The Sick Rose (11 page)

The other people in his life – his band members in particular – became mythical creatures to her. They gained glamour and power the longer they remained strangers. Getting him to talk about them was like trying to prise open a bad shellfish. She gleaned only that he didn’t seem to have much time for the boys, Ben and Ciaran, but he did confess that he was close to Angie.

‘You’re lucky she’s ugly,’ he said.

While she waited, she still had his company in the form of twelve songs spread across two cassettes. She set up Nick’s decommissioned tape deck in her room so that the music was on a continuous loop. At some instinctive level she knew that he must not know how often she did this; it was the behaviour of a groupie, not a girlfriend.

Miranda came home one day to find Louisa cross-legged on her bed, having a staring contest with the silent telephone. ‘Someone playing you at your own game?’

It was a throwaway, affectionate remark that articulated for the first time the relationship’s appeal and its danger. ‘No,’ she said. She would have loved to confide in her sister but what would Miranda know about passion? She’d been with Devendra since their O levels and as far as Louisa could see, the couple had plunged headlong into mild affection and things had cooled rapidly from there. The closest she’d ever seen them come to sexual abandon was when Dev had squeezed her sister’s toes through her socks and Miranda had spilled her coffee on her lap in surprise.

She knew the number of his pager by heart, the digits a rhyme in her mind. She wished she could put some kind of bug on the device, or on Adam himself, that would show on a map of London where he was at any given time. She would never have thought that about any man but Adam and if a previous lover had said such a thing about her she would have been repulsed. Lately, she didn’t recognise herself. The sooner she broke into his life and let reality colour the blanks in her imagination the better.

Chapter 13

September 2004

Daniel Scatlock was a year older than the rest of them, a mystery which was never publicly solved, and he wore his school uniform like a Savile Row suit. He towered over Mrs Fox who introduced him saying that he was new to the area, which was usually a euphemism for ‘excluded from every other school in the county’. Where you went after you were expelled from Grays Reach High was anyone’s guess. She appointed Paul as Daniel’s guide for the day because their names were adjacent on the register. Paul’s dismay was keen. He only hoped that Daniel would recognise his minnowish status and show him the contemptuous disregard he deserved. Invisibility was the pinnacle of his social ambition.

During English, Daniel didn’t even make an effort to look at their shared copy of
The Diary of Anne Frank
and when the teacher was talking he didn’t open his notebook but just doodled. In French, he wrote his name on the front of his exercise book, forming the letters as deliberately and laboriously as a primary school child, but after that seemed to lose interest. In History, they were given a spot test. The class cried their protests; Daniel, who had more reason to complain than most – he could hardly be expected to complete a test based on a syllabus he had never studied – remained silent, merely adjusting his posture and flinging his legs out in front of him. They were so long he could hook his feet onto the chair of the boy in front of him, a nasty piece of work called Hash, who had bright red hair and a lunar complexion and went nuts if you called him by his real name, Hamish. Hash turned to glare at Daniel, immediately identified a higher authority and squared his shoulders to the front again. Daniel made no attempt to answer a single question. As they were read out, Paul soon got lost in the test, quietly confident of all the answers except for the first one, about why the Nuremberg trials were held there instead of in Berlin.

‘Nuremberg was the only prison in Germany that wasn’t bombed out in the war,’ said Daniel under his breath. ‘Berlin was all rubble. I’m right, go on, put it down.’ Paul shrugged, wrote the answer and watched for Daniel to do the same. But he didn’t, just scowled at the blank page before him. Paul remembered the effort it had taken Daniel to inscribe his French book and understood suddenly that he couldn’t read or write properly. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d leaned across and started to jot the correct answers on his neighbour’s page. The look Daniel gave him made Paul wish that he had never been born. Daniel didn’t turn up to Maths, the last lesson of the day, and during it Paul resigned himself to the fact that the list of people who might give him a kicking on the way home had just got one name longer.

He could not avoid the underpass that connected school and home without jumping across live train tracks. (Sometimes he had been tempted to do that.) The urine-scented tunnel was a further example of the Grays Reach architects’ unwavering commitment to fear and brutality. The most hazardous obstacle was a concrete island thick with municipal shrubbery. It usually screened at least one person intent on causing him pain. Tonight it was Simeon and Lewis, two of his regular bullies. Not for the first time, he wondered how come rival thugs never turned up on the same patch. Did they have a rota? Did they meet at the mouth of the underpass after school, saying if you hurt him tonight we’ll just go for a bit of verbal abuse tomorrow? They didn’t even bother to goad him any more, just got straight down to the violence. Paul knew that the more tense he was, the more it would hurt, but he couldn’t make his muscles relax. Simeon smacked the side of his head, a ring catching Paul at the point where his jaw met his ear. The pain was deafening. He tried to walk on but felt his upper body jerk backwards as Lewis stuck out his foot and brought Paul onto the pissy concrete in a pratfall. They both bent down. Tears already on their way, Paul prepared his ribs for the boots.

The third figure came up behind them like a gust of wind, it was so fast and so silent. There was an elegance to Daniel’s movements as his hands encircled both their necks and forced their heads together, once at the forehead and the second time bringing Lewis’s nose down hard on Simeon’s mouth. Paul recognised the sound of a split lip, quieter when it wasn’t his, and closed his eyes.

‘Fuck off, the pair of you. Pick on him again and I’ll kill you, do’you get me?’ It was a man’s voice, not a boy’s, and Simeon and Lewis ran away like children. Daniel crouched down to where Paul lay. His voice droned in and out of intelligibility due to the throbbing in Paul’s ear. ‘Man, what
is
this?’ said Daniel; his anger seemed, if not disproportionate to the attack, certainly inconsistent with the faintness of his connection to Paul. ‘Buzz buzz buzz pair of
wankers
. Buzz buzz buzz you’re a chicken.’

Then something in Paul’s ear went pop and he heard with perfect clarity: ‘I said, do you want to go and get chicken?’

There were two fried chicken outlets on the precinct, one halal and one regular. Paul had walked past them a million times but never once been in: they were not the kind of place you went into on your own if you were undersized and unaccompanied. He remained wary: the initial window for violence had closed but perhaps Daniel intended to take him somewhere public before humiliating him. If this was the idea, Daniel evidently didn’t plan to do it on an empty stomach. Without looking at the menu, he ordered chips, two colas and two boxes of wings. They ate the food in the window. Curtis Goddard walked past and did a double take. Paul tried to look nonchalant but hoped that word would get out.

‘What you did in class,’ said Daniel. ‘I appreciate it. It was good of you, man.’ The way he said it made it sound like a threat. ‘But I don’t want it getting out.’

Paul mimed zipping his lips. ‘Can I ask you something, though?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. If you can’t read, how come you know so much about the Second World War?’

‘History Channel,’ said Daniel. ‘My dad’s obsessed. He has it on all day. And if it’s not that, it’s the Discovery Channel or . . . what do you call the one that’s always got
Top Gear
on it?’

‘My mum has the telly on all the time, but she never watches anything that interesting,’ said Paul. They licked the chicken off their fingers. The grease and salt had given Paul a raging thirst that the cola didn’t seem to be slaking.

‘I’ve got a sort of proposal for you,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m gonna fuck off school as soon as I’m sixteen and the social are off my dad’s back, but until then, you cover for me, yeah? And I’ll look after you.’

The agreement was apparently effective immediately. They left the chicken shop together and from the moment they fell into step Paul felt the benevolence of his protection. Daniel was Aragorn to his Frodo, although he would rather have died than admit that to anyone.

He lived in a house identical to Paul’s, although his was in the middle of the terrace. An England flag hung limply in the kitchen window and a pallet of flattened cardboard boxes was rotting next to the wheelie bin.

‘I’m just over there,’ said Paul, pointing across the courtyard to the back of his own house.

‘Look at that,’ said Daniel. ‘You go past me on the way in every day.’

What must it be like not to be able to read? Paul found it easier to imagine being blind or deaf or without limbs. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t lose yourself in a book, although that was bad enough. How did you know you were on the right street, how did you even know which channels you were watching on television, or who was calling you on the phone? And how could you be exposed to letters and words all day every day and not absorb anything but the letters of your own name? Paul dug out a takeaway menu from the halal Indian and tried to decipher the Arabic lettering. The longer he looked for patterns, the more they all looked like dots or squiggles and he could only see three, maybe four, separate recurring shapes or themes. Maybe this was what English looked like to Arabic people, or to people like Daniel. Why hadn’t anyone ever taught him to read properly? Maybe his parents weren’t very literate either, but how had he got to the age of fourteen without anyone picking up on it? Without anyone
helping
? How was someone like Daniel supposed to get by? No wonder he was angry.

Chapter 14

October 2004

In the days and weeks that followed, the usually empty seat next to Paul was filled. It quickly became apparent that Daniel’s way of coping was a head-down silence that, if anything, marked him out as a diligent student. The teachers at Grays Reach were riot police in mufti. If homework was handed in it was a miracle: they didn’t notice a similarity between the graphology and content of Daniel’s work and that of his constant neighbour. Paul wondered if they even read it. There were two hours between school finishing and the end of his mother’s shift at the bookie’s and every day they were spent with Daniel. The pockets of dereliction that had crawled with threats when Paul had been alone now became their playground. They bunny-hopped their bikes along the chalkpits and construction sites, performed wheelies on the river wall in defiance of the toothy black rocks that jutted from the beach at low tide. They’d ride out to the big mall at Lakeside and wheel around the multi-storey car parks and coast down the spiralling exit ramp against the direction of the traffic. Daniel did it with his eyes closed, and Paul pretended that he was shutting his, too. The challenge was to see how many levels they could descend without the security guards intervening; often they got all the way to the bottom to find two or more security guards there, arms folded across their hi-vis jackets. Then they would duck under the barriers and pedal away, risking their lives on the access roads, legs pumping until their muscles were on fire. They’d keep going until they reached the accessible verges of the riverbank, where it would finally be safe to laugh, and they would freewheel along the coastal path, the salty riparian wind up their noses, in their mouths and wringing tears from their eyes.

If the weather was bad, they’d hang out at Daniel’s after school. The Scatlocks’ living room was dominated by a giant widescreen television connected to a winking stack of equipment that included a set top box, a wifi rerouter, a DVD player, an ancient VHS machine, a massive amplifier and at least three different games consoles. Two gaming chairs, the kind that looked like ripped-out car seats, faced the screen and they had a glass-fronted fridge rammed with cans of Coke and beer like the ones in the corner shop. Paul knew instantly that this was a house without a mother; it was the converse of his own home, where the lack of masculinity was evident in every ruche and flounce in the abundant soft furnishings. Even the dog, Diesel, a huge but unassuming Alsatian, was blokeish.

You could always tell when Daniel’s dad was coming home because the whole living room went dark and cold. Carl Scatlock managed to park his car – a black Land Cruiser – in the space outside the front window. How did it
get
there? The residents’ cars were all, in theory, kept away in parking bays and lock-up garages on the periphery of the estate. Daniel’s house, a staggered terrace like Paul’s, was accessible only by a zagged footpath, gaps too narrow to accommodate a car without mowing down most of the fences and possibly taking down some walls, too. It must have been a slow, painstaking manoeuvre, but if anyone was capable of that it was Carl. He had been a driver in the Army and still drove everywhere as if pursued by the enemy, with reckless speed that he insisted was 100% controlled and necessary ‘to keep my skills fresh’. It was true that Carl still looked like the kind of person who often needed to leave places in a very great hurry. As well as doing something nebulous in construction that meant he was often away for days on end, he also took the odd job in security. You could see why he got the work; unlike most built-up blokes, his bulk didn’t taper off at the lower half of his body. His calves and thighs were as awesome as his arms and chest and his neck was almost as thick as his head.