It might have helped if I’d encountered more of people’s problems and struggles, but other than Mum’s moods, which I’ve never found an answer for, I’ve had little experience. There haven’t been friends with problems that have needed sorting out; there haven’t really been too many friends at all. I’ve realised, over the years, that I have a face that lends itself to anonymity. Or perhaps my vanishings have been so successful I have actually started wiping myself out. It has felt that way at times. Mum says I don’t draw people; that I’m a dart that bounces back from the board, a magnet that won’t pull. She says it’s a characteristic inherited from her, which seems unfair to me. Being alone suits her down to the ground but it can drive me mad. Sometimes I want more than books and vanishings and bad memories. Sometimes I want voices and noise and fun to drown everything else out. But it’s never happened like that. It has been lonely at times. Of course it has. Fiona has been around since we moved to Raithswaite, and I’ve been lucky with that, but we can go days without seeing each other, and when we do meet we might just wander around the quarry listening to half a song each through her headphones, not saying a word, and at school we hardly see each other at all. I know she thinks I’m odd, like the rest of them do, but it doesn’t seem to bother her as much. I think it’s because she doesn’t fit either. She’s too bright for her dad and her stupid brothers and they hardly speak at all. And whilst loads of people at school want to be her friend because she’s so beautiful, she isn’t interested in any of them. She plays along, I can see that, but she’s waiting for the first opportunity to leg it from Raithswaite. She’s biding her time, waiting for the starting pistol, and once she’s gone I don’t think any of us will ever see her again.
Other friends have been few and far between. I was at St Edmund’s Primary School for a year when we moved to Raithswaite and after that I moved to the high school. I can hardly remember a thing about St Edmund’s other than it was at the far side of town, but the only primary school in Raithswaite that had any places. The kids and teachers were nice enough to me there, but everyone had known everyone else for years and I was only there for the last few months, and I was quiet and dull so no big friendships blossomed.
Things started off well in my first year at Raithswaite High though, maybe because everyone was new and people were making more of an effort. There were three of us for a while, and we were almost like a gang for a few months. Me, Lewis Johnson and Nathan Pierce. Lewis was a reader, like me, and I’d see him in the library at lunch. We were in the same year and the only two lads from that year in the library all the time and gradually we became friends. A couple of months into the term Nathan turned up in Raithswaite and wandered into the library on his first day and found us. The three of us knocked around together straight away. We even got out and about at lunchtime and started seeing what else the school had to offer. It worked well at first, but gradually I started to feel like a spare part, the weak link. Lewis and Nathan lived on the same estate as each other, and it was on the other side of town to me. They spent weekends and holidays together, staying for tea and sleepovers at each other’s houses. They swapped games and music and I hadn’t got a clue what they were talking about some of the time. I never felt quite comfortable with the two of them together is the truth. They got on so well, they shared a sense of humour, laughed in all the right places, and I was sometimes slow to catch on, slow to recover from a vanishing. I upset the rhythm. And if it was a bad day, or days, and I was thinking about the little boy, I knew I wasn’t much fun to be around, I knew I didn’t contribute much. But there were other things too. Their clothes were always brand new and everything they owned was expensive – little names or logos on the left breast, nothing flash, just enough to let you know it cost money, and it was obvious that cash was knocking around in a way that it wasn’t in my house. Most of my clothes have always come from the market or the shops in the precinct. And I’m not complaining, cheap clothes never bothered me, but when Mum said you couldn’t tell the difference between the clothes I wore and the ones from proper shops I knew that was untrue. Market clothes you can tell a mile off.
I only went round to theirs once. It was all planned. A big Saturday. We were having lunch at Lewis’s and tea at Nathan’s. Their houses were detached new builds on opposite sides of the same estate. You could hardly tell them apart from the outside and they even smelt the same on the inside. I’d never been surrounded by so many new things before, and I’d never been in houses where everything matched, where everything fitted exactly into the space it sat. It was the same in the lads’ bedrooms, everything new and in its place. They told me that they’d got to choose their own furniture and the colour of the walls. I remember being up in Nathan’s room and seeing a shelf of books, all the spines facing out into the room, bright and unbroken. I pulled a couple down and opened them up and there wasn’t a library marking in sight. In both houses you had to take your trainers off and leave them by the front door. I didn’t know that happened and there were holes in my socks where my toenails poked through. Nobody said anything, but I hated being there with my disintegrating socks and my crappy old trainers sat next to their trainers by the front door. Even their mums made me feel out of place. They were bright and friendly, coming back from the shops with bags full of expensive things, handing out treats like it was Christmas. It was the most embarrassing at Nathan’s when we had tea. His mum and dad sat with us and we were having spaghetti Bolognese. They had a glass of wine each, we all had big glasses of Coke, with ice and lemon, like we were at a restaurant. I’d never had spaghetti Bolognese before, it wasn’t the kind of thing Mum would cook, and it tasted nice, but I couldn’t work out how you were supposed to eat the long spaghetti. They all seemed experts at swizzling it around their forks, but I didn’t have the knack. When Nathan’s dad saw me struggling he said, ‘Tricky isn’t it Donald? Do what I do and cut the slippery sods up like this.’ He started chopping up his spaghetti, and it was kind of him to pretend like that, but it made me feel more stupid, not even being able to eat like they could. After tea when I stepped onto the thick carpet I wanted to sink and keep sinking down until I was gone. All day I felt like I was an actor on stage, an actor who didn’t know what play he was in, never mind know his lines. It was a relief when Nathan’s dad eventually drove me home at the end of the day. Me, Nathan and Lewis started seeing less of each other after that. I spent more time back in the library, and they came to visit me there less, and we reached a mutual understanding about the end of the gang without anyone saying anything or anyone getting too upset. Since then there hasn’t really been anyone other than Fiona. Looking back over the last four or five years, I don’t know what I’ve been doing with my time other than sitting in a silent house with my silent mum, trying not to think about what happened in Clifton and disappearing to places I’ve invented in my head. It was good to have Jake.