Crossing the Line (10 page)

Aidan was not exactly a soft target but there were enough of us. He was on his own that day, except for Allie, penned with him in the malevolent half-noose of boys. She wasn't in the line of fire, of course: Kev knew better in those days than to have a go at my sister, but she was pressed against the fence behind her hero. Now that I think about it, Aidan had shoved her back there, shoved her back and stepped in front of her and glared at me with all the contempt in the world. Cutting his eyes away, he looked at Kev Naughton.

‘Go and give us your phone, then,' sneered Kev.

I sneered too, till my eyes met Allie's.

She didn't look hurt at all, not even shocked, just
reproachful. As if she knew fine it was myself I was hurting; I wasn't capable of hurting her. That I was just capable of better.
You're a disappointment to me, Nick,
that's the message I got loud and clear.

My heart tore with the shame of it. My lowest ebb. About time too.

Shaking his head, Aidan smiled at Kev. ‘Won't your mum buy you one? Here you go. Happy Christmas.' And he tossed the phone to Kev.

Kev could have let it drop to the ground, but by reflex he caught it. Somehow that made it even more humiliating: taking catches for Aidan. It was a prize, that phone. Slim as a blade, matt black, state of the art. And Aidan tossed it to Kev like a trifle, like Kev was a charity case who needed it more than he did.

When Aidan turned on his heel and walked towards me, I stepped out of his way without thinking. For that I got a killing glare from Sunil, but I couldn't retrieve the situation without making the lot of us look even stupider. Besides, Allie was marching after Aidan and no way was I getting in her way. She took no notice of me as she barged past.

Funnily enough, I didn't feel too bad. Aidan had made Kev look a fool, and I realised I was not unhappy about that. In fact, I got a keen sneaky pleasure from it.

A switch tripped in my brain. I felt like I'd caught sight of a small circle of sky above a stinking pit, one I'd climbed in all by myself. Now I could start to claw my
way back up to the human race because I didn't feel like the worst scum on the planet any more; maybe just the second- or third-worst scum. I knew Allie and I would be fine in the end.

I'd have been entirely content with the way the mugging turned out if I hadn't been so afraid for Aidan. And I am right about some things, because very shortly afterwards I betrayed Kev to save Shuggie Middleton's backside, and Mister Hero saw me do it, and was inspired to more and greater and stupider acts of heroism, and died of it.

Shuggie Middleton. His Adam's apple bobbled and jerked as I glared into his blankly intelligent eyes. Oh, the fickleness of natural selection. Why were the smart ones always at the bottom of the food chain? What did it benefit the human race that the likes of Kev and Mickey Naughton were the ultimate predators? Ah well. No accounting for evolution. Back to the matter in hand.

Shuggie's eyes for once were not screened by his glasses, as those were lying on the tarmac stomped into shards under Kev Naughton's boot. He wouldn't hand over his lunch money and he didn't have a phone to hand over, which was another bad move, because it just made Kev irrationally angry. If I'd been Shuggie, I'd have got my mum to buy me a cheap one for a sacrificial offering. But I was smarter than Shuggie. In some ways I was.

I'd been uneasy about targeting the wee oddball from
the start. I felt sorry for him since he'd lost his dad, who I used to see a lot when Allie and Shuggie were at primary and she was always round at his house. When I went round there to drag Allie away for her tea, I used to be scared of his father's height and presence and his fierce searching eyes. In the end the fear was diluted with a juvenile unthinking pity, but it never went away altogether.

Shuggie's dad was a mathematician. I think that's what he was, anyway. I'm not sure what a mathematician does in real life (as my former Maths teacher will confirm) so maybe he was a professor of mathematics or something. At any rate, I can't say he used to be a mathematician before he got sick because he didn't
used to be
anything, even then. It wasn't his brain that stopped working, just his fingers. At first. Then, gradually, so did everything else: legs, arms, neck, the lot, right down to his tongue and his throat.

But his brain never did stop working; it wasn't like Lola Nan. He went on being a mathematician, but a furious one. Shuggie's dad's eyes were diamond clear and diamond hard and full of rage, even as his body curled in on itself and wasted into a rickle of sticks and his head sagged forward in its brace. He could still force his eyeballs up to glare at you, intelligence blazing out of them along with a lasering anger. Whatever he had it felled him like a tree, only he took a terribly long time to fall: slow motion that lasted about a year. Since he couldn't
swallow or speak, he choked to death one day on his own spit, which seemed like a fittingly angry death.

If Shuggie had inherited just half his dad's ferocity he'd never have been a target for Kev, but here we were, and there he was, and I'd been outvoted. And his glasses were destroyed and that was going to cost his mother a good bit more than a phone or some lunch money. I remember wanting to grab the child by the scruff of the neck, drag him into a corner and explain that to him in words of one syllable. A black wriggling worm of guilt had lodged in my gut a little over a week ago, but I'd done nothing about it. I remembered Allie's cold contempt, and Aidan's piss-taking bravado, and I tried to remember that feeling of crashing to the bottom of the pit and rolling over to see the sky a million miles overhead. I tried to remember how I'd planned to reach it.

Instead I stood there like the expendable henchman I was, giving Shuggie the empty-eyed stare that usually got them turning out their pockets for Kev. It wasn't working, and I could feel the atmosphere worsening in our dingy corner. I did not like the shuffling impatience of the others, the charge of eager aggression in the air. I did not like the wolfpack scent of us. I knew Kev had an unreasonable and chippy pride, sharpened by the humiliations of Orla and Aidan, and I did not like the idea of what he might do to salvage it.

What I did like was the stupid defiance in Shuggie's myopic gaze. He just stood there with his hands curled
into tight fists, arms poker-straight at his sides. He looked at me – roughly, I mean we're talking Blind Pew here – and he looked at Sunil, big and threatening on Kev's left hand, and then he looked at Kev. His lower lip was stuck out, his spotty chin tilted half-heartedly, as if he'd committed himself to resistance without really thinking it through, but he knew he might as well take what was coming because there was no getting out of it now. Up against the seven of Kev's regulars he looked brave and stoical and entirely defenceless.

Kev crunched his knuckles, having seen too many cheap Cockney gangster films, and just then I knew I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear what was going to happen to Shuggie, right under my eyes. I couldn't bear to be part of it. Mostly, and quite suddenly, I couldn't bear being on the same planet as Kev Naughton.

‘Leave him alone,' I said.

It just did not compute in Kev's brain for a while, and for that I don't blame him. He didn't know who the hell I was talking to, he didn't know why I'd blurted that out like some badly programmed Terminator, he didn't understand. He smirked at Shuggie for a few seconds longer, his brow furrowing gradually till the smirk faded to a perplexed frown.

‘Leave him,' I said again. I'd started now and I couldn't unsay it, so I'd better follow this through or I'd had it. ‘Leave him alone, Kev.'

Kev turned and stared at me. There was confusion in
his eyes, and betrayal, and a degree of hurt, but even as I watched, it all coalesced into sheer contempt. That was it. It was irreversible, and I knew I'd burned my boats with a few impetuous words and a moment of misplaced sympathy. Oh, feck.

I could feel the combined stare of all of them, including Shuggie, but I wasn't wasting my energy looking anywhere but at Kev. I was the biggest and the meanest of them and they'd certainly take me down and give me a hiding if they got up the nerve and moved as one, but nobody wanted to suffer for making the first move. Anyway, they were all trying to get their heads round what had changed. Some of them weren't that bright, though you couldn't say that of Kev (though I only discovered much later, in a courtroom, just how smart he was).

‘Why don't you piss off and play with the girls, Nick?' he sneered, half turning back to Shuggie.

‘Cause they're harder than you,' I said, ‘and I'm dead scared of them.'

I heard a couple of muffled snorts, turning quickly to coughs, and knew I was maybe OK with a few of them – they wouldn't hit me too hard, they'd only pretend. That still left Sunil, though, and a couple of others, and Kev.

‘Leave the wee tosser alone,' I said.

‘You gonnae make me do that?'

‘Uh-huh. Yeah, Kev. I'm gonnae.' There was a small Nick inside my skull at that moment, headbutting my
brain and shouting at me to shut
up,
but really I didn't have a choice now. I had to bluff my way out or I really was screwed. ‘Just leave him, OK?' I was not getting any more original with my pleas, but I was reckoning, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Because by that time, I was feeling extremely stupid.

‘You.' I looked at Shuggie, and jerked my head. ‘Eff off out of here.'

Shuggie was not as dumb as I was. He didn't hang around hoping to protect
me.
He just effed off out of there.

For the moment, as it turned out, I didn't need protecting. Kev was so stunned by my betrayal he just stood and stared as I walked past him, but it was not a nice stare. I know that because I held his eyes as long as I could. The others weren't going to do anything without his say-so, not now. Later.

It was as I shoved past the last of them that I spotted Aidan. He'd been walking round the corner on the way to the maths annexe, which was a grand title for a couple of prefab huts. He was standing rock-still, as if he'd watched everything, and he was staring at me, his eyes beneath their fair fringe brilliant with shocked approval, which made me want to hit him.

This was not long before he became imaginary.

‘They're trying to kill me,' whispered Lola Nan. ‘They've paid a hitman and I never know which moment could be my last.'

Mum was fighting a jar of organic fairtrade marmalade, trying to get the lid off. Dad sat at the table watching her, jaw in his fists, faded tattoos wrinkled and crumpled, wispy hair coming out of its elastic band. He gave Lola Nan a filthy look.

‘Why would we go to the expense when we could shove you under a bus?'

‘Terence!' said Mum.

I'd sooner push you under one, I thought, than ever do it to Lola Nan. But Dad caught my eye and tried to give me a knowing smile, like it was a shared joke. Pathetic.

Poor Dad. We'd lost contact in his smitten love affair with Allie. Now he knew she was going to grow up too,
whether he liked it or not, and maybe he'd like to be in touch with me again, but he didn't know where to start. Neither did I, so we were on a bit of a hiding to nothing.

Sometimes I got the notion he was thinking about not having the first drink of the evening, so that he wouldn't be dazed, and he'd remember to sit down with me and talk, clear-headed meaningful bonding stuff. Then he'd think about not having the second drink instead, but he'd have it anyway, and a third. After that he'd be dazed and the bonding thing wouldn't seem so important any more.

‘Nick,' said Mum.

I dreaded that bright and brittle tone. Hesitant, afraid to begin. ‘What?' I said.

‘Did you hear Kevin Naughton's mother died?'

I had to take a quick breath. ‘No,' I said calmly. ‘When?'

‘Last week? Sometime last week.' She banged the marmalade jar hard a few times on the table. I don't know what that was supposed to achieve. ‘It was in the weekend paper.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘You didn't show me.'

‘I wasn't sure … I didn't know if you'd …'

Didn't think I'd care, eh? ‘Was it the cancer?' I asked.

Mum nodded, straining at the jar lid. I wished Dad would get his finger out and give her a hand. I wished Mum would snap at him, tell him to stop being such an idle troll. ‘She had a recurrence,' she said. ‘It came back with a vengeance. Jenna Mathieson from the oncology ward told me. So sad.'

So sad.

Came back with a vengeance.

Shame, it really was. Poor woman. Her parenting skills might have been dodgy, or they might not, but
she
never killed anyone. A shiver rippled down my spine. ‘Maybe it was Kev's trial,' I said. ‘Stress.'

‘Don't talk crap,' snapped Dad. ‘The woman had cancer. That can be fatal, you know.'

Sarcastic
arse.

Mum gave him that look she always did: surprised, and slightly sympathetic. I don't know why she should be surprised. It wasn't exactly out-of-character behaviour. Must have been a rough night. Again.

Sure enough, ‘I need a drink,' he muttered under his breath.

I knew he wouldn't have one. Drinking after breakfast would make him an alcoholic. He said it for my benefit, just to let me know how much I upset him. So damn disappointed in me, he was driven to drink. Poor little arse.

Lola Nan threw me one of her rare incisive glances, though it landed just over my left shoulder. ‘Me too.' She flashed a wicked grin. ‘Any whisky?'

Most of the time I knew Lola Nan was gone. But there were times I suspected a lucid old gremlin hid behind her papery eyelids.

‘Later, Lola Nan.' I patted the fragile hand that in turn was patting its little cushion of air. ‘I have to go to
school
now.'