It wasn’t long after Localisation that school stopped for good. Ours, anyway. Or not stopped, but moved, to a single unit shared between three towns. I went a couple of times, but they didn’t do attendance, and most of the teachers were on a web link. Near us, there was still a school for special kids, but it was run by a charity, and even they pulled out soon enough.
It wasn’t hard to fill the time. Me and Davey knew kids everywhere. Old school foster kids and ‘looked-after kids’ who didn’t seem that looked after. Kids in the flats above the Liquor Locker, and the rooms above Reaperz Inc. Nayland Rock Hotel, The Dolphin. Like I said, a lot of hotels. People had left if they could, but they weren’t the people we knew. Everyone our age who stuck around, we knew to nod to. Before the shopping centre got boarded up, we took it in turns to see who could take the smell of the ‘by weight’ charity shop the longest. And until they got dogs at Tracey’s, dogs that moved on ropes attached to long chains that ran all through the building, we would sneak back in and sit in our old classrooms. The electricity was off in the building so the boards didn’t work, but we wrote on them in pens. Pretend lessons, mostly about sex.
I don’t think we actually ever were bored, but we talked about being bored all the time.
We did run-outs from the Polish shops, took beers, ham, chocolate. Someone reopened – not officially, they just broke open the door – the old Club Caprice, Neon Ballroom, whatever it was called by the time it shut, and put on parties. We spent long evenings drinking in our spot on the Winter Gardens roof, until it rained too hard one night and the asphalt fell in. We charged about, tops off in the sun, hoods up in the dark. Dalby Square, Trinity Square, any square.
In my memory of that time, there was always enough food if you looked for it. One night, Davey ripped the grill off an old fridge and we used it to barbecue. He blew on the fire to make the flames leap and cracked the same joke each time – that he was a long-distance dragon. The fridge grill let all this gas out, and made everything taste funny, but we ate it all anyway, and not because we had to, just because that felt part of it.
Another moment. JD pulling me into the living room, because there was more light there. He wanted us to look at each other and tell each other what we saw.
He wasn’t high, or if he was, not very. It was mostly because he was vain and some girl had just dumped him. He was the vainest boy I ever knew – whenever I stole his phone, I found albums and albums of pictures he’d taken of himself – but I was happy to do it. I missed him. When Kole was around he was different. He didn’t ask me any of his questions, his questions about how things worked, or whether people were good or not.
At first, JD made a brick of his jaw, I could see him tensing, and he turned his head from one side to the other so I could get the full show. Then he laughed, this champagne big thing. ‘I’m being a twat, sorry,’ he said. But I didn’t laugh. I looked at him. I really looked. And that’s why I remember that moment so clearly. His crushed earlobes, a tangle of cartilage he could never get a piercing through. His stray eyebrows. His light paper blue eyes.
‘When’s my turn, dickhead?’ I said after that.
He laughed again. Then did the serious jaw. His eyes narrowed. ‘Kole says you’re sweet-looking,’ he said. ‘Cute.’
I looked away from him. That was not what I was expecting.
‘You’re a child though.’ JD looked like he was working this out for himself, like it was a mathematical thing. ‘That’s what you are.’
‘Am not,’ I said.
‘You are, you div.’
‘Not,’ I said. I tried to do a chop thing on his neck.
He held my thin little arms above my head. ‘I don’t mean it rude.’ He shook his head at me and shook my arms with it. ‘I don’t! All I’m saying is, stay that way. Stay that way.’ He let my arms go, and reached for a smoke. ‘Promise you will, just for a while.’
I know what he meant now. I was quite clearly a child. I was twelve. My chest was concave. I’d tried to shave my legs, but the hair grew back soft or not at all.
‘Although there’s one thing,’ he said. ‘Something someone round here’s got to be an adult about.’
He pulled me into the kitchen – he was always pulling me around; not roughly, it was just because I was so light and he was so heavy – and opened the door to the tumble dryer. It hadn’t worked even when we arrived but it was too bulky to even imagine carrying back down the stairs. ‘And for that I nominame you.’
‘Nominate.’
‘Yeah.’
His fingers rapped a beat on the plastic of the machine.
‘I found a place for it,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘The money. Our money. Upgraded again. Got a new box and everything. And I’m adding to it and all that. Properly this time. I figured it was up to me now. To be a man and stuff. For real though. Do you think?’
As he talked, he opened up the door to the tumble dryer and showed me. He reached up at an angle like he was delivering a baby and I peered in after his wrist. The new money box was stuck to the top of the barrel with duct tape.
He said that he was putting money in it, money every week, but that we must never touch it and that that was a promise. ‘A promise, Cha,’ he said. I nodded. We shook hands, with one hand and then the other, in this criss-cross, unbreakable. He said I was the official guardian, and that I had to watch Ma.
‘Watch out for Ma, look out for her,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean. I just got to thinking. Way it is, we need a back-up plan.’
Every now and then, I took out the box and looked at it. I counted the notes and there was only ever more and more in there. Because that was the thing. There started to be money around. Not out in the streets, but in our flat, definitely. JD and Kole started making kem in our bathtub. Kole had a recipe he’d inherited from his dad. (‘Inherited!’ Ma said. ‘You’d think it was a recipe for cake.’) And JD, after years of what he called market research, had tips for making it better.
He explained it to me once. It was anything, really, he said, as long as it got you fucked. But for theirs, they bulked it out with the liquid that used to go into e-cigarettes, cooked down, because they could buy boxes and boxes of the stuff for no money at all. Then they added any out-of-date legal highs they could get their hands on – spice, mamba, voodoo. When I asked to help, they let me open the packets and tip them into bowls. The squeaky crackle of cellophane. ‘Oi, donkey, send it to the list, will you?’ JD would say, weighing powder on his scales with one hand and sliding his phone over the table to me with the other, and I’d transcribe then send out their texts. PSA from the NHyeS – this is the party doctor! 241 on the smoke this wknd. blow your rocks off. Things like that. They’d be laughing as they made them up.
Kole bought masks from the hardware shop, though I never saw either of them with the material bit actually over their mouth. Whenever they were working, Ma made me wait in my bedroom with the door shut and the window open, so I never saw how they actually did it. But it meant that none of us could use the shower any more, so when we wanted to wash, we had to do it in the kitchen sink.
We weren’t richer in the way that I thought richer would be. We didn’t move, and our flat, the dull walls and slipping-off curtains, stayed the same. There were just new things in the living room, piled in the centre or stacked up around the edge, so there was only a kind of circular walkway through the middle.
Both JD and Kole liked furniture that was black and shiny. ‘Console tables’, whatever that meant. At one point, we had three or four of them. And whenever either of the boys brought a new thing back, they would call the flat a bachelor pad, or the batch patch, as if Ma and I weren’t living there too.
Mostly, though, they came home with groups of people. Men and girls, the age gaps always big. JD and Kole would cram together bottles of every alcohol on every table and platefuls of kem. Literally platefuls of it, on the plates we used for eating.
They told stories together, Kole sitting back and letting JD do the work, until he’d lean forward and drop the punchline. He was good at it. Good at timing. The way small movements on his face would pull our reactions like puppet strings. Normally at some point, Kole would tell a story all alone. When I tried to tell Caleb one of them, and kept on saying I was getting it wrong because Kole did it better, I remember Caleb rolling his eyes. ‘Tell you one thing I’ve learned in life,’ he said. ‘All the worst people in the world? They’re brilliant at telling stories.’
Ma would sit with them. All those people. Shy at first but then she’d get louder. I remember her sitting to the side with all the girls one night. I remember the way she looked at Kole. The way she chewed her lip.
‘I know I’ve got ten years on him,’ she said to the others. They were all looking at him too. ‘But fuck me, I’d like to teach him how it’s done.’ She changed her voice when she spoke to those friends. Her voice had changed full stop. She’d sent me to bed. I’d snuck back. She didn’t know I could hear.
At very first, or at times, anyway, it was like having two JDs. ‘Gone from no dads, to two dads in a way,’ Ma said. ‘Now dimwit’s grown up.’ That was one of the problems – she could never work out whether Kole was my dad or my brother. All of it was all too flat. She told me that when Kole was around she’d prefer it if I called her Jas. That I wasn’t a baby any more, and more than anything Ma, Mum, Mad, all the words I had for her, made her sound older than she was – older than she felt. Sometimes she’d link arms with me and I’d feel her shrink herself, like she was trying to make us sisters.
There were times when we did something as a family – JD loved the thought of having a brother, he was the one who said ‘family’ so much – that I saw this look pass over Kole. The muscles under his skin would relax, and for a second he’d look happy, he’d look calm. I’d feel this little soar inside me then. The thought that we could make him happy, even for a single moment. I think we all felt it. That’s the thing about someone who’s hard to please like that, erratic. It’s addictive in a way. Anything that’s rare enough tricks you. It makes you want it.
Anyway, these moments of peace – his eyes shut for a second, like he could keep it in his head – they wouldn’t last long. He’d drink too much. Much more than JD, more even than my mum. I’m bigger, he’d say, I need more, or he’d go out to get some stuff, and when he came back, his shoulders would be popped again, even higher than before, and we’d feel it in ours. A tension, a pushed spring, a question we asked ourselves most days, or I did anyway – what would he do next?
So, no. Not rich in a normal way. I still didn’t have any socks, but when JD visited a woman in Broadstairs for the weekend, Kole got me a pair of trainers that were so expensive he said I should only wear them inside. ‘Pink,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what girls like.’ He looked embarrassed, if that was possible. ‘Look grateful then. Fuck’s sake, give us a smile at least.’
I looked at him. When I didn’t smile, because I was trying to work out what was happening, his face became angry again, almost like a wave.
He threw the shoes next to where I was sitting on the sofa, two smack-like kicks. ‘They’re for bests – do you hear? Oi, dipshit. Don’t you dare fuck about with them on the street.’