Kevin Naughton killed him. Kevin Naughton killed my sister’s boyfriend with a Valu-Pack Stay-Sharp vegetable knife; he stuck it in the brother of the girl I love and severed his subcostal artery. Kevin Naughton murdered Aidan Mahon.
Kevin Naughton was my friend.
What were you thinking? Dad would scream at me in the days afterwards. Why did you get involved with that scum? What the hell were you thinking?
Quite, Dad. What was I thinking? You may well ask.
I like to tell myself that when your mother does the local Whatever-God-You-Fancy slot – and occasionally uses you to illustrate a twee point about her amusing family life – you have to be meaner, tougher and sicker than anyone else, or you’re dead. And there’s an element of truth in that.
I first laid eyes on Kev Naughton on my first day at Craigmyle High. I knew right away he was as scared as the rest of us newcomers, but what he was most scared of was his big brother. Mickey Naughton was a lot older and he’d left school, but he liked to keep an eye on Kev. He had a job selling bull semen to farmers – the back of his car was full of little tubes of spunk – but he must have picked some irregular hours for impregnating cows, because it left Mickey plenty of time to loiter near the school and monitor Kev’s progress.
Maybe it was his intimate involvement with cattle; maybe over-familiarity had bred contempt. Mickey Naughton wanted to stay at the top of the food chain, and he wanted Kev up there with him. Naughton family values were Darwinian, smart and cold. Just like Mickey.
I was dead impressed with Mickey.
Yes, he was a scary bastard. Charming and all, but then I think the charm was part of the fear factor. I couldn’t imagine Mickey taking crap from anyone, bureaucrat or traffic warden or snotty neighbour. I bet no kid would ever dare pee in Mickey’s garden and run away laughing. Mickey would never quarrel with his boss over something pointless; he wouldn’t clamber up on to his dignity and fall off. Mickey did not smell faintly of stale wine, and he did not wear a ponytail or the T-shirts of his lost youth. Mickey was dapper, with a nice line in shirts and jackets. Mickey had a white dazzling smile and no tattoos. I used to look at Mickey – nervously, out of the corner of my eye – and think, now that’s what I call a role model.
Besides, my dad never saved me from getting the crap kicked out of me.
Exhibit A in my dodgy defence: Calum Sinclair. Let’s take Calum Sinclair into consideration.
I was never that friendly with Calum at primary, but at Craigmyle High, for the first few weeks, we gravitated together. We came from the same part of town. Our parents knew each other vaguely. We liked the same films, we liked the same games, we pretty much liked the same music. I’d given him half the songs on his iPod, so I suppose I took it personally when some thick ape from third year tried to take it off him.
We were outside the school gates but it was a quiet time of day and the two of us were backed up against the wire fence. Josh the Ape wasn’t that bright but he had a reputation, and large friends, two of whom flanked him as he held out his hand for the iPod, making beckoning motions with his fingers. I scowled at him.
Calum wasn’t scowling; Calum, from the look of him, was about to soil himself. There were tears of fury in his eyes, but he was about to hand over the iPod, I could see his hand going to his pocket. I couldn’t believe what I was not-quite-seeing.
‘Don’t give it to him!’ I blurted, and one of the side-apes grabbed me by the throat and kicked my knee hard. I went half down, my leg crumpling, but now I was as mad as a cat with a firework up its arse. Calum had frozen in terror, so I lurched for his arm and grabbed it to stop him giving away the iPod. I got kicked in the side for that, which made me lose my grip. Calum was knocked down and away from me, and it took two kicks in his belly before he was shoving the iPod at them, gasping and squeaking at them to take the frigging thing.
Understandably, they did.
They were still kind of enjoying themselves, so they set to with a bit more kicking and punching – well, what passed for punching with a pack of rock apes – and I was roaring and whacking them back when one of them was yanked off me and thrown back.
‘Oy,’ said Mickey Naughton. ‘Piss off out of here.’
They were about to, and no hanging about, when he added: ‘And give us that.’
Meekly one of them handed over the iPod, and they scarpered.
Mickey didn’t hand over Calum’s property, but turned it in his fingers. I was still panting and snarling with rage. I looked at Calum, expecting some sort of reflection of myself. Instead, there was only familiar, tearful, impotent fury. My stomach went cold. If you stuck a ponytail on him, and twenty years, and a Jeff Buckley T-shirt…
Smiling, Mickey dangled the iPod by its earphone cord. ‘Whose is it?’
‘His,’ I said, jerking my head at Calum.
‘Oh, aye?’ He looked from me to Calum and back again. ‘If it wis yours I’d give it back. You’re the one that wis fighting for it.’
I was still enraged enough to say, ‘Give it to him.’
Mickey tilted an eyebrow. ‘Seeing as you’re asking.’ He tossed it disdainfully to Calum, and winked at me. ‘You’re a good lad.’
I was sweating and wiping blood off my nose and gasping for breath, but what I remember most clearly about that moment is my whole body puffing up with macho pride as Mickey walked away without a backward glance. I turned to Calum. Maybe I was expecting a little admiration. Maybe I was expecting a little gratitude.
Oh, aye. I was forgetting he’d suddenly turned into a clone of my dad. The only expression on his bruised face was resentment.
‘What did you do that for?’ he snapped.
I was speechless.
‘It’s only a frigging iPod,’ he yelled, though tears brimmed at the corner of his eyes. ‘You don’t fight back! Everybody says that. They might have had a knife or something!’
I stared, fascinated, as he stormed off.
My dad threw hissy fits just like that.
You don’t fight back. Right. I’d better remember that. I didn’t get these life lessons at home. Except, of course, by watching.
I kept right on watching. I wasn’t committing myself, not in these early weeks, though Kevin Naughton was suddenly trying to be my best friend. He shouted out to me in the playground, asked me where I went to primary school, which teams and bands did I like, what did I think about her or them or that? He flattered me with questions I’m sure he knew the answers to already.
‘My brother thinks you’re great,’ he’d say. And I’d think about Mickey, so cool and couldn’t-give-a-damn, so smart and professional, so brutal and frightening. I should have been wary. Instead I was chuffed out of my skull.
Meanwhile, Calum was giving me the cold shoulder, and I realised I didn’t care, especially when it clicked that he was now a little scared of me. Truly, I did not go to school with the intention of getting into the wrong crowd. I did not pack my fall-from-grace into my backpack on day one. But I’d heard Craigmyle High chewed you up and spat you out, and many things determined what shape you were when you sat dazed in the pool of its spittle at the end of your school career. Teachers were the least of it.
I intended to remain human; well, humanoid. Nick-shaped. I wasn’t going to be stamped into something unrecognisable or even, God forbid, something Dad-shaped. Like my ex-friend Calum …
You don’t fight back. Well, well. There was a lesson that worked two ways.
I’d like to be one of life’s good guys, who wouldn’t? But I was not going to be one of its victims. I was not going to be humiliated and bullied every day of my life, then go home with the shame simmering in my embittered heart and take it out on my kids. I was not going to be small that way. I was never going to grow a tragic ponytail just so people could pull it.
Don’t get me wrong: the first time my dad hit me really was the last time, but I’ll never forget the red shame and rage in his eyes. I was eleven: it was my last day of primary and I suppose I was a bit full of myself.
Dad had fallen out with Mum, in the wake of an argument with his boss. He was always having those, and he always wound himself up to the point where he threatened to leave if he didn’t get a little more respect around here. Since his long line of employers must have found that demand as impossible as I did, it always ended the same way: a month’s notice and a P45. Well, it had happened again, and I suppose Dad was in no mood to be looked at the wrong way. It’s what happens when you let the world sit on you too long.
I was shocked at the time, though. I was shocked by his expression, by the smell of midday whisky, and most of all when he spun round and his knuckles connected with my cheekbone just below my eye socket. I was so astonished I didn’t even feel the pain to begin with. I didn’t hit him back and I didn’t run away; I just couldn’t believe he’d done it to me, and all because I’d made a stupid unfunny joke about getting a season ticket to the Job Centre. Too near the knuckle, I suppose: for him and, as it turned out, for me. He stood there until he couldn’t look at me any longer and his eyes hunted all over the room for something else to focus on. He mumbled an apology and we told Mum I fell downstairs. He never smelt of whisky at lunchtime again and he never hit me again. I never let him. I was never going to let anyone hit me again.
I’d promised myself that, and now, many months on, I’d proved it. The respect of people like Mickey and Kev, I discovered, was a lot more gratifying than respect from the likes of Calum.
So the survival instinct I was born with was by now very well honed. What’s more, I was always tall for my age, I was always well built, and I always had menacing eyes. That isn’t my fault, but never look a gift gene in the mouth, and I knew if I threw in my lot with Kev Naughton I’d be fine. I’d be protected from the lesser thugs of life, and I was sure I’d be of use to Kev. And I was.
But like I said: it’s complicated.
I thought it was a game, the way you do when you’re twelve. I didn’t exactly think it was play-acting but I was starring in my own little movie and the sad thing is I wasn’t even a headline act. Kev swaggered and bullied; he threatened and intimidated, but he was also funny, and he could be surprisingly kind if he wasn’t concentrating on being an arse. I didn’t think he was all that bad, and to be honest I thought he needed protecting from himself.
So here’s how it happens. Here’s how it happened for me.
You start by sorting out people you don’t like, people nobody likes. Other smaller yobs and bullies. You teach them a lesson. You and your pals aren’t bullies: you’re the Three Musketeers, the Fantastic Four, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
It’s all too easy. You get the better of someone and you like the feel of it so much, you want that feeling again. You want no one ever to get the better of you.
So you wake up one day and you’re the arbiter of morality, the arbiter of cool. Now you’re punishing people for things that wouldn’t have shown up on your radar a week ago: wearing the wrong trainers, liking the wrong music, carrying the wrong phone, giving you the wrong kind of look. In the end you’re doing it for your image, your status, your pride.
Just for the hell of it.
I suppose Kev was like me. He was thinking Vinnie Jones or Samuel L Jackson: more anti-hero than villain. He didn’t want to be the guy who gets splattered in the second scene; he wanted to be there when the credits rolled. DVDs, I tell you: God’s apology for you being born too late, God’s way of letting you catch up on all those films you missed.
Kev might have liked to be one of life’s heroes too, but not Mickey. Mickey Naughton wasn’t like Kev, but then he wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. He had places to go in the world and he was smart, well dressed, charming to little old ladies and no doubt to frustrated Friesians too. Mickey’s boss thought the world of him.
Mickey Naughton was an evil shit.
When I saw him beat the crap out of his little brother, that was my tipping point. I could have tipped one way or the other, I suppose. I hadn’t made up my mind. I still had time to save my soul, to be one of the good guys, one of the victims, one of the losers.
I’m not sure what Kev had done and I never liked to ask him, but I don’t think it was all that serious. Mickey was still knocking him into shape, that was all. Maybe Kev had chickened out of a challenge, maybe he’d failed to deliver a message or tried to keep a stolen phone for himself, or maybe he’d just answered his brother back on a bad day. Whatever, I turned the corner on my way home and there they were, in the copse of sickly trees where a footpath wavered alongside the school wall.
When a computer superstore was built next to the school, the council made them keep that copse of trees because it had Amenity Value. I wish they’d just concreted it over and extended the car park, because what it really has is Ambush Value, Assault-and-Battery Value. A quiet green space like that is asking for trouble, and that was what Kev was getting.
I didn’t feel I had to run. I stood like a lemon, and Mickey took no notice of me whatsoever, just went on slapping Kev’s face, coolly and deliberately. Kev was crying but his lips were clamped hard together so he wouldn’t make a sound. On his school trousers there was a dark stain where he’d wet himself. With good reason, as it turned out, because when Mickey had finished slapping him, he took hold of Kev’s head and brought it snapping down on to his raised knee, then kicked him in the stomach and left him curled on the ground. A dog walker appeared, ambling down the far end of the footpath, quite a tall middle-aged guy, but when he saw us he turned on his heel and hurried away in the opposite direction, dragging a yapping Jack Russell that was obviously keener for a scrap than he was.
Mickey took no notice of the walker or the dog. He smoothed his hair and dusted a speck of bark off his jacket before hooking it over his shoulder. As he passed me he paused, put a hand on my shoulder and smiled.
‘You’re a clever lad, Nick. Smarter than he is. Tougher and all.’ The hand patted my shoulder lightly. ‘Take care of him, eh? He needs looking after.’
I was too shocked to say a word, but Mickey didn’t wait for one. He got back into his company Mondeo and drove away.
When he’d gone I hovered near Kev, not at all sure he’d want me around but not quite willing to leave him there alone. A tiny whimper seemed to be coming from another dimension, but I suppose it was coming from Kev. When he saw my feet he fell silent, eyes burning with tears, jaw clenched with humiliated rage. There was a stain of reddish purple on his cheekbone and eye socket that was going to be a lovely bruise. I’d never seen anything so pathetic and vulnerable.
‘Y’all right?’
‘Aye. Fine.’ He half sat up, spat out a gobbet of blood.
‘What did you do?’
He gave me a wary look. ‘S’fine. Nothing. I was cheeky. Asking for it.’
‘Oh, aye?’
‘It wis my fault. I’m fine. Listen, you, don’t go and tell …’
‘Nah. Course.’ I liked the way he wasn’t whingeing. Taking a bit of responsibility, too.
Still, I was smarter than Kev was, and that was official. Tougher, as well. He needed looking after. His brother had told me so. His evil, cool, clever brother.
I glanced at the deserted footpath, then at the road. Then I turned back to Kev.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said.
I meant: I won’t tell anyone, and no one’s coming, and nobody else saw.
But I also meant: we need each other. We can use each other. I’ll look out for you.
And that’s how I sold my soul to the devil.
I never saw Kev brought that low again. Whatever he’d done wrong he didn’t repeat it, instead applying himself with determination to becoming the man his brother wanted him to be. By his third year he was big and mean enough to intimidate most of the school, including a lot of older kids and half the teachers. He didn’t scare McCluskey, obviously, and I don’t think he scared the head either, but only because the Brain pretended he didn’t exist. I became Kev’s principal bodyguard, henchman and enforcer, and while I’m not proud of it, I survived and my phone never got nicked. It’s a jungle out there.
Mickey still gave Kev a whack now and again, to keep him on his toes, but I’d seen enough of the man’s explosive rages to keep out of his way. I stayed out of the line of fire and I tried to make sure Kev did too, because Mickey could turn from cool charm to apocalyptic fury in the time it took to snap your fingers.
Mickey was the only father figure Kev had, but why would he have wanted another one? Fathers bitch about the neighbours’ noise levels, lose the ensuing quarrel to the point of utter humiliation, then get mildly stunned before taking themselves off to bed. It’s not as if a father would have controlled either of them. A father might have made things worse. After all, the Naughtons didn’t get their violent genes from a fairy godmother.
Mickey wasn’t a father figure to me. He wasn’t. I wanted to impress him, that was all. That was all. I could never forget him dangling that iPod and saying If it wis yours I’d give it back. You’re the one that wis fighting for it. You’re a good lad. The memory could still make me swagger. I wanted to hear it again, or something like it.
That bloody iPod. It was only an iPod: Calum never said a truer word. But I wis the one that fought for it.
Must be why I took it back.
I took it back off Calum because, morally speaking, it was mine. If it hadn’t been for me, Josh the Ape would have had it long ago, or Mickey would have kept it. Half the songs on it were mine anyway. Calum didn’t care enough – about the iPod, about his pride, about anything – to fight for it. I did. I cared.
And you know, you don’t fight back.
He held out his hand and my fingers closed over it. It was late autumn and I could have waited for the day when I knew he had his after-school chess club. If I’d done that I could have got him alone, on his way home, when the shadows were thick between the pools of streetlight. That wasn’t how I wanted to do it. For some reason I wanted him humiliated. I wanted to do this outside the school gates, just as the school disgorged a swarm of kids to see it all, while the teachers, distracted, tidied their desks or bolted for their cars, desperate to get out of there. I wanted to do it with my gang watching. I wanted Kev to tell Mickey all about it.
Maybe I didn’t want to look in Calum’s eyes all by myself.
Not that I felt guilty. Not that I was sorry for Calum. I felt nothing but contempt. He was resentful and hating and afraid. He didn’t even have the guts to say no, to say the iPod wasn’t mine and I had no right to it. He didn’t have the nerve to ask me what had happened to me, though he probably wanted to know. He just handed the frigging thing over, and I was so angry with him for not even trying to argue, I tossed the iPod into Kev’s keeping and went for Calum. Big time.
Pure submission. He was a curled-up ball of fear and pain. The longer he refused to fight back, the angrier I got. What was wrong with him? I never thought to ask what was wrong with me, of course, though I was the one punching him to the ground and slamming my fists and feet into his soft stupid flesh. He had his hands over his eyes and I didn’t want that. I’d seen fear in his face, and misery, but it wasn’t enough, and I desperately wanted to see his eyes again. I lashed my foot into his hand and he snapped it away with a yelp of pain, but curled up again. I wanted his eyes, though, so I fell on him, flailing at his head. Where was that look he’d given Josh the Ape? I wanted that. I wanted to see my dad, hiding there in Calum’s eyes. Come out, come out, Dad, wherever you are…
There was a tight, closed circle of kids round us, and I realised I was loving it. I think I was. I do seem to remember loving it, loving it so much I couldn’t stop. Sunil had to make me stop, tearing me off him because I’d been at this for long enough and there was a limit to what even we could get away with. I kicked Calum once more in the balls for luck and staggered back, exhausted with joy.
There was a kid at the front, filming it all on his mobile. With a snarl Sunil ripped the phone out of his hands and stuffed it in his own pocket, and the kid didn’t argue. That was because of me, I thought proudly. They were scared. We had the respect of the entire school, me and Kev and Sunil and the rest. I knew what my dazzled audience was thinking, and it made me light-headed. If I could do this to a guy who used to be my friend, they were wondering, what wouldn’t I do? So watch out for that guy. Better take care around him. Don’t mess with Nick Geddes, no way. No way, José. I swear to God, the voice in my head was slurring into a New Yoik accent.
‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’
It was the voice of a disgusted girl, and it cut through the silence, breaking my spell of terror. (I mean, who did I think I was? The Great Lord Sauron?)
Orla Mahon, brutally beautiful, half a dozen books in her arms and her black nails tapping against the covers. Her disdain punctured my swollen pride and drained all the adrenalin out of my body. My crazy high was gone, replaced by dizziness and the beginnings of embarrassment. Her black-edged eyes were locked on me as she chewed her gum, but though she glanced down at Calum with mild pity she made no move to help him. She turned on her heel and stalked away, her friends at her side.
Her younger brother Aidan was the next to leave, and his friends after him. And then they were all backing away, some of them staring at me, some of them staring at Calum’s curled body, some of them pretending they’d seen nothing at all. Was I missing something here? I wasn’t seeing much admiration or respect. Not even hatred. Just dislike, that was all: dislike seriously muted by fear.
‘Not really supposed to kill the wee fecker,’ said Sunil, ‘but he was asking for it.’
‘Yeah. Good man,’ said Kev approvingly, tossing the iPod back to me.
Somehow Kev’s approval didn’t thrill me. I wondered if even Mickey’s meant quite as much as this. I wasn’t sure Calum had asked for it really. The boy was crawling to his feet and limping away while he thought he had the chance. I couldn’t watch that, couldn’t even look at him any more, so I turned away.
And saw Allie.
I thought I was hallucinating. At exactly the same instant I remembered her telling me that she wanted to meet me after school. She wanted to show me something. The memory kicked me in the stomach and I swore, out loud, but somehow didn’t manage to make a sound.
She made no sound either. Her dark eyes found mine and wouldn’t let go, but she didn’t speak. She took one step back, and then another. She turned and walked straight into the road, making a Vauxhall brake and screech and blare its horn, but she didn’t flinch. Only at the far side of the road did she start to run.
Aye, like she was going to change her mind and come back. I ran after her, but she did not want to be caught, and she wasn’t.
When I got home, exhausted and terrified, she wasn’t there. Dad shouted after me as I pelted up the stairs. Something about, where was Allie and wasn’t she supposed to be meeting me?
I couldn’t even answer him. I ran to the upstairs bathroom, knelt on the lilac shagpile thing round the base of the toilet, gripped the matching lilac-shagpile-covered seat and threw up.
I wasn’t Nick-shaped, I was Kev-shaped. I put my head in my hands and looked at the lilac shagpile and threw up again.