The Sick Rose (14 page)

His evenings might still have belonged to Daniel but his days were his own and, in a reversal of his peers’ patterns, he lived for them. Spending every lunchtime revising in the library would normally have singled him out for violence but he was one of the oldest kids in the school now and one of the tallest, too. Most of his tormentors were long gone and in any case the legacy of Daniel’s protection loitered in the collective memory. He still walked beside him, an invisible presence. He was predicted decent GCSEs – he’d got mostly Bs and a single, shining A* for his English Language mock – and had a place waiting for him at the sixth form college in Tilbury town. He dared to dream of university and teacher training after that. He didn’t care how much debt he had to accrue; education was his ticket out of Grays Reach. He supposed that the friendship with Daniel would naturally cool then. The time when he would be desperate to escape him, would do anything to get away from him, was still a couple of years off.

Daniel came round at the same time as Troy arrived home.

‘Someone’s parked a bloody great jeep in my space,’ grumbled Troy. Parking at Grays Reach was unallocated but if Troy couldn’t leave his van in the same bay, the one that was visible from the bedroom window, he became agitated and would leave the house at hourly intervals in case the usurping motorist had moved his vehicle. ‘It’s not much to ask, at the end of a working day, is it, for a man to park his van where he wants?’

Behind him, Daniel pushed his tongue under his lower lip and crossed his eyes. Paul swallowed a laugh, kissed his mother goodbye.

‘But you haven’t had your tea!’ said his mum. ‘Have you eaten, Dan?’

Paul’s mum was the only person who got away with shortening Daniel’s name. When she did, he got a weird look on his face, soothed and stressed at the same time, as though the comfort he took was too painful to bear.

‘We’ll get chicken or something, don’t worry,’ said Paul.

The jeep in question was Carl’s Land Cruiser, occupying not only Troy’s space but the one next to it, too. Paul looked around for Carl, wondering why anyone would drive when the two houses were almost within hollering distance. He was astonished when Daniel brandished the keyring and climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘What the fuck?’ Daniel’s seventeenth birthday had only been a week ago. What was he doing with a car already?

‘Get in, then,’ said Daniel.

Paul almost never went anywhere in a car; his mother didn’t drive so all outings were made in Troy’s indiscreetly bright orange work van, Paul forced to ride in the windowless rear of the vehicle which stank of cooking fat and chemicals. Sitting in the passenger seat of a car, on the other hand, reminded him of trips with his dad. The click of the seatbelt and view over the dashboard rescued a dormant memory of a fishing trip to Canvey Island; they had pitched a two-man tent and stayed the night and in the morning, when the dawn had filtered through the green canvas and woken them, his dad had told him he was a real man now. He couldn’t have been more than about five.

‘How did you pass your driving test?’

Daniel gave him a look that was part contempt, part amusement.

‘I haven’t got a licence, you dickhead,’ he said. Paul should have known better and his relief at Daniel’s mild reaction outweighed his shame. Daniel’s lack of qualification was evident within seconds of the key turning and the first raucous rev; he reversed out of the parking area with only the briefest of glances over his shoulder. There was a dull clanking from the boot, as though it were loaded with clapperless bells.

‘Did your dad teach you to drive?’ he said, recalling with discomfort Carl’s arrogant, lawless speed.

‘When I was fifteen. You didn’t know that about me, did you? I can drive
anything
. Manual, automatic, left-hand drive, whatever. I could drive an HGV if I had to.’ He reached down into the footwell and pulled out a giant AA road atlas with a handwritten page of directions sticking out of the top. ‘Read that, will you?’

Carl Scatlock only just had the edge over his son when it came to the two literary components of the three Rs, and it took Paul a few seconds to deduce that Pizzy must be Pitsea. Paul opened the map on the relevant page and began to direct Daniel onto the A13, from where they would follow signs to the A127.

‘Where are we going? I mean, I know where we’re going, but why?’

‘My dad’s working on a big refurb job up London,’ he said. ‘He’s ripped about three ton of piping out of some old Victorian house. The woman who owns it told him to make sure it was recycled. She hasn’t got a clue you can sell it, silly bitch.’

‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘You want to take this next slip road.’

There was no way Daniel would have been able to do this without him. Paul had never considered how much reading drivers had to do. How were you supposed to know where you were going if you couldn’t read road signs? There were no landmarks here; each scrubby verge, each slip road and roundabout looked exactly like its predecessor.

The scrapyard was half a mile from Pitsea market. Carl had turned cartographer for the last few hundred yards, sketching the side streets they needed to cross. They took a left at a disused petrol station, pumps ripped out, buddleia replacing them on the forecourt, and found themselves in an expansive, menacingly silent industrial estate.

‘There’s no sign,’ said Daniel. ‘It hasn’t got a name. You’ve got to look for a green fence with a wheel hanging over the door. You don’t even tell him who sent you. If he doesn’t know, he can’t tell.’

They supposed that the leaning carapace of corrugated iron to their left was the fence in question and when Paul spotted the tyre suspended from a girder Daniel let go of the steering wheel and hit the dashboard in delight. The open gateway was wide enough to accommodate the vehicle, and Daniel drew it in in a clumsy manoeuvre. They found themselves facing a giant hangar. Old white bathtubs filled with taps flanked the entrance like two stone lions. Daniel sounded the horn and a man in navy overalls with a camouflage of black grease on his face emerged.

‘Gavin?’

Daniel leapt from the driver’s seat, leaving the engine running, and shook Gavin’s hand as though they were friends and equals. He did not give his name. Paul felt as though he were seeing Daniel for the first time all over again. He had forgotten how impressive, how confident he could be.

‘Let’s have a look at it, then,’ said Gavin, and threw open the back doors.

When they had finished unloading the pipes, Gavin filled a white kettle that was fishscaled with greasy fingerprints and made them tea so sweet that Paul’s teeth hurt. The negotiations were conducted out of his earshot. Before they left, Gavin peeled some layers from a roll of notes in his pocket and handed them to Daniel, who pocketed them without counting.

‘I can’t get rid of it quickly enough at the moment,’ said Gavin. ‘It’s ever since the Chinks got the Olympics, they’ve gone building mad out in Beijing. It’s caused a world shortage of scrap, I’m not taking the piss.’ He tapped the side of his nose with a grime-encrusted fingertip. ‘No questions asked.’

It was the most fun he’d had with Daniel in years.

There was some coursework to be finished at home and he was glad of it; what with the excitement and the rush from Gavin’s sugary tea, it would be hours before sleep came. Daniel insisted on dropping Paul as close to his front door as he could. Troy’s van was back in its rightful place. Paul wondered if he had identified the cuckoo in his nest. If he had, he’d hear no end of it tomorrow.

Daniel handed over £90. It was more money than Paul had ever held before.

‘What’s this for?’

‘You’ve earned it. I couldn’t have done it without you, could I? There’s gonna be loads more jobs where this came from, my dad’s too busy to do it himself. And we’ll have to do pick-ups as well as drop-offs, all over Essex. Sometimes up London, even. I’ll need your eyes.’

Paul thought of all the things he could do with £90. A job a week like this and he could set up a college fund. It was certainly better than playing computer games, and he liked how Daniel was in this context: cool, in control but not controlling of him, someone he could admire again.

Chapter 18

August 2008

He would never have got involved with the stealing if it had been suggested that first time. The line into unlawfulness was crossed so gradually that, looking back, he could not isolate the moment. Carl would occasionally hand them goods that no sane person would ever dump – a drum of copper wire, uncoated, that glittered and rolled like a Catherine wheel as he threw it into the back of the car, sheets of lead so brand new they were millpond-smooth – but by then the trips to Gavin’s yard had become a habit, like getting up for school in the morning. By the time the grey area had unambiguously blackened, Paul’s ideas of what was and was not normal had been distorted.

It was inevitable that Daniel and Paul would, at some stage, look to source their own materials. Even when it was all over he could never be entirely sure whether the first theft was impulsive or the climax of a master plan that he had been too naive to suspect. If he had been plotting, Daniel certainly put up a convincing show of spontaneity.

He had his own car now, although it was necessarily registered in Carl’s name. It was nothing special, just an old Volvo estate. Blooms of rust flourished all over its body but if you folded down the back seats, pulled the front ones forward and didn’t mind the odd bit of piping prodding you in the back of the head, there was as much interior space as in a small van.

The first time it happened they were deep into Essex, driving around for fun. You had to get a good half-hour inland before you hit proper countryside, the kind that was honeycombed with green and yellow fields and unbroken by the heavy industry that characterised the estuarine stretch of the county. There were no pedestrians and few cars, which Daniel interpreted as a chance to take the Volvo up to a hundred miles an hour. The car shook in protest at eighty but Paul knew better than to ask him to slow down: if you did that, he just laughed and floored it. Paul’s finger traced the B-roads on the map, trying to keep up with him, and it was either ask Daniel or get hopelessly lost.

‘Slow down, mate. Those signs might as well not be there. I can’t keep my place on the map.’

They passed a complicated, five-armed junction with bewildering asymmetrical Give Way lines and a vast array of signs pointing to towns, villages and roads that were only vaguely familiar. They had no idea who had the right of way, and were lucky that there were no other vehicles in sight or earshot.

‘In fifty years, no one will use road signs any more,’ said Paul, a mile or so down the road. ‘It’ll all be done by sat nav.’

‘Genius idea,’ said Daniel. He hit the brake and reversed back so quickly that it took Paul’s stomach a second or two to catch up with the rest of his body. They came to a lurching stop not back at the junction but at a parking spot dominated by another road sign, this one pointing the way to a nearby antiques market, white lettering on a chocolate brown background. Daniel got out of the car and examined the sign, tapping its surface and peering round the back. Meanwhile Paul sat in the passenger seat and tried to remember having voiced any idea, genius or otherwise, in the recent past.

‘First sound of a car, you call me and we leg it, OK?’ Daniel appeared at the passenger window with a smile on his face and a bolt-cutter in his hand.

‘Be careful you don’t cut yourself.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Daniel. ‘Eyes and ears, all right?’ He flipped his eyes upwards and Paul understood that he was supposed to climb on top of the car. He ascended the bonnet in one stride and the roof in another. There was a hollow thud as his weight made a faint impression on the metalwork. From this makeshift crow’s nest he looked out over miles of flat countryside. If he turned his back on Daniel, he could even see the QE2 bridge, hazy in the distance.

‘Can you see all right?’ said Daniel.

‘For miles and miles,’ said Paul. ‘But what am I looking for?’

Daniel was too focused on his task to reply. He made dismantling the sign look as easy as opening a can. When he had finished, the grey signposts stood empty. It reminded Paul of the time they’d been to the fair and his dad had hit every single target at the coconut shy and they had left a row of empty poles behind them. Daniel threw the sheet of metal into the back of the car. It landed with a thunderclap and Paul was dragged out of his memory.

‘Pure steel, this,’ he said. ‘You heard Gavin. He can’t get rid of it quick enough.’

‘Daniel, I’m not sure,’ said Paul.

‘It’s the ultimate in recycling,’ said Daniel in the voice he used when the case was closed. ‘Use it again and again and again. I like to do my bit for the environment.’

They got back in the car, Paul not quite able to believe what had just happened. Five minutes further down the road, a couple of miles deeper into the country, Daniel made a rapid, centrifugal U-turn on a country lane barely big enough for two cars to pass. Paul saw what he was looking at; the black and white chevrons that indicated a steep bend. He had forgotten that Daniel didn’t know his Highway Code.

‘No,’ said Paul, astonished at his own bravery.

‘
No
?’

‘Look, if we’re going to do this we need to do it . . . responsibly.’ Daniel rolled his eyes. ‘No, listen, I’m serious, Daniel. These arrows tell people about the bend. You take this away, someone’s going to drive straight into that bank and die. I don’t mind helping you out but I don’t want anyone’s death on my conscience.’