Seventeen

“What are you doing, Kenny?” He was hunched in the corner of the shed, holding something in his arms.

“Go away.”

I went over to him. I wanted to say sorry. Or say something.

Then I saw what he was doing. He’d blown up the lilo and he was squeezing it in his arms, as if it was something precious.

I put my hand on his arm. He shrugged it off.

“Leave us alone,” he said.

Where we’re from, people sometimes say “us” when they mean “me”, but the way Kenny said it made me think he did mean “us” and not “me”.

He wiped his face with his sleeve, smearing snot and tears together.

I felt a lump in my throat like I was trying to swallow a walnut.

I tried to put my arm around him, but Kenny flailed at me. He was a strong kid, and when he got angry he could do some damage. I didn’t mind getting hurt. In fact, a part of me wanted him to hurt me, to punch me in the mouth, to knock me out. But I knew he’d be even more upset when he realised what he’d done, and I didn’t want that to be my fault as well.

So I left him there in the shed, hugging the lilo bouncy castle, thinking, I suppose, about the things that we’d lost.

I didn’t know what to do with myself then. I didn’t want to be in the house, and it was too cold to wander around. I looked in my pockets. Three quid and some coppers. Not even enough to get into Leeds and back.

So I thought I’d go to the library. I could look on the internet for ways to sort out the raft.

The library lady was kind of old-fashioned. Strict, but nice. She used to tell me what sort of books I’d like. She sometimes got it wrong, but other times it was as if she had read my mind. You could tell that she wasn’t too keen on people using the computers, but she put up with it because it got kids into the library.

Usually she’d say something like, “I’ve got something for you, Nicholas,” but today she just looked up at me from behind her desk. There was a man with her. He had that kind of soft hair like a baby’s, and it was moving around in the breeze from the heater, and he had a brown jacket on that looked like it was made from dried horse manure. I wondered if the library lady was going to pack it in, and if the man was going to replace her. I’d have been sad if that happened.

So I went straight to the computers and googled about rafts and pallets. Most of the stuff there was about how you could join pallets together to make a big raft, and then use oil drums and that sort of thing to keep it afloat. But that was no use to me. I did see one raft that was a bit like ours, but it had blocks of polystyrene under the boards of the pallet, and I didn’t know where you could get polystyrene, or if it was the kind of thing you could even buy.

And then I did something I’d never done before. I googled my mum, just in case. Her name’s Yvonne, so I put in “Yvonne Lofthouse”, and there were 56,500 results. I clicked through a few pages, but there was no one who could have been my mum. Then I realised she might not even be called that any more. I mean she might have gone back to her own last name, whatever that was, or got married again and changed it to someone else’s.

So I went back to the pictures of rafts and tried not to think about anything.

Then I heard a voice behind me. “This is one of our regulars. He comes in every week, don’t you, Nicholas?”

I turned round, and the library lady was there with the baby man in his horseshit jacket. He looked like he’d have given all the money in his wallet to be somewhere else.

“This is Mr Catterall from the council,” the library lady said. “He thinks we don’t need to have a library here. What do you think, Nicholas?”

I felt sick in my stomach. I wanted to say that I loved it in the library, that it was the best place in the town, and that they should shut everything else down before they shut the library, but I couldn’t think of the right words.

“We’ve got to find the money somewhere,” Mr Catterall said. “You’ve got a computer at home, haven’t you, young man?”

“He comes in for books, as well,” the library lady said. “Not just the computer. He’s got a brother with learning problems. He helps him, don’t you, Nicholas?”

I still couldn’t get my mouth to work. I felt all the badness of the day piling up around me, and bursting out of me at the same time. It was like I was under the water of the Bacon Pond, and it was crushing me, and I was swallowing it, and I was full up with it. Like a balloon, like a drowning man, like a dead body. I got up, and the library spun around, and I tried to run to the door but I hit a chair, then another chair, and I sent them crashing around me, like white waves on the water. I heard a voice behind me, the library lady, but I couldn’t understand her, and then I was outside, and the sweat on me turned icy cold.

Everything was turning to shit. I knew, somehow, that the watch was wrapped up in this, that the watch was to blame. And that made me want it more. I was like one of those drunks you see staggering around outside the pub, the ones who drink to forget that they’re an alcoholic.