Graffiti My Soul (9 page)

She's always calling me mate when she's not using Veep. Her family are traders so everything's all cor blimey guvnor, strike a light. It's not what I'm used to.

Kel calls her mum, who panics and duly dispatches her dad up the A3 pronto.

‘Listen to me, Kel. Stay where there's plenty of people, and don't talk to anyone,' she goes, the quivering modulations of a normally hardy woman who has been floored by sitting through too many evenings of
Crimewatch
.

She calls back five minutes later.

‘Better still, stay near the security cameras. It's the safest place to be.'

It makes you want to disappear for an hour or two just to shit her up.

We pool the last of our cash and set up camp on the Burger King balcony. Fags for Kelly, a milkshake each, and a jumbo box of nuggets for me. A feast. This was exactly the reason I'd endured ninety minutes of Britney's cod artistry and an hour of Kelly's wrath – for this late-night one to one with my beautiful girlfriend.

Kel isn't like Moon, so everything is easy. I don't have to try so hard. Her eyes soften after a sip or two of milkshake, curled lips shift from down to up. We snog in Burger King for what feels like an hour. Her lips are the tenderest I've ever felt, her tongue the longest, her breath the sweetest.

There's this sign tattooed to my forehead that says I'm hookable. She hands over the snogs, knowing this.

Now that we're going out officially, Kel is holding back on the sex. Wants us to talk more, hang. Since my treat in the park, we've only done it once – on my sofa when Mum went for Chinese. A fifteen-minute wonder. She still flirts like a mother whether we're alone or not, but unlike Moon none of it's for show. When we talk, she only ever has eyes for me, there's none of this looking over my shoulder to check who's around, grass-is-greener bollocks.

After the Pearson business, Kel's honesty comes as a welcome relief; feels like a holiday away from female madness. I'm not as bothered about the sex as I thought I would be. Sometimes just being with her is enough. I'm shooting them off every night obviously – I am fifteen – but I ain't worried. Sooner or later she'll get so hot and crack, and then the curtains will part, haha.

Jase thinks she wants me to respect her. Read it in
Cosmo
when he was stacking the magazines at work. I do respect her, I tell him. I buy her bus ticket, drop in a ten pack of Benson when I can get served, spend Saturday afternoons down the mall, take her nan to the park. If that isn't respect, I don't know what is. Jase looks at me like a retard.

‘Mate, that's not even the start of it. If you want to get into her pants, you're going to have to do better than that.'

Like he knows anything. Jase shags one of the part-timers, a Micradriving housewife, in the stockroom once every three weeks if he's lucky, but he's never had a proper girlfriend in his life. A casual grope with Lizzie Jennings every once in a while. Nothing that lasts more than a week or two. Something to do with his sister and the car crash; girls think he has too much baggage . . . that he's a proper nutter because of it. They're not at the age where a lanky stoner is considered a great catch. In another five years, though, when they're pining for surfer chic . . . I ditch his advice, need it like I need a hole in the head.

Snogging is snogging, I don't confuse it with anything else. Kel is still mad at me, each of us taking pains to avoid mentioning the Brit-word in case something blows up again, but I know things are forgotten when she comes back from the toilet with a bag of those baby jelly beans that cost about five pounds a pack. Standing above me, and placing them in my hands wordlessly. She lets the beans and the kiss on my cheek that follows do the talking. Payback for taking her shit on the tube, I guess, and also in part for the strawberry milkshake I'd produced earlier without any prompting, because I knew it was her favourite. We kiss, and hold hands, and giggle, and kiss again.

Much later, close to one a.m., once we're back within Surrey's safe
borders, and Kel's mum has been informed, and Kel's dad is driving past the station, I spot something standing at the taxi rank.

There's two of them, a man and a boy, the shorty slightly behind the man, both in shadow, and both in trackies I'm now noticing. They're the last in the taxi queue, a line of around twenty people, and are laughing about some bollocks. The kid is cracking up so the older one must be a hoot. He's holding a rolled up Britney poster, identical to the two I picked up outside Wembley after the show; supersized so that the tits are bigger than the average human head – one for me and Jason. The older man is in and out of shadow, but the build, the laugh, the Nike airs with the exaggerated red soles like Coco the clown, are all photo-fit material; match my disgraced ex-Harrier trainer 100%. Someone call
Crimewatch
.

26

Pearson is a volleyball-playing shit-for-brains lump who thinks he's popular just for punching a stupid ball around an indoor court like a faggot. Sure, the volleyball squad are the glamour elite of the school, twelve guys and girls riding the crest of a wave, the closest thing we have to jocks, but even this status doesn't protect him from ridicule.

He doesn't realise that everyone laughs at him behind his back. Thinks of him as an oaf, which, at this place, is saying something. The other members of the squad are protective of him and all, on the court they're like brothers, but away from the sports hall they're not as defensive as they should be. Must be something in his manner: loud, overbearing, know-it-all smartarse. Has a habit of hogging the ball and busting a few solo moves on the court, whether it benefits the game or not. Coming out with all kinds of shit just to get some attention. Dumping the flid kids' clothes in the shower whilst they're
in PE, bullying the pikeys in the changing rooms, challenging them to prove that their underwear wasn't 2p from Oxfam. General stupidness we should all have grown out of at twelve.

The team seem to agree. Me and Jase would have got a cleaning from them otherwise.

Moon used to realise this, I think, but seems to have forgotten now that her eyes have gone heart-shaped. Now they walk around the corridors hand in hand, barely out of each other's sight.

Normally I have respect for the jocks. Fellow sportsmen, and all that. It should be a mutual thing. We all give each other a heads-up around school, some more enthusiastic and exuberant than others. Since I do most of my training out of school, do all of my competitions out of school, steer clear from competing in lacklustre class athletics, I keep it low-key. I'm not a show-off like some of these volleyball and footie idiots. But nothing will make me like this guy. Rich boy trying to be like one of us? Fuck off! What's the appeal of that? Putting my feelings for Moon aside, he just ain't right for her.

‘They're sweet together,' Kel said once, when we saw them feeding each other chips in the canteen. Thought it was all right now that we were a couple ourselves, thought she could relax her neuroses a little, but she saw my look, realised I wasn't laughing.

‘If you want us to stay together, you're going to have to stop saying things like that,' I go, voice so low it's virtually in the gutter; where tone ends and a snake-like hiss begins. ‘Don't keep talking about them. Don't even mention them. Doesn't do anyone any good.'

It came out tougher than I meant it to. I was going for jokey, but something in Kel's observation set something off. Made me panic that she was possibly right. Panicked me more when I thought about how everyone else at school might be thinking the same thing; that Moon was better off with a proper boyfriend, and without me.

Glance over in Moon's direction whilst Kel goes to the loo for a discreet cry, waving over Lizzie Jennings on the way. They've finished the chips and she's now biting into his Snickers. They take alternate
mouthfuls. She takes it slow, conscious of crumbs falling on her shirt. He grabs the fucker like the greedy pig he is. It's all about ownership with that piece of shit. Then they share the same can of drink. I can almost feel Pearson's gob on my lips. Can't stop watching. Feel sick. Her face is so different. Furrows smoothed, mouth looser, eyes wide, none of her usual defensive squinting. Touches her hair every other minute but all the time certain of herself. None of it's a ruse. She's never looked so settled . . . or sated.

27

Jason has no time for Casey. Calls him various vegetable names, depending on which aisle he's stacking.

‘He's a turnip, man,' he goes, on more than one occasion, when I find myself justifying exactly why I'm with him. ‘He's a fucking kiddie fiddler. I've got no time for him, however great you say he is.'

I get twitchy at the mention of kiddie-fiddler and Casey in the same sentence. I wish I hadn't been looking out the car window, seeing things I shouldn't have.

Jase believes everything he reads in the papers. Swears by
The Sun
, like it's the Torah or something.

It doesn't escape my notice that the fiddled kid is the same age as his sister would be now. It touches a nerve; his sole defence for starting a little backyard blaze last summer that ended up in Casey's house being burnt to the ground.

I'm not supposed to know, but I do. He told some slag the night he did it, as a way to get into her pants. She told Chinese Peter's sister, who told me. I'd been running as usual, so wasn't around. And I wonder why people don't invite me to anything. But I wish I'd got evidence of it. Something like an MPEG would've been awesome. Like capturing
history in the making
. Totally wild.

It's one of those secrets that Jase keeps from me, the way I keep stuff from him; like when I had to start giving Mum tuff love when she started overdoing the pity party a couple of years after Dad left, and got really close to embarrassing herself. (Jews, delayed reaction.) You gotta do what you gotta do.

We all have our secrets.

28

Kel makes me walk on air and I start forgetting the real things. It's gone eleven at night when I realise that Mum hasn't washed my kit. Or any other clothes at all. I'm half asleep when I work this out; one of those late-night flashes that hits you before nodding off, gets you out of bed and staggering about the utility room with your eyes shut.

Mum is watching TV and says she won't help.

‘I'm moving on,' she goes. ‘I can't be your maid for ever. You're going to have to learn to take care of your own laundry.'

There's an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table, one of the pocket ones, so I ain't too worried. I'm not casting aspersions, I'm just saying.

‘Watch what you're doing with the washing liquid. Don't overfill the machine like last time. If you make a mess, clean it up.'

‘Okey-dokey, lemon-cokey.'

When she's in this mood, it's pointless trying to argue.

The reason for the wine bottle and the mood is this:

Mum has decided it's been long enough since Dad. We've been here before, eight months after he ran to Germany with the optician slut, when she said quite resolutely it was time to move forward, but she hadn't reckoned on the fear taking her over. Ever since Dad left it's only ever been the two of us.

This time there seems to be more weight behind it. Far from
coming out of the blue, it's been on her mind for a while; something to do with one of the younger doctors at the health centre fancying her. He wasn't her type, but did something to remind her that she could still cast a spell if she put her mind to it.

She doesn't tell me this obviously, our open relationship only works one way, but I overhear her on the phone to Jason's mum one night. Billie was distraught because she'd spent all afternoon chucking her guts up and needed to talk to someone about it. Listening to one-sided phone calls is amazing. If you can concentrate hard enough, you can pick up just about everything. It's something Moon taught me. She's an expert at it.

Dad's also been threatening to come by for a visit, which may also explain Mum's spring cleaning of self. Bored of life in the Black Forest or wherever the fuck he lives in Germany. Wants to come and bond with his firstborn. A solo trip; new wife staying at home with the kids. Twins, aged five. Killer time manager, my father.

This will be purely a father/son thing, the first time for about three years. He doesn't want to make a big fuss, and he's right not to. For once in his life, he'd judged the mood correctly. I've got no intention of seeing him.

Mum gets herself in on a speed-dating evening in town with another district nurse, one of the showy younger ones who's always down the pub, and persuades Billie to go with them. It's being held at Po Na Na, the smartest bar we have, and also the slimiest. Mum dresses up to the nines, long black dress, feathery shawl, heels. Hair piled up so high that you know she ain't messing. Face made-up by her mate at the House of Fraser counter two hours earlier. I'm left to fend for myself for the evening. Kel comes round and I get lucky. So does Mum by the look of her. Her face is flushed. She tries to tell me off about not clearing up the snacks after Kel's left, but can't help grinning; keeps putting her hand over her mouth to giggle whenever I ask her how the night went. She got numbers, two of them, but won't tell me any more than that.

29

I hate this trend for skirting around issues. I don't see the point. Mum's prone to procrastinate. She knows which tube of toothpaste she wants, but picking the lottery numbers can take most of the afternoon. I'm the other way, happy to charge into anything. Something I picked up from Dad. He's the master at it. He upped and left the country the moment he'd poked the homewrecker optician and got serious. It's the reason I hate him, but if it were anyone else I'd admire his style. I suppose it's like this with any parent. Feelings change from one day to the next.