How To Be a Boy (9 page)

“He’s a bastard,” she said. “Like the rest of you.”

I got nearer, crouched down.

“You cold?”

“Course I’m cold. Whaddya think?”

“I could get you warm.”

“Stay right away.”

“You were going to kiss me that time at the party.”

“What kiss? What party?”

“The other week, over in Dalston.”

“Oh that, yeah. You were with that knob Meado, and he was dancing on the train.”

“I could take you home.”

“Not going home.”

“You gave me your number.”

“Did I, posh boy? Why was that, then? I must’ve been mad.”

“Don’t know.”

“Didn’t call me, though, did ya?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Scared.”

“Bet your friend Meado wouldn’t be scared.”

“No, he wouldn’t. You could come to my house, to get warm, I mean.”

“Wherezat, then?” She looked up at me, and she didn’t smile her neon smile.

“Not far,” I said.

“One of the big houses?”

“No, small,” I said.

“You should cut your hair shorter.” She stood up, shuffled and wriggled herself, her back to the tree. “It would look good short.”

And then she leaned her head back against the trunk and looked up through the tangled branches.

I just stood there and looked at her, and my heart exploded. I ruffled my hair and planned to get it cut. I looked at her profile, at her nose, which tilted up – she looked like Christina Applegate. I took my jacket off, and the hoodie from underneath. I held the hoodie out to her and she took it without moving her head and shrugged it on over her black dress.

“You even smell posh,” she said. “DKNY?”

“Better than DK,” I said.

“DK?”

“Donkey Kong.”

“Oh that,” she shook her head.

I handed her my jacket. “Nah,” she said. “You need that, you’ll freeze up.”

“Now we have to get out – the gates are locked.”

“I thought that my posh boy would have a key.”

“No key,” I said.

She said MY posh boy.

“You’ll have to boost me back over,” she said, and then she did smile, her neon smile.

At the wall I put my hands out, locked together. She stepped forward. “No looking up my dress.”

She put her shoe, all cold and muddied, into my hands and I pushed her upwards. She hung at the crest of the wall for a moment and I looked at her legs hanging down in their torn black fishnets, and her lovely skin showed through in bone-white patches like light, as if she was electric in the dark.

I heard my phone signal a text.

She put my hoodie right over her head, and we walked back past the pub and down the side road. There was no sign of Pimsa and Meado. They weren’t in their usual place, which was lurking on the low pub wall by the entrance to the new flats. There was no one out at all, it was cold and late.

I approached the front door and using level four acquired stealth power, I turned the key as slowly as possible, felt the soft click and release, and opened the door.

Into the short hallway, where trainers were piled up, coats, low voices.

Watching the television late…

Watching anything…

Waiting for me.

“Hello, darling. That boy Meado telephoned. He said …oh…”

She had turned and stopped at the sight of the girl standing, head bowed, giggling softly behind me, her face well hidden in shadow under my hood.

“Is that all he had to say: ‘OH’?” I said, walking to the stairs holding the girl’s hand.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me, darling?”

“Need to get warm. We’re just going to my room.”

“I am sure, but who is your friend? I…”

We went up the stairs and I shut my door firmly.

My room was a mess and looked suddenly like a small child’s room. Games posters pinned up all over the walls, cyber warriors, greasy muscles, and red cars. An Astro Boy made from a kit. The mattress and bedding on the floor, a PS3 console, a PSP on the covers, a poster for
The Godfather
. She wrenched off my hoodie top, chucked it. She pulled her dress up over her head, then tore her torn tights off and wriggled out of them. Faithless – I heard the lyrics in my head.

“Take a good look, posh boy,” she said. “That’s all you’re getting tonight.”

She stood then for a moment in front of me – hushed, close, naked, pale and perfect – in my room, with all my sad stuff. The air crackled as if she had let loose with a super power, was an electric X-Girl. Then she smiled her neon smile and it shone around my children’s room like an alien blaster, like a destructive ray. It devastated me and everything else in its path.

Her dangerous electric nakedness was gifted to me.

A VIXEN, out of the undergrowth.

Then she lay down in my bed with the duvet pulled up and over her head.

“Night,” she said.

“Night, then,” I said, and there was nothing else I could say. I had seen her and she was burnt into me like an eclipse, like a sunburst.

I stripped out of my clothes, got down to my pants in the semi-dark and lay across the beaten-up gaming sofa near the door. I pulled the patchwork crochet blanket over myself. Her pale nakedness was in my room, under my duvet, like a blinding white light, blazing and hidden under there, like a submerged nuclear device.

I leaned forward and tugged my phone out of my rumpled trousers.

A text from Meado: HOPE IT WAS GR8. HA HA. U Luv her.

I deleted it.

I scrolled down and found her number, as tapped in at the party with her pearl-pink-varnished thumbnail and saved by me.

I saved her
.

I saved her under FOX.

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

She might smile the neon smile at you again, I thought. She might pull open the duvet cover, and lie there waiting. I looked down at the buttons against my thumb and waited.

“Oi!” Faintly from outside the house. Meado, I knew it.

“Oi!” And laughing now, “I love you-hoo.”

“Thing is,” came the girl’s voice, muffled from under my duvet, “he probably does.”

I clicked on her name FOX and pressed
CALL
.

Her phone played out “Umbrella” from under the duvet. She answered it.

“Yeah?”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” she said. “Y’all right yeah?”

“Bit cold.”

“Yeah well, it’s winter innit?”

“Innit though?” I said.

“Whaddya want?”

“I thought we might go…”

“Go?”

“Out – go out some time?”

“We might. No Meado though, no Pimsa.”

“No Meado, no Pimsa,” I said.

If Mum had known downstairs, crying washing up, her dial turned all the way down, with the big sad glass of wine on the sink and the puffy eyes like always, she might have smiled for once. “No Meado,” the girl had said, “no Pimsa.”

The fox jumped up with her long red legs, right up onto the top of the wall in one graceful leap, her back legs and tail hung there for a moment, and then her tail slipped between the privet leaves, between the rose leaves and the thorns. Her tail was the last to go; it vanished into the dark like a smile
.

MURRAY ELEMENTARY—MR. JOHN FOREST’S ROOM—END OF THE DAY

“YOU DON’T KNOW NOTHING.
I live in two different worlds, two separate worlds. You don’t know. What you teach me is one world. You have any idea what it’s like in my house? You have any idea what it’s like on my street? No! Jeez. You know I
see
your white world, but it ain’t my world. It ain’t never gonna be my world. You know my brother, my thirteen-year-old brother, when I was seven, was shot in a convenience store.”

“I’m so sorry, Ricky. What for?”

“Ehh, eh, whatd’ya mean? Whatd’ya mean, what for? Jesus!”

“He didn’t have to.”

“Whatd’ya mean, he didn’t have to? You try livin’ where we live for one day, one day, Mister! God! And you’re tellin’ me I should study. Ha. You’re tellin’ me I can go to college! Oh, Jeez. Ha. You stupid. And you think I’m stupid.”

“No, I think you’re smart.”

“Smart is keepin’ my ass alive. That’s smart. Smart is goin’ home and bein’ able to face my brother, his friends, and the streets. That’s smart. This here, this is stupid. Math. Freakin’ fractions. Gimme a break! You think I’ma ever have to use a fraction in my goddamn black life? Ha, ha, ha. Unlikely. Oh, hey, I thought of one: which half of the loot you get, bro? Do me a favor, hey; do me a favor—just stay outta my life.”

“I’m your teacher.”

“Ehh, eh, get off, you’re my teacher. Stay here in school then, don’t come round my neighborhood. Stupid ass showin’ up the other day—whatd’ya think you’re doin’? White man in my hood likely to get killed. Ride up on your bike like you’re some goddamn Zorro. An idiot is what you are. Look, Mr. Forest. Look, I know you’s just doin’ what you thinks is best. But it ain’t, ok? It ain’t. Look, I gotta go.”

TWO YEARS LATER—MONDAY, OCTOBER 17—FROGTOWN POLICE STATION 157—DETECTIVE HARCOURT INTERROGATES RICKY MIMMS

“You want to know about my dad? You serious? Why? You think he had something to do with all this? Lemme see… Why don’t you check Cell 42 or something. Let me tell you
he
didn’t have nothing to do with this. Last time I seen him I was three, maybe four. Wait, he come by one time—I must have been six or something, ’cause I remember it better than if I’d a been a little kid. Came by for money. He and my mother screaming so loud half our floor at Oakview burst in. I tell you, you gotta be pretty raucous for the people at the View to pay attention to any screaming. They’s screaming there every night. Two, three guys tried to talk him outta there, then they just pulled him out. Arms flipping all around, my mom screaming, ‘Don’t you come back here no more,’ over and over, ’fore she collapses in a chair gasping and sweating. Renzo ain’t there— good thing, too—he’d a shot him, comin’ in there messin’ up Ma. Martin ain’t there, neither—he out trying his wings with the local boys. Been running with ’em ’bout a month or two, then. So it’s just me rubbing Ma’s hand, telling her it’s OK, it’s OK. ‘Get me some water, Ricky,’ she tells me.

“Yeah, that’s the last time I saw him. So, you see, he ain’t have nothing to do with none of this.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18—MERCY HOSPITAL, ROOM 362—DETECTIVE HARCOURT INTERVIEWS JOHN FOREST

“One of the brightest students I ever had by far. Potential? Beyond limit. Motivation? Pish. Did you know that an urban kid, a low-income,
poor
kid, given five bucks shares it with all his pals, just like candy? Buy whatever they can, till it’s gone. Middle-class kid with five bucks doesn’t show it to anybody; he saves it. He saves it, because he has that middle-class mentality. He has that ‘there is a future’ mentality. Once in a while a kid comes along who… I wanted to give Ricky that mentality worse than anything. Oh, he was smart. Ricky was so smart. Succeeding wasn’t on his agenda. I did a couple of home visits when he was in my class…”

AFTERNOON VISIT—APARTMENT 337, OAKVIEW APARTMENTS

“Afternoon, Ms. Mimms.”

“Afternoon.”

“Ricky home?”

“No, he ain’t home from school yet.”

Social worker chimes in. Tells Ms. Mimms that there is help for the family if they need it. If she wants it. Ms. Mimms says they’re already on welfare. They’re already getting all the help they can get. Social worker says there is always more.

I speak up: “Ricky has great potential, Ms. Mimms.”

“Oh, yes, he is very smart. He helps Keety with her homework and when Martin was here—Ricky was only seven then—he was helping him with his homework. Writ a paragraph better than any of us, that’s for sure. He helps me out, too.”

“That’s good, that’s good. I just … I want to keep him on the right track.”

“Oh, me too, Mr. Forest. Me too. Sometimes I do worry about him.”

“Well, Ms. Mimms, shouldn’t he be home by now?”

“Oh, he don’t come home this early. I don’ts usually see him till maybe seven or eight. He’s with his friends. Boys them age, they needs their friends.”

“We’re concerned about his friends,” the social worker says.

“What do you mean? Why would you be concerned about Ricky’s friends?”

“We just want to make sure he’s hanging out with the right people,” I say.

“What kinda thing is that to say? What d’ya mean the right people?”

“Well…”

“You tryin’ to say that he might get shot like my Martin did? Well, sir, Mr. Forest, maybe you don’t know how things is down here. Maybe you don’t know what my boys has to look at day in an’ day out, do you? You ever sent one of your child into the store, had someones follows them around? You ever gone into a Target yourself, had someones follows you around? That’s what it’s like, sir. Don’t you be tellin’ me my boy’s hanging out with the wrong people. My boy’s hanging out with people who protect him.”

“Now, Ms. Mimms, I don’t mean to imply that—”

“Now, look here, sir: you take care of him at school; I’ll take care of him at home, alrighty? Doin’ OK in school?”

“Well, the work he does is good; it’s what he’s missing I’m concerned about.”

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17—FROGTOWN POLICE STATION 157

“Renzo was busy runnin’ with his buddy TR. They was hittin’ preppies up by the college. Easy prey, he said. Squirming like fish when they saw a piece in their face. They was getting all kinds of jack: computers, iPods, PS2s, Gameboys. Books they dumped. Rest of it they took over to Tajee’s. She took care of fencing the stuff. They was making pretty good bling. That’s when I decided I wasn’t too young to do this. The local boys run tough. Renz was big with them ’fore he moved up. They sorta heat you up, you know? No?

“Get you ready? Anyway, I meet ’em up. I knows most of ’em from the hood—but meeting them up is different.”

THE MEETING WITH THE LOCAL BOYS—A GARAGE ON KENT STREET, FROGTOWN

“You ready for this, Chili Boy?” Rubber ask me. We in his grandmother’s garage over on Kent Street.