Nick's Blues (4 page)

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay.”

“You're sure?”

“Yeah.”

The inspector identified herself to Nick and said there were a few things she wanted to ask.

“I don't know nothin',” Nick said.

“Why don't we all sit down? This needn't take very long.”

Still Dawn hesitated, trying to read the expression on Nick's face, wondering if it was all as harmless as the detective was saying. Maybe she should have contacted a solicitor or something instead of doing this on her own? She didn't know what kinds of trouble Nick might talk himself into if he were given the chance.

“Mrs Harman? The sooner we're done, the sooner you can both be on your way.”

Dawn sat down.

Ferris began by confirming Nick's age and address and where he went to school, Nick not really looking her in the eye.

“And your father, Nick, is he living with you?”

Nick stared back at her then. “My father's dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“He jumped off a bridge, right? Jumped off some fucking bridge.” He felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and shook his head, wiped a hand across his face. He'd rather die than cry in front of her.

Dawn sat frozen in her chair, not knowing what to do.

“Would you like to take a few minutes?” Ferris asked. “A drink of water?”

Nick shook his head.

Ferris took her time all the same, waiting for the tension to seep away. “Were you aware of anything going on this evening when you were on your way home? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Nick shook his head again.

“A man was mugged. He'd been cutting through the same alley as you.”

Calm now, Nick looked back at her.

“What's that got to do with me?”

“The youths who attacked him, they would have run off in your direction. The direction you were walking.”

“I told you, I didn't see nothin'.”

There was a slight shift in his tone that Dawn recognised and she wondered if the inspector did too.

“You're sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.”

“You didn't see anyone at all?”

Rawlings, it came to him now. The youth who'd pushed past him. Rawlings. He'd heard them calling his name. Steve, he thought it might be. Steve. Steve Rawlings.

“No,” Nick said.

“And there's nothing else you can tell me?” the inspector said.

Nick shook his head. “Can we go now?” he said, looking at his mother.

Dawn pushed back her chair. “He's said he didn't see anything. He can't help you.”

Ferris nodded, took a card from her pocket and slid it across the table. “If you do think of anything, give me a call.”

Glancing at the card, Nick wanted to leave it where it was, but instead be picked it up and pushed it down into the back pocket of his jeans.

“If you were protecting a friend, I could understand it,” Ferris said. “But whoever this was, I don't think they're friends of yours.”

Nick didn't reply.

Neither of them spoke all the way home.

As soon as they were inside the flat, Nick went to his room and closed the door.

Dawn didn't know what to do. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn't think Nick would want to speak to her. And if he did, she was half afraid of what he'd say.

Answering the inspector's questions — You didn't see anything? — she was sure Nick had lied but didn't know why.

As for the outburst about his father, well, it shouldn't have surprised her that after she'd given him the photos and everything, his dad should be on Nick's mind. But for him to come out with that the way he did, then and there, it made her realise how much she underestimated what it would make him feel. How angry.

***

Nick sat on his bed. An old CD by Aphex Twin was playing on the stereo. When Scott had first started going with Laura, he'd started listening to all that spacey, ambient kind of stuff, but unlike Laura it had proved a bit of a five minute wonder and Nick had reaped the rewards.
Selected Ambient Works Vol 2
,
Drukqs
,
Twenty Six Mixes for Cash
. Brian Eno's
Apollo
and
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
. How far round the estate would the fact he'd been picked up by the police have gone? How far would it go round school?

He leaned back and closed his eyes.

When the music finished he remained where he was, unmoving, allowing the small sounds to gather round him.

The box containing his father's things was on the floor beside the bed, the lid askew, and he reached down and picked it up, sliding the lid back into place.

He wasn't going to let it screw him up.

If he shunted some things aside, there was just room for it in the drawer with his t-shirts and socks and stuff.

He could hear his mother now, crossing from the living room to the kitchen, the quick flow of water into the kettle.

“Hey, mum!” he called, easing open the door. “There anything to eat?”

***

Dawn had checked that Nick didn't mind pizza twice in one day before phoning for a delivery. One American Hot with pepperoni and extra anchovies, one Hawaiian with pineapple and ham. Coleslaw and a large portion of garlic bread. Pepsi and Seven Up. They sat in the kitchen, eating from the open boxes. Just this past twenty-four hours the weather had changed and it was warm enough to have the window partly open, traffic noises drifting in from the street outside.

Dawn had just finished telling Nick about the acoustic night in Highbury, the first time she had seen his dad.

It didn't seem possible that it was more than twenty years ago.

Not until she looked at Nick sitting there, all but fully grown, almost a man.

“You knew you were going to see him again then?”

“Not really.”

“You took his flier. Where he was going to be playing. You said so.”

“That didn't mean…”

“It meant you fancied him.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh, yeah. The music, was it? The way he played his guitar.”

“Don't be so cheeky.”

“You thought he was well fit.”

Smiling a little, Dawn bit into a piece more pizza. “Maybe I did.”

“Where d'you see him next then?” Nick asked. “Go on.”

“This place over in west London. Earls Court. The Troubadour. It was famous, apparently. That kind of music. Bob Dylan had played there. All kinds of people. Paul Simon. It was just a cellar really, underneath a coffee bar, but your dad liked it, he played there quite a bit.”

She paused for a mouthful of Seven Up.

Nick folded a triangle of pizza back on itself and bit into it, catching a spiral of stray cheese with his finger and winding it back up.

“He recognised me the moment I walked in, though, of course, he didn't let on.”

“You went on your own?”

“No. I dragged this mate of mine along.”

“Not the one who was after him?”

Dawn laughed. “You think I'm stupid?”

No, Nick didn't think that. “So what happened?”

“He took his time, finally came over and said, ‘How about that drink then?', something like that. I said ‘All right,' and he said, ‘Coffee, then,' and I must have made a face, I didn't like coffee much at the time. Turned out the place wasn't licensed, it was pretty much coffee or nothing, so we went upstairs and sat at one of these small tables.” She smiled. “Must have been my first cappuccino. We chatted for a bit, don't ask me what about. I was looking round half the time. Some right types. Arty, you know. A lot of black jumpers. People sitting around reading, playing chess.”

Nick tried to imagine it, not quite succeeding.

“When Les went back down to play,” his mum continued, “he broke a string right in the middle of the first number. I thought it would throw him off, but no, he told this story while he was fitting a new string, about the time he'd been playing with a couple of American blues musicians. One of them, Sonny Terry, he was blind, and Les, it was quite a big thing for him so he'd been drinking more than usual, more than he should, and somehow they got locked, the pair of them, inside the dressing room. Stumbling around, falling over things, trying to get out. The blind drunk, as Les said, leading the blind.

“People laughed, of course, and by then he was ready and he went right back on with the song. And I really admired that, the way he seemed so at ease, didn't matter where he was or what size the audience, up there in front of a microphone, he was so confident, sure of himself.”

She stopped and turned her head away and Nick thought she was probably crying.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

Her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear.

“The last time I went with him, somewhere just out of London, Hitchin I think it was, he couldn't even get his guitar out of its case, never mind get up on stage.”

“Because he'd been drinking?” Nick said.

“Because he was afraid.”

“What of?”

“Everything. Not being any good, people not liking him. Everything.”

***

There were a hundred more questions Nick wanted to ask, but his mum had made it clear enough was enough. Some other time maybe, but even then he couldn't be sure. As if there were things she didn't want to talk about, places she didn't want to go.

They said good night and for the first time in a long while she kissed him, fleetingly, on the cheek, her face just brushing his.

“G'night, mum,” Nick said again and went into his room.

There was reading he had to do, history. More stuff about the Nazis, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War. As if nothing else had ever happened. Scott's eldest brother had been taken prisoner in Iraq. The Gulf War. Most days he walked the streets and when you spoke to him, he looked away. Scott said some nights he wet the bed, just like a kid. How come they never learned about that?

After quarter of an hour Nick realised he'd read the same page four times without taking in a thing.

Opening the drawer, he took out the box and from the box took out the audio cassette. Slotting it down into the tape deck of the stereo he pressed play.

A hiss and then the notes of a guitar.

Nick lay back on his bed and suddenly there was his father's voice, surprisingly light and high.

Woke up this morning, towel round my head,
Woke up this morning, towel round my head,
Looked in the mirror, wished that I were dead.

His turn to cry.

Next day, Nick came straight home after school.

Christopher was meeting his cousin or something up in Finchley and Scott had gone back to Laura's — both her parents worked and her sister was staying late for netball. Scott had been scrounging money to buy some rubbers. And Nick had work to do on his art project, which had started off brilliantly, but then got stalled.

“You've got a real chance for an A in this,” his Art teacher had told him. “You know that, don't you?”

Nick had shrugged and examined the floor. An A in anything would be good, and this was about the only chance he had.

“Well, you best pull your finger out then. Time's getting on.”

Nick nodded and dragged out a “Yes, sir.”

To begin with, using a borrowed camera, he had taken pictures of some of the market stalls in Holloway and Kentish Town. Some of the stall owners had been happy to pose for him, holding up bunches of bananas, packets of men's underpants, three for a pound, wrapping paper with last year's Christmas design. He'd photographed the giant boots and shoes that hung above the half a million shoe stores that littered Camden High Street.

The best of these he had arranged and pasted painstakingly down on to sheets of different coloured paper, interleaved with blown-up copies of the appropriate pages from the A–Z.

The trouble was, he couldn't really see what to do next.

He had tried painting street scenes, working from memory and a few sketches he had hurriedly made, but each time he opened his folder and looked at them he had to resist the temptation to tear them into small pieces and throw them away.

The project needed something, though, what he had on its own was not enough. He was thinking about this, not getting anywhere, when he saw Melanie Mitchell cutting across the path ahead of him, heavily-laden bags from Iceland in each hand.

Melanie lived in the same block of flats, on the top floor; her mum was a dinner lady at one of the local primary schools, and her dad worked on the post and seemed to spend most of his afternoons in the betting shop or the pub. When Nick had been a lot younger, he and Melanie had played together quite a bit, their mums chatting while they took turns to push them on the roundabouts and swings. Picnicking on the bandstand in Parliament Hill Fields.

But then, a little older, Nick had only wanted to play with boys, charging around after a football and coming home with scuffed shoes and grazed knees, and he hardly saw Melanie at all.

By the time they got to junior school, what had been chubbiness in Melanie had turned to fat and other children, Nick included, laughed at her and shouted names, poked at her with sticks, and gave cruel impressions of the way she wobbled when she walked, a jelly on a plate.

At eleven she and Nick went to different schools and not long after that he remembered his mum telling him Melanie had been sent to a special unit with some kind of eating disorder. She was thin and then she was fat again, fatter than before.

“Don't you ever let me hear you say anything,” his mum had said. “Don't you ever dare.”

Today, walking slowly along the path towards the flats, bags of shopping in each hand, Melanie was fat. No two ways about it.

Nick slowed his pace, letting her reach the forecourt ahead of him but then realised he'd have to wait forever while she negotiated the main door. Giving her a wide berth, he hurried ahead and was just reaching for his keys when he heard a crash and a shout and turned to see Melanie surrounded by the contents of one of her bags, some of them still rolling in slow small circles away from where she stood.