Cat Kin (2 page)

‘What about you?’ he said to Ben. ‘Lemonade?’

Ben had his bearings by now. He said, ‘No, thanks.’

Toby brought the tea and a plate of biscuits, which he placed near Stanford. Mum grimaced as she sipped hers. It clearly had sugar in it.

John Stanford settled down to business. He said he would increase his initial offer on the flat. Mum reacted as if he’d spat at her. Stanford lit a cigar, ignoring her grunt of
distaste.

‘Mrs. Gallagher.’ He spoke in a clipped, polished way. ‘This property isn’t nearly so desirable as you think. Not with kids running amuck and leaving litter
everywhere.’

Toby slurped his tea in the silence. Stanford allowed smoke to curl up around him.

‘Tell you what. I’ll give you till midnight on Monday. You can call my mobile. After that, my offer drops by a thousand every day I don’t hear from you. So think about it, Mrs.
Gallagher.’ Mum’s face had no colour in it. Stanford’s wrinkled with another smile. ‘At least do it for your son.’

‘Leave him out of it!’

‘It wasn’t I who brought him into it. All I’m saying is that this area is growing less and less like somewhere I’d want to raise my own children. And the longer we wait,
the less desirable it’s going to be.’

He laid his still-burning cigar upon a cushion, one that Mum had embroidered herself. When he picked it up, a black crater gaped in the fabric.

Mum told him to leave. Stanford finished his tea and biscuits and nodded to Toby. The men breezed out as smoothly as they had arrived. Mum burst with a shriek of rage. That was when they’d
called the police, who did precisely zilch, as far as Ben could make out. And now they had no front door.

‘Look out, Ben!’

He’d already seen the danger. He hammered at the button and the flipper winged the steel ball before it could plummet into oblivion.

‘Yay, Gallagher!’

He cradled the ball in the right flipper, let it roll and flicked it at a deflector. It rebounded into a multiplyer zone and buzzed around like a trapped hornet. His score piled up. He kept a
weather-eye on it. Not too much. Not today.

Ben’s reputation as a pinball wizard had spread like head-lice around his school, and beyond. The new craze for the old-fashioned machines meant contests were a regular thing. Ben’s
advantage, aside from quick reflexes and an unusual ability to watch the ball no matter how fast it ricocheted around, was that his father was obsessed with the game and had even built a pinball
table from scratch, which he kept at his own flat.

‘Come on, Ben,’ Alistair urged. ‘Make us rich. You’re destroying that sucker.’

Other friends chipped in with cheers of encouragement. Glancing to his left (and a fair way up) he caught Cannon’s eye. Cannon—real name William Canning, nickname a
no-brainer—gave him a warning wink. Ben carefully sent the ball into a low-scoring area.

Normally he wouldn’t dream of doing this. He hated the idea of letting everyone down. Many bets got placed on these games and most people here had a couple of quid on him winning, as
usual. But Cannon had offered him twenty pounds to throw the match. (‘You’ve got to make it look real,’ the huge boy insisted. ‘I want you to
almost
win.’
And I want a titanium front door and a Kalashnikov
, Ben had thought at the time,
but it ain’t gonna happen
.) However Cannon had been, well,
insistent
, so Ben
reluctantly decided he could stay in one piece and give Mum the money towards the new door—he planned to slip it into her purse so she wouldn’t know it came from him.

‘Hit the reactor again. The reactor!’ Rajesh gibbered, jumping up and down.

Ben fired the ball at it and missed, deliberately. He thought how dumbfounded everyone would be when he lost on his favourite table. It was called Fort Osiris and the setting was secret agents
storming an enemy’s lair. How this scenario related to the abstract way the ball spasmed around the board, he couldn’t guess—but the concept appealed to him.

Groans swept the arcade as he let himself drop the ball. He had one more shot left.

A droplet fell from his nose and splashed a red star on the bathroom’s decorated tiles. Just then Mum rustled in through the cardboard barrier they’d rigged up as a
substitute door. He knelt, dabbing up the blood with a tissue. Mum wouldn’t want her mosaic of a giant seashell stained—she’d slaved over that every evening for two weeks.

‘Sweetie! What happened to you?’

‘Football accident.’ He sniffed, trying not to bleed in front of her. ‘I bumped into the goalie.’

‘Are you sure?’ Mum peered at him. The bruises on his face were already darkening. ‘Have you been playing with those yobs from school?’

‘We don’t
play
…we hang out.’

‘You’re lucky your teeth aren’t hanging out. I can’t afford dentists as well as carpenters, you know.’ Mum tutted, then hugged him. ‘At least you’re
brave about it.’

Later, tucking into his fish fingers, he felt her eyes on him again.

‘Ben. This isn’t about…You aren’t doing that pinball nonsense still?’

‘Of course not.’ Ben drank quickly from his water glass. What an idiot he’d been. As his last ball rolled harmlessly towards the gully, a reflex had taken over and sent it
hurtling back up the board. His safety margin vanished in a barrage of lights and he had beaten his opponent’s score by a measly 200 points. And then, outside the arcade, Cannon had beaten
him.

Mum picked at her Marmite on toast, about the only meal he saw her eating these days. She looked tired and hollow-cheeked as she continued to give him suspicious glances.

‘I won’t have you doing it, do you hear?’

‘Mum! I stopped ages ago.’

‘Good. So how are you spending your free time now?’

Ben tried to think. If you took out school and the arcade, his mind was a blank.

‘I’ve got the computer. I like time by myself.’

‘You need to get out more. And I don’t mean with those bus-stop kids. The leisure centre’s just down the road.’

‘We do enough swimming at school.’

‘Do something else then. The man who takes my self-defence course is starting Tae Kwon Do classes for kids. Why not try that? It’d be a great way to meet new friends.’

Ah. Now he recognised the signs. She’d been looking for a chance to suggest this.

‘I don’t need to learn self-defence.’ He winced as a bit of ketchup stung his cut lip.

‘Ben, I’m not nagging,’ said Mum. ‘I worry, that’s all. This time it was the front door. Next time…’

‘Oh yeah. Like a kid with a bit of kung fu could duff up Stanford’s heavies.’

‘Not exactly.’ Mum held his gaze. ‘I don’t mean a big thug like the one who came here. Stanford would be sneakier than that. He bribed those yobs to dump litter in our
garden. That mightn’t be all they’re prepared to do.’

‘Mum!’ She was scaring him now. ‘Okay. I might check the class out. If you want.’

‘Only if you want.’ She touched his hand across the table. ‘We’ll be all right, Ben. No-one’s going to force us into anything. This is our home.’

It hurt to smile.

The highlight of the dog’s morning had been nosing inside a bin, so when the cat appeared it was like winning the Lottery. A mongrel, part Alsatian, part hearth rug, it
hurtled along the gutter two strides behind a ginger streak. The cat leapt onto the bonnet of a blue Volkswagen, its fur standing in spikes as if frozen by an icy wind.

The dog barked in triumph, making experimental jumps at the car. The cat retreated up the windscreen, hissing and arching like electricity. Half-crazed with joy, the dog got its front paws on
the bumper.

It recoiled as if stung by a spark. The cat had flashed across the bonnet and clawed its nose. More horrified than hurt, the dog ran in circles, yelping. The door of the nearest house opened and
a lanky, brown-haired girl ran out.

‘Oi! Pack it in, fleabags!’

Sensing that the fun was over, the dog slunk away.

‘Ssshh, Rufus. It’s gone.’ Tiffany Maine scooped the cat off the car. Rufus changed from feline fury to fluffbundle, squinting with pleasure as he let himself be carried
baby-style into the house. He gave Tiffany’s hand a sandpapery lick.

Cats didn’t, of course, do this. Cats didn’t care for people the way dogs did. Cats were selfish and cold, neither giving love nor welcoming it. What rubbish. Tiffany got cross when
she heard people saying that. If any dog was more friendly, more needy, or more doting on humans than her cat Rufus, she had never met one. But still people refused to see it, purely because they
didn’t expect to.

‘Tiffany! Do shift yourself. We’ll be late.’ Her mother was calling up the stairs, not noticing Tiffany right behind her, getting a free hair-styling from Rufus’s tongue.
‘Oh, you’re there. Shoes on? Where’s your coat?’

‘It’s the first day of spring.’

Her mother tutted. ‘The year has no business going by so fast. Peter!’

‘Hang on. We’re about to break a world record here. Five, six…aha!’ Tiffany’s father hurried downstairs, both hands bristling with mugs. ‘Tiffany, unless the
dwarves are visiting I think
seven
cups in your room is excessive.’ He vanished into the kitchen.

‘Come
on
, Peter.’

‘Cathy, the hospital won’t fly away if we’re five minutes late.’

‘But he’ll be waiting.’

Dad swept into the hall with a jingle of car keys. ‘It’s a good job then that
I
was ready half an hour ago. Tiffany, put the creature down, he’s not coming.’

The hospital’s logo was the face of a crying child forever on the point of cheering up but, Tiffany noticed, never quite managing it. In spite of this the place felt less
like a hospital than a huge playhouse. A helter-skelter stood where the receptionist should have been and a shiny red bus looked as if it had wandered in off the street. Only the unnaturally clean
smell made her uneasy.

They still knew the way to Lion ward blindfold, even though Stuart had been living mostly at home these past months. He had enjoyed learning to use his electric wheelchair, pretending to be a
comic-book super-villain, and Tiffany had been glad to help out in her own way. Not many big sisters were actively encouraged to thump their little brother repeatedly on the back every day.