Here’s a thing about people in Britain. They say ‘yes’ when they mean ‘no’. In the States, if you ask someone the way to a street they’ve never heard of, they just shake their heads and keep walking.
Here they stop. ‘Somerton Gardens,’ they say slowly. ‘Yes, now where is that?’ It takes five minutes for them to admit that they ain’t got a clue.
I see this real quick, but Crash has this old-fashioned thing about believing people. So it takes about fifteen minutes, with people walking by, staring at us like we’re unusual or something, before Crash gets any notion as to where we’re going.
‘What a country.’ Crash squeezes himself into the Nissan, sweat soaking through his best red shirt. He crunches the car into gear and we’re gone.
I could tell from the way Tyrone looked as they crossed the street on their way back to us that something bad had happened. He was walking close to Sam and just behind him, almost as if he thought my cousin might throw himself under the wheels of a car at any moment
Then I looked at Sam. He was always pale, but now he was sheet white. The way he looked, blank and empty, reminded me of how he was that day – years ago, it now seemed – when he turned up on my doorstep beside my mum.
They walked up to us.
‘What’s happened?’ Jake asked.
Tyrone shot him a warning look. ‘Sam thinks he’s seen his dad,’ he said.
‘I don’t think,’ said Sam in a hard, cold voice. ‘I know.’
‘Here?’ I said. ‘In London?’
‘He was the guy in the blue car,’ said Tyrone.
‘That was your father?’ I could sense that Jake was trying to square the man we had seen – a pudgy little bald guy dressed up like something out of a gangster movie – with the heroic hard man Sam had talked about in the past. ‘He’s…different from how I had imagined.’
‘Yeah?’ said Sam in a flat monotone: ‘Seems like the same old Crash to me – except he’s got himself a new girlfriend.’
‘But why’s he in London?’ asked Jake.
Sam was looking down the road in the direction the small blue car had taken. ‘He ain’t here to see the sights, that’s for sure,’ he said.
After Jake and Tyrone said goodbye and left us on the High Street, we made our way towards the park.
‘All that stuff about your father being in jail,’ I said, breaking the silence as we went. ‘Was it true?’
Sam nodded. ‘Sure, it was true.’
‘You acted like you were…proud of him,’ I said carefully.
Sam seemed to think about this for a while. ‘I guess you can be proud of someone and still not want to see them too much.’
‘Can you?’
A sort of wince, a flicker of pain, crossed Sam’s face and, for a moment, I thought he was going to tell me what this was all about. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
‘We’d better tell my parents,’ I said as I walked.
Sam looked across and gave me the benefit of one of his smiles, ‘Maybe I’ll leave that one up to you, cuz,’ he said.
I was at my desk in the sitting room, catching up on some much-delayed paperwork, when I heard the boys come home. There were mutterings in the hall and the sound of one of them going upstairs.
Moments later, Matthew opened the door. From the look on his face, I could see that something – probably something bad – had happened.
‘Sam’s just seen his father,’ he said.
‘Ah.’ I made a note in the margin of my proofs to remind me where I was and put the papers on one side of the desk. ‘So Mr Lopez is in town.’
‘You don’t seem surprised.’
‘Take a seat, Matthew,’ I said. ‘I think that maybe it’s time to bring you up to date on one or two background developments.’
And out it came – the call from Durkowitz, the story of Sam’s inheritance, the distinct possibility that his jailbird father might be taking an interest in the situation. By the time I had finished, Matthew was shaking his head.
‘So much for our family not keeping secrets,’ he said.
‘Under normal circumstances, we would have told you both about what was going on, but’ – I hesitated, choosing my words carefully – ‘your mother and I thought it would be better if Sam settled into his new school before we worried him further. It was a question of timing.’
‘So Lopez is here for the money, you think.’
‘From what Gail told your mother, he was never the most conscientious of fathers.’
‘Sam was pretty shocked to see him. It’s strange – he’s always talking about his father but, from the way he’s acting, I don’t think he’s too crazy about the idea of going home with him.’
‘Which, of course, is a problem,’ I said. ‘Not many courts of law would agree to keep a son away from his own father.’
‘Sam’s not ready to make up his mind,’ said Matthew. ‘We need to keep him out of sight for a while.’
‘Listen, Matthew.’ I smiled reassuringly. ‘The important thing now is that this is a grown-up problem which we shall solve in the best way for all concerned. Leave it to us and—’
‘No.’ Matthew interrupted me and spoke with a startling firmness in his voice. ‘It’s not a grown-up problem,’ he said. ‘It’s a Sam problem. I’ll talk to him.’
I was about to suggest that we might wait for Mary to return and hold a family conference, but before I could speak, Matthew was gone.
Sam was sitting on his bed, staring into space.
I sat down on the side of the bed and said, in as cool and matter-of-fact a tone as I could manage, ‘It turns out that one or two things have been happening without our knowing.’
‘Yeah?’ Sam’s voice was distant, bored.
I told him about the money, the wealth that was his, the cash that would keep flowing in, so long as the records of a group called 666 kept on selling. Normally I’d have expected him to cheer up at this point – Sam has always had a deep affection and respect for the dollar – but now he just sighed, as if none of it mattered any more.
‘So Mom wasn’t quite so dumb,’ he said quietly. We were reaching the tricky bit in our conversation, but Sam was there first. ‘My dad knows about this, right?’ I nodded. ‘And that’s why he’s flown over to London. Not to see me, but to get his hands on the cash.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe not.’
‘More than maybe. I know the guy.’
I looked at him for a moment. There was something helpless about Sam at times like this. All his swagger and bounce seemed to fall away, leaving this pale, solemn kid, as lost and lonely as anyone could be.
‘Was he really such a terrible father?’ I asked.
To my surprise, Sam shook his head. ‘He wasn’t so bad. Sure he and Mom had these big fights and he hung out with other women and he was always in some kind of trouble with the cops, but he had his good points.’
‘Like?’
‘As I got older, we spent more time together. We went out, just him, his guys and me. He’ – an odd smile had appeared on Sam’s face – ‘involved me in his work, shall we say.’
I waited, sensing there was more to come.
‘A kid can be useful,’ Sam murmured. ‘Say, when you’re cashing a stolen cheque and you’ve got a four-year-old creating all kinds of mayhem, it can make the cashier want to hand over the money just to get you out of there. Or when you need to get past the security guard in an office building, it helps if you’ve got junior in tow, bawling that he needs to go to the bathroom. Or if there’s some little guy, acting like he’s lost and frightened on the sidewalk, it can distract the cops for a few minutes. Stuff like that.’
I tried not to look shocked. ‘He took you on jobs with him?’
‘He introduced me to the family business a bit earlier than is usual. It was all right until…’ Sam looked down and flicked the thumb of his right hand as if tossing an invisible coin. ‘Until we kind of hit a wall.’
‘A wall?’
Sam turned to look at me. ‘If he takes me back, I’ll be gone. I’d take a hike. Hang out with a few of my old buddies from the gang.’
‘You’d run away?’
‘Sam Lopez does not run away. He relocates.’
I thought for a moment. ‘So you don’t want your father to find you for a while.’
‘That would seem to be the case.’
I told him my plan. Even before I had finished he was laughing.
Mary had returned from work and we were in the kitchen, discussing the latest developments, when Matthew re-appeared.
He told us that he had talked the whole thing through with Sam, that he had told him about the inheritance left by Gail. He said they had come up with a possible solution. ‘It might be a bit of a surprise,’ he said. ‘Just keep an open mind.’
To be frank, we were already in shock. This was not the Matthew we knew. The Sam crisis had changed him. We were used to a child – funny, awkward, our little boy. Suddenly it was as if he were taking charge not only of his cousin but of us, his parents.
I tried, as kindly as possible, to point out that, although we were grateful for his help, we had decided that it was impossible and impractical to keep Sam hidden for any length of time. On balance, we thought it was best to ask the advice of the police. ‘This is serious stuff,’ I said. By all accounts this Mr Lopez is not the most savoury of characters.’
It was at this point that the door behind me opened. Mary, who was sitting opposite me, looked over my shoulder.
Then she screamed.
As it happens, I probably haven’t allowed one involuntary sound of any volume to escape from my lips since I was about eleven years old.
But when I looked up to see her…him…it, standing there at the kitchen door, I felt a genuine sense of shock – even of fear.
It was a girl. Yet it wasn’t a girl. It was Sam. I could see that. All the same, he was so perfectly self-contained, so completely undisguised, that it just took my breath away. It was as if we were not seeing a fake, female version of Sam but that this was the real thing.
‘Hi, folks,’ he said quietly.
‘Bloody hell,’ said David.
Solemnly, Sam walked past us to the far wall, then turned, ambled back, and sat on one of the chairs. ‘Welcome to the new me,’ he said.
‘Where did you get the clothes?’ asked David.
‘They were Jake’s sister’s,’ said Matthew. ‘We borrowed them.’
‘Well.’ David tried for a smile but managed a wince. ‘You certainly look at home in them.’
‘That’s because I’ve been wearing them all week,’ said Sam.
‘What?’ This was both David and me.
Matthew smiled. ‘We had this idea. It was sort of a challenge. We wanted to trick the girls in class.’
‘I’ve never heard anything so thoroughly irresponsible in all my life,’ I said. ‘Did it work?’
‘What do you think?’ Sam widened his eyes slightly and smiled in an alarmingly feminine manner.
‘So that explains the plucked eyebrows,’ said David. ‘And you must have been Simone, Matthew’s girlfriend.’
‘Please don’t think I was too happy about that.’
I was looking more closely at him now and noticed something for the first time. ‘Sam, are those breasts?’ I asked.
We cruised by, late that night, checking out 23 Somerton Gardens, the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. Inside there were lights, people moving about, just like any family, all innocent and unaware that sharks were circling their little pool.
‘I can almost smell the money,’ I said.
‘Miew’ went Ottoleen. She was one happy kitten that night.
Now here’s a surprise. My parents were none too hot on the idea of Sam becoming a girl, round the clock, until his father gave up and went home. They came up with one objection after another – practical, legal, whether it would be a bad, bad thing that we would be doing – but the more we talked, the clearer the position became. This was one tough project – the stakes were high and so were the risks.
But if we all played our part, we could carry it off. Whether it was worth it or not came down to one person.
Late that evening, after supper, we sat in the living room and the silences grew longer and longer.
‘Maybe we should just be honest and straightforward and take it to the courts,’ Dad said.
‘We would simply explain that Sam has settled into life here,’ said my mother. ‘Mr Lopez would be very welcome to visit now and then.’
But Sam was shaking his head. ‘You don’t get it, you guys,’ he said softly. ‘Crash just doesn’t do honest and straightforward. The only time he’s been in a court is when his lawyer lets him take the stand. He’ll get me back – somehow he’ll do it.’
‘How would you feel about that?’ Mum asked.
Sam gazed at her for a moment, a cold and stony stare.
‘More to the point is, how would you feel, Mrs Burton?’
My mother held his look, then smiled. ‘I would be very sad, Sam Lopez.’
‘Me too,’ said Dad.
All three looked at me. ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. ‘I admit it would be pretty boring without you around. It’s almost like you’re part of the family.’
Sam blinked rapidly as if some speck of dirt was in his eye, then seemed to notice something on the floor which required his close attention. ‘I guess…’ He frowned. ‘I guess that’s how I feel too.’
Mum made as if to put an arm around Sam’s shoulders, but he shrank back, holding up his hands in mock horror. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘One step at a time, right?’
There was a moment of silence as each of us came to terms with the big scene of family bonding that had just taken place.
‘We need to work out what to do next,’ said my father eventually. ‘Tomorrow’s Friday. Go to school as’ – he smiled – ‘normal. We’ll make a decision over the weekend.’
Sam shrugged and stood up. ‘Suits me,’ he said. ‘But when he finds out where you live, old Crash’ll come knocking soon enough.’
‘Why do they call him Crash?’ Mum asked.
‘You’ll find out,’ said Sam.