Tuesday morning. Breakfast. My parents – or should I call them my jailers – ate their morning toast suspiciously. Mum’s quite good at hiding how she feels but Dad just can’t help himself. He kept casting me angry little glances as if he didn’t trust me. Mum was being … not smug, she doesn’t do smug. She does confident. It amounts to the same thing. It’s the same as smug, only better concealed.
In this respect, oddly, my stupid dad is better than my clever mum. It’s not intelligence. It’s instinct. She’d thought it through and decided that nothing could go wrong; their plans were watertight. But my dad knew instinctively that somehow I was going to find a way round it.
He was right.
I sneaked back home at lunchtime to get the stuff I needed for Plan B. I had hoped to have Alex with me, despite the fact that he’d proved himself about as trustworthy as a sack of scorpions. One last chance.
‘But I don’t want one last chance,’ he whined. I gave it to him anyway, but then we fell out on the way to school. I did a Bad Thing on the bus. We were sitting together as usual. I was swigging blackcurrant juice out of one of those squirty bottles when we went sailing past the stop where the Statside kids were waiting – and guess who was there? None other than Roly Poly, the snail cruncher, standing there with his evil little brother.
I didn’t even have to think about it. I stuck the bottle out of the window and gave it a good hard squeeze. A long snake of purple juice wiggled its way down and – bingo! – splash! Right on the fat one’s front.
The results were spectacular. He started dancing about on the pavement, bending over almost double in his efforts to pull the jumper off over his head. It was bizarre. You’d have thought it was sulphuric acid or something, not a humble fruit drink. Then he actually dashed out into the road after the bus, as if he was going to catch it and tear it to pieces with his bare hands.
Wow.
As soon as we were out of sight, Alex turned on me. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. He’s going to kill you now, if he finds out that was you. Oh, mate! You’re on your own with this one,’ he said, sitting back and crossing his arms.
‘I always am on my own when you’re around, Alex,’ I told him. The hypocrite – he’d been laughing his face off just moments before. But he was right. I shouldn’t have done it. I wasn’t expecting Roly to go actually mad. What sort of monster is it that loves his T-shirt so much he’s prepared to try and beat up a bus for it?
‘Why do you always have to get into trouble?’ he said. ‘Why can’t you just be more like everybody else?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Why would anyone want to be like everybody else?’ I asked him.
‘Because that’s how you get on. Because it’s how the world works,’ he told me.
By the time we got to school, we were both steaming. I didn’t even bother reminding him he’d said he’d help me out at lunchtime.
I run the business from the garage. There’s an old PC where I keep my database and go online. The Wi-Fi doesn’t get to the garage so I have to run a cable through to the router. The business goes in phases; it was in a quiet phase just now because Mum and Dad had frozen my assets. That was the last attempt to make me knuckle down. Freezing my assets – like I was Colonel Gaddafi or something. The lengths these people go to is unbelievable. I’ll get sent to Guantanamo Bay at this rate.
I had some good stuff there waiting to be sold on. Vintage clothes are a big thing. The older the better. You turn them from jumble into vintage by sending them to the cleaners and putting a label on them saying 50s dress, or 70s retro, or even 80s if it’s really crap. I bought most of it from charity shops and jumble sales, but some of it was liberated from Mum and Dad’s wardrobe and drawers. Mum in particular has some sort of shoe and dress fetish. She never wears most of them. Other people do. I call them customers.
They freeze my assets, I liberate theirs. Who started it? That’s all I ask.
There’s some other bits and pieces. Some of my stuff I hadn’t got round to flogging yet. My old Scalextric. My bike – it’s a good one. I try not to use it much in case I scratch it and affect the resale value. Dad’s bass guitar’s down there too. That isn’t mine, but it will be one day. The way I see it, they’re going to leave it all to me in their wills anyway, so it’s just, you know, getting a preview.
There’s my old drum kit too. I got it a couple of years ago. Christmas present. I fancied the idea of being in a rock ’n’ roll band, pulling loads of girls and getting off my face all night, but once I actually had the drums I realized – that’s not the same thing as sitting for hours on end practising hitting things with sticks.
The gear I wanted today was hidden behind a heap of plywood. Camping gear. There was a reasonable-sized four-man tent and a two-man that I bought off eBay to resell. It was a bargain. There was also a gas camping stove, plastic mugs and stuff like that from when we used to go on camping holidays years ago. No one had used any of it for years.
I took the four-man. The two-man was lighter, but it might end up a longish holiday.
That was about it. Oh – money. Yeah, I had to take that out of the food kitty. They don’t usually notice if you just get a few quid. This was different – I took forty, which was fair – they put in a hundred a week and it takes more to feed one.
I had it all worked out. You’d never guess. I was going to camp out – actually on the school grounds. Genius, eh? No one was ever going to think of looking for me there. Our school has acres and acres of land. A load of it is footie and rugby pitches, most of which never get used. It all dissolves round the edges where there’s a river and it turns into woodland and bushes and stuff. I’d found a great spot, hidden away among some bushes.
It was perfect. I’d go to school, hang around with my mates in the evening, kip in the tent overnight – and that’s me. Just until the heat dies down, you know?
Round two to Mum and Dad. They had made me do homework for the first time in four years. But was I broken? Was I giving in? I don’t think so.
Round three to moi.