Over the months while you were here, I never told you much about that period of my life, but throughout it all, any time I left our front door, I wanted to run, scream, do anything that would get the tightness out of my neck. I got away with stuff. Pushed it. Got brought back to the flat by what was left of the police a few times, but no one at home seemed to mind much. Davey and I got in fights with older kids. He got his arm sliced with a knife, but he thought the scar looked good so asked me to add more afterwards. He cut a Superman S into his own leg.
We were twelve, then turned thirteen. We started having sex. Not me and Davey together, though that did happen a couple of times, as a joke, maybe, more than anything. Mostly us and other people.
The first of my friends who did it was this girl Perry Beckett, with one boy, then two more on the same night. ‘They said I like it rough,’ she told us when she came to find us the next afternoon. She had bruises on her arms and on her neck. We crowded around. She showed us the biggest one, this purple-yellow tie-dye, so dark it looked alive, like there might be galaxies inside it, or you could stick a finger in. She asked us if it would always be like that. If they’d always do it like that.
I don’t know why the bruises made us all start. I sometimes think that there’s nothing childish about being a child. The opposite, almost. My first time was okay. He was only twelve or thirteen too. It was hands and pushing more than anything, no bigger than a finger anyway, this empty, soft thing. I remember the bed more than anything, the mattress looked like a big black bite had been taken out of it, a fire from a fallen cigarette. When we came out of his house, there was a group of older teenagers sitting out nearby.
‘You lot have started then. Fucking bait, bruv.’ They all shook the boy’s hand, that handshake where you bring it in to touch each other’s back. ‘Nothing else to do round here, is there?’ They looked at me. ‘No one else to do.’
After a few months my body had greenish thumbprints all over it. When Ma asked me what was going on, I told her we were all fighting, but for fun.
Later, when I came back with a long red scratch across my neck, she threw an ice cube across the room at me. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Isn’t there enough bad going on?’
At the time, Kole cooked most of the kem, which meant JD was the one selling on the streets. That was why JD was the one who got caught, and went to prison once, then twice. He joked that prison was the one thing that still worked – mandatory minimums with a judge who did it in batches – except the prison he went to the second time was different from the one before. The new one used to be a holding pen, he said, a ‘big-ass cage for refugees’.
The second time, JD was away for a year. Eleven months, actually, February to December, which was long enough for everything with Blue to happen.
Blue was born in November. A year later, Kole got a tattoo of Blue’s birthday big on the back of his calf, but he got it wrong by a day.
When JD got out of prison, he stared at the baby. Ma handed him over and JD held his tiny pale head in the palm of his hand and stared at him.
‘You two?’ He looked at Ma and Kole. ‘Together? I never would have…’ He shook his head. ‘I never would have guessed.’ Kole took Ma’s hand. ‘But if you’re happy,’ he said. He turned to me after that, ‘How you doing, titch?’ but it was hard for me to look at him, or say anything.
Prison wasn’t good for JD that time. It wasn’t good for either of us. He came back with his muscles doughy, and under his eyes looked like black-sand beaches. I looked at him and wanted to look after him, but my whole body was wound tight, like the slightest touch would send me spinning.
‘Is it because I’ve been away so long?’ he said. ‘Not you too, angry with me. Please don’t be. Please come sit.’ He hadn’t left the house since he came back. He’d barely moved from the sofa, which I’d never seen him do before. I sat down, a little gap between us at first and then, when we were alone in the flat, he pulled me into him and started crying and I had never seen him cry before and so I cried a little bit as well.
‘I think I’ve got it too,’ he said, after the longest while.
‘What?’
‘The thing,’ he said. ‘The anxiety.’
‘What, like being worried?’
‘No, the proper one,’ he said. He looked up at me. ‘What Liam had. The anxiety – you know, when he’d flex his fingers a lot ’cos it was all pins and needlesy in there. I think I’ve got it too now. Do you think I have?’
I told him I didn’t know. When he was in jail, he said, they gave them shots in their arms, shots to calm them down.
‘But I feel shit now,’ he said. ‘Soft, like I can’t lift up. It’s not good though, it’s not good. It isn’t good.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all through my head,’ he said. ‘All thick.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘But do you think it’s for ever?’
He asked me after that if it would get better, and I didn’t know what to say.
On New Year’s Eve, JD said he wanted to stay home to look after the baby. He said he wanted to get to know him. He smiled for the first time in ages and said he was going to teach Blue all the secrets of life. He picked him up and kissed his eyebrows. It was the first moment that he’d looked happy since he’d come back. He did this noisy little sucky sound on Blue’s nose, then walked around with him, this figure of eight rocking against his chest. Baby bro, bro, bro, bro, he said.
I went out with Davey – we lit Catherine wheels made out of bike spokes in Cliftonville and they only half-worked – but I came home early.
When I opened the door to our flat, I saw JD straight away. He was sat on the floor in a right angle in the doorway to my room. I couldn’t work out the image at first – that way where your brain just stops being able to process, to put together colours and shapes and make meaning. There was powder all round him, and his face – it wasn’t his face.
I touched his shoulder. He didn’t move. Then I shook him. I shook him again. His head hit the wood of the door frame. It slumped forward.
I touched his neck. It was hot because the room was hot but there was no pulse. I put my fingers to his mouth, I put my ear against it, nothing. I shook him again and again and I held his head, and when I realised, when I realised, when I realised…
I walked backwards until my shoulders were against a wall too. Blue. Where was Blue. Fear came like cold fingers round the back of my neck and picked me up. One room, no sign of him, the next room, nothing, then finally – there he was on my bed. Too small to crawl. Too small to even hold his head up. But he was okay. Okay on the bed. My hands fell over him, around him, he started crying, I picked him up. And I sat there on the bed, and I held him, and for a while I couldn’t make myself go back.
The days after that passed in a blur. Like the world was moving all around me, and I was just completely still. Seeing Ma and Kole together at the funeral made it a hundred times worse. Kole was what? Twenty-three maybe, rock-hard arms and double-yoke shoulders and these stupid lines shaved into his eyebrows. He’d rented a suit and he kept on looking down at his own body and smoothing down his arms. Everyone said how good he looked. But Ma – he hadn’t thought to get her anything to wear. She was wearing a summer dress even though it had rained all morning, with a black cardigan, the buttons done up wrong until halfway through the service.
We stood together, Kole, Ma, me and Blue. Blue in Ma’s arms until it looked like she might drop him, and Kole took him and tucked him under his arm like a parcel. Everyone we knew was at the service. When Davey got there he kept on saying sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, like it was the only word he knew.
JD’s casket was open. When it was my turn to put a flower in, I looked at his hands. How big they were, how safe. The bumps on his nails, the way he could lift me above his head in a single swoop. His hands on my head. His hands making a tent for us under sheets. His hands that had always tried to keep mine warm. My brother.
With Blue in my arms, I walked behind Kole and Ma on the way home. The way he guided her down the street, like she was an old lady he was helping to cross the road. But she wasn’t old, I realise that now. She was thirty-eight. He made her old. Then, as soon as they’d be home, his hands would be all over her. He’d paw her into the bedroom, slap her bum and catch my eye, and the things that he said to her in there were loud enough for me to remember some of them word for word.
The first time he hit her, I remember the blood coming from her eye, but maybe the blood had been on her hand and she moved it up by covering her face. After he’d gone, even though the networks were pretty much gone by then, she made me go to someone’s house to charge her phone, and then kept on checking the sound was on, in case he called her. He came back a couple of days later with flowers, and a pack of tissues. ‘Soft,’ he said, as if you could buy hard ones. ‘I am sorry though,’ he said after that. ‘I am sorry. It’s not me. It’s a different part of me.’ He looked at her. He looked at me.
Blue was the tiniest baby anyone had ever seen. He smiled early, this faraway smile, a tiny bit sad if that’s possible, but clever. His nose would crinkle, I’d think he wanted to sneeze, but it would never come. He was the size of a hand – my hand and the beginning of my wrist – for a month, and then he suddenly started to grow. The way it happened so fast reminded me of a plant.
I grew too. Tall, then taller, like I was matching him inch for inch, having a race. My ankles stuck out of my trousers. The sleeves of my T-shirts started at the middle of my shoulders. If I’d stood up next to my mum, back to back, I would have, for the first time in my life, been taller than her, but I found it hard to stand next to her. I found it hard to look at her sometimes. Her and Kole together. How happy she would be, and then the sounds that she would make, curled in the corner, when he hit her and left. The way I found her scrunched up on the sofa sometimes, sick on her top.
I cut my hair myself without a mirror. I lined up the scissors with each of my collarbones. Kole told me it was better longer, so I cut it again.
When the washout happened – huge waves, waist-high water through the whole town – I felt almost numb to it. This sense that it was bound to happen, this sense of, fine, come on then, wash it all away.
Davey and I didn’t know a single person with a job. There weren’t any jobs. Stealing made sense. It started for fun – curiosity, boredom, the same as breaking into Tracey’s – but it was easy. We were good at it. I could scale up drainpipes, make it to the top of a wall with my fingertips. He knew people who knew people through his Uncle Trevor to sell stuff on. So many houses had been left behind, it was fifty–fifty, luck of the draw, much better than that. Sometimes alarms might ring, though less and less and, even if they did, it didn’t matter. No one would come.
All around us, England went right, then right, then more right, then ultra-right, then left, but no, still right – I couldn’t follow it, no one could really follow it. ‘Going in circles,’ Caleb said, ‘that’s all we need to know.’ When the government was bad, charity would come our way. NGOs, non-profits, go-it-aloners. When the government got worse, we’d get less – people needed what they had at home. These were the rhythms that we lived by.
I got to sixteen. A smash of freckles across my nose, and strong arms from pull-ups into windows. It had been two years since JD had died. I wore the T-shirts that he’d left behind. I’d never been in love. And that’s what I was like the day you met me.