Life death prizes, p.10
Life! Death! Prizes!, page 10
She never had a job. Not a real one anyway. In those days people seemed to manage on the dole. Someone was always getting a giro and where we lived people helped each other out. She wasn’t proud either. When she got really skint she’d do a bit of cleaning, or get someone to look after me while she worked a few shifts behind the bar at the uni. It’s what she’d done as a student and they were always keen to have her back. I guess they sold a few more snakebites whenever she rocked up with her smile and easy banter. That’s what I imagine anyway. Occasionally Granny Ann would send us some cash, and so would Dad’s mum. Not Dad though. And to be fair Mum never asked him for any. I was definitely her project.
And then, when I was eleven, two things happened: Mum decided to earn some proper dosh. And she met Dean Hessenthaler.
Rosie didn’t like it when Aidan started getting interested in girls. Titus encouraged it. Titus set him up with a couple of slags he knew. Aidan Jebb got a blow job when he was fourteen from one of Titus’s girls. Aidan had to lie there and pretend to be asleep while Titus filmed this old bird groping him and getting his dick out and waking him up by sucking him off. Titus put it on the internet. Milf Aunt Wakes Up Her Nephew In That Special Way. Aidan didn’t enjoy it very much. Was that all there was to it? Was that what people paid for?
Aidan wasn’t really going to school any more. Sometimes he’d go down to the entrance and just look in and hang around. Sometimes a teacher would call over and say ‘Come and join us, Aidan’, but mostly they ignored him. And if a teacher’s car got keyed then it was Aidan that got the blame, and the cops would be round. They could never prove anything though.
The first time Aidan had full sex it was with a girl called Janie Summers. Janie would do anything for smack and Aidan told her he could get her some. Aidan didn’t think she believed him, but she shagged him anyway just in case. And he knew for a fact that she shagged three other lads that afternoon.
A few days after that Aidan’s cock felt sore and it hurt whenever he went for a piss. He thought it would get better but it didn’t. And it smelled funny and he got really freaked out when there was this greeny-yellow pus coming out. He had a wank just to see, and the spunk was sort of yellowy too. Aidan told Rosie and Rosie was weird about it. She was sort of pleased.
‘Told you, didn’t I? Told you what would happen,’ she said, triumphant.
Titus took Aidan to the clinic in the Lexus. ‘You can find your own way back can’t you?’ he said. ‘Take the bus or something. I’ve got things to do.’
Aidan didn’t like the clinic. But then, you weren’t meant to. He asked at the desk where he should go and they told him to ‘follow the red line to the GUM unit’. He asked what GUM meant and the nurse didn’t even look up. Kept writing on a pad. She said ‘Genito-urinary medicine’ in this bored voice. But then she looked up and when she saw his face she smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’ll be OK.’
The GUM place had its own waiting room. And there were a few other blokes there. All much older than him. One bloke was flicking through a magazine, but the others weren’t doing anything. They were just sitting staring into space. After a while a black guy came in who looked straight at Aidan and said, ‘There’s a lot of pagan women out there. A lot of pagan women.’ Aidan was glad when they called his number.
The doctor was big and Indian and Aidan couldn’t understand his accent very well, but he looked at Aidan’s cock and laughed and gave him a prescription. Said that he had got away lightly and to be more careful in future. At least, Aidan thought that was what he said. Aidan was going to be careful. Aidan was going to stay away from sex. It wasn’t worth all the fuss people made about it.
There was one girl Aidan liked. And not just in a sex way. He just liked to be around her. She had a voice that always sounded like it was sort of laughing. Leanne Gladstone was a girl he met when he was out doing backup on collecting loans. She owed Titus money and sometimes she had her instalment and sometimes she didn’t. And sometimes Titus let her off and sometimes he didn’t. She had a little toddler – Kai – who was frightened of the dogs and Aidan didn’t like it when kids cried. It upset him. Leanne was beautiful. Huge smile, crooked teeth. But crooked in a good way. She could have been a porn star. She could have been a model. She could’ve made loads of cash if she wanted.
Titus said, ‘You’re sitting on a goldmine girl. You might as well use it.’ But Leanne just laughed. If she had the cash she gave Titus what she owed. If she didn’t she might let him shag her, but she wasn’t going to do anything else. She wasn’t frightened of him.
Rosie hated Leanne. ‘Stuck-up cow,’ she said. ‘Thinks she’s it. Thinks she’s special.’
But she was special. Aidan knew it. Titus knew it. Everyone knew it.
And then Leanne disappeared. And then she turned up in the boot of Titus’s Lexus.
The car was stolen. Titus reported it and everything. He was calm though. Aidan thought he’d be raging. It was properly insured. Titus was careful about keeping his driving record clean. He kept to the speed limits, didn’t drink and drive. He was fully comp, all MOT’d and taxed. No one was going to get him for a crappy motoring thing. That was for mugs. And he bloody loved that car. He didn’t even go to the car wash in case it got scratched. He paid people to handwash it, to wax it and buff it. That car was loved.
And then it just vanished. Turned up three days later in Tostock with Leanne naked and dehydrated in the boot. Someone snatched her from her house in front of Kai, stripped her and put her into Titus’s car. And left her near Tostock woods in Suffolk.
Titus tried to act shocked.
‘Who would do that?’ he said. ‘Who would do that to Leanne? In my car?’ But he seemed pretty calm.
Aidan thought about Leanne’s kid. Kai. He found it hard to walk the dogs now. Every time he saw them, he saw the face of Leanne’s kid crumpling up and going pink and crying as his mum was taken by the bad men.
Leanne wouldn’t say who had taken her, or what they did. But she was different after that. Different in that she was the same as everyone else. Quiet. Scared.
The days move on, Oscar’s plane goes up and down but he never lands on the sun. I promise him guinea pigs if he makes it and he brightens immediately. I regret it straight away of course. All the squeaking. It’s bound to do my head in, but it’s done now. You can’t undo promises to children.
The days are still a dull, grey wet background to our dull grey lives and then Oscar is invited to a sleepover by one of the Walking Bus mums. Millie’s mum.
It is a fact that nothing is private any more: doctor’s reports, school reports, social enquiry reports, court reports, confessions you might make to a priest – all things you could reasonably assume were confidential, right? Wrong. Trust me, there are people out there right now hawking your credit rating round town like the Betterware guy with a new line in plastic food storage. School reports are tagged on Facebook, the neighbourhood priest is blogging about a juicy titbit fed him this very morning by a parishioner. Right now a group of junior doctors are settling down to watch a film of your gran’s hysterectomy. They probably have popcorn and cheesy snacks.
This is a world where court photos of tortured children have a Buy It Now price on eBay.
Nothing is sacred. Nothing is secret. Nothing. So it doesn’t surprise me that stories of Oscar’s supposed emotional abuse and possible personality disorder leak out into the playground. Certainly within two days everyone knows about my meeting with Mrs Bingley. I can tell by the way I’ve divided opinion in the playground. Some of the mothers lean away from me, or look right through me. I can tell by the way one of the few obviously skint parents, a stone-faced Sumo Mum in jogging bottoms, grabs my arm on the way to school one day, breathes early morning vodka over me and croaks ‘Bastards, they’re all bastards. Fuck ’em.’
But it’s the A-star PTA Walking Bus mums that are the most relieved that I’m screwing up. What would it say about the role of being a mum if it turned out that anyone could do it? That a nineteen-year-old lad could do it?
I remember Mum had to read this thing for a book group once. It was all about how women who had children should be prepared for physical and mental torment. Should be prepared for the death of any joy in their lives. I remember because I was about nine and at that age you remember if your mum suddenly lets out this massive, blood-curdling scream and hurls a library hardback across the room. Babyshock it was called or some such. Must have been an interesting meeting. Mum never went back anyway. ‘I knew it was a mistake to actually read the books,’ she said. ‘I only really went for the wine.’
The fact that they are relieved at having concrete proof of my inadequacy as a surrogate parent means that some of these women feel free to start to cluck with all that hideous sympathy again, just as they did in the first days after Mum hit the front page of the Gazette. And that’s when one of the most groomed and PTA of all the mums asks if Oscar would like to come over for a Halloween sleepover?
‘He’ll be the only boy, I’m afraid. Do you think he’ll mind that?’
‘I think he’d love it.’
I’m not sure this is true actually, but it seems the right thing to say. Until I think it makes Oscar sound like a predatory sex-pest. At six. The mum – what is her name? – doesn’t recoil though, she smiles that terrifying glossy smile and says, ‘Cool. We’re going to make it really old-fashioned. Games. You know, apple-bobbing, things like that.’
‘He’ll like that.’
Will he? I don’t know. We don’t really do games, Oscar and me. We do movies. We do movies till we fall asleep. We fell asleep in front of Jason and the Argonauts last night. This morning Oscar told me that he actually wanted to be an Argonaut when he grew up. Mum did games. Ludo, Uno, Junior Scrabble, all that. All a million years ago, but he seemed to like games back then. Maybe this will be a difficult social situation. Then again, maybe it’ll be useful therapy. Maybe it’ll help his plane towards the top of the sky.
Chapter Seven
I’m feeling restless without Oscar, and estranged from the house in some odd way. It’s the first time we’ve been apart for a night since the accident. There’s a nervousness fizzing in my guts like bad alcohol and I haven’t even had a drink yet. Rick and Alfie are meant to be coming round but I can’t really be bothered with them. Maybe I should face up to the fact that I’m not a kid any more, not the way that Rick and Alfie are.
Besides, I feel watched. Spied on. He’s close by out there, I know it. Part of the weather. Eyes glowing hard and bright and red in the rain. Little septic rubies.
Outside there is laughter and fireworks. Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night seem to have become conflated in recent years. Merged. We’re greedy with our celebrations in this country. We want the American candy-fest with its Scream masks and polyurethane witches’ cloaks, but we also want to continue burning our own sixteenth-century Papist plotters in the same week. How long before we add the Yankee turkeys of Thanksgiving to the good old British turkeys of Christmas? As a nation, we’re also well on the way to co-opting Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah and St Patrick’s Day into our own celebratory calendar. We could soon become the sort of schizoid country that sees the start of Ramadan as an excuse for an orgy of binge drinking. It could happen.
The doorbell starts ringing at around 6 p.m. Nine-year-old muggers squeaking ‘Trick or treat’. Actually the latex goblin masks are so thick that you can’t hear the words but the meaning is clear. ‘Give us all your dosh and we might not push burning rags through your letterbox.’ And at the end of the pathway you can see shame-faced adults lurking because their kids can’t be allowed out to bully law-abiding citizens on their own. The world is, after all, full of paedos and axe-murderers.
Of course I’ve got no cash in the house. I have to buy off the first three lots of visitors with ice-pops, the all-too-healthy oat bran bars I give to Oscar to take to school as a snack and, most disappointingly of all for one little gang of baby zombies, actual fruit.
‘What the fuck is this meant to be?’ says baby zombie one.
‘It’s a fucking pear,’ I say and shut the door. As the doorbell rings again, with what I feel sure is a menacing note, I leave the house by the back door and jog painfully down the garden and out into the streets. If I’m not to run the risk of having the house taken apart brick by brick by refugees from Dawn of the Dead, then I need a cashpoint very badly.
And so, sixty notes in my sticky palm, I wander through the damp streets until I find myself outside a bar where a cheery outlaw throng are busy smoking and flirting with one another. All the girls seem to be wearing plastic devil horns accessorised with Poundland tridents, which they use to poke the blokes in the arse every now and again. This causes much hilarity every time. Somehow I’ve found myself outside the Waterside Vodka Bar. I dither.
And then there’s a strange sick animal scent, stronger than the usual dieselly smell of Southwood town centre at night. And I look up and there he is slouching in the doorway of the Oxfam shop. Of course he is. It’s definitely him. Aidan Jebb. Blue trackie bottoms and a grey Lonsdale hoodie. Like he’s a ferrety boxer putting the road-work in. I should go over there and smash his scabby face through the plate-glass window of the shop. I should pound his head against the pavement until it goes pulpy in my hands. I should give myself the satisfaction of hearing his bones crack under my boots. He’s nothing.
But I don’t.
I look at him, he looks at me and I crack first. I turn and go into the bar nodding at the tuxedoed grunt on the door. He ignores me.
I see them at once at a corner table near a window. Dressed like extras from that Polanski Macbeth we watched in GCSE English. Easy for Lucy, she does that all the time, but I wonder about her friends. A blonde witch and a raven-haired witch. And they must have got in early to get a seat because the place is rammed.
I stand behind several sets of broad shoulders at the bar. The Waterside Vodka Bar seems full of huge men with mouths too wide and teeth too big. And they are mostly in fancy dress. There are mad monks and mummies and pirates and vicars. The burliest and beefiest of men have come as tarts of course. Hairy chests and beer bellies bursting free of their satin and tat, their ribbons and bows. Those few that aren’t wearing costumes are sporting variations of the same crazily patterned baggy shirt.
I’m not a short guy, but everyone in here is six foot plus with a sleek, successful look. Even the fat bastards in dresses. Everyone seems to be laughing, and the air is full of competing perfumes and facial scrubs. It’s a complete horror show.
I’m about to back out of the scrum at the bar, and slip away into the Halloween rain, back to Oaks Avenue, when there’s a tug at my sleeve.
‘Hello,’ Lucy slurs shyly. ‘We’re drinking watermelon martinis.’
Once the purchase of the martinis has been negotiated, plus Stella for me – I have my standards – I perch on a stool that miraculously becomes free next to their table and am polite but not intrusive. After all, I’ve made an absolute and unshakable decision – one pint then I’m off.
It’s an easy half hour before I make a strange discovery – the shame of turning away from a fight dissipates, evaporates, whatever, and I find I am enjoying myself. Jebb’s out there friendless in the rain and I’m in here with the beautiful people. With money and booze and girls telling dirty stories. Who’s the loser?
Lucy and her friends are sunshine. Unlike Lucy, her mates don’t have an authentic witchy aura. They are not even Goths. They are backcombed just for Halloween, not for life. They are raucous and bawdy. All three of them are teachers, but they’re OK. They still have the plastic devil forks. They don’t seem to mind me being there as they fizz with filth, telling outlandish tales of sex and embarrassment and what wankers blokes are. They remind me of my mum and her mates. They could be just like this when they got together: dirty, filthy – only it’s not really filth is it? It’s exuberance. It’s a kind of joy.
Lucy and her mates attract a lot of attention. And the other two – Heather and Christine – take ages to get back from the bar when it’s their turn to go. They get to it fast enough, with a kind of wriggling, side-stepping movement that a rugby coach would admire, but getting back involves negotiating dozens of chat-up situations as beefy ghouls try to get off with them.
‘Do you know what he said to me?’ says Heather, laughing as she gets back with a tray full of Absolut over ice. ‘That one there with the nose.’ We look over. A tall, muscular, Latin-looking smootho in a Persil-white grandad shirt accessorised with a noose, raises his glass. His nose looks normal to me.
‘Him. Yeah, well he only says, “If beauty is a crime you deserve to be in prison for a very long time.”’
The girls laugh, Lucy spitting an ice cube right across the table. Then Christine makes a cross face. ‘Cheeky sod. He said that to me too. I’m going to have a word.’ They laugh again and Christine says she’s going to give Grandad Shirt a piece of her mind.
‘Perhaps he’s Argentinian,’ says Heather. We look at her, puzzled. She sighs. ‘In Argentina it’s just good manners for blokes to say things like that to women. I read that. In the Guardian.’
‘He’s just a nando,’ I say.
‘A what?’
‘A nando. You know, someone completely ordinary trying to make themselves seem a bit funky, a bit crazee, a bit life-and-soul. Most of the clientele in here are nandos.’
‘Ah, like the popular High Street restaurant chain.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, I like Nandos actually. Their piri-piri chicken is to die for,’ says Christine, and pouts off to play Build the Sexual Tension with her target and his mates.
