in my ear and then I heard Mr Ross.

“You’re safe now,” he said. “Just lie still – the ambulance is on its way.”

Lucy burst into tears. I heard someone else scream. My back was killing me – low down, on the right side. My stomach was on fire and my legs felt cold. I put my hands to my side, trying to stop the pain, but it just got worse. I brought my fingers up to my face and opened my eyes.

They were covered in blood…

Loved up?

Then play the game, man
.

Play the game
.

You can learn through the game
.

No predictive text
.

Go on, just tap it out in real time-----------

and---------send it, send LOVE
.

Go on, send it, you want to, you do
,

L- O- V- E

______________________

WE REMEMBER, THAT’S
what we do a lot of the time, idiot Pimsa, me and dumb Meado. We remember being kids, little kids. We keep doing that, we hold on to that, hold on to what it was like being ten. We grip it tight to ourselves, the three of us, and a lot more than we would admit when we crash about. Well, those two wouldn’t admit to anything anyway.

“Donkey Kong, Mine Cart Carnage,” Meado said, chuckling and scuffing through the slush on the ground. “Hoo, that was a level, on the old Superintendent Super Nintendo. Ooh man, what a level – just before the end you always forgot that little crap jump onto the sloping rail track above.”

“That was the one, the best EVAH,” Pimsa said, going straight into DK gorilla mode himself, loping forward, miming throwing a barrel and kicking up yellow leaves from the wet gutter.

“Had to hit that balloon, man, hit that balloon
pop
. SAVE that level,” said Meado, leaping up to punch the low branch above our heads, bringing down showers of icy water and leaves, wet leaves.

Pimsa and Meado, my homies, ha ha, my BOYZ
.

I remember it too. There was a silvery kind of
snickerty
snack
noise, a scrape of metal on metal, as the little mine cart went along the rails. Like the weird noises in the slow-stalled Silverlink train that time when
she
was sitting at the other end of the carriage.

We hang together near the pub end of the road, get a little high on nothing; we talk about WIMMIN.

We wish.

Never happens.

Pimsa won’t come to my house – or, I won’t let him come to my house, he doesn’t notice. I won’t let my mum meet him. I can just see her face now if she saw him.

PIMSA, ha.

Meado is bad enough. She knows him already though, from school. Every day the same Meado, outside the house, waiting, shuffling and swinging his dumb book bag, on the dot from Year Four.

If she met Pimsa I know just what would happen. Her big brown eyes would well up all wet, and her mouth would turn right down. With her you can almost watch as she turns the dial all the way down to…

SAD, sadder, saddo.

I can read the worry there all over her STUPID face, like a big huge FLAG flying. “No good for you.” I can see her thinking it every time she looks at me and Meado, and she’s always looking over at me with that worried face. I can read it there as clear as day and it makes me hate her. “No good for you.” she says. “What do you
really
want to do with your life? Why do you want to hang around with them?”

THOSE … “Lazy, troubled boys.”

Makes me hate her. I feel bad for caring that she’s worried – it makes me want to go out on the wreck, on the shots, on the smoke, even more.

We saw the girl again, the same girl, the girl from the party, the one with the smile like a light. She was in a car with the older kid, in the dark, LATE. The car was parked up near the bridge. That’s where people go, out of the way.

We were in the wet street, just down from the bridge, talking Super Mario and DK, acting up dumb, all down by the lock gates, along that big empty road, at night, a winter night. The car was parked furthest away from the orange streetlights, trying to hide in the darkest part.

It had steamed-up windows, and wet leaves were plastered all over the windscreen. We were on the other side of the road, looking over, laughing it up, under our hoods, under the streetlamp.

NO; stop. Retake, rewind, rerun
.

“Yeah, it’s her,” Meado said. “In the car, your girl. Man, she’s a FOX that one.” Meado knows nothing about her, and then he laughed and he hit me on the back. He laughed with his cackling whoop, “You
love
her. Omigod you really do though,” so that I stumbled forward unbalanced into a puddle, mucking up my Swiss whites.

Walking back once, I saw a real slinking
FOX
there in that same place. I was all on my own
.

Out then, below the trees, in the dense shadows, cast deep dark and sharp-edged across the pavement from the orange sodium lights, and in the darkness of the parked car.

She was there.

Her … the girl.

With the neon grin…

I knew her at once, the girl in the back of that car. She was the one at the big party the night it snowed. She tipped the BOTTLE, finished it off and then smiled at me with her neon grin, and spun it at ME so the neck ended up pointing directly at me like a gun barrel. Then we went out into the corridor and everyone cheered. She pulled my head towards her, holding the back of my neck, her bright smile. I was trembling. “Ooh, nervous, posh boy?” she said, and then pulled away from me. “Want my number?”

I nodded like one of those dumb dogs you see nodding on the back shelf of crap cars.

“Giss yer phone, then.”

She took it and added herself, clicking the number in with her pearl-pink thumbnail and then she gave it back to me.

“Name?” I said.

“Guess.”

A shadow came between us then, from the stairs. A bigger, older guy, with a close-cropped head.

“What’s this,” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Come on,” he took her hand. “It’s snowing and the car’s bust. We’re going.” And they went off down to the kitchen at the bottom of the house.

I looked down at the phone screen and I saved her.

I saved her
.

“Oi,” I said to Meado and Pimsa. “We’re going.”

“Who says?”

*  *  *

Once upon a time
…

There was a rattling cold train back from Dalston. It stopped suddenly in the snow in the middle of nothing and nowhere. The boys were well up for it after the party, but I was down, I was out – no kiss, the older geezer. The train stopped somewhere after Finchley Road and Frognal and it just sat there and made these strange
chug, chug
, noises. It squealed and squeaked too, and it chattered on like R2-D2. We sat there while Pimsa stuffed his face with his stinking late-night doner. The train throbbed, fluttered, made jittery noises, and the stalled engines made a metallic brushing
throb, throb, throb
, rhythm while they idled. And in that pause there was a weird blend of sounds, a Todd Terry remix of electric engine harmonies, of the fractured note from a flickering stilled fluorescent light. There was a higher note too, from where the swaying carriages were joined, and together they made a random chord, like static from a short circuit. There was a crackling sort of song too, a whining mosquito melody, which was almost beneath hearing. I sat there on the late train, knowing the girl was there too, looking out at grimy North London through the snowfall.

Meado was well gone. He stood up, and kite-high on vodka shots he danced to the accidental train trance music. He was bent low, he swung his Donkey Kong arms about and made Donkey Kong noises and disturbed the late-night people, and he didn’t care, but then he never did. The girl watched him from down the carriage, pretended not to notice, but I saw her looking, smiling, and giving me her neon come-on smile, then she turned back to the geezer and to look at herself in the window.

She was beautiful.

The train noise was like an empty phone line now, crackly and hollow-voiced, an absent threat, like the geezer’s cropped head. The crackle was his hollow voice. I should have flicked up her digits and waited for her voice. I could see her neon-bright mouth. When she laughed and spun the bottle, her smile was for me in brittle cracks and snatches.

Her name
.

“Dja get her digits?” Pimsa mumbled. “Squeeze out her numbers, did she, that girl?” He nodded down the carriage in her direction. He was all slumped across the seats spitting out bits of his kebab as he spoke.

“I know her,” said Meado, waving his arms at me like a hypnotist as he danced. “SLAG.”

“Don’t say that,” said Pimsa. “’E loves her.” And he elbowed me and laughed with his greasy lips pursed together.

The train was its own radio, a pirate half tuned between stations.

“Yes, I got her digits,” I said quietly, ignoring them both, looking out at the slow snow falling.

I saw a FOX just once in that same stretch of road. It was night and a wet October and the rain had just stopped
.

Its nose was close against the tarmac
,
VIXEN GIRL
,
and was silvered by the streetlights
.

And the river mist made a nimbus of light around its fur
.

We saw her jump out of the car. There was a sudden billow of warm air sucked out like steam as the passenger door opened. She was fast but in slowed motion too. With her lean legs and her torn black tights, she pulled herself up, fast and slow, up and onto the high wall of the secret gardens, the private park by the river.

From near the river I walked, late one night, a night of snow, slush, stopped and stilled of a sudden. The street was wet with reflected lights
.

There was the fungal smell of gardens. And of the privet above the fences, dark with rain water and moss. You were in the middle of the late and silent road. Your beautiful nose close to some night scent which arrested you
.

The car drove off with a squeal and a great cloud of exhaust fumes in the cold air.

“NIGHT THEN, DARLIN’,” she screamed out from the top of the wall, half laughing and half crying at the retreating red tail lights. And then she fell back and over and through the low angled barbed wire into the dark.

I vaulted past the laughing hooded Meado boy, and scrambled up onto the ledge that ran along the wall. Then she looked at me once, direct. Light haloed her head, a turned-down neon smile now on her face. Oh, and she was tall and long-legged, and her eyes, like the fox’s eyes, reflected back the light from the silvered road, from the iron lamps, from the bridge.

You did not fear me. You watched me
.

I pushed my hooded head over the ledge, and Pimsa and Meado shouted up to me:

“What’s up, man?”

“Oi, nerd. Wotya doin’?”

I felt for the barbed wire, found a gap and dropped down deep, on the other side, into the secret gardens, landed on iced mud and snow.

Silence then, like a closed gate, like a barred door, between us, and then I lost her, somewhere on the grounds; gone to earth.

A tangle of spiky bushes grew tight against the high bricks, sentries to keep out scum and droogs like Pimsa, and Meado, and me. Sharp branches and brittle twigs. I was scraped up, cut and scratched up altogether, like a Lee Perry mix, bits of thornbush and jagged holly. My hood fell back onto my shoulders.

“You all right?” I called out into the slush and the cold dark. I could see yellow lights in the big warm houses beyond the garden grounds.

“You following me, posh boy? Nick off. Go on, leave me alone,” sobbing.

They patrol the grounds with dogs.

I tracked her, the girl with the neon smile. I tracked her by sound location. I could see it in my head: a real tracker, the one in
Alien
, a big tracker, with the little red blip dot getting nearer to the other little red blip dot, all on a grid of neon lines and all the time the sound response bleeps speeding up. I pushed on through the bushes, and I could hear Pimsa and Meado on the other side of the wall.

“Wotya doin’?”

“Where are yer?” (Laughter) “Leave ’er alone, come on?”

“C’mon, Mead. Ferget ’im – the bastard, ’e’s in love, innit?”

The fox wasn’t scared of me. It just stared as I walked forward, it just stayed there and watched me coming towards it; the
VIXEN
was in no hurry
.

I found her easily enough, slumped, half crouched against a tree, her feet in the slush. She watched me coming.

“That’s far enough,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

A shout from Pimsa further off towards the pub. “I love you, my darlin. Ha ha.”

Then there was just the sound of the weir water from the lock gates, and the trees dripping, the ice melting.

I walked up to her.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Nowhere. Gone,” she mumbled, looking down between her knees, looking at the ground, the tangle of dead leaves and grey slush, the lost snow. I wanted to lift her head very gently, get the little Pikmin to move her remotely, use the joypad to settle her. I could almost feel my thumb move the stick, to turn her head to look at me, to give me the neon smile.