How the Trouble Started (6 page)

I’d been sneaking out of school and watching the kids at Gillygate Primary more. There’s so much life to them, so much spirit, that the thought of sitting in a near-empty school library just can’t compare. It cheers me up to see them all enjoying themselves, to see them charging around, having fun, falling out, falling over. Mainly I go to check that Jake is safe and sound, but it’s good to watch the others too. I have my favourites and I make sure they are all there and that all appears well. I make mental notes of faces and characteristics so I can quiz Jake and see what he has to say about them.

I was down there the other day and it was worrying to see Jake alone by the tree. He’d been alone when Harry was at home sick, but this time, after a quick glance around, I could see Harry over the 
other
 side of the yard with the football lads, trying to join in their game. He was rubbish, useless, but they were letting him play. And I couldn’t help 
noticing
 that he’d gone through a bit of a transformation. His hair had been trimmed down and thinned out, it was all up in spikes and he was wearing a new jacket. It was hard to tell from a distance but it looked like he had new trainers too. He looked good. I wanted to go over and chat with Jake and make sure he was OK, but there were two teachers in the yard and there was never an opportunity to get close enough without being spotted. I only went back one more day that week but the scene was the same: useless Harry being tolerated by the football lads, Jake alone by the tree.

‘We fell out,’ Jake said, on the Saturday. It was clear he was sad – there was none of the speed that normally comes with him and he hardly said a word. He didn’t start to open up until we were settled in the upstairs room at the haunted house.

‘He said my breath stank.’

‘Well it doesn’t,’ I told him.

‘It doesn’t does it not?’

He looked up at me with a face full of hope.

‘Not even the slightest,’ I told him. ‘People always say things that are untrue in arguments.’

‘But he said I always smelt and my clothes were rubbish.’

‘Well I’d try not to worry about it Jake. It doesn’t matter about clothes, does it? Look, my clothes are rubbish too and I’m doing all right.’

Jake looked me over but didn’t say anything.

‘Is there anyone else you could be friendly with?’ I asked.

He started to cry then. A flood of little boy’s tears poured from him. Snot bubbles formed and popped and formed again. His shoulders shook. There was nothing to do but hold him until he’d cried all the tears out. He pushed his hot face against my chest and it felt like he was trying to burrow his way in. I rubbed his back and told him it was all right, but he wasn’t listening, he just needed a good cry and a comfort. When he’d cried himself out I asked if he’d told his mum about all this.

‘She’s been sad. Steve doesn’t come round any more so she’s been in her room.’

‘You’re a right pair at the minute, aren’t you?’ I said, and he nodded that they were. Emptying himself of the tears seemed to help and he perked up a little. After all that emotion I thought it might do him good to get some fresh air so we played out in the garden and had a few laughs chasing around in the overgrowth for a while, pretending I was a zombie trying to get him, but when it was time for home he fell quiet again.

We walked the normal route back to Jake’s house but before we reached Fox Street he veered off track and was heading to the main road.

‘Jake?’ I said. He stopped and turned round.

‘I have to go and get chips,’ he said. ‘For tea.’

Fair enough. ‘You and your mum having fish and chips then?’

‘Just me, it’s Saturday so she’s going out. She doesn’t eat when she’s going out.’

‘Who looks after you when she’s out?’

‘Nobody, but it’s OK, I don’t mind. She has to have fun sometimes.’

I couldn’t help thinking that people like Jake’s mum shouldn’t be allowed to have kids. I left him there and started making my way home to spend a silent Saturday night with Mum and our books. But sat down with my book I didn’t do much reading. I was thinking about Jake’s mum. Trying to work her out. What kind of woman sends a little lad out and tells him not to come back before five? All I’d got from Jake was that she was twenty-six, they lived alone, and she went out at night and left him. I didn’t like the thought of her much, but I knew it was wrong to jump to conclusions. It’s important to give people a chance. You shouldn’t judge without all the evidence. I couldn’t concentrate on my reading any more, so I asked Mum if she wanted a game of dominoes but she waved me quiet and carried on with her book. I left her to it and went up to bed early.

The next Saturday I got chance to see Jake’s mum for myself. I was at the library and Jake came in and returned some books. He came over to say hello but couldn’t hang around; his mum was waiting outside and he was helping her with the shopping. I left it a couple of minutes before I walked out after Jake and followed them further into town. It was obvious where Jake got the skin and bones from – she was made up of nothing else – she could have passed for one of those skinny foreign girl gymnasts. She didn’t look much older than some of the sixth-form girls and I wondered for a moment if there was an older sister Jake had forgotten to mention. Her hair fell straight and thin and she was wearing a grey tracksuit which had the word ‘Juicy’ written across her backside. It didn’t look juicy at all. I hung back so there was no chance that Jake would see me and call out, but I didn’t need to follow too closely because he’d told me that they always go to the precinct behind the town hall, where they have all the cheap shops.

Even before they made it to the precinct it was easy to see what was going on. Jake was free to run ahead, to cross busy roads without being properly supervised, to walk too close to the road with cars and trucks shooting past. His mum spent most of her time talking into her phone and ignoring him. She snapped at him a few times when he disappeared off in the wrong direction, but he was mainly left alone until it came to bag carrying. As they trudged back in the direction of Fox Street, Jake swung one of the bags a little too high and half of the contents fell out onto the pavement, spilling into the gutter. His mum turned to see what the commotion was. She saw what had happened, shook her head and carried on walking, leaving him there to pick up everything by himself. Jake made sure he had it all and set off after his mum, who was halfway up the road by then. I went back to the library, but I was too angry and couldn’t concentrate on anything so I went back home. Later on that night, after I’d thought about it more, I realised I shouldn’t be surprised at how she’d treated him – the fact that he walked home alone from school, was always alone in the library, and by himself every Saturday afternoon, gave a clear indication of her idea of parenting. It was clear that she’d had him too young and didn’t know what she was doing. It had been ugly to see, but I was glad that I had. At least I knew what I was up against.

My favourite-ever vanishing, other than the early one to Neptune, was a vanishing to Iowa. In Iowa I was Roland Harry and I ran a hardware store. The idea came from a film the English teacher, Mrs Lyon Dean, made us watch at the end of one term. I can’t remember what it was called, and I didn’t get to follow the story too closely because of all the nattering and mucking about, but I could see it was about a massively fat lady and her family who lived in an old wooden house on the outskirts of a small town in America. One of her sons wasn’t quite right and he liked to climb up to the top of a water tower, and his older brother always had to go and rescue him, always had to look out for him. Even when he was angry and annoyed with his brother for doing stupid things, you could tell that he still loved him. l liked that, but it wasn’t just the story of the film that interested me; it was the landscape: the wide blue skies, the long straight roads, the massive yellow fields and the quiet, dusty towns. It looked like a safe place. The kind of place where you could be born, live and die and never have to come across any trouble if you didn’t want to. The kind of place where you sit on your porch at night and watch the sun go down on a quiet day and look forward to more of the same the next day, the day after and for ever.

In the vanishing my hardware store was on the main street in the middle of the town. We sold everything you could think of: mops, buckets, hammers, nails, screws, paint, paintbrushes, locks and hinges, everything. It was a dusty old store with long shady aisles, wooden floors and high shelves. Every space filled with something someone might want. On the off chance we didn’t have it in stock we would order it for you – all part of the service. During the week I worked there alone. My wife, Lucy, dropped by with sandwiches at lunch and we would eat them at the counter and chat for a while before she headed back home. At weekends business picked up and I employed a Saturday boy who served, and helped customers with their purchases to their cars, whilst I advised and rummaged through the shelves and the stock room for whatever was needed.

For a while, when the Iowa vanishing was new and fresh, it was a great place to be. I loved settling into bed at night and transporting myself to the middle of America, to my white house with the porch, my store on the main street of a sleepy town, at night my wife next to me, a warm breeze slipping through the room, a dog asleep at the foot of the bed. It was perfect. It was such a good vanishing, so vivid, so calm, that it was one of the few that worked in the daytime too. Sat with my mum eating our tea, neither of us with anything to say, or on a bad day when every thought turned back to the dead little boy, all I needed to do was think of Iowa and I could escape, for a while at least. But vanishings get used up, they wear themselves out through use, and once they’re worn out they’re empty. You can keep trying to go back, you can keep trying to escape, but it’s never the same and eventually they don’t work at all. And then you’re back to reality with a thump, and you have to wait for inspiration to strike again, you have to wait until you’re able to conjure up a whole new vanishing to somewhere else.

We started to make something of the house. Well I did. Just the room upstairs where Jake thought Mrs Lorriemore was shot, and where we did the reading and spent most of our time. I’d had my eyes peeled for a while and found it easy to pick stuff up from out and about. The music room at school was being done up and loads was getting chucked so I acted like a magpie and swooped. And then I found a skip outside one of the big houses on Eastham Street. Eastham Street lies about a mile north of the quarry and is the richest street in town. The houses have lawns that need to be mowed with little tractor lawnmowers and the garages are as big as bungalows. All the children from Eastham Street wear the purple uniform of Greenhurst Private School and nobody from my school knows anyone from that school and you never see any of them out and about in town. And you never see anyone from Eastham Street on Eastham Street, just people who don’t live there walking their dogs up to the woods, gawping at the big houses on their way. I’d clocked the skip on one of my wanderings. It was sat at the end of a long drive and was filled with stuff that didn’t look like it needed to be thrown away at all. I had a rummage, decided what I wanted, and went back when it was dark. But when it came to taking it, when I was stood there, I was nervous. I told myself that nobody would put stuff into a skip that they wanted to keep. The first time though, I still felt like a thief, but nobody shouted and ran from the house, and with the length of the drive I had about a two-minute head start on them anyway. As soon as I left Eastham Street I nipped down a track that leads through Moorland Wood, which eventually gets you to the quarry. It was easy enough to get to the haunted house with little chance of seeing anyone, and if someone did spot an overgrown teenager walking through the night carrying a lamp stand over his shoulder, they probably wouldn’t say anything, probably be terrified he would crack them one with it.

The next time Jake was due to visit there were old school chairs, a white plastic garden table, a lamp stand and a little bedside table I thought we could leave stuff in. Of course there was no electricity, but the lamp fitted somehow, and the room looked good. Jake was made up with it when he saw it, and the first time we spent the afternoon there I had a fair job to drag him away and back to his mother’s. But that was something that had been happening before I’d done the room up. For the last few weeks he’d been a bit moody at the start of the afternoon, back to his usual self by mid-afternoon, then back to quiet when it was time to get him home. I thought it might be his mum, he had reason there, or something at school, but he shook his head at both of these things. Then I thought he might be getting bored with our Saturday afternoons, that he’d rather be off somewhere else, but when I broached it with him he shook his head again, and it was a relief to know that it wasn’t me causing the upset. It was clear that something wasn’t right though, and I wanted to help, but when I tried to get him to speak he would fall quiet and not say a word and the more I pried, the tighter his lips became. I didn’t push him too much. Instead I tried to cheer him up and get him back to the happy lad I knew from the first couple of weeks. Each Saturday I would attempt to make the day a bit special. I would spend the week thinking about it, thinking about things that might put a smile on his face, and I would plan the afternoon in my head like a vanishing. And it
was
like a vanishing, only now I had Jake and the house there was a real destination waiting for me, not something I’d just imagined out of thin air. I’d bought doughnuts and sweets, the odd cake. One week I even brought a football along. I thought that if he could practise his skills he might surprise the lads back at school and get to play with Harry again. But it was the blinder leading the blind, and we could barely get the ball from one of us to the other. I could see that he wasn’t enjoying it any more than I was, so I threw the ball into the overgrowth and we went back into the house and read one of the horror stories instead. But they didn’t appear to be working much lately either. I was stuck and the problem I had was I couldn’t ask for advice.
What makes eight-year-old boys moody?
was the question I needed answering. But it wasn’t a question I could present to Mum or ask at one of my visits to the library. I knew I would have to work it out for myself. The only thing I could think to do was watch him as closely as possible, keep looking for clues.