Another Life (4 page)

‘We’ll need to review your security, double check that this will be a safe environment for you,’ he says.

I nod again.

‘Don’t worry, though. You’ll be in a single room, because of your age. You’ll be known as Luke Smith, which I’m assuming is not your real name. You’re a long
way from London, which I gather is where you started out.’

I can’t think of one thing to say.

‘Don’t draw attention to yourself, and we’ll discuss your situation with the Metropolitan Police, see if we need to move you,’ he says. ‘You’ll spend most of
your time in the classroom or your room. I see you’re taking some GCSEs.’

His plan for making sure I’m safe seems to be to plonk me down in the middle of a prison full of potential killers and make a phone call to the police in London to see if they think
I’ll survive. Given that I nearly got shot twice under their care, I don’t think I’m going to have much time to work towards external examinations.

‘It’ll be OK,’ he says. ‘Right, let’s show you where you’re going to be.’

As we walk through the prison, through echoing corridors, past rows of closed doors, he explains a few things. I’ll get supper in my room – there’s usually a choice, but
tonight I’ll have to eat what I’m given. I’ll get woken up between 7.30 and 8 am, and breakfast around 8 am. Education starts at 8.45 am. I’ll be meeting with someone to see
which classes I fit into. They only teach a few GCSEs – ‘There are lots of vocational courses too, might be interesting for you. Woodwork and gardening and mechanics. Some of our older
trainees have jobs, but for you younger ones it’s a real chance to improve your qualifications.’

Woodwork means drills and saws. Mechanics means screwdrivers and jacks. They’ve kitted out a whole prison so people can kill me.

He opens a door. ‘Here you go. Home sweet home.’

It could be worse, I suppose. There’s a bed and a cupboard and a TV on the wall. I look around for the remote, and he says, ‘The TV won’t work at first. You have to earn it.
Good behaviour. You can earn points towards a radio, then a TV, then even a PlayStation.’

‘Oh, right.’ I wonder how long it takes to earn the right to watch sodding
EastEnders
. Will I be here long enough? How much do I care?

There’s a loo and a sink and a towel. It’s not the cosiest bedroom ever, but at least there’s no one sharing it with me.

‘OK, lad,’ he says. ‘They’ll bring your food quite soon. You must be hungry, eh? Normally you’d have association now, or you’d be using the gym, but you can
do that tomorrow. Lights go out at 11. You’ll be woken up at 7.30.’

I wish he’d just go. I’m overloaded with information.

‘Your door will be locked at 8.30 pm, but there is a panic button here – see it? – for use in emergencies. OK? See you tomorrow.’

When he’s gone the room suddenly seems smaller and the quiet presses down on me, like a pillow over my head. I’m not sure I can breathe in here.

I sit and stare at the sink, wonder if there’s a way of cleaning away the dirty feeling that’s creeping over my skin. There isn’t, I’m sure of it.

I’m trying to avoid thinking about people that I care about. I don’t want Alyssa, Gran, Mum anywhere near my head at the moment. But I can’t keep Claire out. She’s my . .
. my best friend, my love. She’s clean and honest and there’s no hiding from her.

I can’t bear it. They’ve put me down in the dirt where I’m too low to even think about Claire.

There’s a rattling noise. My door is opening.

‘Supper,’ says a voice.

I look up. I see a trolley laden with trays. I see a sandwich, an apple, a packet of crisps.

And the person handing them to me, I see him too. I see his long legs, his dirty nails, his short blond hair.

I see his brown eyes, the scar running from eye to chin, the tattoo on his neck. ‘Tanya,’ it reads, ‘forever.’

I know those eyes. I know those legs. I remember that tattoo.

Jesus. I was there when it was done.

I
’m lying on a huge springy double bed with Lily – the girl of my dreams, ever since I started having dreams with girls in them.

She’s sixteen – an older woman – she’s got long legs and skinny shoulders, springy blonde fusilli curls and freckles splattered over her little stubby nose. She’s
one of those girls who kind of exudes gorgeousness, so that it doesn’t matter what she looks like, although, actually, she looks great.

And this isn’t a dream, it’s the bed in Oscar’s parents’ bedroom. Lily and I are lying on a slippery green bedcover, surrounded by little brown cushions – like a
field full of cowpats done in satin – and Oscar’s sitting at his mum’s dressing table, straightening his hair.

Even though both of us are completely fully-clothed, it’s still exciting enough to be lying this close to Lily that I have to focus on the chandelier light fitting – all white and
tinkly and a bit cobwebby – try not to breathe in her spicy smell, and occasionally travel the Bakerloo line.

Things have been slightly difficult. Mum and Dad are completely fixated on the whole drug find thing, which is one big joke considering it was all a set-up. I get non-stop anti-drug lectures
when they’re home, which isn’t all that often. And they’re always arguing about what school to send me to. It’s a bit boring.

In the end, to shut them up, I offered to go to the local comprehensive.

‘You’d get murdered on day one,’ said my dad, and Mum added, ‘Have you seen the results? Only thirty per cent pass five GCSEs. It’s a scandal.’

‘I’ll definitely pass more than five GCSEs,’ I said. I’m not boasting, it’s just that I find school quite easy. It’s like Ty being good at running –
just a natural talent. ‘I could improve their statistics.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Archie,’ Dad grunted. So now they’re looking into really expensive tutorial colleges in central London – yes! – or small, caring
boarding schools.

It’s a bummer that Ty’s in prison and not allowed a mobile. I can’t even ring him for a chat. Luckily I’ve got Oscar’s house just down the road to escape to.
It’s so nice to see my friends again, especially as they’re both incredibly cool and a year older than me and if I get to stay in London, they’ll give me a massive leg-up in the
popularity stakes.

‘It’s so good to see you!’ says Lily, patting my leg. Tingles run up and down my thigh. I close my eyes.

Elephant and Castle. Lambeth North.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve known Lily since we all went to Baby Mozart classes together. She used to be this scrawny, fighty girl who, luckily, adored me on sight. She fought my
battles for me at prep school – Scary Lily, people called her – and at the weekends we’d go over to Oscar’s house and watch television, play computer games and hang out.

Then I turned thirteen and went away to boarding school (it took eighteen months to engineer getting expelled – I tried everything, including bedwetting) and the first time I came home for
the holidays, Lily had evolved into a sex goddess, like a tadpole turns into a frog, only with breasts.

‘I don’t know how long I’m here,’ I say gloomily. ‘They might send me away again.’

‘It was you who wanted to go to boarding school in the first place,’ points out Oscar – a bit unnecessarily, in my opinion.

‘I didn’t realise what it would be like. They should’ve known I wouldn’t like it.’

‘What did you think it’d be like?’ says Lily. ‘I’ve always thought it would be awful. Curfew . . . shared showers . . . hockey . . . getting up at 6 am. .
.’

I’m not going to tell them that I thought it’d be kind of fun to have midnight feasts and stuff, plus I kept on hearing from Oscar how hard you had to work at day schools.

‘I don’t know, I just thought it’d be different.’ I certainly wasn’t expecting to feel so stripped of everything that made me myself, and kind of worried about Mum
and Dad when I wasn’t there to keep an eye on them.

‘He thought he was getting on the Hogwarts Express,’ says Oscar. ‘What happened, Arch, did the sorting hat put you in Hufflepuff with all the other thickies?’

I throw a cushion at him, and he bats it away with the straighteners.

‘I was in Slytherin,’ I say, ‘obviously. But they couldn’t contain my talent for the dark arts, so they threw me out.’

‘And now Mummy and Daddy want to get rid of you again?’

He didn’t need to put it like that.

‘They think I’m lonely in London because I haven’t got any brothers and sisters,’ I explain.

Mum and Dad both grew up with loads of brothers and sisters. Even though Dad never talks to his, he still agrees with Mum that it’s freakishly odd to be an only child. I think they’d
have had a few more if it hadn’t been for Mum’s wonky womb (I don’t want to know the details) and lucrative career.

‘And anyway,’ I add, ‘they’re both away on business a lot.’

Lily snorts. ‘My mum’s away all the time. I’m OK with Maria. Why are your folks so bothered?’

Maria is their au pair. She’s from Portugal and she’s here for a year before going to university in Lisbon to study mathematics. She’s actually from an island called Madeira
and she finds London so terrifying that she never leaves their flat. Lily’s offered to take her clubbing and shopping and stuff, but she just scuttles off to her room to Skype her boyfriend.
‘The perfect au pair,’ according to Lily’s mum.

‘My mum says she won’t have another au pair. Not since Paola from Padua’s psychotic episode.’

‘Oh well, fair enough.’

Oscar laughs. ‘You can come and live here. Have my brother and sister. I’ll swap with you any time. Marcus is a total grumpy git and Eliza’s a chav.’

‘Marcus is a misunderstood genius, and Eliza’s not a real chav,’ says Lily, ‘she’s just needs some style advice. I’ll take her in hand, Oscar. Lose the false
eyelashes and the Fake Bake and halve the jewellery.’

Eliza’s only twelve. Last time I saw her, she had pigtails and she told me all about how she was taking Grade Two on the oboe.

‘Misunderstood genius, my arse,’ says Oscar. ‘He’s too lazy to do A levels, so he’s pretending he’s a great poet slash songwriter. Actually he’s only
interested in getting stoned and sleeping.’

I’d hate to be part of a big family. I think that being an only child gets an unfairly bad press. You never have to share. You never have to fight for attention. I read an article once
about China where they have a very sensible policy of only allowing families one child – good for the planet, good for China, good for the kid. ‘Little emperors’, they’re
called. Who wouldn’t want to be a little emperor?

‘When are you finally coming out of the closet, Oscar?’ says Lily, watching Oscar comb his fringe forwards. ‘Archie and me, we’ll throw you a party.’

Oscar raises a well-plucked eyebrow. ‘Lily, darling, I’d have thought you’d know a metrosexual man when you saw one. . .’

She’s laughing at him. ‘Oscar, if you’re going to be that beautiful, you need to prove your manliness somehow.’

‘Be patient,’ he says. ‘All in good time. Let’s go into my room. I’ve just had a new delivery, perfect for welcoming Archie back to civilisation.’

Ooh. Wow. What could this mean?

We roll off Oscar’s parents’ bed – Oscar smooths the cover and carefully rearranges the cowpats – and decamp to Oscar’s lair, which is upstairs in the converted
loft. Moaning noises leak from Eliza’s room – she’s still playing the oboe, then – and Oscar shuts her door and then latches his.

Lily leaps onto Oscar’s bed, I think about joining her, but it’s only a single – might look a bit harassing. So I collapse onto a silver bean bag, and Oscar straddles his one
and only chair.

And then he pulls open a drawer and scrabbles in the back of it, and there’s a plastic bag full of . . . yes, it is. Weed, a lot of it.

‘Won’t Marcus notice that you’ve got all that?’ I ask, and Oscar pulls a packet of Rizlas out of the drawer as well and says, ‘Things have moved on, Archie-boy.
I’ve got my own source now – some guy from east London. Marcus introduced me.’

OK, the drawback with being an only child is that you don’t have a cool big brother to sort you out with a dealer.

‘This is it, Big A,’ says Lil. ‘Your first ever joint.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ I say automatically. That was my nickname when I was a freakily undersized seven-year-old. Now I’m completely normally proportioned in every way
– not that Lily would know, unfortunately.

She pulls out her phone. ‘We should record the occasion.’

Oscar’s expertly packing the Rizla. ‘I don’t think so, Lil. In your room, maybe.’

‘Next time!’ says Lily. ‘Are you ready, Archie?’

‘It’s not actually my first time,’ I say, accepting the roach and Oscar’s lighter. I’m trying to look cool and like I’ve been doing this for years. I’m
glad that Lily and Oscar introduced me to normal smoking some time ago.

I’m trying to look like this is no big deal, nothing special, nothing new.

But it feels like it might be.

I
’m feeling kind of bubbly inside and completely starving. There wasn’t any food at Oscar’s without getting past his mum, who was
crying at the kitchen table, so I came home.

In Oscar’s room the main effect of the weed was feeling as though my skeleton had hardened to iron inside me, with my flesh waving in the wind like clothes on a line – which was
funny, obviously, so I laughed a lot and showed Oscar and Lily how I could make my skin wobble around. They thought it was hilarious too.

We hung out for a while and then we heard Marcus come into the house (you couldn’t miss it, his mum was shouting so loud) and Lily went downstairs to see if he’d written any new
songs. Oscar says she’s trying to get noticed so she can join Marcus’s band as lead singer.

Oscar and I watched
Phineas and Ferb
in his room. It’s actually very funny if you’re stoned.

And that was four hours ago, so by now I’m almost totally back to normal, except I’m very hungry and I can still feel that flesh-wobble.

I grab some peanut butter and pile it onto a piece of bread, before I even notice that my mum’s sitting at the kitchen table next to a box of tissues. She’s still in her gym stuff,
and her face is a bit red.