When you’re little, it’s easy. You see your dad, you run out of school and give him a hug. He tells you he loves you and you don’t give a damn who hears it.
Then you’re almost thirteen. Sat in the passenger seat of your dad’s chugging Ford sedan with a lot of different feelings.
Sorry for what you’ve done.
Freaked out that you almost got killed.
Cursing the bad luck that meant you got caught.
Mortified that everyone in your class saw your dad wearing shoes held together with sticky tape.
Knowing that your dad is a gentle soul and you crushed him when you told him he was an embarrassment …
Robin couldn’t look at his dad, so he stared out of the window at his hometown, or what was left of it.
Locksley had been a car-making town. At its peak there were sixty thousand auto workers on good union wages. Rival assembly plants faced each other across the River Macondo and a car rolled off a production line every twenty-eight seconds. One million cars per year …
But the factories moved to sunnier climes, with cheap workers and solar energy. People left to find work. Neighbourhoods emptied, leaving houses worth no more than the electrical cables and copper pipes that could be stripped out and melted for scrap. Locksley High had been built for three thousand kids and now had less than six hundred.
When people and companies left, so did the taxes they paid the City to fix roads, maintain parks, and pay cops, teachers and fire officers. So the town started falling apart, which made more people move away, and then there was even less money …
Robin had grown up seeing media reports about Locksley’s spiral of decline. He saw plenty of evidence as they merged onto a high street of boarded-up shops, empty parking bays, crashed-out addicts and the warped steel frame of a burnt-out Eldridge’s department store.
‘This isn’t the way home,’ Robin said, breaching the awkward silence as they stopped at a red light. There were no shoppers wanting to cross, and a postal truck going the other way didn’t bother obeying the signal.
‘I was at work when Mr Barclay called,’ Ardagh answered. ‘I have a stop to make, then a class at the library. You can sit at the back and make a start on that essay …’
Robin sighed. ‘How do I write two thousand words?’ he moaned. ‘Saying sorry is five sentences, tops.’
Ardagh smiled slightly as the light went green. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to hack Mr Barclay’s password and change your report card.’
Robin gulped.
Dad’s clever, but how the hell?
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Ardagh teased. ‘I noticed you’d been spending a lot of time looking at hacker forums on the web and wondered why you’d downloaded database software on the computer in the back room.
‘I didn’t figure it out, until I realised there was nothing worth stealing in Mr Barclay’s office, and noticed that the power cable on his PC was pulled out, like someone had switched it off in a hurry.’
‘Ahh …’ Robin said weakly, then asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell Mr Barclay?’
Ardagh shrugged. ‘You might get away with it.’
Robin screwed up his face with frustration. ‘Or Barclay might punish me more when he finds out.’
‘You’re certainly facing a dilemma,’ Ardagh agreed. ‘Perhaps you could make your two-thousand-word essay into a full confession.’
‘You’re my dad – tell me what to do!’ Robin begged.
‘This world is full of sheep,’ Ardagh said thoughtfully, as he slowed the car and indicated to turn off. ‘I’ve always set loose boundaries because I want you and John to learn to think for yourselves. But I won’t always be around to bail you out.’
Robin squirmed cluelessly in his seat.
‘Why don’t you message some of your cool friends and see what they think you should do?’
Robin groaned. ‘I’m sorry I said you were an embarrassment.’
Ardagh stared at the road, ignoring the apology.
‘Dad, none of those kids you saw are my friends. I’m the brainy titch. I like archery and computers. I have a rubbish phone and unfashionable trainers. Nobody apart from Alan speaks to me.’
Robin got distracted as they turned off into a parking lot.
They’d reached the liveliest remnant of Locksley High Street, a strip mall, across from the abandoned light-rail terminal where you could once have ridden a tram fifteen stops to the centre of Nottingham.
Hipsta’s Drive Thru Donut had mums and tradies seeking caffeine and sugar, and the Curl Up and Dye salon kept busy fixing up elderly ladies who’d starve sooner than cancel their regular hairdo. But they rolled past these and stopped by the aquamarine frontage of Captain Cash.
‘What are we here for?’ Robin asked. ‘You hate Captain Cash.’