Payback

PAYBACK

JAMES HENEGHAN

Copyright © 2007 by James Heneghan

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Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Heneghan, James
Payback / by James Heneghan
ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-701-2 (bound) –
ISBN-10: 0-88899-701-9 (bound) –
ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-704-3 (pbk.) –
ISBN-10: 0-88899-704-3 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8565.E581P38  2007       jC813'.54       C2006-905651-X

Cover photography by Tim Fuller
Design by Michael Solomon
Printed and bound in Canada

To Lucy

With thanks to Norma Charles for her input after reading the manuscript.

And my grateful thanks to my editor, Shelley Tanaka, for her patience and hard work.

My name is Charley Callaghan, but this story is not about me. It's about a boy named Benny Mason.

But it starts off with me.

We came from Dublin, Ireland, about five months ago to live here in North Vancouver. There were four of us — Da, Ma, me and Annie — but now there's only three because Ma died last month, in August. The reason we came here instead of some other place in Canada is because Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus live only a block away. Aunt Maeve is my mother's sister.

Leaving your friends and coming to a new country is a desperate experience, so it is. First there's the problem of starting a new school. Then there's the problem of trying to twig on to the Canadian dollars, the loonies and toonies, the nickels and dimes
and quarters, and learning how to use the bus service and the SeaBus and the SkyTrain without everyone thinking you're a totally gormless eejit.

Then there's getting used to biking on the wrong side of the road, and...the list goes on and on.

It's deadly.

At the very beginning of May, soon after we got here, I was wedged into the seventh grade at the elementary school for the final two months of the school year. The woman at the school district office said it would help me settle in with my age group before going on to junior high in September.

Right away I made friends with a boy named Sid Quinlan, but then, in July, Sid and his family moved thousands of miles away, to Ontario. They're gone for good. Probably never see Sid again.

Before he left he said for me to e-mail him, knowing I've got no computer or internet connection but hoping, I suppose, that I'd get one once my da got working steady.

Well, now he's working steady, thank God, but there's still no way we can afford one.

I'm way behind everyone here in technology. Most of the kids have cell phones, too, with instant
text-messaging — not that I want all that stuff anyway. I'd rather be out riding my bike.

I'm trying to get rid of my Irish accent so I'll fit in better and be the same as everyone else and make friends easier. The Canadian twang is coming, I think. It's dreadful slow, but I'm working on it. Our Annie is doing way better than me. She's eight, and her Irish accent morphs into almost perfect Canadian whenever she wants it to.

Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I don't really want to lose it. I do and I don't, if you know what I mean.

Ma was terrible sick with the cancer for more than a year at home in Dublin, but that was a long time ago, when I was about the same age Annie is now, and she fought and got over it. She was free of it for the longest time, and everything was grand. Regular check-ups, diet and exercise — we thought she had it beat. Then soon after we came here to Canada it came back and destroyed her.

It all happened so quick. Now she's gone.

I miss her something fierce.

I miss my friends, too. I left them all in Dublin — Sean and Fergus and Seamus and all the rest.
Making friends was easier in Dublin. We all spoke the same language for a start.

And there was a girl, Fiona Devlin. I wrote her a letter, but so far...well, I guess she doesn't miss me the same as I miss her, because it's been ages since I wrote — the same week we got here, as a matter of fact. She sat in the desk behind me in Religious Instruction. Lovely girl, sweet lips, brown eyes. She'd pass me notes that had nothing to do with the subject we were supposed to be studying. I even kept one of them:

Dear Charley, I get more out of staring at the back of yer lovely red head than I get out of a hundred books of common prayer or the catechism. Wouldn't ye think in this day and age we'd be studying something useful like how to behave on a date or how to get a job and look after yer money? Write back what ye think. F.

Maybe people don't answer letters any more, only e-mails or text messages.

It's now sunny September and I'm in another new school, junior high this time, eighth grade.

I don't want to go but my da says I've got no choice. It's not because I don't like school, but not having Ma around makes everything so...well, not worthwhile, somehow.

Annie's the same as me. She used to be full of bright chatter, full of vim and vigor, with enough energy to light up the whole street. But these days she gets home from school and mopes about in front of the telly, not really watching, only half alive, it seems to me. Or she goes straight to her room and stays there until she's called out for dinner.

The other night Aunt Maeve plopped a scoop of ice cream on top of Annie's blueberry pie, and Annie threw down her spoon and burst into tears.

Go figure, as we Canadians say.

••••

Junior high is very different from elementary. It's bigger, for one thing, with different teachers and courses. You move about between classes, so the hallways are always full of kids going somewhere, talking loudly or messaging on their cell phones to only God knows who, and there's gray metal student
lockers lining both sides of the hallways. Lots of them have graffiti, cleaned off during the summer but still showing faint ghosts of the original marker-pen ink, so it isn't hard to make out the tags, swear words, pairs of boobs, johnny wobblers and all the other rude stuff.

So I go to school even though my heart isn't in it this year. Also it's still like the middle of summer — bright and hot, with a lovely gold light early in the mornings and the smell of the sea coming up from the inlet. It's grand, right enough.

I've got to admit this is a lovely place. North Vancouver is built on a steep slope facing the sun and the sea and the tall city towers of Vancouver. The mountains are tight up behind us.

And the forest. I love the trees here. Sid Quinlan told me that the snow usually comes to the ski hills in late November or early December, which is one of the reasons he didn't want to leave.

But Sid's gone, as I said, so I'm starting eighth grade with no friends.

Annie spent two months in second grade and is now in third, with a teacher named Mrs. Frederickson, but that's about all I know. Annie
doesn't talk about school, and as far as I can see she hasn't made any friends either.

Wednesday of the second week, two kids come up to me in the schoolyard grinning like sharks.

The big one, head the shape of a coconut, goes, “Hey, Red!”

I stare at him.

He yells, “Yeah, you with the hair!”

I know them. They're in my English class.

I remember to try and flatten my tongue the shape of a maple leaf and speak in Canadian.

I go, “You talkin' to me?”

The big one goes, “Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, Red. Who else round here got a head like a three-alarm fire, eh?” He gives a loud, phony laugh.

“The name's Charley,” I tell him.

The second kid — long nose, pointed face — steps forward with a sly grin.

He goes, “I'm Rebar?” making it sound like a question.

I don't trust this pair of amadáns. That's Irish for eejits, or idiots. They look like trouble.

I'm not much good at fighting, but I will fight if I'm really forced to it, if my back is up against
the wall, so to speak, and there's no other way out of it.

I usually manage to avoid it, though, by bluffing and acting tough.

To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not very brave. Even though I love riding my bike, I'm not much good when it comes to zooming fast down steep hills. I couldn't in a million years ride like my hero Lance Armstrong, whizzing round the bends of the Col du Galibier, because I'd be in mortal fear of crashing and breaking my head.

That's the way I am. Not brave.

Anyway, I'm a bit suspicious and fearful of these two desperate-looking classmates.

“Me and Sammy, eh?” Rebar nods toward his friend. “We really like your accent, Red.”

I give them the hard stare. “My name's Charley.”

I don't like being called names like Red and Rusty. I like my proper name. These guys are not sincere. They're making fun of me. I already told them my name, twice.

Sammy goes, “Yeah. We figure you're Irish or English or something like that, eh?” He turns to his friend. “Right, Rebar?” Then he turns back to me.
“Or maybe you're from Scotland. Which is it, Red?”

“I'm Irish.”

As I already said, these guys are both in my English class. They sit in the row near the wall, opposite side from the windows, last two seats at the back of the room. I sit in the next row, beside Sammy, second seat from the back. The seat behind me is empty.

Rebar is also in my social studies class. His real name is Rod Steel, face sharp and mean like a ferret, tiny, mud-colored eyes close together, razor blade of a nose.

His big friend, Sammy Cisco, has a sneering gob with a lipless slit of a mouth, light brown hair sprouting up from his coconut top, and shoulders like he's got a coat hanger under his shirt.

This morning Mr. Korda, our English teacher, glanced at his seating plan because he doesn't know all our names yet and assigned character parts to be read aloud in the book we're doing,
The Tempest
. We're not doing the whole play, just a special condensed version for eighth graders as an introduction to Shakespeare. It looks to me like
Mr. Korda starts the year using it to check for reading problems.

Anyway, when it came my turn, Mr. Korda, seated atop a student desk at the front of the room, book in hands, elbows on knees, size fifteen brown Hush Puppies up on the seat, gave me the nod and asked me to read.