Nicking Time (9 page)

“I can’t, Midge.” Bru’s just answered the door to me. There’s a resigned look on his face. “My mum’s going out and I’ve got to look after the Toaty Terrors.”

“An-drew!”

“Sorry, got to go. See you later maybe?”

“I’ll help.”

“Really? Would you? No, but don’t. They’re a pain. That would be above and beyond, you know.”

“I’m not going to abandon you.”

“Aw, thanks, Midge. You’re a pal.”

Mrs Brown gives me a smile when I go into Bru’s living room.

“
Two
big brothers to play with. You’re brave, Jamie!”

Bru’s five-year-old twin brothers, Kenny and Graham – more usually known as the Toaty Terrors – fling themselves at me. “Midge! What’re we going to do? What’re we going to play? What’re we going to do?”

“Enjoy yourselves!” Mrs Brown calls after us. They’re still attached to me as we leave the house and get in the lift.

“How hard can it be?” I ask Bru, as the lift doors open and his brothers whirl out (and when I say
“whirl”, I mean whirl – all the way down they’ve been spinning to see who can make themselves the dizziest). “As long as we don’t lose them… Or let them injure themselves… And they don’t start crying… That about covers it, doesn’t it? See. We’ll be fine. Then as soon as we get rid of them, it’s up to the den to make the final arrangements for Friday.”

Bru says nothing. It’s possible that he’s thinking that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but if he is, he’s not the sort to say it.

“Do that spinning thing again,” he calls to Kenny and Graham. “Here on the grass, where it won’t hurt when you fall down.”

We sit and watch, admiring them, for a minute.

“You’d fall down before me,” says Bru.

“Prove it,” I answer.

“You’re on.” Bru never says no to a challenge.

Bru is the first to drop. As I knew he would be. Kenny and Graham shout gleefully for another round, all of us together. We let them win, or maybe you get less good at this sort of thing as you get older. The four of us lie whooping on the grass. I keep my eyes closed to enjoy the last moments of the wheeling, out-of-control feeling you get.

“What’re we doing now?” asks Kenny.

We try to teach them how to play tennis. It’s a dead loss. They don’t seem to get the whole ball-racquet connection thing. If Bru and I aren’t ducking to avoid head injury from the wildly swung racquets, we’re sprinting down the hill after the ball. We all agree it’s time to find another activity.

We go up to play on the bars. I think they’re supposed to be for people to hold onto as they go up and down the stairs but we all use them for tricks. We show the TTs how to turn somersaults, then hold onto them as they have a go, to make sure they don’t split their heads open on the concrete. They get quite good.

“Monkey genes,” says Bru.

“That makes sense,” I say. “How long have we done so far?”

“Half an hour,” says Bru.

“You’re kidding!”

He shakes his head. “They actually make time go slower. Didn’t you know? I think it’s their superpower.”

“What’re we doing now?” asks Graham, who’s hanging upside down. If he didn’t have the ginger hair, he’d look quite like a vampire bat.

“What about a game of Spies?” I suggest.

“I’m James Bond,” Kenny announces quickly.

“No, I’m James Bond!” says Graham, now the right way up and looking less batty. “I’m dead good at being a spy!”

“No – me.” Kenny gives his brother a push. Graham gives him a push back. These things never stop at one push each. It’s not looking promising.

“Whoa!” says Bru. “Why d’you want to be James Bond? The Russian spies are much more dangerous.”

“Russians?” says Graham, suspiciously. “Who are
they
?”

“They’re… from Russia. They’ve got bombs. We’ve got bombs. They spy on us all the time and we spy on them. That’s the main spying thing that’s actually
going on right now in the world at this very minute. The Russians practise a lot and are really good at spying – they’ve got lots of amazing gadgets. You should definitely be Russians.”

“So, these Russians, they beat James Bond?”

“Well, no…”

“They sound rubbish,” says Kenny.

“Yeah,” says Graham.

“Let’s both be James Bond, Graham,” says Kenny.

“Yeah!” says Graham.

The flats are a great place for spying (well, if you can forget the fact that you can be seen from about a million different windows). There’s loads of walls to hide behind, lots of different ways you can go to avoid capture, plenty of places to hide. We give Kenny and Graham a head start by talking loudly in Russian accents whenever we’re getting close to them, to warn them we’re on their trail. Bru and I agree our accents are brilliant, even if totally unappreciated by Kenny and Graham. It turns out we don’t know any real Russians apart from Olga Korbut (and she’s a girl), so we go by the code names Midgeski and Bruski.

Using all our cunning, and some very skilful Russian spy tactics, we eventually capture the Jameses Bonds and are just about to make sure that they never cause us any trouble again, when, totally unexpectedly… they manage to escape! (Who could have guessed that was going to happen?) As they run off, the Jameses Bonds pause only to shoot the brilliant Russian agents Bruski and Midgeski, who die slowly, dramatically, tragically…

“Aren’t you
dead
yet?” says Graham.

“What’re we doing now?” asks Kenny.

It’s quite hard work, thinking up all these great things to do.

“What would you like to do? What ideas have you two got?” I ask them hopefully.

Kenny frowns. “We don’t have any ideas.”

“That’s
your
job,” Graham adds. There’s a hint of a warning in his voice. Bru wasn’t kidding. They are tough customers.

The van comes. Bru’s mum has given us money. Going down to the van (the long way), queuing (politely allowing grannies to go before us) and eating our ice creams uses up another ten minutes.

“What’re we doing now?” asks Graham.

Bru and I have noticed that there are quite a few other wee kids at the van. We try to interest Kenny and Graham in playing with their own kind, but they’re not having it. Even when one of the wee kids comes up and asks if he can play.

“No,” says Graham. “We’re playing a game with my big brother.”

“That’s who I meant,” says the wee kid. “It’s him I want to play with.”

It is risky but we’re stuck for ideas so we don’t have a lot of choice. We started off with two and now there’s a whole crowd of them wanting entertainment from us. Luckily, Bru comes up with a brilliant plan.

“OK, you can all play. D’you know Hospital Tig?”

They don’t. When we explain it, they look at us like we’re aliens, bringing details of an amazing new technology from another planet. Even Kenny and Graham seem impressed.
“Right, listen!” says Bru. “Rule 1. One person is het. They do the chasing. Everybody else runs. You have three lives. If you’re caught, you lose a life. First person to lose all three lives is then het.”

“Rule 2 – and this is why it’s called Hospital Tig. If the person who’s het catches you by touching you on the arm, after that you’ve got to run holding your arm. If you’re caught on the head, you hold your head. Get the idea?”

There’s a chorus of yeses, and more than one “Yes, Kenny and Graham’s big brother.”

“Rule 3. You can only run in this big space between the flats – the stairs are too dangerous, so they’re out of bounds. We don’t want any actual hospitals involved, do we?” As jokes go, it’s really pathetic – if we hadn’t had the audience, I would have had to punch Bru to bring him to his senses. But the wee kids laugh like he’s the funniest person they’ve ever met.

I’m het first. There’s a lot of shrieking and squealing as they scarper. I do give them a chance by running sideways a lot of the time. My target (one that I’ve just made up for myself) is to catch them all in different ways to see who runs the funniest. I get a wee fair-haired girl by touching her hair as it flies out behind her when she sprints, so she has to run holding her plait up in the air. Then I duck right down and manage a neat backhand tap to Graham’s ankle. (Not easy – being so toaty, he’s really very near the ground.) After that, he’s got to hop so he can hold onto it. And I flick Kenny on both buttocks, so he has to run around holding his bum. This has most of the wee folk in stitches (now
that,
Bru, is what
I
call a genuinely funny hospital joke). This makes it a lot easier to catch them.

We play until Bru and I are exhausted.

“How come little kids are so hard to tire out?” I say. We’re sitting on the steps at the edge of the grass, watching them run away from each other, clutching their heads, their legs, their backs. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.

“Don’t know. It might be because they sleep a lot. Or maybe just all the sugar.”

“Hey – that’s cheating! You’re not allowed on the steps. You said!” They are onto us.

“That’s right. Well done for noticing that. The reason we’re here is because that’s the game finished now.”

There’s a howl of protest.

“No, that’s it. That was good and thanks very much for playing.”

“Yeah, excellent running. Never seen so many fantastic players of Hospital Tig. OK – now go and… play your other games.”

The grumble of disappointment takes a while to die away – and I hear in the midst of it at least one ungrateful “Spoilsports!” – but they do drift off and in a few minutes are busy doing whatever it was they were doing before the Bru & Midge Show came into town. Only Kenny and Graham remain, panting, red cheeked and crazy haired.

“What’re we doing now?” asks Kenny.

“Well…” Bru turns away from them, pretending to scan the surroundings in search of new fun activities. “What’s the time?” he mutters to me. “Don’t make it obvious.”

I yawn and stretch, using this crafty ploy to glance at my watch. “Nearly half seven.”

“At last. Hey – Kenny, Graham. We’re really thirsty after all that running around. What about you? We were thinking we’d just go up and get a drink.”

Kenny eyes him suspiciously. “And then we’re coming back out?”

“Well, it’s not even dark yet!” says Bru, like he’s surprised by Kenny’s question.

“What’re we doing when we come back out?”

“Need to think about that. C’mon.”

The Toaty Terrors entertain themselves in the lift on the way up by seeing how many times they can jump on our feet. Toaty they might be, but it’s a lot like sharing the lift with a herd of dancing baby elephants.

Bru directs them out of the lift and into the house with the patience of a man who’s about to be reprieved.

“Hi, Mum. I think you said we should come up and Get A Drink at half seven,” says Bru meaningfully. “It’s half seven now.”

“Okey dokey,” says Bru’s mum. “You must be thirsty after all that playing. Was it fun? You’ll have to tell me all about it. Now… oh, wait a minute. I don’t know if I’ve got any juice. Kenny, can you look in that cupboard and see if there’s any there? Or there might be some behind the kitchen door – Graham, you have a look there.” Out of the twins’ eyeshot, she waves her hand at us to go. We sneak out backwards.

But they’re not as easy to fool as you’d think because as we’re creeping up the hall, we hear a wail, “Bru! Bru! You said we were going back out!”

We make a run for it.

I spot Lemur coming down the hill, through the long grass. I’m pleased to see him. He was here yesterday – he’s a regular for Wednesday morning viewings of
The Flashing Blade
now, but apart from that it’s been a long while since he came for me. We’d arranged to meet at the den this morning but he must want to say something about getting into Cathkin tomorrow before the others get there. (We’re so close – it’s definitely going to happen tomorrow – definitely!). It’s really early but I’m just about dressed. The window’s open the small amount the safety catch allows. I’m about to shout down to him and wave, then I have a better idea.

I wait by the side of the lift. My plan is I’ll leap out as soon as the door opens, and scare the life out of him. I watch the numbers in the bar above the door light up in turn, so I can time it right. It always takes ages to get to 6, which gives me time to plan. 1, 2… I’m thinking King Kong style, full roar. 3, 4… I’m wishing I’d brought something I could use as a sword – more dramatic, scarier. 5… No time for other ideas, King Kong it is. 6…

7?

I get it.

He saw me at the window. He worked out what I was going to do and now he’s going to leap down the stairs and get
me
as I cross the stairs landing back to my house. No chance. I’m ready for him. I open the door to the stairs slowly, crouching down to make myself less of a target. On the next floor up I hear the door from the lift to the stairs open, hear it swing shut. I don’t breathe. I’m ready to pounce. Footsteps cross the space between the fire doors on the stair landing. The second door swings shut. He’s waiting to make sure I’ve fallen for it. But then I hear a third door, the one that takes you into the space outside flats 74 and 75. He’s standing outside Mr Murphy’s house.

What is he playing at? My mum will give me hell if we end up annoying Mr Murphy. The game’s a bogey. I need to get him out of there. I go up the stairs to floor 7 and through the fire door, making as little noise as possible. As long as Mr Murphy doesn’t open his door and catch us messing about, we’re OK.

Lemur’s not there.

I can’t see him outside Mr Murphy’s. And he’s not hiding behind the rubbish chute. I go all the way round floor 7, past the lift – which is still on this floor. I go back out to the stair landing by the other fire door. He’s nowhere. And I realise I will find him outside my house, looking smug and ready to crow about how easily he tricked me.

But he’s not there either.

I go back in. “Has Lemur been here?” I ask Kit, who’s lying on a sunny patch of carpet in the living room, colouring in.

“No,” says Kit.

“Sure?” I ask, looking at her hard.

“Yeah, I’m sure. He’s quite hard to miss.”

“He didn’t tell you to say that?”

“Midge, he hasn’t been here. Why do you think he has?”

“Never mind.” I don’t tell her, because she’d find it funny that my plan backfired.

So I just wait for Lemur to appear. I wait for him to get bored with keeping me waiting. I wait, very bored, for a long time and he still doesn’t turn up. Kit keeps colouring in for a while, then Shelagh turns up and they go out.

I hear somebody yelling my name from outside. It’s Hector – he’s standing down on the road, at the bottom of the hill. He’s been running.

“Hey,” I shout back.

“C’mon!
Where’ve you been?”

“Here – waiting for Lemur.”

He looks confused. “Lemur’s with the others, at the den. We said we’d meet there. We’re all waiting for
you
.”

Kit and Shelagh are playing on the bars halfway up the hill. Kit is practising pulling herself up backwards to grip on to the bar with her legs, then reaching down to flick off in a handstand. She’s getting quite good at it.

“No Lemur?” she shouts as we trudge through the long grass up the hill.

I ignore her.

When we get to the den, Lemur’s in full flood: “The defender tackles, knocks the ball clear to the side, then punts it up into the air –
High, high, high!
the crowd shout – that’s how the team got their nickname, you know, the Hi Hi’s – Anderson runs back to collect it, then there’s a blur of red as he sprints down the wing. He’s unstoppable!
GOALLLLL!
Oh, there you are… You’re really late, Midge.”

“I saw you coming down the hill. I was waiting for you – I thought you were coming to get me.”

He gives a laugh of surprise. “I didn’t say I was coming to your house today, did I? Didn’t we agree to meet here?”

“I know. But then I saw you and I thought it was a change of plan.”

“It wasn’t that other boy, Midge?” Skooshie chips in helpfully.

We all turn and look at him, bemused.

“
What
other boy?”

“The one who looks like Lemur. The one that Mr Murphy confused Lemur with. It’s funny we’ve never seen him before.”

“Shut up, Skoosh. It was Lemur I saw.”

“The plan was to meet here.” Lemur speaks slowly and deliberately, like he thinks I’m a bit dim and I need help understanding. “And here I am. And here you are… At last.”

“You must have been seeing things, Midge.” Hector grins. “Or you need glasses. It’ll be all that studying you’ve been doing.”

“Shut up, Hector,” I growl. “I didn’t imagine it. Lemur’s lying.”

“I never lie!”

We’re standing right in the middle of the den – Lemur and me, eye to eye – much too close to each other for this not to turn into a fight.

“Aw, don’t argue,” says Bru, pushing us away from each other. “C’mon. Lemur’s been telling us about Third Lanark, the team that used to play at Cathkin. We were imagining what they were like, back in their heyday.”

“And what Cathkin must have been like with the stands full. A pity your flats weren’t built then, Midge. You’d’ve had a brilliant view!”

“Yeah,” says Hector. “We’d all’ve got to watch for nothing!”

I find that a cheering idea. I nudge Hector with my foot – well, it’s more of a kick. It makes me feel better. “Move over. You’re taking up all the room. So, how come you know so much about this team? Did you ever see them?”

“He couldn’t’ve. The stadium shut down about ten years ago, my dad says. They went bankrupt,” says Bru. “When you think about it, they couldn’t’ve been that good if nobody wanted to see them.”

“My dad says that the year I was born, they lost 30 matches out of 34. That’s not good.”

“They
were
good,” says Lemur. “Not at the end but before. They were one of the first teams in the Scottish League, right back in the 1880s. They won it 1904 and the Scottish Cup in 1889 and 1905. They used to be better than Rangers and Celtic.

“Their strips were red because at first the team was
made up of soldiers – the Third Lanarkshire Rifles. Their uniform was red. That’s where the name’s from – Third Lanark.”

How does he know all this stuff? Not for the first time, I wonder how much of it he invents. He’s got a vivid imagination, as my mum would say – and obviously that’s something you want in a friend. But the others, they know – and I know – when they’re making stuff up. Does Lemur? He says he doesn’t lie but I’m not sure he’s always clear on the boundaries between real life and fantasy.

But it’s hard to stay very annoyed with him. His stories are entertaining even if they’re not totally true. Plus we need to be a team if we’re going to get into Cathkin. It’s really going to happen. Tomorrow we’re actually going to be there. For definite this time.

“Bye, Midge!” shouts Skooshie, as we split up to walk home. “Don’t forget to ask your mum to take you for that eye check-up!” He disappears down Bolivar Terrace, snorting with laughter. I want to throw a rock at his head.

And then I turn round to find that Kit’s waiting on the other side of Prospecthill Road. She’s strictly forbidden to cross it on her own. That road is our moat, the wall around our Troy. If we stay on this side of it, Kit can’t get to us.

“You’ve to hurry up,” she calls across. “Mum says it’s dinnertime.”

She’s so annoying. This was my one chance to talk to Bru. It has been completely impossible to get him on his own to tell him about Mr Murphy saying I should watch out for Lemur – if it’s not wee brothers, it’s the rest of them getting in the way – and now here’s Kit joining in! And I know he won’t take sides in the argument Lemur and I have just had, but I need to tell him I
did not
imagine it. I say nothing, Bru says nothing, Kit says nothing, all the way down the stairs.

“See you,” says Bru.

“Why does Skooshie think you need your eyes checked?” Kit asks, as soon as we’re in the lift.

“It was just a joke.”

“They think you didn’t see something properly. Was it Lemur?”

That’s annoying too, how good Kit is at working stuff out.

“Yeah, OK,” I admit. “I thought I saw him coming down the hill this morning. But then he didn’t show up at the house.”

“And he said it wasn’t him?”

“Well, he just kept going on about how that wasn’t the plan, we were supposed to meet at the den, blah, blah, blah, like I was a total numpty. But if it was a trick, why didn’t he say so? The others laughed at me but they’d have thought Lemur managing to make me wait and wait was funnier. The problem is he’s so good at telling stories, so convincing. We’ve stopped even wondering what’s true and what’s made up. I mean, look how scared Skooshie was at his ghost story.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“It was spooky – but in a good way. I wasn’t scared, not like I thought it was real.”

“The funny thing is,” says Kit, “I saw him too.”

“This morning? Really?”

“When you rushed out, I went to the window to see why. I saw him just coming into our flats. I don’t think he’d seen you – he wasn’t hurrying or anything… I did tell you he was weird!”

That night when we’re in bed, I tell Kit everything that happened (she murmurs appreciation at the King Kong detail and sympathises about me not having the sword idea earlier).

“So either he sneaked back down—”

“Not in the lift – it was still there.”

“…using the stairs. Or he went into Mr Murphy’s house.”

“I don’t think so. Though Mr Murphy did want to see him.”

“What?”

“Yeah, one night we were playing Kick the Can and Mr Murphy came out and said, ‘Tell your pal to come and see me.’”

“He was really angry with Lemur that time at the lift, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. I wondered if he wanted to apologise? I told Lemur, but he just acted all, ‘Yeah, right. Some chance I’m going to do that.’ I never thought he’d go.”

“But if Mr Murphy just wanted to apologise, wouldn’t
Lemur have told you?” asks Kit. “What’s going on there, then?”

I’m drifting off when Kit’s voice comes out of the dark again. “Hey, Midge. What if the lift door had opened and you’d leapt out and it was Mr Murphy, not Lemur?”

I’m sinking so fast into sleep I nearly don’t get the picture. Then the giggles hit both of us right at the same time.

A warning voice comes from the hall. “You two, settle down!”

I have to bury my face in the pillow to try and muffle the noise. Kit has a corner of sheet stuffed in her mouth. She pulls it out and sits up, suddenly sober. “Old folk don’t have heart attacks if that happens, do they?”

“Not the ones from the Glasgow Corporation Factory,” I say. “They’re really tough.
They’re made in Scotland. From girders.”

And that sets her off again.