10

We didn’t move just because I was caught in the garden and because Mum was scared of bumping into the boy’s parents. There were problems with older lads too. The first time it happened was just a few days after the trouble. There was a knock at the door early one evening and when Mum answered it I heard a voice I didn’t recognise. Nothing seemed too unusual until our door was quickly slammed shut and Mum came into the back room and told me to get upstairs. Her voice sounded like stone being shredded and I quickly did as I was told. It was a summer night and my bedroom window was open and I could hear people out on the street. After a couple of minutes lying on my bed listening to the voices and wondering what was happening I walked over to the window and looked out. I could see a group of what seemed to me men, although they were probably only lads the age that I am now, and they were on the pavement in front of our house. They looked like they were having fun – a group chatting in the evening heat, a couple of them on bikes, some holding cans at their side. They didn’t seem like trouble to me and I wondered what had been said to Mum to make her slam the door and turn her voice so strange. Then one of them looked up at the window and clocked me. He pointed without saying a word, and they all turned and looked. It was a strange reaction they had. There was a cheer, some pretend gasps and the odd word shouted. One of them threw an empty can, but it didn’t get close and ended up in next door’s hedge. Mum must have been as fast to the phone as I was upstairs because a police car drove down the road then and the lads scattered, discarding more cans as they went. After the police had gone and I was allowed back downstairs I asked Mum what had been said when she opened the door, but she wouldn’t tell me. She shook her head and said it was just a lot of silly boys and tried to raise a smile. But then they came back the next night. Mum knew not to answer the door this time, she sent me upstairs again and made sure I went to her bedroom at the back. I could still hear them, faintly, out at the front, shouting to each other, maybe shouting to me, I couldn’t tell. They came back regularly, but because they didn’t throw anything again or do anything illegal the police stopped answering Mum’s calls. Mum grew quieter and thinner with the stress of it. Her cheeks hollowed out, the patches under her eyes darkened, and her breath started to smell. One Friday night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard hissing below me down in the front garden. In my sleepiness I imagined a massive snake sliding around down there, but then I heard giggling and I knew the naughty lads were back. I thought about going to tell Mum, but if they were just pretending to be snakes in our front garden, well, that was better than knocking on the front door and making her cry, so I left them to it. The next morning we got ready to go into town. When Mum turned to lock the door she froze with the key in mid-air. I was stood behind her and had to step to the side to see what was causing the delay. Someone had sprayed ‘Psycho Killer!’ in red paint across the front door. The key never made it into the lock. Mum grabbed me by the shoulder, pushed me back inside and slammed the front door shut behind us. She went straight up to her room. I did the same and we lay in silence in our bedrooms. Or maybe she was crying quietly, she had been doing that quite often. Lying there, it took me a minute before I realised that I was the psycho killer the paint was referring to.

It was when Mr Mole turned up that I realised we wouldn’t be staying in Clifton much longer. Even before the trouble Mum wasn’t the friendliest of people and we didn’t have neighbours calling round all the time, but we both liked Mr Mole and he seemed to like us back, despite Mum’s reserve. He came to see us a few days after the accident and then he arrived a couple of days after the graffiti was sprayed. Mr Mole was one of the neighbours Mum would leave me with and I’d spent lots of days at his house, reading and playing, as he sat with his newspaper, or did the washing up, or mowed his lawn. I liked Mr Mole, he was my favourite of the neighbours to be left with, and we always went to him first. But occasionally he would be away, or he wouldn’t be well, and I would have to go elsewhere. Those were always long and awkward days. Mrs Armer would insist I helped her with her baking and cleaning and would try to teach me how to knit. Mr and Mrs Seedall had never had children and watched me like I was an animal in a zoo, like I might suddenly turn wild and decide to break everything I could get my hands on. At the Seedalls’ you weren’t allowed to watch TV and at three o’clock every afternoon Mrs Seedall went upstairs for her afternoon nap and everything had to be even more silent than it had been all morning. Mr Seedall had no idea what to do with me for that hour, but he must have been given instructions not to let me out of his sight, so we sat in the front room, both pretending to read, and time did long division on itself until one hour felt like ten. In some ways the stillness at their house prepared me for life with Mum after the trouble.

But Mr Mole was easy to stay with. He didn’t care what I did or didn’t do. I could go anywhere in his house and he didn’t follow. I could turn the TV on and off whenever I wanted and watch anything I liked. If he was working in the garden, or decorating a room, I could help or sit on the couch and read my books and let him get on with it. I did have to take his dog, Scruffy, for a walk with him every afternoon, but he always let me hold the lead and I enjoyed that anyway. When Mum wasn’t well once, and had to go and stay with Aunty Sandra to be looked after, I stayed with Mr Mole for a couple of weeks because it was term time and I couldn’t miss that much school. It was a brilliant two weeks. We had fish and chips from the chippy, he let me have shandy when he had his drinks in the evening, and he let me stay up later than Mum did. I watched programmes with him Mum would never let me watch. And I don’t think it was just me who was sad when it was over. ‘We’ve had a good time together, haven’t we Donald?’ he said, when Mum turned up and I had to go and pack my stuff. ‘He’s been good company.’

When he turned up after the graffiti was sprayed he brought with him a box of vegetables from his garden. He spoke more loudly and cheerfully than he usually did. I followed him and Mum into the kitchen and answered Mr Mole’s questions and wondered when Mum was going to start speaking. But she didn’t speak at all. She looked at the box on the kitchen table as if it contained dead puppies, not potatoes and cabbage, and I thought she might burst into tears. When it became clear that Mum wasn’t going to speak Mr Mole rubbed his head a lot and kept saying, ‘Well then, well then.’ He didn’t stay long and I knew then that we wouldn’t be in Clifton much longer. The dead little boy, my midnight garden visit and the bunch of bad lads had all combined to make Clifton impossible in Mum’s eyes. Mr Mole could be as kind as he liked but nothing was going to keep us there.