We got the blame. Can you believe that? Sam goes psycho, and it’s Jake, Tyrone and me who get cautioned by the police. It was too much.
After the policeman left and Mum and Dad had finished giving me the full parental interrogation, I went upstairs. It was time for me and Sam Lopez to have a little talk.
His door was closed. I pushed it open without knocking.
Sam had changed the spare room, just like he changed everything else. A few days ago, this had been a fresh, clean, sunny room. Now it was a den. The curtains were drawn. The floor was a tangle of clothes and old rock magazines. The air was thick with the whiff of ancient socks.
He was on the bed, playing a game on his phone that he had brought with him from America. Lying there, frowning with concentration, he looked small and innocent, nothing like the fist-of-fury psycho we had seen at Burger Bill’s.
‘Trouble?’ he murmured without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘I could swear I heard raised voices in the Burton household.’
‘A policeman called round. It was about a fight at Burger Bill’s.’
Sam chuckled. I guess the old Sheds are known to the police now too.’
‘Yeah, right. Thanks for that.’
‘The dude insulted my family.’ Sam spoke in a bored sing-song voice. ‘In my book, that counts as a capital offence. He’s lucky he can still walk.’
‘And in my book a person can make a joke without getting his face punched in.’
‘Different strokes for different folks,’ Sam said casually. ‘I guess he won’t be making fun of my dad from now on.’
I gave him my chilliest smile. ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Because you won’t be around.’
‘Huh?’ A tiny frown of concentration gathered above Sam’s dark eyes. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘Find your own gang, Sam. We don’t need the hassle.’
Sam laid down his phone. ‘Hey, come on, Matthew. These things happen in gangs. I got slapped by guys in my posse loads of times. It goes with the territory.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s as you say – different strokes for different folks.’
‘What about when I go to your school?’
‘There are loads of other kids. You’ll be fine.’
Sam gazed ahead of him. On a shelf at the end of his bed he had put three framed photographs. There was a picture of him with his mum sitting outside some kind of tepee thing, and a publicity photograph of the rock band 666 in which Galaxy could be seen kneeling at the feet of a long-haired guitarist. Then, in a small plastic frame, there was a shot of Galaxy with a baby in her arms. Beside them, a big, cheesy grin on his face, was a small, dark-haired guy. I guessed it was the one and only Crash.
‘I don’t want to be alone.’ Sam spoke the words so quietly that he might have been speaking a private thought out loud.
‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you mashed Jake’s face.’
‘I don’t want to be alone, Matt.’ When he repeated the words, there was an echo of desperation in his voice.
He turned and looked up at me, unblinking, dark-eyed, and for the first time I saw something different and unfamiliar in Sam Lopez – something that he had managed to keep concealed until now. He was afraid. He was lost. All his life, the people who mattered to him had left. Every time he had begun to feel secure, something had shifted, changed, and suddenly there he had been, all alone once more. Sam may have come on like this big tough guy but, behind the mask, he was one scared kid.
‘Could you just tell Jake and Ty that I’m really sorry about what happened?’ he said. ‘Tell them I’d do anything to make it right.’
‘Like what?’
He sat up on his bed. ‘In the States, new gang members have to do some kind of initiation test to prove that they deserve to be in the gang.’ A note of confidence, more like the old Sam, had entered his voice. ‘So for my initiation I could get stuff from the shops for you. Hot-wire a car and take you for a ride. I know – I could get back at the guys who finked on us to the cops. Show them that nobody messes with us Sheds and gets away with it.’
‘I’ll talk to Jake and Tyrone,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t hold out your hopes.’
‘Thanks, Matt.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a sneaky feeling the guys who finked on us to the cops weren’t guys at all.’
What Elena did at Burger Bill’s cast a bit of a shadow over the holidays. At the time, Charley and I must have looked shocked by the cool way she had given Bill the names of the boys because, as we sat across from her at the table, she started crying.
This, with Elena, is a sure sign that she has something to hide.
Behind the counter Bill was on the phone, and we just knew that his threat to report Jake and the other two to the police had been real. Charley got into this lecture about how Elena had gone too far, how there was a big difference between getting someone into trouble at school and with the police.
Then it all came out – the Great Mark Kramer Disaster.
Well, excuse me, we were not impressed. Elena makes a prat of herself with a minor-league hunk and, to make herself feel better, she drops three boys, who had nothing to do with anything, into the doo-doo.
I told her I thought she was sad.
‘Beyond sad,’ Charley agreed. ‘Tragic.’
And that was it. Elena swore at us and walked out of Burger Bill’s.
We never did get to see Ratz.
Why? Why? Even before they reported us to the police, I would now and then wonder why exactly we were at war with Charley Johnson, Elena Griffiths and Zia Khan.
We had known them ever since we had all arrived at primary school in the same year. I could swear that the three of them were absolutely fine and normal until we all reached our third or fourth year at school – I can distinctly remember us all playing football together in the playground.
So why did they turn? What happened? How was it that, at the age of about ten, they suddenly seemed to belong to another species altogether – one that was strange and hostile to all civilised life forms?
It was a mystery. All we knew was that, when the Bitches were around, there was trouble and, when there was trouble, it was never the girls who got the blame. It was us.
Then, when we all moved up to the new school, things got even worse.
It was as if our very presence at Bradbury Hill reminded them of things about themselves in the past that they wanted to forget. They wanted to be big, grown-up, but, when they took a look at us, they were somehow reminded that they were still just kids.
At first they took to ignoring us or, as we passed, they would mutter something to one another and go away giggling. They told other members of the class that at our previous school, we were called ‘the Losers’ (false: everyone wanted to join our gang). They spread a rumour that Tyrone had broken a spring on the trampoline at primary school (false: he never went near the trampoline). They said that an outbreak of nits a couple of years back had been caused by me (false, or at least mostly false: lots of people had nits one term). They decided that Jake’s nose was the biggest joke in history and thought up a nasty nickname for him.
But it was in Steve Forrester’s class where there was the worst trouble, for here the girls knew that virtually whatever happened, the blame would never fall on them.
The way I saw it, they started the war, not us.
It is entirely wrong to suggest that I am in any way biased against the boys in my classes. It so happened that the three boys in question were a bad influence upon one another, albeit that their individual contributions to class activities were acceptable. Those three, together, were trouble. I saw it as my duty to make sure that I headed off the trouble before it became more serious.
That tangle with the law touched each of our lives in different ways. Tyrone’s mother, a tall, flashy woman, some kind of interior designer for houses, grounded him for a week. Even when things are going well, she treats her Tyrone as if he’s some kind of private punishment for her, and having a policeman turn up on her doorstep was not exactly the best of times. Things were pretty bad in the Sherman household that summer. Mrs Sherman took to wondering out loud why she couldn’t have had a nice normal girl rather than a boy like Tyrone – which was kind of rich when you think that it was a load of girls who had caused the problem in the first place.
For Mrs Smiley, it was another reason to blame Jake’s dad, the walkout king. She hung around Jake, moaning about the many terrible things Mr Smiley had done and how it was not surprising that Jake was angry. Most evenings, according to Jake, she found comfort somewhere else – in a gin bottle.
And Mr and Mrs Burton? They were very stern and sensitive for a while before letting Sam and me get on with our lives. Normally we would go camping for a week or two, but Mum’s trip to America had taken up her holiday allowance, so pretty soon the Sheds were back out there on the mean streets of suburbia.
But as far as we were concerned, Sam was history. I had mentioned my conversation with him, his idea of doing something wild and great enough to win back our friendship, but Jake was still smarting from what happened at Burger Bill’s, while Tyrone was still simmering with rage about the hard time he was getting at home.
And maybe I was angrier than either of them. At that moment, it seemed to me that my cousin had stamped all over my life, my family and my friends, leaving a hopeless mess behind him for me to clear up. Jake and Tyrone could drop him from the gang, but my future with Sam Lopez stretched ahead of me like a jail sentence.
So, without ever discussing it in detail, we had come to the conclusion that we would let him tag along over the summer but, once school started, he would be on his own.
Sam sensed what was happening and took it surprisingly badly. He tried to persuade us that there was nothing wrong with a bit of fighting – it was the glue that kept a gang together, he said.
Then, time after time, he returned to the idea of some weird kind of test that would allow him to prove that he deserved to belong to the gang.
At first we ignored him. Then we had a better idea. We’d give him his test and maybe then, when he had failed it, he would leave us alone.
All we had to do was find him one impossible task.
It was Matt’s idea, but I helped along the way.
One night, I was talking to him on the phone. Matt was saying that there was only one way to shut Sam out once and for all – we had to set him a task that would prove, beyond the slightest shadow of doubt, that he could never be one of us.
‘Yeah,’ I said gloomily. ‘Then he’ll set up a rival gang at school. We’ll have two sets of enemies – Sam and the Bitches.’
‘Maybe he could join their gang,’ Matt grumbled. ‘After all, he looks like a girl with his cute little face and all that hair.’
‘Small enough too,’ I laughed. We chatted some more and then we hung up.
He rang back five minutes later, sounding unusually excited.
‘Tyrone,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a thought.’