Nicking Time (15 page)

You know by now that we are really good at not talking about stuff we don’t want to discuss. Well, that day, as my dad would say, we surpass ourselves. No one would have guessed that it was Lemur’s last day. It could have been any day in that long, hot summer.

We follow the route marched by Mary’s army up and over Prospecthill Road, making appropriate military sound effects along the way. In the recs we go into action. The five of us charge forward with fearsome battle cries so scary that the (totally invisible) forces against us scatter in confusion and we win the day.

Once inside the park gates, we split up for the scavy hunt: Bru, Hector and Skooshie in one team; me and Lemur in the other. The goal is the flagpole. But on the way you have to collect stuff. Today these are: a pine cone, an ice-lolly stick, an orange handprint.

“An actual print,” says Hector. “You can’t just turn up with an orange hand.”

Apart from that there are no rules. Winners are the first team with all the items to touch the flagpole.

Bru, Hector and Skoosh set off at a run, straight up the hill. But Lemur and I pause to discuss tactics.

“OK,” I say. “There’s only one set of tennis courts between here and the flagpole so that’s where we need to get the dust for the handprint. It’s near here so we should do it first.”

“Agree.”

“But first we need a bit of paper to do the handprint on. That must be what they’ve gone to look for.”

“Disagree,” says Lemur. And he’s off and running. “C’mon!”

The tennis courts are made of the same dusty orange stuff as the pitches in the recs. So it’s easy enough to get a handprint. The tricky part is getting onto the courts. You have to get by the man in the booth. He’s really only interested in letting people who want to play tennis onto the courts. People who can pay.

“Talk to him, Midge,” says Lemur.

“Good morning,” I say, planting my elbows on the booth.

He is instantly suspicious. “Yeah?”

“I was wondering,” (I’m aware of Lemur at the height of my ankles trying to sneak in unnoticed), “if you would perhaps be good enough to tell me the actual cost in money for me and some friends – some very good friends of mine – to play on these lovely courts.”

“Look, son, do you actually have any money or are you just wasting my time?”

“How could it be a waste of time when it’s a lovely sunny day and we’re having this nice conversation?” I realise I may have gone too far because he’s got up out
of his seat now and he’s looking annoyed. Then Lemur pops up beside me.

“Got it!”

“Thanks, mister!” I say and we run off. The man throws a few swear words after us but it’s half-hearted. It’s too hot for him to really care.

“So where do we get the paper for the handprint?” I ask.

“We don’t,” says Lemur. “Stand still.”

He clamps his left hand to my back, then pushes my chest really hard with his right hand. “See?”

The print is bold and clear against my (once) white t-shirt. I look down admiringly. “I quite like that. I might keep it.”

“Pine cone next.”

We spread out among the trees, looking hard. We wander along towards the gate at Victoria Road, then up the hill again, so we don’t get too far from the flagpole. We’re having no luck.

“It would help if we knew what a pine tree looked like,” grumbles Lemur.

“There!” I whisper.

“Where?” He’s looking for a tree but I’ve spotted something more useful. Hector bending down to pick up something from the ground. “Hector’s found one. There’ll be more round there.”

We wait until Hector’s moved away so he doesn’t see us. When we get to the patch of trees, we realise he’s tried to hide the other pine cones by kicking them into the bushes.

“Nice try, Hector,” I say. “But not quite smart enough to out-fox us.”

“Only the ice-lolly stick now,” says Lemur.

“Ice-lolly stick, ice-lolly stick…” We’re scanning the ground, but it’s a big park. There are plenty of sticks, but none of the lolly variety to be seen.

“Wee kids!” I say with sudden inspiration.

We start running towards the swings. And there is a wee kid there, halfway through a bright-red ice lolly. It’s melting faster than he can eat it, and there’s red stuff running down his arm.

“Hey,” I say. “Can we have your lolly stick when you’re done?”

He looks up at us and his lip starts to quiver. “Mu-u-um!”

“No, no! I don’t want your lolly, honest! Just the stick.” Now his mum’s arrived and she’s looking really unimpressed. “I wasn’t trying to take his lolly,” I say. “We’re playing this game and I just need a lolly stick—”

“Midge!” Lemur’s standing by the bin at side of the swing park. Well, not so much standing by it as half in it while he rummages through the contents. What a piece of brilliance!

I run over to him, shouting over my shoulder to the wee kid, “Sorry! Enjoy your lolly!”

I’m asking, “Any luck?” when Lemur turns to me, triumphantly waving a lolly stick. The wee kid’s mum is looking at us with a disgusted expression on her face.

“That’s it. Let’s go!”

The flagpole’s in sight. We’re heading for it full pelt when we see Bru sprinting in from the side. He’s really legging it.

“Run!”

We’re a bit nearer than Bru but he’s not giving up. We throw ourselves over the fencing and lunge at the pole. Bru touches it at exactly the same time we do.

“We won!” I shout, as Hector and Skooshie jog into view a few seconds later.

“Draw!” protests Bru.

“No – our whole team was here first! Yours has only just arrived.”

We look at Hector. He usually has the last word on rules.

“Aw, we didn’t think of that,” he says.

We don’t have enough money for the boats, but we sit on the swings by the boating pond and call out warnings, telling the people rowing and paddling to watch out for the dead soldiers lurking under the water.

“Whoah!” shouts Lemur as two boats collide. “Did you see that?”

“Those two hands reaching up out of the water?” says Bru.

“Yeah – they shoved that boat into the other one!”

“Watch out, mRS!” Skooshie shouts to a woman lying back in her boat, with her hand trailing in the water. “They’ll pull you over the side!” Unfortunately for her, she’s too far away to hear him.

We’re hoping for a sinking (very rare) or at least some daredevil ending up in the water (less rare), but today’s not the day for it. So we move on.

Between us we manage to scrape together enough
money for two pokes of chips. We run up Victoria Road, with the chips wrapped in Hector’s t-shirt to keep them hot. We’re planning to get to the stones before we eat them but with the first waft of vinegar and hot chips, everybody agrees that’s a rubbish plan, and we drop onto the first bench we come to and eat them there. And then we wander up to the stones, the highest part of the park. There’s not much to do there but we always go. It’s in an area that’s wilder. The grass is allowed to grow long and there are dirt pathways, not tarmac. There are no flowers or neatly cut bushes – it all feels a bit neglected. It’s that and the remoteness and the view of the city that we like, I think. The stones look quite important but we don’t really wonder why they’re there. We just know you get a better view when you stand on them. And that it’s fun jumping from one to another.

When we’ve exhausted the park – and the park has exhausted us – we head for home. I tell my mum Lemur’s parents have had to go out and is it all right if he has dinner with us?

“Of course,” she says. “Come on in, Lemur.” And my dad grins at him and says, like he always does, “Anytime – it’s just a few more potatoes in the pot.”

Lemur sits in Kit’s place because of course she’s not here.

We’re just about to leave my house and go and find the others. I’m showing Lemur the postcards I got at the art gallery.

He says, “Here.” And he presses into my hand a pink slip of paper. Joe Murphy’s ticket. “So you don’t forget.”

“We’ll never forget you, Lemur! How could we? You’ve been a totally memorable pain in the arse.”

That makes him laugh. Luckily. “And so have you,” he says, giving me a thump. “Don’t let Kit get her hands on it. She’s always taking your stuff.”

“I won’t.”

Though it’s evening, it’s still really hot. “D’you know what I’m thinking?” says Bru. “That this is perfect weather for a water fight.”

We use old washing-up liquid bottles. You can squirt a long way with them. “Not in the eyes,” my mum always says firmly. “I’ve washed them out but if you get a bit of Fairy in your eye it’ll really hurt.” We don’t listen. It does nip a bit, but if you’re stupid enough to get caught full in the face, then that’s your lookout.

It’s Bru and me against Hector and Lemur. Skooshie’s a free agent, floating between the teams, sometimes on our side and sometimes against us. It mainly results in him getting soaked by us all.

We refill the bottles using the tap down by the lock-ups that’s meant for people washing their cars. Hector considers whether we should have rules on how many times you’re allowed to refill and whether you’re allowed to defend the tap to stop the other team refilling. He stops talking when we all squirt him at once. “OK. A free-for-all it is,” he says.

And then the water fight begins. And we take some hits but we give as good as we get. Whoever planned these flats was dead clever. So many walls to duck behind and nooks to dive into and opportunities for ambush – obviously someone who had enjoyed a water fight or two in his childhood.

“Ready?” mouths Bru.

“Ready,” I mouth back.

Lemur, Hector and Skooshie are pressed against the lock-up wall, planning to sneak up to the corner, then leap out and get us. What they don’t know is that Bru and I aren’t around the corner. We’ve climbed onto the lock-up roof. We’ve crept to the edge on our bellies. We are right above them.

“Now!” I yell.

That makes them look up. And we get all three of them right in the face.

It is without doubt our most glorious moment.

We’re lying in the long grass, exhausted and soaking wet. Skooshie is wringing the front of his t-shirt and we’re laughing at the long stream of water that runs out. The front door of the flats trundles open, announcing my dad on his way to work. Time’s almost up. He struggles to pick us out in the fading light. I wave down to him. “We’re just walking them up the road, then I’ll go up.”

“OK, son. See you in the morning.”

We get up to go, reluctant to let the evening slip away
from our grasp. We must all be tired because we make slow progress going up the hill.

“Great fight,” says Lemur.

“Pure dead brilliant,” says Hector.

“A shame you lost,” says Bru.

“We didn’t lose!” says Skooshie.

“Oh, I think you did!” I say.

Skooshie grins. “Next time,” he says. “Just wait till next time.”

It’s Bru who starts to sing first. We all join in. We sing it as we walk, not loudly like we usually do, like we’re François challenging the Spanish, but quietly, like we’re determined and deadly serious. And we walk even more slowly so that we’ve time to finish it before we get to the road.

Hector and Skooshie stay on our side while Lemur crosses Prospecthill Road. It’s the last we see of him. Lemur, walking backwards and waving. Just before he’s lost in the trees and the dark, he cups his hands to his mouth and yells. “
See youse later. See youse.
”

We’re in the den, the four of us. We know it will be the last time. Outside it’s hot, but the den is cool and shady.

I’ve managed to sneak four mugs out of the house, plus some Irn-Bru that my dad had planked in a cupboard for the next time he has a bottle of whisky. I was nearly caught red-handed (or ginger-handed, even) but Kit had worked out what I was up to and distracted him long enough for me to get it out of the house. So now I owe her. I wonder what her price will be?

They hold out the mugs and I pour the ginger into each one.

“To Lemur. Who we will never forget.” We clatter the mugs together in a toast, then drink.

“And to us,” says Hector. “Who will never part.” A second clattering.

We pull back the vegetation growing over the hollow at the back of the tree. We don’t break it off, just prop it back so we can get to the trunk.

And beneath the carved writing that’s already there, Hector uses his dad’s penknife to add:

Lemur

missed by

Midge, Bru, Hector, Skooshie

“Add Together side by side,” says Skooshie. “He was a big
Flashing Blade
fan.”

“Yeah?” asks Hector.

“Yeah.” We all think it’s a good idea.

It takes a while. Skooshie offers to help out, but to be honest his spelling can be a bit dodgy.

And before letting the green stuff spring back into place, we tuck into the hollow: an empty washing-up bottle we used in the water fight, a piece of souvenir concrete from Cathkin, and Bru’s football – the one we’d used at the recs.

“Are you sure, Bru?” Hector asks.

Bru nods and Skooshie takes his foot away from the branches he’s been holding back. The hollow disappears from sight once again.

Then it’s time to leave. We pile up sticks and leaves and stones behind us, to block the entrance to the den. It’s not that we think it’s unsafe – it’s just that we don’t want anybody else to go there because it was ours.

We go and sit in the grass at the top of the hill. It must be nearly time for them to cut it again. When you lie down, it’s so long it tickles your nose.

We’re quiet for a while. I guess we’re all thinking about Lemur and how we’re going to miss him. Then
Skooshie’s belly makes a noise a bit like a cat singing along to a badly played violin. And, weirdly, that helps.

Bru’s playing with a ladybird, moving it from stalk to stalk in his hands. “It’s funny,” he says, “how your interests change as you get older.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, we haven’t talked about the bins in ages.”

“Aw, the bins,” says Hector.

It’s true. It started as a conversation about stuff we were afraid of. Places you can’t just walk by – you have to run. You don’t know for definite that there’s anything scary there but you have your suspicions… And I was telling them that for Kit, it’s the place where the bins are.

When you live in flats like ours, you don’t take your rubbish outside. Each floor has a rubbish chute. You pull open the heavy metal front – it opens in a V. You up-end your kitchen bin into it (taking care not to put in anything too bulky), then close the front. The whole load of rubbish is tipped into nothingness, falling floors and floors into the huge bins down on the ground. It’s worth lingering to hear the noise it makes as it plunges down, especially from six floors up. It’s also worth sorting through a bin a bit (avoiding the muckier stuff) and selecting items to send down on their own, just to hear what they sound like. An empty bean can is a favourite of mine (you flip the flap closed quickly to try and make it bounce off the chute walls as it goes down – it makes a brilliant plingy noise) or something heavy, like a pair of old shoes (you wait, wait, wait, and then
there’s a dull but very satisfying thud that echoes up from the bottom).

Sometimes I used to hang about holding the chute flap open a crack, to watch for stuff from floor 7 shooting by. A draft of cold air hits you in the face, a distant pong of rubbish, always with a waft of old bananas. But I’ve never managed to see any. Bru and I worked out that I was unlikely to, as I was depending on only six families emptying their bins while I was waiting. Whereas, if we waited further down, there were six families using the chute on
each of the floors
above us, so more chance of catching sight of their rubbish. So we took to hanging about on floors where we’d no business to be, checking out the chute. When this didn’t work, we decided we needed to take a more scientifically active role. If a bin needed emptying, one of us stood ready, while the other raced downstairs a few floors to glimpse the contents shooting by. It could have developed into a brilliant game, with the glimpser trying to identify and remember all the items falling past him. We took it in turns to chuck and to observe, but it was a short-lived experiment. People objected to us hanging about their chutes, with or without bins, and chased us with a threat to tell our mothers.

Now I come to think about it, I might have been the one who started Kit’s bin worries. Yeah, it might have been me. Though I was only joking when I used to threaten to put her down the chute. I only did it when she really annoyed me. “Head first, Kit. But don’t worry – the rubbish will be nice and soft for landing on. A bit smelly, but nice and soft.”

She’d squeal, “No, no no no – don’t let him, Mum, don’t let him!” That’s when she was really wee. Later on she just looked at me as if she’d like to see me try. Sadly, she’s too big now. She’d only block it. And that wouldn’t be fair on the neighbours.

You can’t see the bins at the bottom of the chute. They’re under the ground-floor flats, shut away behind a brown double door with vents high up. The lift machinery’s in there too.

“Well, it
might
be the lift that makes the strange noises,” Skooshie said. “Or it might be something else…”

No one ever goes in there – except the caretaker, I suppose, to check the level of rubbish in the bin and move a new one into place. And the bin men, of course, to empty the bins. The topic of the bins used to keep us busy. There was a lot to think about.

Questions we asked: Why do we never see the caretaker going in there? Why does the bin motor come so early in the morning that we miss it too? Why have we never seen the door open, never seen inside?

“For all we know,” said Bru, “it isn’t bins in there at all – there is in fact a huge, rubbish-devouring monster lurking in the dark.”

Hector nodded his agreement. “So whenever somebody opens the chute, it sees the light and opens its mouth to eat what comes down.”

“Yeah. And as long as we keep feeding it by chucking stuff down the chutes, it stays there.”

“If we stopped,” said Lemur, “it would burst through the brown double door with a single flick of its long scaly tail and go on the rampage.”

“THONK, THONK, THONK!” Skooshie’s
imitation
of the monster, crushing all in its path, was pretty impressive, as I remember. “It would go for the oldsters first. They’re slow-moving and easy to catch.”

I could see that happening. “Yeah, it would knock them out by belching deadly rubbish fumes in their faces.”

So I was an oldster, the prey of the rubbish monster, and as Skooshie breathed noisily on me, I went rigid, then keeled over.

“We’ll have to try and trick it back into the bin place!” shouted Hector, coming to the rescue.

“What about a trail of really tasty rubbish?” Bru called to him.

“Good one!”

“Or we could offer ourselves as bait,” said Lemur, “then nip out once we’d got it back inside.”

“That’s a plan! Let’s do it!”

And that’s what we did. And I was saved – and the flats were saved! And probably the rest of the world as well. Not that anybody round here’s ever expressed their gratitude either in words or in small presents.

“I suppose every block of flats has its own rubbish monster, Midge?” said Bru, when the monster was once again in captivity and order was restored. As Bru and I are the ones that actually live in the flats, above the rubbish monster’s lair, it was accepted that we were the experts on rubbish monster behaviour.

“I would think so.”

And Bru puffed the air out of his cheeks, thinking the unthinkable. “Wow. Better hope they never plan an outbreak together.”

We laugh. It’s still funny, even now, though we’re older and we’ve moved on.

“It doesn’t matter about the bins,” I say.

“I wasn’t saying it did,” says Bru. “I don’t need to keep talking about the bins.”

“No, I mean it doesn’t matter that we don’t talk about the bins
any more.
What matters is that we
used
to talk
about the bins. That there was a time when you and me and Skooshie and Hector and Lemur shared a conversation about the bins. D’you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” says Bru. “Of course I do.”

And as we sit in the grass, I realise I’m not worried about school. I’m not scared of losing them – Skoosh, Hector and Bru and even Lemur – and I’m not scared of changing. Because there will always
always
be the bins, and the den, and Cathkin, and Wibfipper, and the water fight, and a million other things we’ve done together. Nobody can ever take that from us. Because that’s ours, for all time.