The Sick Rose (12 page)

‘You here
again
?’ he said one afternoon, even though it had been weeks since they had last met. ‘You homeless or summink? Don’t worry mate, I’m only taking the piss. You’re as thick as thieves, you two. I had a mate like that when I was your age. Frank Jackson. D’you remember him, Daniel?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Daniel, with the eye-rolling resignation of one who has heard a story many times.

‘He was killed in Bosnia, must be, what, twelve years ago now,’ said Carl. ‘I still miss him. Losing him was much worse than when this one’s mum left us.’ Daniel’s chin hit his chest and stayed there. ‘We signed up together, me and Frank. We was blood brothers. When we was about your age we cut our thumbs and made our blood run into each other. It was all the rage.’ Carl Scatlock took a knife out of his pocket. It flashed like a light and he pressed it to the soft fleshy pad of his thumb. Paul felt dizzy. ‘You can’t do that any more, of course, we didn’t know about AIDS and all that . . . What’s up with him?’

The idea of deliberately cutting your thumb made Paul feel like his lungs were filling up with blood. He was slowly bending down into a foetal position, self-control slipping away like liquid through fingers.

Daniel dropped to his level, his concern evident. ‘Paul! Paul! What’s happening? What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t breathe,’ said Paul.

‘Whoa there,’ said Carl Scatlock.

‘Don’t let him cut himself,’ wheezed Paul.

‘You’re all right, mate,’ said Daniel. ‘No one’s going to cut anyone.’

‘The idea of it . . . the thought of it. The thought of the – I can’t stand even the word. Please, make him stop.’

‘What is it, like a phobia?’ said Daniel. Paul nodded. ‘I saw a thing on them. He’s all right, Dad.’

‘Jesus, Daniel,’ said Carl in a disgusted sort of way. ‘For a moment there I thought something was really wrong with him.’ He walked off to the kitchen, cleaning his nails with his knife.

‘He can’t talk,’ said Daniel, when Carl was out of earshot. ‘You should see him when a shark comes on the telly.’

Paul managed a thin smile. ‘Don’t spread it about, will you?’

‘You kept my secret. I know yours now. That makes us even.’

Paul found out about the name thing one day after football. They were in the boys’ changing room with its prison-issue lockers and its stench of adolescence.

‘Nice pass, Danny boy,’ said Max Grant, who was a footballing legend and a decent bloke by Grays Reach standards. Once Max had warned Simeon off him in the underpass. In fact, before Daniel, Max was the nearest thing Paul would have had to an ally.

‘What did you call me? My name’s Daniel. Not Danny boy. Not Danny. Not Dan.
Daniel
.’

Max raised his palms conciliatorily. ‘All right, mate.’

‘I’m not your mate,’ said Daniel. ‘Say Daniel.’

Max actually obeyed. ‘Daniel.’

Daniel slapped Max lightly on the cheek, which was more humiliating than a punch. The funny thing with Daniel was that while the threat of violence was always there he rarely – bar his double assault on Simeon and Lewis in the first week – raised his hand. He didn’t carry a knife, but even the boys who did gave him a wide berth. After initial attempts at recruiting him proved futile, and it became obvious that he had no interest in taking or selling drugs, even the gangs ignored him. But his quiet authority was palpable. There was a thrill, a kind of fear, about going in his slipstream.

Thanks to Paul, he gave in just enough work to be able to slide under the radar. Paul sometimes wished that Daniel would make more trouble for himself, knew that then he might be rescued by ‘the system’ – you saw it happen, every now and again, these kids got hauled out for extra tutoring, but it was always the mouthy ones and Paul secretly wondered if the extra attention was for the pupil’s benefit or just to make crowd control a little easier.

Paul worried about how Daniel would ever pass any exams. So far it was all coursework, which he could help with, but he couldn’t sit papers on his friend’s behalf (at any rate, not at the same time as sitting his own). One of his dad’s favourite sayings had been ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.’ It gave Paul an idea, a brilliant idea. He would teach Daniel to read. He thought he’d be a good teacher because it didn’t always come easily to him, either. Some teachers, like Mr Taylor, you could tell they’d been to good schools and that at those schools they’d always been top of the class. If you didn’t get the poem the second it was read out to you, he had this way of taking off his glasses and looking at you like you were a slug. Paul wouldn’t be like that: he’d encourage his students to take their time and tell them it was OK if you didn’t memorise it all straight away, OK to go away and think about the poem. In fact it was better to do it that way. Otherwise, it was like eating your food without chewing it.

He gave the books to Daniel on the evening of his fifteenth birthday. They were in Daniel’s front room playing
Grand Theft Auto III
. Paul hated the kinds of games Daniel liked. He preferred the ones that were more like versions of the books he read (much less than he used to: Daniel didn’t like him reading, not for pleasure anyway), the ones with a bit of history or fantasy and where the women were just as beautiful but they hid it under long flowing gowns rather than bending down over cars in cropped tops. He could see enough of that just looking out of the window or going to the precinct. Daniel got up to fetch a can from the fridge and Paul saw his chance.

‘I got you something,’ he said. He’d thought about wrapping the present up but then decided that might seem a bit gay, so he taped the carrier bag down instead and just handed it over. Daniel’s face darkened as he opened it.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ said Daniel.

‘No, hear me out. I want to teach you to read. I’ve been looking it up, I can help you. I want to be a teacher.’

‘You little
prick
,’ spat Daniel. Paul had not been prepared for this. He’d expected embarrassment, diffidence, but not this rage. Too late it occurred to him that he wasn’t allowed to mention it, that apart from that first encounter in the chicken shop they’d never explicitly spoken about Daniel’s illiteracy, they’d just got on with it. Daniel had him by the scruff of the neck. Paul had grown unused to violence and his self-defence muscles had lost their memory; he couldn’t remember whether to cover his face or to curl up.

‘I thought you got it! I thought you were my
friend
.’

‘I’m sorry! Daniel, I’m sorry! We won’t talk about it again.’

‘Fuck off out of my house,’ said Daniel, ‘before I do something I regret.’

The knock on the door came a couple of hours later. Paul checked his reflection in the hallway mirror. The graze on his neck was livid but the puffiness around his eyes that betrayed his quick, hot tears outside Daniel’s house had almost gone down. Daniel sank into the sofa and sat on a copy of
Gormenghast
that was open face-down, cracking its chunky spine in half. Paul wished he’d been watching telly or listening to music or playing the Wii or doing anything other than reading.

‘I shouldn’t have hit you. It’s just . . . it takes me back to being a kid again. I didn’t like learning to read then and I won’t like it now. And our system works, doesn’t it? I like things the way they are, you know?’

The weight of Daniel’s need tempered the lightness of Paul’s relief.

‘But what about the exams?’

‘Oh my God, you’re obsessed. I don’t need exams. I’ll work for my dad. He hasn’t got an exam, it never did him any harm.’ He paused to crack a knuckle. ‘Did you mean that about wanting to be a teacher?’

His tone made it clear that there was only one possible answer. ‘It was just an idea.’

The funny thing was that his failure to help Daniel only strengthened Paul’s resolve to teach. Daniel might be a lost cause but that was because they hadn’t got to him early enough. Paul would become a teacher and help all the other Daniels out there, catch them before they became young men. Of course he understood that this dream was incompatible with Daniel’s idea of their relationship, but that did not worry him too much. Once Daniel had left school – earlier than him, as he must – their friendship would naturally change. In the meantime, Daniel was right: the current arrangement suited them both. They had fun together, didn’t they? And it wasn’t as though they were going to be tied together like this forever.

Chapter 15

October 2009

With some crude detective work she had managed to find out his date of birth. She had had to ask Ross, probably at the expense of her own dignity; that boy saw sexual intrigue even where there was none. But she had got the information she wanted, and the result she had hoped for. The dates did not tally. Paul was only a couple of months into his nineteenth year. Even someone as promiscuous as Adam could not have managed posthumous impregnation. The relief when she found out was intoxicating, like wine. She had in fact drunk wine that evening to celebrate but one glass had led to another and she had finished the night dressed up and painted and weeping apologies at an old videotape. She was trying to discipline herself to dismiss superstitious and supernatural thoughts – there were no ghosts, no reincarnations, and the only destiny was the one you carved out for yourself – yet she clung to her ritual with both hands. Three mornings in the past week she had woken up in her costume with a throbbing head. Each time it had been a relief to wipe her face clean, leave her secret self behind and lose her worries in her work.

The switch of focus required by the grant application had saved her sanity. If necessity was the mother of invention then panic was its pushy father. Playing chicken with the deadline, she had handwritten one thousand words of the most persuasive prose she was capable of. The best lines had been crafted in the office when everyone else had gone home; she liked to work with the cabin door open, so that the wild land and the ruin could keep an eye on her. Ingram had proof-read the document, declared her a genius and come with her to the post office where he had kissed the back of the envelope for luck. Exactly a week later they received a one-page reply from the Heritage Gardens Trust, inviting them to their London office to make a formal pitch. Ingram was ecstatic, convinced that the invitation was a precursor to acceptance. The jungle drums of the heritage management community had told him that only twenty per cent of applicants were granted an audience, and that the pitch itself was little more than a formality.

‘Listen to this,’ he said, brandishing the letter and bouncing in his ergonomic chair. ‘They want us to bring an expanded business plan.
Expanded
. We might yet be able to create my vision. What kind of figures do you think we’re talking?’

‘I don’t dare to hope.’

They had worked out that nothing short of two million would allow them to turn the garden from a community project into a thriving tourist attraction, with an exhibition, a café, and her personal baby, a nursery growing and selling heritage plants. They would be able to erect a walkway within the ruins so that visitors could view the garden from above, as the original residents of the Lodge would have done, as the original garden designers would have intended. She kept cool in front of Ingram but inside she was cheering.

‘It says here that they’ve been looking to sponsor a project in this region for some time now and that they’re intrigued by the work we do with young people. D’you want to see for yourself?’

To humour him, she scanned the letter that he had read aloud three times now. There was a postscript in small print below the signature.
As our Pimlico premises are currently being renovated, we would be grateful if you would attend at our interim offices, 72 Warwick Gardens, London W8
.

The words reared up off the page and slammed into her.

‘I can’t go,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes you can.’ Ingram flicked through the diary. ‘We’ve nothing booked on the twenty-fifth.’

‘I can’t . . . you’ll have to go without me.’

‘What are you talking about?’

How could she tell Ingram the truth? For her, the streets of London were paved not with gold but with pictures from the past. They flickered before her now like images from a terrifying film, and the climactic scene, the one where the violins screeched their warning and the audience hid behind their fingers, took place on Warwick Gardens. She saw the faces now of all the other players, Adam of course, and the other men and the woman, too. She shook her head hard, as though she could fling the memories from her mind.

‘I can’t tell you why, Ingram. I just can’t go.’

It was not like her to oppose him without giving a good reason and Ingram was losing patience. ‘If you can’t even give me a reason . . . You do know what this grant means to us. If I were a theatrical man I’d go so far as to say that the last five years have been leading up to this moment. You’re coming, and that’s that.’

She tried to be rational, telling herself that she was no more likely to be discovered there than anywhere else, that it had been more than twenty years, that the residents would have moved on . . . It was no good. She could not go back. She would give herself away, she knew she would, her smokescreen of control diffusing at the sight of the street where it had happened. She would be exposed, as sure as if the bloodstain was still on the ground.