Ostrich Boys (5 page)

Both Mr. Fell and Caroline were shouting at me.

I wanted to stay and explain, I really did. I knew that what we were going to do was bound to hurt them, but we were doing it for Ross. I might have told them everything if I’d had the chance. And yet I guess I believed Sim: nobody else would understand why we wanted to do this, so no way would they agree to letting us do it. I slammed out the front door and ran onto the street without looking back.

Kenny and Sim were waiting at the corner. “Come on! Come on!” Kenny urged and beckoned me to hurry. Sim grabbed our rucksacks. Then we were all running. All four of us. Me, Kenny, Sim … and Ross.

“It’s not really kidnapping, is it?” Kenny said. “He’d have to be alive, wouldn’t he? For it to be proper kidnapping, I mean.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “But I doubt that means we’re in any less trouble. You know how it’s going to go: Ross’s dad’ll ring up my house, and my mum’ll ring Sim’s, who’ll ring yours. Sim’s mum’ll find out he’s not really staying at your house, yours’ll find out you’re not staying at his—”

“And then everybody goes ape-shit,” Sim said, making it all sound so very inevitable anyway.

Kenny was looking much more worried. “I thought you were going to sneak him out. That was what you said. You said you’d—”

“Caroline wouldn’t let go of him. Maybe if I’d had some chloroform or a couple of tranquilizer darts I could have prized him out of her unconscious fingers. Apart from that, what else was I meant to do?”

“Pass him to us, like we said.”

“Yeah, great, then I’d have been the one trapped in there trying to explain how come the urn had upped and disappeared into thin air all of a sudden.”

Kenny was quiet, but he wasn’t happy.

Ross’s house was on Hardy’s Road, but we’d run all the way to the train station, and going by the clock tower on the station’s roof, had made it with five minutes to spare. The day was getting hotter and I wasn’t the only one panting for breath. But I didn’t want us to start squabbling and bickering now; we had to get on the train and get moving.

“Look, be glad the police didn’t want to talk to Ross’s dad about the graffiti, okay?”

“Yeah, what did the police want, anyway?” Sim asked.

“Just some mad bullshit—I’ll tell you about it when we’re on the train. Can we just get our tickets and get going before anyone thinks of following us?”

Kenny grumbled, but went through to the ticket office.

Last night Sim had been easy to persuade. Straightaway he’d grasped just how brilliant and meaningful and cool it would be to take Ross to Ross. And how brilliant Ross would have reckoned it was too. “Just like one of his stories,” Sim had said. Ross wrote adventure stories, and even though he changed the names, we knew the characters were based on us. I’d managed to persuade Sim not to spray Nina’s house and we’d made our plans for today.

Kenny’s reasons to be worried were good ones. The
biggest being that what we were doing now was far worse than spraying a bit of graffiti. Which meant we could land up in even bigger trouble. Sim had first used the story argument to try and sway him. Hadn’t he ever wanted to live out one of Ross’s stories for real? And then I’d resorted to emotional blackmail. If he’d hated the funeral as much as he reckoned he had, and thought all those people were as big hypocrites as he said he did, then wasn’t giving Ross a real, proper, fitting memorial exactly the right thing to do? Kenny’s problem was one minute he said yes, one minute no. It was why me and Sim had to make up his mind for him most of the time.

But standing on the platform waiting for the train, we were all tense, jumpy. Even Sim, no matter how cool he thought he looked with his shaved head and trendy sunglasses. He was checking over his shoulder, watching the clock as often as me and Kenny were. The train was late and we were anxious we might have been followed. Getting stopped before we even got started wouldn’t be the smartest idea.

The trouble with Cleethorpes station is that the platforms are so open, there’s nowhere to hide. You can see the beach, and what we call the sea. I’ve never understood why people would want to come here on holiday—there must be half a million more exciting places. But at this time of year, and on sunny Saturday mornings like this one, there are plenty of day-trippers wandering around. I kept thinking people were looking at us. It was difficult to go unnoticed
standing next to Kenny in his horrible orange T-shirt—it was the orangest T-shirt I’d ever seen. No wonder Sim was wearing sunglasses.

There were about a dozen others waiting on the platform with us; I didn’t recognize any of them, so hoped they didn’t recognize us. We felt guilty knowing Ross was tucked deep inside my rucksack, and conspicuous with our tickets to Scotland. Cleethorpes is also a dead end: the trains only come this far. They don’t even turn round, just go backward out toward Grimsby the same way they came in. And the train coming in was late, so we knew it would be even later going out again. We shuffled our feet, fidgeted, squirmed, stared along the track—willing the train to hurry up.

When my mobile rang Kenny and Sim leaped away from me quicker than if they’d heard the sudden ticking of a bomb. I didn’t want to even touch it at first—guessing who was on the other end. I had thought it was funny to pick the noisiest, nastiest ringtone I could. But I wasn’t laughing now. And some of the other waiting passengers turned to glance at us. Waiting was boring; they were quite happy to be nosy. I killed the call without even taking the phone out of my pocket, just fumbling for the button. Then, reluctantly, oh so reluctantly, I took it out to read the caller display.

Sim stayed at a safe distance when he asked, “Your mum?”

I nodded.

He swore. Then went pale when his mobile burst out
ringing too. He hurried to shut it up. Looking a little pale, he said, “My dad. They must have got him out of bed—he was on night shift last night.”

“Please, God, don’t let them call my mum,” Kenny prayed. “Please, God. Please, God …”

He shook his fist at the sunny blue sky when his mobile finally went off.

We switched our phones to silent. Maybe they’d be easier to ignore. But the way they buzzed and vibrated was like trying to hold angry pins and needles in the palm of your hand.

So now we knew: Ross’s parents had been quick to contact ours. In my mind’s eye I got a flash of the look on my mum’s face as she gripped the receiver of our phone in the living room at home. I stopped the call but she kept ringing back. There was no way I was going to answer, yet I didn’t quite dare switch the phone off either. Ignoring my mum’s call was dangerous enough; switching it off altogether was close to mutiny.

I decided to let her shout at the voice mail instead of me and was grateful when at last it kicked in. My phone went still. I grinned at Kenny and Sim in relief. But only for a second or two. Mum wasn’t going to be ignored quite so easily.

Kenny was dancing on the spot, juggling his mobile like it was on fire.

“Don’t answer it,” Sim told him. “Don’t you dare!”

“But … my mum … she’ll go mad if I don’t.”

“That’s exactly
why
you don’t.” Sim waved his own phone high, and with an exaggerated devil-may-care grin held down the power button, blanking the screen and killing its furious buzz. He shrugged and pushed the phone deep into his jeans pocket. “My dad’s gonna kick my arse. But I reckon it’ll be worth an arse-kicking.”

Kenny didn’t seem so sure. “You know my mum. You know what she’s like. I’m telling you: she’ll
kill
me.”

“She’s just going to tell you to come home, right? D’you want to go home? You’re not flaking out on us already, are you?”

Right then I think Kenny was tempted to say yes, but he knew Sim and I would never give up so easily. So he shook his head. “No, course not. Just …” He danced a bit more, pointing at his phone.

Sim snatched it from him. “It’s got an ‘off’ button too, you know.”

“Maybe, yeah. But my mum hasn’t.”

Sim ignored him, turning the phone off. Then he looked at me.

I nodded, forced the image of my mum’s angry face out of my mind and pressed down hard on the power button. I felt a little shaky with my defiance but didn’t let it show. I held the phone up to Sim to prove the screen was blank.

“Right,” he said. “Now, this is the deal. We don’t turn them on again until we get home, okay? We don’t need
them. It’s not like anything’s going to happen to the three of us together, is it? We’ll take whatever crap they throw at us when we get home. But by then it’ll be too late to stop us, because it’s already going to be done, isn’t it?” He seemed pleased with his logic.

Kenny and I didn’t get a chance to argue because that was when the train decided to arrive. We hurried on board. And I felt that bubbling, nervy defiance I had inside become a definite rush. I realized I’d never been this rebellious before. My parents would stop me in an instant if they could, and they’d certainly punish me now that they couldn’t. But here I was, doing it anyway. Doing it with my friends.

Who’d have guessed it could feel so good?

I let out the big breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding when the train at last dragged itself away from the station. No one could stop us now—no turning back.

It was a short, noisy train. We managed to find a free table in the second carriage out of two and huddled around it like the conspirators we were, Sim blocking the fourth seat with his rucksack to discourage anyone else from joining us. An old lady with spiderweb hair sat at the table across the aisle and was watching us, but when I met her stare she took out a glossy magazine to read.

Kenny pressed his face to the window, trying to keep an eye on the station as it disappeared behind us. “We’ve not been followed,” he said. He sounded like he was expecting his mum and a whole host of SWAT police to come charging onto the platform as we escaped just in the nick of time.
I reckoned he’d been watching too many movies. “No one we know spotted us.”

“Which is a miracle for you in that T-shirt,” Sim said.

Kenny turned round in his seat. “What d’you mean by that?”

“It’s not exactly camouflage, is it?”

“It’s designer.”

“It hurts your eyes if you look at it for too long,” I said.

Sim asked, “Did someone give it to you?”

“No, I bought it.”

Sim acted amazed. “With your own money?”

But Kenny refused to bite. He stroked a hand across his chest, smoothing rumples. “It’s my favorite. And you’re so jealous I can smell it.”

Neither Sim nor I had a clue what that meant. We burst out laughing.

Kenny grinned at us, pleased that he’d been funny. He pushed his messy blond fringe out of his eyes and said, “Come on, Blake. Get the map out. I want to know where we’re meant to be going, exactly.”

But Sim shook his head. “No. Get Ross out first.”

We cleared up the newspaper and half-eaten sandwich crud left by the passenger before us; Kenny even scrubbed away a dried coffee splot from the tabletop. We didn’t want our mate sitting in litter. Then, checking to make sure we weren’t being watched by the old lady across from us, I carefully took Ross out from where he’d been wrapped up in my
jumper at the bottom of my rucksack and placed him on the table. I had to keep hold of him because of the rattling and swaying of the train. And just like it had been with Caroline, we couldn’t take our eyes off him.

“This is the closest I’ve ever been to someone who’s dead,” Kenny said.

“I can’t get over how small it is,” Sim said. “Ross was as tall as me, and now he fits in
there.”

“How do we know it’s all of him?” Kenny asked. “How could you tell if they’ve missed some?”

“Can you believe somebody even has that job?” Sim was incredulous. “How did work go today, darling? Well, it was a bit slow; I only collected four burned-up dead people.”

“D’you reckon they’d fit you in there?” Kenny asked me.

I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t taking the piss. “Maybe,” I said. “If they tamped me down a bit, you know?” With my fist hitting my palm, I made the action of squeezing a dead chubby kid into a confined space—or something similar. And Kenny laughed.

Sim reached for the urn’s lid.

Kenny blocked him. “What’re you doing?” he said, shocked.

Sim’s hand hovered. “I want to have a look inside.”

“No, you can’t. That’s wrong, that is.
Disrespectful.”

“Says the one who was going to put him in a lunch box!”

Kenny looked to me. “We can’t … can we?”

I knew what he meant. But when I’d been with Caroline,
hadn’t I also wanted to look? “Aren’t you just a little bit curious? If you’ve never been this close to a dead person, you’ve definitely never
seen
one before.”

Kenny thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “What if you spill him?”

“I’ll keep hold while Sim takes the lid off, okay?”

He still wasn’t keen. “Okay. But we’ve all got to cover our noses too. Because I’m telling you: we’re really shittered if anybody sneezes.”

Sim pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head, stretched his neck to look around, double-checking that none of the other passengers were paying us any attention, then took hold of the urn’s lid. Kenny watched me to be sure I kept a tight grip on the base. Sim struggled at first, before realizing the lid was meant to be screwed off. He waited for the clattering train to get over a bumpy section of track. Kenny and I leaned as close as we could. And finally he lifted the lid away.

We peered inside.

It was ash.

Of course it was. But we’d been expecting … I don’t think we knew what we’d been expecting. And none of us knew what to say. We didn’t know whether to feel disappointed, humbled or just that little bit stupid. We were all quiet.

Then I remembered what Caroline had told me about the weird memories that kept popping into her head. “It’s what
can’t
be fitted in there that counts,” I said.

Kenny nodded hard, sitting up in his eagerness. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? And that’s why we’re doing all this stuff. Because of all the other stuff.”