Demus’s parting words had been to get Mia to meet him in the park on Saturday evening. So now, in addition to having my own little voice inside my head telling me to call her and ask her out, I had . . . my own, older voice outside my head telling me pretty much the same thing. And I desperately wanted to ignore them both.
I wished Demus had told me more, but I guessed he could only tell me what he remembered telling me. He probably remembered my frustration, too. But somehow this loop of recollection and action had been frozen in place into Demus’s memory, and if we broke it then all of Demus’s certainty about what happened next would vanish along with whatever he was hoping to achieve. And since he was me, I assumed that his ambitions were in my best interest. At least he got to punch Michael Devis in the face. I could imagine how satisfying that felt, especially after twenty-five years waiting for it. I just wished Demus had shown up when Ian Rust did and kicked the shit out of him, too. Though, thinking about it, that guy was scary as hell whoever you were, and I guessed I was probably going to be no keener to meet him at forty than at fifteen.
Mia then. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, seeing her face. I could imagine doing it. Creeping to the telephone in the hall, dialling her number, easing the dial back after each digit so the noise of it resetting wouldn’t bring Mother out as witness. ‘Hi,’ Mia would say. ‘Hi,’ I would say back, voice low, hopefully sounding seductive rather than like a boy scared his mother might come into the hall to ask what he was doing. ‘Hi, Mia. Nick here. We should get together again. My place?’ It seemed almost easy. I was admittedly slightly high on cannabis resin. The stuff had taken my pain and nausea and squeezed them into a corner where I still noticed them but wasn’t tripping over them all the time.
I would, of course, need her number first. John had it, but he’d be full of questions. For all I knew, they were going out together already. Holding hands, snogging in the park . . . But then, if that were true, why had they come for me that night? Three’s a crowd.
I could call John and he’d give Mia’s number to me, but I would have to pay for it. Not in money. He had plenty of that. But in other less substantial currencies. And I wouldn’t hear the end of it. ‘Did she say no, Nick? Was she gentle with you? Did she laugh?’ I didn’t want John as an audience to this any more than I wanted Mother listening in the background. No, it had to be Elton.
Elton’s comprehensive had the Wednesday off that week; Founder’s Day, or something. I told Mother I was too sick for school, but not sick enough to stay in bed. She let me stay home and went to teach science to her current crop of students in the vague hope that, this year, at least one or two of them would make it into university. I’d never really understood why she had decided to teach. She wasn’t what you’d call a people person any more than I was. I understood the choice of the sciences, though. It wasn’t a subject traditionally sold through the warmth of the teacher’s personality or their passion for the material.
She let me stay home with a defeated kind of air, where once she would have encouraged me to try to study and spoken of upcoming exams. Watching her leave and walk into the street it suddenly struck me quite how hard all of this must be for her. And, at the same time, I knew that Demus must have understood this thing for many years. Widowed by cancer, her only child struck down with another flavour of the same disease. It’s always been hard for me to see myself through others’ eyes, but I suppose that seeing Demus helped with that. Normally, just being fifteen wholly occupied my mind. The baby crawling toward the camera in the photo albums, the toddler with his bear and a red plastic car, that string of little Nicks linking this gangling teenager to the moment of my birth . . . none of that had shelf room in my thoughts. But Mother must see those children queued behind me every time she looked my way. And all of us were at risk.
I guess if either Mother or I had been a little less awkward in our skins, a little more Elton and a little less Simon, we would have been able to talk, to hug, to do the right thing and make all of this mess a little less terrible. But we weren’t born like that, and couldn’t.
I found myself hoping very much that Demus had found something useful to say to Mother that first night in the hospital corridor. From where he stood, she was of similar age. Perhaps in his future she was dead already, and he carried that around with him. My eyes misted and I realised that there was at least one thing about the future I didn’t want to know. It would be enough to know that he’d found the words I couldn’t and said something to help.
I took my bike from the shed and cycled to Elton’s house. I may have wobbled a little and ignored the odd traffic light, but oddly cycling was less painful than walking, and a hell of a lot quicker.
Elton lived two miles away on the far side of Richmond Park. His flat was about halfway along the line that joined the gentrified heart of Richmond, with its stockbroker mansions and well-heeled townhouse terraces, to the concrete jungle of Brixton. During the Brixton riots last autumn – the second set of riots within four years in that area – you could see the smoke from Elton’s window. A month later, they had another riot north of the river in Tottenham, and tried to stick a policeman’s head on a pole. I’d asked Elton what he thought of it. He just shook his head. ‘Nothing to do with me. That’s Jamaicans, man. Is ten thousand miles from Jamaica to Madagascar.’
I’d considered saying the arguments behind the violence might have had more to do with the colour of people’s skin rather than where that skin sailed to England from, but I didn’t. The truth was I didn’t know anything about it really. Not even what Elton and his family went through. And according to John it wasn’t good. So, I shut my mouth.
When I pulled up, Elton was outside the block eating rice and chillies from a bowl. He always seemed to eat outside, unless it was raining. Cold, though, not a problem. He’d stroll back and forth along the strip of dying grass that ran between the flats and the low wall to the street. In the summer, other kids would lean out from their windows to chat. They all knew him. It seemed odd to me that Elton spent so much time learning to fight when he was the person least likely, out of anyone I knew, to have to. People just liked him.
The blocks were four storeys high, and sometimes when the little kids called to him, Elton would climb up the outside Spider-Man style to say hello. He had fingers like steel rods and zero fear of heights.
He saw me as I chained my bike to the gatepost and came across frowning. ‘That won’t last. Gotta bring it in.’
‘Your place? Won’t your mum mind?’ The idea of cramming my bike into their tiny hallway worried me, muddy wheels on Mrs Arnot’s linoleum. The woman was fiercely house proud, endlessly kind, and I lived in terror of her disapproval.
‘She’ll mind more if I have to chase down whoever takes it.’ Elton nodded me toward their door. ‘It’s not locked.’
I took the bike in, leaning it against the radiator. The hallway was dim, the wall-space crowded with little knickknacks. The sort of comfortable clutter I always hankered after. Though Mother would never entertain that sort of thing on the empty magnolia acres of her walls. I breathed the place in. There was always something cooking, and it always smelled good. The TV burbled in the living room. Elton’s brothers would probably be in there, maybe all four jammed on the sofa, watching a martial arts film on their Betamax.
Elton still had his frown when I came out again. He offered me his bowl.
‘Hot?’ I asked.
‘A bit spicy.’ I could see a light sheen of sweat on his brow despite the January chill.
‘Best not.’ I grinned. When Elton called something spicy it meant it would remove the skin from most other people’s tongue. Everything smelled good at the Arnots’ house, but you took your life in your hands if you put it in your mouth without a taste test first.
‘I’m not happy with you,’ Elton said.
‘Me?’ It was the last thing I was expecting to hear. ‘What have I done?’
‘Mia.’ Elton narrowed his stare and took another spoon of rice.
‘What?’
Elton ringed his left eye with finger and thumb.
I realised he meant the black eye Mia had at the last session. ‘Me? You don’t think—’
‘I know you didn’t hit her, moron.’ He scraped up the last of the bowl’s contents.
‘What then? Who did hit her?’ I’d been wanting to ask on Saturday, but never got the chance.
‘I’m not happy with John, either,’ Elton said.
‘John didn’t do that.’ I couldn’t believe it of him.
Elton waved the idea away. ‘Both of you been getting her back with the wrong people. Dangerous people, Nick. A punch don’t make no never mind. Those folk will cut you over nothing. Push them and you’ll turn up on a missing person’s list. These guys will wrap you in bin bags and sink you in the river. I ain’t kidding.’