‘You know we’re best friends?’
‘Yeah ...’ I said, but really I was holding on.
We were sitting on the fence, it was really unsteady. We climbed up because Brian said he wanted to talk, but it wasn’t coming out what he meant and we had to hold on with our fingers to stop the fence wobbling and brace with our heels on the cross-wire. I had one hand on the metal support to keep steady, but he was balancing on his bum with both hands gripped to the mesh as it folded over at the top. If he fell, he was going to have to flip over backwards and hang on. I was worried about getting my fingers twisted.
‘For a long time now ...’
I nodded.
‘We can be friends, but we can’t be best friends any more.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded and looked down at my feet to get them into a stronger position.
‘It’s because my dad says.’ He wobbled a bit on his bum to get comfortable and I could feel myself tipping forward. He stopped to let me get my balance.
‘Shall we get down?’ I said.
‘If you want,’ and he did a backflip over into the playground.
That’s when it happened. I put one leg over the fence to climb down but the top of the mesh caught in my shorts. It stung, and I could feel a warm trickle. I unhooked it, got down slowly, and jumped off the wall at the bottom. He watched me lift back the waistband and look.
‘It’s bleeding,’ I said. Not much, not like a nose bleed, but it really hurt.
‘Shall we go up the hospital?’
‘Let me go and wash it,’ I said. We both knew I was wounded. I wasn’t sure how badly.
He held the button down on the water fountain by the sandpit. I held the waistband open with one hand and cupped water on to it. It was a strange feeling getting my pants wet, but I didn’t mind because I could see I’d nicked it and it might be serious. A watery reddish trickle ran down my leg into my sock.
‘I have to go to hospital.’
He looked at me like he’d hurt me. It was difficult. We hadn’t done anything like this before.
People were looking because I was limping and because I had to go slowly and keep my waistband open all the way there. I minded because even though you feel important when you go to hospital, sometimes you don’t want people to see. We were trying to sort it out ourselves.
We knew the way because it was up by the park we used to go with Brian’s mum and climb trees. She made us hold on to the pram across the busy roads and sit down on the grass for picnics with the sunshade up for the baby. But when she was trying to get the baby to sleep she let us go wild and run around and climb. There was the big climbing tree with twisted arms that made her scream when she woke up and saw how high we’d gone. She called us ‘right little monkeys!’ and slapped his bum. She gave me a worried look. I could see in her eyes she thought he was a better climber than me and she’d have to tell my mum if something happened.
We walked in through the entrance of the children’s hospital to where we could see the nurses having a cup of tea and pulled back the curtain to show them my willy. The one nearest coughed out her biscuit and spilt some tea. The others started laughing and it was only the one who got some ointment on cotton wool with pliers and plastic gloves that could see it was serious and dabbed it so it stung. I flinched and she lost her temper with me.
‘Keep still!’
They burst out laughing again and I looked up, annoyed, and said, ‘Ow!’ They stopped what they were doing, took their tea and moved outside.
‘Is it gonna leave a scar?’ Brian asked as the nurse snapped off the gloves. I hadn’t thought of that, but the sting was wearing off and she didn’t look worried.
‘Be careful next time,’ she said. ‘No climbing fences.’
I saw the nurses looking at me as we went out, so I stopped limping.
‘There goes a very proud little boy,’ said the one in the blue cardigan by the tea trolley.
‘And very brave,’ said the nurse coming out behind us. ‘Go straight home and tell your mummy – show her where it hurts.’ They all burst out laughing again. Brian’s face went red.
‘Why don’t you shut up?’ I said, but I don’t know if they heard me, so I didn’t stop to find out.
We didn’t go home. We sat inside the concrete tunnel in the playground and I showed him my scar. It was purple with ointment. I felt proud for being brave and I felt bruised. So I asked him, ‘What does your dad say?’
‘He says I can’t play with you no more.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Anyway, those nurses are tarts – my dad says!’
I couldn’t see it – how nurses could be tarts – only the way his face was going red again.
‘But we can be friends?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘How can we play and not be friends?’
‘We can’t.’
We both nodded. And it started to rain.
We were playing in the hallway when his dad came in. He came backwards out the rain, blocking the whole doorway, banging and shaking his umbrella. He turned to us at the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He looked at Brian and looked up at Brian’s mum who came hurrying out with a tea cloth from the back kitchen. I saw the look that passed between them. I shouldn’t be there. He didn’t say anything, he just looked.
‘It was raining,’ she said. ‘They had to come in.’
I hadn’t been in Brian’s house before. All the days we’d played had been sunny up till then. We sat on his front windowsill and minded the baby in the pram with the doors open. We walked with his mum to the park and sat on the grass for picnics. We climbed trees and it never occurred to me I’d never been inside his house. His mum made us sandwiches and brought them out to us. She had a beehive hairdo before anyone else and wore miniskirts which my mum didn’t. She put him in long trousers when I was in shorts. I wanted my mum to be like his, but I didn’t mind she wasn’t because his mum was looking after me. She was standing over us to keep that man off. I’d never seen her scared like that before.
He didn’t say anything. He walked round us and went upstairs. I looked at Brian. He looked at his mum.
‘Go home now. Run all the way. Don’t get wet. Go on.’
I stood up and walked into the rain. I didn’t stop to look back. I ran, ducking the moving cars. I ran as fast as I could so the rain would bounce off me. I ran home and pushed past questions, and ran a bath and told my mum she couldn’t come in and see me. And I sat in it until it went cold, and looked back at what I’d seen.
‘This is a moonstone my dad gave me,’ he said. ‘It changes colour depending how you feel.’
I looked at his eyes. They were grey, aeroplane grey. They looked steady. I believed him.
I looked at his mum.
‘When you get stung by nettles look for dock leaves and rub them on. You always find the cure in the same place.’ Where she rubbed it on, my skin turned green and it stopped hurting.
I looked at my hand. It was brown. I looked at my willy. It was white at the edges of the cut. I held up the moons in my fingernails, the spongy white where I gnawed my thumb to the knuckle, the tips of my fingers, puffy and waterlogged.
I looked up at my dad coming in through the door and closed my legs.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Playing in my friend’s house.’
My mum came in behind him.
‘Stand up,’ she said.
I kept my hands in front of me, shivering. She folded the towel around me and let the water out. ‘It’s cold. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’
She looked at me, pursing her lips. My dad shifted on to the other foot, shaking his head.
‘I don’t want you in that house,’ he said.
I waited, feeling the water trickle at my feet, but he wasn’t telling me why or what he meant. My mum helped me step out and started rubbing me dry with the towel. I took it off her to do by myself. He didn’t like that. I didn’t care.
‘I don’t want you going there, do you hear?’
I nodded.
‘His father’s back,’ my mum said quietly.
We were back in the playground, in the concrete tunnel. Brian was brushing sand out his ruffled up hair.
‘My dad doesn’t want me to go in your house,’ I said.
He stopped and looked at me. He nodded. We were even. ‘That’s all right, then.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Then, slowly, he shook his head and I had a pang. We weren’t happy.
‘Let’s be blood brothers.’
We both said it. We nicked the end of our thumbs with a dry stick and closed them together, our fingers clasped, letting the blood mingle. And that was it. We didn’t have to be friends to be together. We didn’t have to be apart any more.
‘We’re blood brothers now.’
‘What you gonna do when you grow up?’ I said. I was gonna tell him I’d be an astronaut, but he said, ‘I’m gonna work with my dad.’
I thought about that.
I could remember glimpses of his dad telling us to race to the car. It was a funny race because I wanted to let Brian win so his dad wouldn’t mind me. Brian pretended to have a limp too and we ended up leaning on each other and getting to the car at the same time. But I couldn’t go with them, and Brian didn’t look back as they drove off. I couldn’t remember his dad being around that much, and didn’t know where they went, and didn’t actually know what his dad did.
‘I don’t remember,’ I said, ‘what’s your dad do?’
He shrugged and opened his hands, ‘We’re thieves.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
I started stealing my dad’s money. Every time he came home he emptied his pockets out on to the sideboard and I started to nick his loose change. We all did, so I didn’t think it mattered. It was where you went to get money for the shops – milk or paraffin, a loaf of bread. When you didn’t bring it all back and got some sweets, no one noticed. Until my dad started asking, ‘Where’s my change?’
You weren’t supposed to take half a crown – at the most it could be sixpence, or a shilling. ‘Don’t take too much!’ Manus said. But it was too late – I was stealing, I took all of it.
My dad started checking and testing to find out who it was. He’d leave it on the side like he wasn’t thinking, but then he couldn’t work it out because we were all doing it, bit by bit, going and coming from the shops, when he was looking and when he wasn’t.
‘I won’t have thieves in my house!’ he shouted.
The shouting was getting my mum down, she said, things were hard enough already and it was only coppers, to let it pass. He looked at her furious, and said she could give in, but he wasn’t going to tolerate it, he was going to stamp on that kind of sickness before it spread.
I could see he was upset and he really meant it, but by then I wasn’t on his side, I didn’t want what he wanted. I was going around watching to see what he’d do to stop me. He kept money in his jacket pockets, I’d find it. He’d set traps of money round the house, I’d leave it alone. He’d send me to the shops, I’d bring him his change.
I started stealing ten bob and one-pound notes, spending them on food I wanted and being careful not to bring any of that change back into the house.
‘Who is stealing from me?’
Everyone was standing in front of him, looking around like it wasn’t them. ‘All you bloody bastards!’ This was when I took five pounds out the wallet in the bedroom. It was too much. I knew it was. I slipped it behind the skirting in the hall. But now it was all going to come out. I was going to get caught.
‘You,’ he said. My heart stopped and everyone looked at me. It was like a knife at the lump in my throat before I could lie. But then he said, ‘It wasn’t you. Go and sit down.’
For a moment, I couldn’t move. It felt like a relief, but it wasn’t. I got myself out the way, but it wasn’t going to end there – it was going to get worse. There was Manus and Connor and Busola standing, and me on the sofa facing them as my dad shook the wooden spoon in the air, ‘Which of you is stealing?’
Manus said he’d told everyone to bring back the change, but my dad said that was a lie and he was going to beat him twice, once for stealing and once for lying. Connor said he took the money and got himself something because he thought he deserved it for going to the shops, especially when it was heavy gallons of paraffin that made his arms ache. My dad shook his head, tapping the spoon on his palm with a thwack! It was the wrong answer, but he didn’t say anything and turned to Busola, ‘What have you got to say?’
She looked at me sitting on the sofa and pointed her finger, ‘He’s the thief. He’s the one who’s been stealing.’
My face started burning. I could see Manus and Connor hating me with their eyes because I’d been singled out to be safe, but I didn’t know how Busola could see I was stealing or if she was only guessing, so I looked back at her and said nothing.
‘Liar!’ he said, and told her how much she’d stolen, what she’d bought and when she’d done it. ‘You are the one stealing!’
‘That wasn’t stealing,’ she said. ‘Mummy told me I could have a shilling for helping her with the shopping.’
My dad looked round at my mum standing by the door. She put her hands up to the sides of her face and nodded. He threw out his arms like he couldn’t go on and I thought it might end there, but he whacked the wooden spoon down hard on his own hand.
‘Steal again and it’s you or me!’ he said. ‘If I catch you, you’ll wish you were never born!’
He put on his jacket, pushed past and went out, slamming the front door. My mum waited until it stopped shaking and left the room without speaking. The others turned and looked at me on the sofa.
I went to find my mum. She was bending over the bath with dirty clothes and the scrubbing board, wet strands of hair falling forward over her face. It was steamy and smelly, so I stayed by the door and let the clouds of air out into the backyard. She looked round at me and used her wrist to wipe the sweat and hair off her forehead.
‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘Close the door, it’s letting the cold air in.’
I took a deep breath of fresh air and let the door bang to, going over to hold on to her dress. She shook me off.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I’m busy.’
‘The others don’t like me,’ I said. ‘Connor called me a cunt.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, grow up!’ she snapped, and I started to cry. It worked because she sat down on the edge of the bath and held me. ‘There ... don’t cry. Tell me, what’s wrong?’
It was easier to cry than tell her about Brian, or the money, or being in the wrong about getting everyone into trouble, so I burst into tears again. She held me away from her by the sides of my arms and looked into my face. I don’t know what she saw but she buckled up her lips and shook her head.
‘Ah, no, it won’t do,’ she said. Then, ‘Another fine mess you’ve got me into.’
I thought she wasn’t taking me seriously, I could feel myself getting angry. I tried to shake her off and get my arms free but she wasn’t letting go.
‘He’s turned them against you, do you see?’ she said. ‘And he’s going to take five pounds out of the housekeeping. There’ll be less to eat. We can’t afford it,’ she said. ‘And neither can you.’
I couldn’t cry any more, and I couldn’t pretend to be on my own side. I felt like I’d lost weight, I was floating. I heard myself say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ but the thought came in my head, so who was it?
She pulled me close and held me. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, ‘you don’t know.’ Her clothes were wet against her body, she was hot. I looked down at the clothes in the bath behind her. We were all there, climbing over one another in the muddy water – trousers, arms, socks, kicking and struggling. The collar of my dad’s shirt was up on the scrubbing board, by the plughole I saw brown stains on a pair of my underpants.
I was running up behind Brian’s mum as she was pushing the pram and dragging Brian along in her other hand. She was telling me not now, we could play when we got into school. She kept looking over her shoulder, back at the house, but I’d been watching for them to come out and his dad had already left with another man. I ran up when I saw Brian and gave him a hug and jumped around to show how much I wanted to be with him.
‘Don’t do that!’ she said. ‘Come on, we’ll be late for school.’
Brian gave me a quick look, ‘My uncle’s in,’ he said. ‘He’s not well.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I said when his mum dropped us off inside the playground and hurried back. The bell was ringing but we hung back in the arches under the school caretaker’s house.
‘My uncle got beaten up,’ he said. ‘He’s all bloody.’
I asked what happened and he said it was all because of his dad coming out of prison and there was a lot of trouble and they might have to move. I could feel my stomach dropping out from under me. The bell stopped and we were alone.
‘I want us to be friends,’ I said.
He looked at me with his grey eyes, that looked dark, the colour of kerbstones, and a bit frightened, and leaned his forehead on mine.
‘We’re brothers,’ he said.
I took the five pounds out from behind the skirting and tucked it in my underpants.
‘What you doing?’ Busola said, leaning round the stairs on the banister. ‘Is that where you’ve hidden it? You can’t hide it there no more.’
‘What makes you say I’m stealing?’ I said.
‘You are,’ she said.
‘So are you!’
‘You have to catch me first,’ and she hopped down some stairs. ‘No one likes you because you’re no good at it. You don’t even know what to spend it on. You can’t spend five pounds on sweets, you get sick.’
‘Then how do you know how much it is, then?’ I said.
‘Mummy told me, so I knew you did it. You’re stupid.’
‘I’m going out,’ I said.
‘Don’t get sick,’ and she jumped down the last stairs.
I got in behind the corrugated iron across from Brian’s house and peered through the gap to see what was going on. I saw my dad walking up the street on his way home and leaned back out of sight with my heart thumping, trying to stop it being so loud. Some people walked by on my side of the street with their heels clicking on the pavement. A car turned the corner and went past. I kept still against the wooden post of the fence. A cat came up out the bomb site and had a look and slipped past my feet and stopped and looked back and went on, sniffing the weeds and peeing against a bed frame. The hole in the ground was spread out from under my feet and I could feel myself tipping forward on the slope like I was standing on the edge of a crater. There was a rusty tin bath upside down, a burnt mattress with springs, a broken television set. It was like being on the moon. The cat looked back at me and disappeared into the weeds. Everything went quiet. I had the feeling I shouldn’t be there, standing in someone else’s house, the shadow of the stairs going up the wall, brick fireplaces on the different floors and rooms up in the air with layers of wallpaper peeling off. A door opened and closed shut across the road. I heard steps running towards me and the corrugated iron being pulled open. I crouched down. It was Brian, breathing like someone was after him.
‘I saw you from the window,’ he said.
I got out the five pounds and gave it to him as he got down beside me.
‘What’s that for?’
‘For you,’ I said, ‘for going away.’
He shook his head and held it back to me, ‘It’s your money, you keep it.’
‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘I stole it – from my dad.’
He blinked at me and put his head on one side. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said. He put the money in my hand and steadied himself on the wooden post. ‘I didn’t tell you to do that.’
‘I don’t want you to go away,’ I said.
It was half dark, the light was going. We looked round at the rubble of broken bricks from the house that wasn’t there any more, at the gaping hole that was full of rubbish people had thrown out. The empty space between the walls had tall weeds growing up into it. We were on our own.
‘My mum says people got killed in this house,’ he said.
He picked up a pebble and threw it down on to the tin bath, making an echoey metal sound snake up the walls. We listened for anyone moving on the street.
‘How’s your uncle?’ I said.
‘He’s got holes in his hands.’
I looked at him because – ‘What?’
‘They banged in nails,’ and he pointed his finger into the middle of his palm. ‘My mum has to take off the bandages and look after him. I’ve seen it. A man comes round and gives him injections.’
I looked at the fiver in my hand. ‘What shall I do with this?’ I said.
‘Can you give it back?’
I shook my head. He nodded.
‘What would you do with a hundred pounds?’ I asked.
‘Run,’ he said, ‘because they’ll come after it.’
We both smiled. I tucked the note back in my pants.
‘Maybe you can leave it somewhere they can find it?’ he said.
We froze because something moved. It was down in the hole. It wasn’t a cat. It was inside, tugging at the mattress. My stomach went cold and suddenly we were scampering across the ledge to the opening and got out.
The lamp posts had come on. We looked at each other to get steady. Brian had a cut on his arm and licked it with some spit. It was there, but he could close it up. We both nodded not to say anything and turned for him to cross the road and me to run home.