Devil You Know (3 page)

“Have you got to come in with me?” I asked the policeman. “I’d rather go in on my own.”

He leaned over the back of the seat. “Sorry, son. As I told you, you’re not in any real trouble, but we have to make sure your parents know what’s happened and the trouble you might have gotten into.”

“Parent,” I said. “I’ve only got one. I don’t have a dad.”

He nodded. “Oh. Sorry.”

“My mum’s got a boyfriend though.” I made sure he knew that. I wanted him, both of them, to know that crew-cut Vince of the tattoos, ex-SAS, was no dad of mine.

In fact, it was Vince who opened the door. He looked from the policemen to me, and you could see his annoyance written all over his face. He’d never make a poker player. Everything about him said, ‘What’s he done now?’

“Are you Mr Massie?” the older policeman asked.

I turned on him. “I told you. I don’t have a dad. He’s not my dad.”

“Do you want to speak to my wife?”

“Your wife?”

Vince nodded. I never let anyone know they were married. Kept hoping it wasn’t true. “Yes, my wife. He didn’t tell you that we were married, I suppose. Come on in.”

My mum came running down the hall then. “What’s happened?”

The policeman held up his hands. “The boy’s not in any trouble. Him and his friends were heading for the community centre and they
were confronted by one of the gangs in the area. They were protecting themselves. It turned into a fight.”

It was then I remembered Baz had been the first one to jump in. I hoped they never found that out. Of course I didn’t mention that Baz or Mickey had been there too. I knew none of the boys would. It would have been a betrayal even to name them.

As the policeman spoke, my mum was leading both of them into the living room. “I always warn him to stay out of trouble.” She glanced at Vince when she said that, and I could tell they’d been talking about me. Well, I had lived down to all their expectations, hadn’t I? Here I was, escorted home by the police.

“Better keeping clear of these gangs.” This was Vince. “We keep telling him that.”

“We were trying to go to the community centre. That was all. But this gang, the Young Bow—” I felt I spat the words out, “—that’s in their territory, and they decide who gets in and who doesn’t. They were barring our way. Have you ever heard anything so stupid?”

The younger policeman said, “You can get to the community centre, you know. They send a bus to the precinct, takes you there and takes you back.”

Couldn’t they understand this is what really annoyed me? “And that’s what we should do then? Get a bus, like a bunch of wee scaredy-cat boys, so we don’t give the Young Bow any bother?”

“Logan!” My mum sounded exasperated. “The policeman’s trying to be helpful.”

“This is supposed to be a free country.” I nodded across to Vince. “Is that not what Rambo here was fighting for?”

I could see I was losing any sympathy I’d had from the two policemen. I was turning into a boy with a bad attitude. I didn’t care. We hadn’t done anything bad. We should be able to go anywhere we wanted. What was I saying that was so wrong?

After that, I said nothing. It was all very civilised till the police left and then it was Vince who gave me the lecture, not my mum. This was the man who’d been chucked out of the army, now he couldn’t get a job. My mum was the sole wage-earner, and she didn’t exactly get executive pay at the call centre. He was living off her, he should be grateful. Instead, he went on about how they had warned me about gangs and fighting and stuff like that, while my mum sat on the sofa, looking as if she was ready to cry again.

“All we asked you to do was to stay away from trouble. And you couldn’t even do that, could you? Do you do this deliberately to upset your mum?”

What was it to do with him? I wanted to know. It’s my mum’s house, not his. It’s in her name, I was sure of it. Why didn’t she throw him out?

And do you know what he said? “You live in another world, Logan.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” I had said it over and over, and still he didn’t listen. “And it’s not your house,” I reminded him again.

He didn’t like that. My mum stepped in between us. I wondered if she thought he was going to hit me. Though he never has. Got to admit that. Never even come near it. If he’d ever lifted his hand to me, he’s the one who would have been in trouble.

“You promised me, Logan.” Her voice was breaking, as if her throat hurt, as if she had been crying for a long time. Long before tonight.

But her tears couldn’t get to me any more. Her boyfriend was the only one who mattered to her. I didn’t. Do you know how that makes you feel? If only my dad was here. Why did he have to die!

Die!

There, I’d said it. I’d said the word, though it broke my heart. He had died and left me. Everybody deserts me, that’s how I felt. That was the excuse for everything I did.

I ran out of the house and banged the door and stood on the walkway and yelled – like some kind of ancient warrior. My voice seemed to bounce off the walls and then it rose up through the canyons of the high-rise
flats and into the night.

Doors opened on the balcony, neighbours took one look at me and shut them again. None of them liked me, I was sure of it. They’d probably seen me being escorted home by the cops, thought I’d done something terrible. They all thought I was trouble, though I’d never done anything to them.

“There’s something wrong with that Logan boy,” I’d heard one of them whisper as I passed their door. How they’d come to that conclusion I don’t know – I’d never done anything to them.
Stuff them
, I thought.
Why should I care what they think?

And then Vince comes running out of the flat. “What on earth do you think you’re playing at?!”

I pushed past him and slammed back inside. If he was going to apologise to the neighbours, he could do it by himself.

I heard him and Mum talking about me as I lay in my bed. Tried not to listen but the walls are like paper, you could hear the whisper of a whisper through them.

“Out of control,” I heard Vince say. “You really have to do something about him, Marie.”

I waited for her answer, waited to hear her shout, tell him to get out of her house:
My son comes first!
But there was no answer. I could only hear muffled voices, and then there was silence. She was probably whispering sweet nothings in his tattooed ear.

I saw Baz next day. He was waiting for me at the corner when I was heading for the precinct. “Where did you go to last night?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I hoofed it. What was the point of me hanging about? No point in all of us getting lifted.”

I told him about being taken home by the police. “You should have heard what I got when I got back.”

He laughed, another of his big belly laughs. “I did actually. You were yelling that loud I could have heard you in Aberdeen.”

I laughed too. He always made me feel better.

The boys were all at the precinct. All with a tale to tell. A big warning for Gary from his dad, who didn’t like any contact with the law. As for Claude’s mum, she had spoiled him rotten, sent out for a deep-fried pizza and chips to make him feel better. I told them what happened to me, and there were nods of sympathy, until Gary said, “I thought you’d be used to the police taking you home.”

I’d told them once, in a stupid moment, about things that had happened in Aberdeen when I was running with a bad crowd. I’d been trying to show off to them, show them how tough I was. It annoyed me now that Gary brought that up.

“Things have been different here though, haven’t they?” Baz said it, his tone daring Gary to challenge it.

But Gary did. “Not last night they weren’t!” Then he held up his hands as if he was surrendering. “Sorry, Logan, shouldn’t have said that.”

I patted him on the back. He didn’t often talk back to Baz. That took a
bit of nerve, and I liked Gary, I liked how he always stuck up for his dad. Didn’t matter if his old man was a bit of a crook, or that there were times when he had lost his temper with Gary and lifted his hand to him. He thought his dad was brilliant in spite of everything.

I turned to Mickey. He was sitting on the pavement, his mangy dog curled up by his feet. “What about you, Mickey? You did a runner last night.”

He shook his head. “I would have got hell if I’d been picked up by the cops. My dad would have killed me or worse, even if he knew it wasn’t my fault.”

Nobody, I noticed, asked why Baz had run off. And Baz didn’t offer any explanation either.

“I don’t know what we were even thinking about, going there,” Claude said. “Bad idea.”

“We did it, because we stand for freedom!” I got to my feet and yelled: “FREEDOM!”

Claude laughed. “Well said, Logan.”

“But who says we’ll not do it again, eh? It’s too dangerous,” Mickey asked.

“Oh, come on,” said Baz. “What was dangerous? We got in a fight, proved we could stand up to that gang. Gave them a good run for their money, didn’t we?”

“I think we were just lucky the cops came when they did,” said Mickey.

He was right, I probably knew that, but there had been something exciting about confronting the Young Bow, one of the worst gangs in the area, and standing up to them. I had been scared, but excited too. I wanted to have that feeling again, the feeling I had had last night.

“They said it wasn’t finished. They’re gonny get us back,” Gary said.

I shrugged. “Well, we let them see we’re not scared of them. If they want to mess with us, let them try.”

I didn’t go out for the next couple of nights. My mum was so pleased about that. She had a couple of days off and we spent them together, just her and me. The atmosphere in the house was so much better. Even with Vince – he was smiling, whistling. And Mum and I had real talks, not arguments. This was a new start for us here in Glasgow, she said. Things were going to be good from now on. She was waiting for news about a house well away from here. My heart fell when she said that. A new beginning, moving to a new area, just when I was making friends here. I would lose Baz, and the rest of the boys. She didn’t understand how hard it was for me to make new friends, to begin again somewhere different. I didn’t say any of that to her, of course. I didn’t want to make my mother unhappy. It just seemed I never got the chance to fit in anywhere. And no matter how hard I tried, things went wrong.

She’d made all my favourite teas, mince and potatoes, macaroni cheese, and we ate together, and, you know, just being together, without Vince, it was almost like old times. I could almost imagine us waiting for my dad to come in, then Mum putting out his tea, and the three of us sitting round the table while he told us all about his day. Only we weren’t waiting for Dad any more, were we? It was Vince we waited for now.

So don’t think I didn’t consider staying in. Staying in for the rest of my life. But I was a boy. I couldn’t stay in forever.

Mum went back to work. She was working a night shift, and Vince was out, but he would be coming in later and I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting in with just him. I could be out and back, and Mum need never know. What could possibly go wrong with that? So I left the house after
she had gone to work, to go and meet up with the boys.

I was just running through the park towards the precinct, when I heard the voice. “You out the other night?”

The grass here was overgrown, the swings were broken. I didn’t see anyone at first. Then, in one of those eerie moments that sends a shiver down your spine, Lucie stepped out of nowhere. She had a habit of doing that. You wouldn’t hear her coming, or see her anywhere, and suddenly, there she’d be. Scared the life out of people sometimes.

I looked around. Not a soul in sight. She was completely alone. Yet, Lucie never seemed to be afraid to be alone. For other people, especially here, the opposite was true. In fact she was the one people stayed back from. People were afraid of her. Not that she was a bully, or a girl who started fights. It was just that she was strange.

“Her lift doesn’t go to the top floor,” I’d heard someone say.

So, there was something wrong with me, and her lift didn’t go to the top floor. We were well matched, Lucie and me.

She even looked weird. I had to admit it. She looked like no other girl I had ever met. She had attempted once again to put her hair in a ponytail, hadn’t quite succeeded. Half of it stuck out in spiky strands. The streetlamp gave her face an orange glow. She was bouncing a football on the ground. She was a good football player, was Lucie. A lot better than I was. She asked again, “Were you? The other night? Out?”

I answered her question with one of my own. “Were you?”

“Me? Joking? I’ve not got any friends, remember? Was it you I saw getting a personal escort home?” She laughed.

“What makes you think that was me?”

She plonked herself down on the lopsided roundabout, caught the ball and held it on her knee. “It’s hard to miss somebody your size in the middle of two big cops. Were you in handcuffs?”

“I wasn’t being arrested. I hadn’t done anything wrong.” And before I could stop myself I was telling her all about the Young Bow and what had happened
that night. “I didn’t even really want to go to the community centre.”

“So why did you?”

I just shrugged. Couldn’t tell her it was all down to Baz.

She shook her head and her ponytail completely escaped. I imagined her hair falling in long golden strands on her shoulders. It didn’t. It still stuck out in spikes. “You got to do everything everybody else does? You’re easily led, do you know that? Stay out of trouble, why don’t you?”

“What’s it to you?” She was talking like my mum.

“Nothing. But you’re on a final warning, aren’t you? You don’t want to get into any more trouble, Logan. I like you.” Honesty was another thing that made Lucie different. “Don’t like many people, Logan. Do you like me?” she asked suddenly.

“If I say yes, does that mean we’re engaged, Lucie?”

That made her laugh again. “You should be so lucky.”

The truth was, I did like her. I liked walking to school with her, talking with her. I could say things to Lucie. And I did listen to her. For all she was a bit off the wall, she talked a lot of sense.

“You going out again? Not across the bridge, I hope. They’ll be waiting for you.”

“No. Not across the bridge. We’ll stay away from the Young Bow from now on.”

I looked across the park. Baz was there, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his hoodie, waiting for me. I held my hands up in a wave.

Lucie followed my gaze. She ignored him. “Want a kick about?”

“I’ve got to go, Lucie.”

She aimed a long hard kick in Baz’s direction. If she expected him to kick the ball back she had another thing coming. Baz just stood there, glaring at her, letting the ball dribble to a stop at his feet. It was me who picked it up when I ran toward him. I threw it back to Lucie. “Another time, I promise.”

She caught the ball and yelled back, “You’re weirder than me.”

And I don’t know who she was speaking to – me or Baz.