Ostrich Boys (2 page)

“Three guesses,” Sim said.

“Munro, Munro, Munro,” Kenny and I answered together.

“Kind of makes it all a bit more difficult,” Sim said.

“Maybe we should go do Nina’s house first, then come back.”

“I’ve got to be in by twelve,” Kenny said. “You know what my mum’s like. I’m telling you: she’ll go mad if I’m late.”

Sim wasn’t happy. But I jumped in to back Kenny up. “I’ve got to get home soon as well. We’re not gonna have time for Nina’s.” Which wasn’t strictly true. The thing was, if I didn’t feel right doing this to Mr. Fowler or Sean Munro, no way did I want to do it to Nina.

“Let’s get a bit closer,” Sim sighed. “Maybe they’re gonna be going home soon.”

The gardens along either side of the road were small but they all had trees and bushes and it was easy to creep along. The road forked before it hit the sea front and Munro’s house was the first house on the left-hand side. The house on the opposite side had a hedge big enough for all three of us to hide behind as long as we stayed on all fours. Kenny moaned about his new suit getting filthy, and after crawling under fir trees and sneaking through bushes, I knew I was going to have to hide mine from my mum too.

Looking toward Munro’s, we realized the bright lights illuminating most of that side of the road were the high beams of a sleek, gorgeous sports car sitting in the driveway. The engine wasn’t running but the music was also coming from the car. The driver’s-side window was down and the stereo was pumping it out.

We recognized all four of the lads. Munro, obviously, and like us still wearing his funeral clothes—but it felt disrespectful from him somehow, like he’d forgotten he had them on. He was the biggest kid in our year. As tall as Sim, as wide as me, with no neck but extra face to make up for it. He kept walking around the sports car, pawing at it, polishing it with his sleeve. I guessed it was his dad’s new toy and Munro junior couldn’t keep his hands off it, was dreaming of being seventeen and burning up the streets in it.

An age our best friend would never reach. An experience he’d never have.

We couldn’t see the car’s badge from this distance. “What kind is it?” Kenny wanted to know.

“The seventy-grand kind by the look of it,” Sim said.

I didn’t have a clue about exotic cars—but I did know a bit about music. “Why is it that all these blokes who insist on having their car stereos turned up loud enough to annoy people always have such crap taste in music?”

“Is he stroking it?” Kenny asked.

Sim just growled his contempt. His dislike of Munro far outweighed his dislike of Mr. Fowler.

The other lads were Munro’s most recent goons. I couldn’t even be bothered remembering their names. It wasn’t as though they were his friends—more like hangers-on. He had a different set each year. I guessed these three had already done all their oohing and aahing over the car,
had done enough fawning for one night, and were now bored. One was swinging on the front gate, another was lying along the low garden wall with his arms dangling down on either side, while the third was sitting on the grass verge plucking at his laces. They reminded me of chimps in a zoo.

I nudged Sim. “What d’you call a bunch of monkeys?”

He grinned when he realized what I was getting at. Knowing this stuff was his specialty. “Either a troop or a tribe,” he said. Which didn’t sound insulting enough. “But it’s a
flange
of baboons.”

I nodded, grinned back. That was more like it.

As we watched, the front door of the house on the far side of Munro’s opened and an elderly man with wispy gray hair, wearing a tartan dressing gown and slippers, stepped out onto his drive. “Can you turn that music down, Sean? Do you know how late it is?”

Munro’s monkey mates all perked up—at last there was going to be something worth taking notice of. But Sean ignored the old man.

“Sean? Sean! I’m asking you to turn your music down.”

With practiced disrespect Munro deigned to look across at the man.

“Sean. Are you listening?”

Munro leaned in through the car’s open window, but only to turn the music
up
a notch. His goons thought it was hilarious.

The old man didn’t come any closer so had to shout louder. “Sean! Sean! Where’s your father?”

Munro continued to paw and polish the car but did it in a weird jerking fashion. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was him trying to move to the music, his version of dancing. His monkey mates gibbered and chortled, thought it was pure cabaret.

“Sean!” the old man shouted. “For God’s sake, boy!”

And then Munro’s dad appeared, barging out onto his own doorstep. “What’s all the noise about? Doesn’t anybody give a damn what time it is?” He was barefoot, wearing stripy pajama bottoms and a white vest. He had a gold bracelet as thick as cable on one hairy wrist and more chunks of gold on several fingers. You could see who little Seany had inherited his good looks from—necks must have been rare in the Munro genealogy.

“Can you please ask your son to turn that down?” the old man from next door shouted.

“Go to bed, Gerald,” Munro senior bawled back.

“It’s nearly midnight and—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s nearly time for you to turn into a bat, you old vampire. Just go back to your coffin, will you?”

Sean glanced at his goons to make sure they were watching and seeing how cool his dad was. They grinned back at him in wide-eyed, head-bobbing pleasure—this had so been worth hanging around for.

The old man stood there for a few seconds longer. The music banged on. “I’m calling the police,” he threatened. “It’s nearly midnight.” But the Munros stood shoulder to shoulder, unmoving. “You’ve dragged this street right down since you arrived” was his last riposte before scurrying back into his house. “Right down.” And he closed the door firmly behind him.

Munro was laughing. “I think he’s just jealous of our new car,” he said to his dad. “Old git.”

Munro senior smacked his son around the head with a ringing blow. Kenny, Sim and I winced at the sound of it. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing running my battery down?”

Sean staggered back, hand to his ear, scrunching his face up in pain. “I was just showing it to my mates.”

His dad’s hand flew at him again. And he almost ducked it. Almost.

“Do I want a new car with a dead battery? Eh? Do I?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He was quick to turn off the stereo and the lights, letting calm night return to the street. “Get inside,” he told Sean.

“But my mates …”

Munro senior glared at the three of them hovering at the bottom of his drive. “They can piss off too.” He shoved his son hard in the back and marched him indoors.

For a few long seconds Munro’s monkey mates didn’t know what to do. They usually only did things Munro told
them to, and this seemed like a new and confusing situation. But at last it dawned on them that Sean wouldn’t be coming out again tonight and they sloped off down the road, dragging their knuckles behind them.

Kenny, Sim and I had watched it all unfold with a kind of amazed horror. And if it had been anybody else, maybe we would have given a damn.

Sim pulled the spray can out of his pocket.

“You shouldn’t have done it on the car,” I said.

We’d leaped the gate at the sea-front end of Brooklands Ave and legged it across Kingsway, dodging taxis. We didn’t slow as we jumped down the steps in between the ornamental flower beds on the opposite side. Down to the path that ran the length of the beach from the lifeboat station to the leisure center. Only when we reckoned we’d put enough distance between us and the Munros did we stop and lean back against the seawall to catch our breath. The tide was out and the beach was dark. I was glad I wasn’t the only one red-faced and sweaty.

“Sim. I said you should’ve just done it across his door, like Mr. Fowler’s.”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard you the first time.” Sim took his suit jacket off and tied it around his waist by the sleeves. “Look, Munro’s a shitweasel. His dad’s obviously an even
bigger shitweasel. Are you telling me you really give a toss?”

He waited for me to answer. I didn’t.

He checked his watch. “Come on, we’ve still got time to do Nina’s if we’re quick.” He started to walk away with Kenny in tow.

I didn’t follow. “We haven’t got time to do Nina’s.”

“It’ll take two minutes, if that.”

“I don’t think we should do Nina’s. I’m not coming.”

Sim carried on walking but Kenny hovered between us, hopping from foot to foot, unsure what to do. “Sim, Blake says he’s not coming.”

I saw the set of Sim’s shoulders and knew that he wanted to keep going—he’d do it by himself if he had to. But our friendship was too strong. His shoulders slumped and he turned back to face us. “What?” He didn’t come to us but waited for Kenny and me to walk to him.

I shook my head. “Not Nina.”

“Why not?”

“Honestly? Because I don’t think Ross would want us to.”

He pulled a face.

“Look, if we were gonna be spraying stuff anywhere it should probably be school, right? You know he hated it.” I saw his eyes narrow as he considered the idea. “But I don’t think Ross would want us to do it
anywhere,”
I added.

Sim looked like he was ready for an argument. “How
come you reckon you know him better than us all of a sudden? You didn’t even meet him until you moved here. Kenny and I knew him in primary.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” I didn’t want to get into some ridiculous argument about who was our best friend’s best friend.

Kenny obviously did. “I knew him longest. He always told me stuff he never told anybody else.”

“It’s not a competition, Kenny.”

“I’m just telling you he did. Remember, he told me first about the time when he was trying to run away.”

“He wasn’t trying to run away,” I said. “He just wanted to get to that place in Scotland.”

“He told me he was trying to find himself.”

“Only because he was going to a place that’s actually called
Ross
. He thought it’d be cool to
be
Ross
in
Ross. But he wasn’t running away.”

Kenny was adamant. “But that’s what he told me—kept going on about it, about wanting to ‘find himself.’”

“And did he?”

Kenny shrugged. “He said he got as far as Leeds.”

Sim was gripping the can of spray paint. “Look, we agreed. For Ross.”

“It just doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I was struggling to explain it in my own head, never mind out loud. “It means, it doesn’t feel right.”

He wasn’t impressed. “You were there too, Blake.” He was talking about the funeral.

“And I’m telling you,” Kenny said. “Ross would’ve hated it.”

But Kenny didn’t have to tell me anything. I’d sat in between my mum and dad in that cramped and claustrophobic crematorium, feeling my stomach twist itself into hot knots, getting tighter and tighter as my best friend’s farce of a funeral dragged on. People who hardly knew him reckoning they could tell us about him, a stupid vicar, patronizing hymns … Ross would have loathed every single second of it.

“You were there,” Sim repeated. “And half the other people shouldn’t have been. The kids from school who turned up? They probably never once even spoke to him, just wanted to get out of this afternoon’s lessons. Bunch of hypocrites. And his mum or dad or sister just never said anything, did they? But for me the real killer was seeing Fowler, Munro and Nina. The three people who’d made Ross’s life the biggest misery ever! What the hell did they think they were doing there?”

“Ross hated them as much as they hated him,” Kenny said.

I shook my head. “You can’t include Nina. You can’t say she’s as bad as Munro and Mr. Fowler.”

“You weren’t there when she dumped him,” Kenny told me. “I was, and I saw the look on his face. I’m telling you: really bad, really cut up.”

I couldn’t answer that; didn’t know how to.

Sim said, “Out of all the hypocrites that went this afternoon, those three are the lowest of the low.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Nina told him she loved him, and then went and dumped him. Fowler hassled him and picked on him in class, getting him even worse grief from his mum at home. And then Munro goes and beats the crap out of him. No way on earth should any of them have been there.”

He waited, watching me.

I shrugged.

“It was a disgrace, you said so too. It was shit.”

I nodded. I agreed with him—up to a point. But for me it was the
whole
of the funeral that was the problem. I wished I’d had the courage to stand up there and then, right in the middle of the crematorium, and say something. What we were doing now was Sim’s idea of revenge, not mine. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted revenge. I wanted something
bigger
. Something more
Ross
. But I couldn’t figure out what.

“You can’t flake out, Blake,” Kenny said.

“I’m not flaking out. I’m not scared of spraying up somebody’s house. And if we get caught, get done—fine, I’ll take my share. I always have done, haven’t I? It’s just, you know …” But again I struggled for what I wanted to say.

And that wasn’t like me. I know Ross was the one who wanted to be a writer, but I was top in English and couldn’t ever remember getting stuck for something to say before. I knew some pretty big words. But this was infuriating,
exasperating. I waved my hands about as if trying to gather up my thoughts and knead them into a proper sentence. Then felt stupid with the other two staring at me.

With a shrug I turned away from them toward the beach and the sea. Out there I could see the bulky silhouettes of tankers waiting for the tide to turn so they could head out onto the North Sea proper. Our sea’s not the real sea, just the choppy gray River Humber. But the beach is sandy and there’s a pier and candyfloss and rock and a funfair—so it’s close enough. Beyond the tankers, across on the other side, was the steady, slow blink of the lighthouse at Spurn Point. I watched it, let it hypnotize me for a few seconds.

Kenny and Sim were expecting me to say something. I waited for one more blink of the lighthouse and still the best I could do was: “It just doesn’t feel
right.”