Crossing the Line (11 page)

Focusing, she snatched her hand away. ‘Wasn't talking to you!' she screamed.

Great. My last contact with the human race didn't remember who I was. I didn't know my father, my mother was too embarrassing to know, my sister was psychologically unhinged and on top of everything else I was Billy Nae-Pals and had been for more than a year now.

This might have been partly my own fault, since very few people extended the hand of friendship in case it got bitten off. I'd put a lot of energy into my public image. Boy, was it paying off.

From my old gang, Kev's friends, I was ostracised, excommunicated. I was as dazed as Dad on a Friday night, but with an unfocused anger and a sense of violent injustice. Funny how I was the great untouchable, when it was Kev who'd …

Well, there was no way back with Kev, which was lucky because I didn't want one. Shuggie was not much of a replacement gang, but for once I felt extremely benevolent towards him. The lights had come on in my head, so dazzling I couldn't sleep for the glare. To hell with Dad; to hell with ex-friends and imaginary ones. I had a date with Orla Mahon. Tonight.

A worm of unease had been nibbling at my guts, but I put that down to excitement – anticipation, nerves, lust, whatever. I wasn't letting myself associate it with the sniggers of Orla's posse yesterday afternoon. Anyway, she'd shut them up fast enough. All but Gina, who was a
hard girl to shut up, but she'd choked and spluttered so long into her Tango, Orla had finally sworn at her and kicked her ankle.

I'd had to turn away to hide my stupid smile. Orla Mahon, no less, was sticking up for
me.
No need for the squirming ball of nerves in my gut then. No reason to let it distract me.

It did though. Between nerves and ecstasy, I wasn't capable of thinking about anything else. That must be why, when I pulled the front door shut behind me and jogged down the concrete path that morning, I had my hand on the rusty iron gate before I recognised the car parked across the road.

Dark blue Mondeo. Fancy rims. A suit jacket hung carefully in the back. Tinted windows, but the driver's side was down and a lean, muscled arm rested on the sill, crisp shirt sleeve rolled neatly to the elbow. Lola Nan's hitman, eh? Easy mistake to make, even with a functioning brain. After all, the nearest sexually challenged cow was some way from our street, so what was
he
doing here?

I stopped, not breathing, my hand tightening on the gate till flakes of rusty metal dug into my palm. He didn't worry me. He didn't scare me, I told myself. When a few repetitions of that didn't convince me, I tried to picture him at his day job. Mickey Naughton, up to his armpit in a startled Friesian. Dreamy look in his eyes.

Still didn't work.

I tried to focus on his shadowy face. He was looking right at me, an unpleasant sneer on the side of his mouth. Mickey had a thin face, a handsome face, and Kev's girlfriend had once assured me those shadowy eyes were sexy. Dangerously so.

Kevin Naughton's mother died. Did you hear?

She had cancer. That can be fatal, you know.

That can be fatal.

Stupidhead.

Mickey lifted his fist like a wee boy pretending to have a gun, his first and second fingers jutting out to make the barrel. He pointed it not at me, but at the upstairs window of our house. He was aiming at the parents' room, had he but known it, but I wasn't tempted to laugh at his mistake.

Came back with a vengeance.

His finger gun jerked up with the imagined recoil, then he brought it to his lips and blew away imaginary smoke. Mickey smiled at me.

He didn't do anything as cheaply dramatic as screeching away. He turned the key lazily in the ignition, nosed the car into the road and drove out of sight.

Aidan was exactly the wrong age to witness my wee Clint Eastwood performance with Shuggie. He was fifteen, just one year younger than me: young enough to be reckless, old enough to be brave.

Never do heroics. Even if they do you no harm yourself, some stupid shining-eyed tosser will be far too impressed. And then a few months later they'll try to live up to your pointless example, and that's when they'll get themselves killed.

I got my overdue kicking a week after my defection. They were waiting for me to drop my guard, which I didn't, but I thought I'd probably better get it over with. I'd been the other end of the boot myself, so there was no point making an official complaint.

They were waiting among the sick-looking trees on
that footpath beside the computer store, and I was expecting them. It was only about half the crew, four or five of them. Nice to know I was popular. It didn't take long because only Kev's heart was really in it – honestly, I was quite touched.

This didn't mean they didn't put the boot in quite efficiently, of course, because a kicking's a kicking. Eventually, I hoped, some teacher pulling out of the school gates in his car would decide he couldn't in all conscience drive on by, even when it was only me.

You don't fight back. Everybody says that.
And you know what? They're right. I just curled in on myself, since the most important thing was to protect my head and my guts, not to mention my precious genitals. For the most part I managed to achieve all this, but you can't protect everything all at once. So that's when my nose got broken.

The teacher with the conscience, luckily, was McCluskey. When his car turned out of the gates, he swerved on to the kerb, leaping out practically before he'd braked, purple with fury. Obviously he couldn't touch anyone for fear of being sued, but they legged it anyway, because nobody ever liked to push McCluskey to the point where they – or their bereaved parents – might be forced to sue him. He had a natural moral authority; in other words, he scared the living shit out of everybody.

Risking a timeout for a second, Sunil bent down to me. ‘Sorry 'bout that,' he muttered, then hared away with the
rest of them.

Dragging me up by the arm, McCluskey laid into me like it was my fault, which in a way it was.

‘You stupid wee fecker, Geddes.' He could shout like this because he was outside the gates and outside school hours, or at least that's what I assumed. Whatever, I wasn't going to upbraid him for his language. ‘You thick tossers want to kill each other, just do it when I'm not going to fall over your bleeding corpses. Right?'

‘Right, sir,' I mumbled through a mouthful of blood and a nose that didn't belong to me. The words I managed to get out, I won't even try to spell phonetically. ‘Understood.'

‘What are you, Geddes?'

‘Stupid fecker, sir.'

‘Stupid
wee
fecker, and … ?'

‘Stupid wee fecker and a thick tosser.
Sir.'

He sighed and stared at my face, gripping my arm too hard because I was swaying. I didn't like to wipe my nose in case it looked like I was snivelling, which was something McCluskey would not tolerate, but there was a warm stream of blood coming out of both nostrils, and McCluskey briefly let me go, fumbled in his car and shoved a faceful of tissues on to my nose. He caught me in the nick of time, just as I was about to lose my centre of gravity all over again.

‘Are you all right, Geddes?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Aye, right.' He sighed. ‘Look, Nick. You're smart and you're not a bad guy. Right?'

‘Aye, right,' I mimicked.

His face darkened again. ‘That's not smart. That's stupid. Stop trying to be stupider than you are, Geddes.'

‘Right, sir.' He had the knack of making me feel ashamed of myself, and what was with all the flaming ‘sirs'? McCluskey made me feel like I was in the army or something.

‘It may be cool to be stupid, Geddes, but it is phenomenally stupid to want nothing more than to be cool. Why in God's name did you ever get involved with a loser like Naughton?'

I gave him my stupid-question-sir look.

He held on to his temper. ‘Can I give you a lift home?'

‘You are fecking joking, aren't you?' I said. ‘Sir.'

Instant death sentence for fraternising with enemy aliens, and he knew it. ‘I suppose I am, Geddes, I suppose I am. Are you sure you're all right? Well, even if you aren't, I suppose there's nothing I can do about it. What are your parents going to say about this?'

‘I'll deal with them, sir.'

‘I see.' Experimentally he let go of my arm, and I managed not to fall over.

‘I won't be pressing charges, sir.'

‘Funny ha ha.' He gave me a last sharp look. ‘I heard about Hugh Middleton, by the way. You're improving.'

For a moment I didn't have a blind clue what he was on
about. ‘Oh. Shuggie.'

‘Geddes, it's just as well you're a big ugly thug who's perfectly capable of looking after yourself. Otherwise I'd be worried about you.'

‘But I am a big ugly thug, sir,' I pointed out. ‘So don't let me keep you awake nights.'

‘You don't.' He got into his car, wound down the window and chucked me another handful of tissues. When I dropped the blood-soaked batch in the gutter, he didn't tick me off. ‘If your parents want to make a complaint ask them to contact me.'

That was pure officialese and he knew it. Just as my bravado was all spit and wind, and I knew it. My nose was bleeding so much I thought I was going to bleed to death (I know better now what that actually looks like) so when he'd gone I staggered back to the deserted school and through the swing doors into the toilets and propped myself over a basin to watch my blood swirl away. I blinked really hard and tried not to fall over.

‘The state of you,' said a voice behind me.

By now I couldn't help going abusive. ‘Puck off,' I said. ‘Pucked up by ettire life, you.'

Undeterred, Shuggie soaked some loo roll and started cleaning up my face, not seeming to consider the notion that I might feel like breaking
his
nose. I didn't, though, because the cold water felt good: soothing, numbing, as if it was soaking through my skin and all the way into my brain. I was terribly tired anyway and I could almost have
fallen asleep on my feet, but just as my eyelids sagged, Shuggie coughed and stepped back to examine his handiwork. Nodding contentedly, he flushed away the bloody paper, and I muttered ‘Danks.'

‘Thank
you,
Nicholas,' he said.

‘Puck off, Thuggie,' I said.

‘You don't mean that.'

‘Buddy do.'

‘Well, I understand. But thank you anyway.' His gaze was very direct and unswerving. ‘You know, we have to look after each other now. I have to look after you. And you have to look after me.'

‘Like buddy hell I do!'

‘Of course you do. You haven't got any friends left.'

‘Danks a buddy punch.'

He shrugged. ‘You're welcome. It was very brave of you.'

‘Bave,' I glowered. ‘As in toopid.'

‘Bave,' he said, ‘as in bave.'

His solemn straight face quivered not a jot so I had no excuse to hit him, though I knew fine Shuggie was laughing at me. Silently. Like an emotionally incontinent drain.

Shuggie Middleton was laughing at
me.

If I thought Shuggie had got me looking remotely respectable, I was kidding myself. Distorted body image or something, looking at my reflection in the striplit toilet mirrors and thinking the black eye and the skinned cheekbone and the swollen jaw didn't look too bad, and
that I could walk without almost doubling up. When I got home and Mum dropped her mug of tea, I just said ‘Football.'

‘Nick!' She half crouched, not knowing whether to start with me or the broken mug and the spilt tea.

‘Rough tackle.'

Standing up straight, she bit her lip hard and I saw tears blur her green mascara. She wanted to hug me, that was obvious, but I hunched my shoulders and turned as if to leave the room. Clenching her hands at her sides, she blinked. ‘It's not games day, Nick.'

Hmm. More switched on than I thought.

‘What happened to you, Nick?'

‘Told you. Bad foul.'

‘No, Nick.' She had her hands full of broken china and I saw she'd cut the base of her thumb. She glanced down at the welling blood and she just let the drops spill darkly on to the carpet as she looked back up at me with tears burning in her green-rimmed eyes. ‘No. I mean, what happened to you?'

I just looked at her. I don't think I've ever been so angry in my life. Part of me wanted to take the china shards out of her cupped hands and take her thumb and kiss the blood off it. The other half of me wanted to hit her.

‘You wouldn't know,' I said. ‘You were busy.'

‘You never tell me anything!'

‘You were busy,' I said again. ‘What was I supposed to do?'

It sounded like cheek. But the fact is, I really wanted her to tell me.

‘You were supposed to come to me.' But she sounded only sad.

‘It's too late now.' That was the arrogance of youth speaking. Like I knew everything. Like everything that could ever happen to me had already happened. Hah.

‘It is not too late! I'm going to see Mr Pearson and …' Her voice died under my glare.

I had to explain to her, in words of one syllable, that if she went anywhere near the Brain I'd make it clear it was all my fault, I started it, I was to blame. I was, after all, to blame. So in the end all Mum could do was drag me to A & E, where a doctor gave me a disapproving glare as she checked me over and sucked her teeth and stuck a dressing over my nose.

‘Suits you,' said the woman tartly, eyeing her handiwork.

But that was all she said. She was busy with the deserving poorly and didn't want to know anything about my little fracas. Anyway, she thought she already knew everything.

In school assembly next day we got the obligatory pained lecture on the futility of violence. This was not McCluskey's idea, though undoubtedly it was his fault, since he must have felt obliged to report the incident to Pearson. It was a wildly irrelevant lecture, given that anyone in your average secondary school knows that violence
is anything but futile, but Pearson liked to give it to us now and then, maybe so he could meet his anti-bullying targets. (There was no bullying culture at Craigmyle High. The Brain knew this because back when there was a bullying culture, he'd had the bright idea of getting bullies into dialogue with their victims. The programme was a huge success: after not very long, victims stopped turning up, since the perpetrators never failed to. These occasions were great for looking contrite, sounding sorry, and finding out what was really, really working on the bullying front.)