Wee Danny (5 page)

"God, no. I'll fill my boots at lunch time."

Conan sits back in his chair and cranes his neck to look under the table. It takes me a second to realise he's looking to see what kind of boots I'm wearing.

"No, mate … I mean, I'll eat more at lunch time. Pack my stomach, kind of thing?"

"Oh, right. I get it."

I don't think he really understands but it's nice to see he's not embarrassed. He's been a little more talkative lately and I think it's because the big lad's got more confident in his skin. I like to believe I helped him with that.

"Do us a favour, though, will you, Conan?"

"What is it?"

"Walk past Adrian on your way up there."

"Why?"

"I just want to see what he does."

"He'll make fun of me."

"How do you know?"

"He always makes fun of me. Even when he's not doing it out loud, I know he's doing it behind his eyes."

I pause for a second. "This is a wee bit deep for breakfast conversation."

Conan looks at me. No smile, no shrug, no sign of emotion. He's hard work.

"If Adrian annoys you, why don't you punch him?"

"Why don't
you
?"

I put down my spoon and rub my forehead. Then I realise that I'm doing the exact same thing my older brother Paul used to do when I was annoying his head. If I said something daft or told him about whatever trouble I'd gotten into, he'd massage the skin along his hairline with one hand, his eyes and mouth clenched shut. And he went bald in his twenties.

"You know what, Conan? That's a very good question. Watch this."

I get off the seat and lift my bowl from the table. The leftover mess of milk and cheap corn flakes slops against the edges. I move with purpose; a little faster than usual but not noticeably so to an outside observer. My mind is clear and worker-drone focussed. Adrian doesn't see me coming.

A couple of feet from where the speccy creep sits, I pull my move. One of the younger kids at the same table jerks his chair backwards to leave his spot at the table.

My reaction time has always been impressive. It's what made me a decent scrapper amongst the gang of wee rockets I knocked about with back home.

I dart towards the kid's chair, crash into it and let my breakfast leftovers fly.

The bowl crashes into Adrian's head and the trail of milky mush slops down his right side. It soaks into his black T-shirt. That's going to stink. Adrian can't figure out what's happened. I wish for instant replay, slow motion and play-by-play commentary. But that'll come later. After. Right here, right now, I've my role to play. I'm working on instinct for the most part but that's just how I roll.

I turn to the kid that pushed his chair out at the perfectly wrong time. He's visibly shaking. None of this is actually his fault but he doesn't know that. And fuck him anyway. He looks like he could do with a bit of hardening.

"What the fuck is your problem, wee lad?"

"Sorry, Danny—"

"Watch what you're doing, okay?"

The kid backs away. I keep my hands down, aware that the supervisors have started their cautious approach. They'll not charge until things get physical. And they're just about to.

Adrian doesn't waste time with threats. It's been a step too far, and now it's on. I woke up with a loose plan to get into a fight with Adrian and succeeded. The next step is to get my digs in
after
he hits me. I can hear Conan's voice. Sounds like he's too far off to get involved this time. Good.

The supervisors have started shouting. I see the flash that comes with a decent punch in the eye. Didn't realise Adrian had it in him. All the better for me, though. My hands are still down like I hadn't expected this to happen, but I bend back slightly and Adrian's haymaker – intended knockout – catches the side of my nose. Now I'm bleeding and nobody can blame me for this.

I grab a handful of Adrian's T-shirt and sink my head into his face. His nose erupts. The fight's not out of him yet but he's swinging blind, tears and blood clogging his vision. His right hand lands on my face and he tries to catch my ear with it. I take hold of his fingers and bend them back. A quick quarter-turn of the wrist.

Snap.

Adrian screams and I suppress a grin. I can't look like I bossed this fight. The speccy creep swings at me with his left and I let it land once, twice, three times. But I hold on to the mangled fingers with all my strength. Grind them together. Adrian looses an Al-Qaeda-style
jihad
scream. He connects another couple of punches, much weaker than the previous flurry. And then we're tackled by the supervisors. I hold on to his mangled digits for another second before we're separated.

"My hand, my hand. The wee fucker's destroyed my hand."

Adrian's screams don't earn him much sympathy.

"What's the matter?" The supervisor holding on to me can talk easily because I'm not struggling. "You break it on Wee Danny's head?"

"It looks pretty bad," the other supervisor says.

"Serves the bully, right. I saw him tackle this wee fellah for hardly any reason at all."

"He threw his bowl at me!"

"The lad tripped and you know it."

Adrian's on the floor. I'm ushered to the nearest bathroom to clear my face. The sympathetic supervisor stands outside, content that I'm not in a rage and not too badly hurt. I run the hot water tap and dampen a handful of blue paper towels. Before I wipe the blood from my face I allow myself one huge, devilish grin at my reflection. I look evil as fuck. In a good way, like.

Conan takes up a lot of bus seat, but that's okay, because I don't. Plus, I let him have the window seat so I have plenty of space on the aisle side and don't feel a bit claustrophobic. Conan's too busy taking in the passing scenery to chat. It's only a small bus and the seat across from me is made for one. I don't bother talking to the Billy-no-mates sitting in it. My mind is occupied and the silence suits me.

I rest my elbows on the back of the seat in front and close my eyes.

Guilt gnaws at me again.

It's been at me since I wrecked Adrian's hand. I don't understand why. It's not like he didn't deserve it. All right, so I heard he liked to play the guitar and he's going to have to take a break from strumming for a while. I bet he was shite at it anyway. And maybe I did go a little too far, but I had to stamp out any notions of future revenge. It may be that I felt bad about Adrian getting excluded from this trip by baiting him into the fight, but if the fellah had any cop-on at all he'd have taken his time to get his own back. I can't help it if he's too stupid to handle me.

Or maybe he's smarter than I give him credit for. He came up to me a few days after the fight, his hand all strapped up and supported by a pinkish foamy sling. His glasses had been bent out of shape in the scuffle and they rested askew on the bridge of his swollen nose. I told him he needed to stay out of my way if he wanted to continue wiping his own arse.

"Why do you have to be such a dick?" Adrian's eyes held more sorrow than anger. "I've been trying to make peace with you for ages but you're determined to hate me."

I looked at him, silent, waiting for another insult. The speccy creep worked his mouth a few times but no sound came out. Then he turned his back on me and hurried off.

Now I see it for what it was. A mind fuck. He's just looking sympathy so he can suck me in and get me vulnerable. Well, he can fuck right off.

My stomach will feel better when we get out of this shitty wee fuck-bucket of a handicapped bus and breathe some air.

I think of Conan and how kids like him probably travel in these yellow buses all over the country and what snap judgements people make about them. Window-lickers, spastics, retards. Words that I'll try not to use again. Try not to think about. My stomach feels worse.

"Are we nearly there, Miss?"

She turns and the hassled look on her face is a welcome distraction.

"It'll be about ten more minutes, Danny. All right?"

Some other wee …
eejit
pipes up. "You said that ten minutes ago."

"Shush now," Miss says.

A chorus of "
Stop the bus we wanna wee-wee!
" breaks out. Miss opens her mouth to tell everybody to shut up, but a laugh tumbles over her blow-job lips instead. Now this is what it's all been about. The craic starts here.

I prime up my best Pavarotti voice and belt out, "
Because the boys in the back can't swim!
"

Miss shakes her head at me but I can see the indulgent twinkle in her eyes. The humpy-hole supervisors are as humourless as ever, though. I return a few dirty looks then slump down in my seat. We turn off the country road and onto the entrance to Castle Ward a little under ten minutes later.

The bus driver pulls in at a wooden hut and some geeky guy comes out for a quick natter with him. The geek slaps the side of the bus like he's probably seen real men do and the driver ploughs into a speed bump. A few of us cheer like we're on a roller coaster. Juvenile stuff, but we're hyped up worse than a bunch of primary school kids about to hop off the bus at the zoo. You have to expect a wee bit of messing.

The bus rolls down a lane that seems to go on forever before I see the mansion that Alan told me about. But I only catch a glimpse before the trees lining this wee narrow road thicken and cut off my view. We get parked up in a spot that must be about half a mile away from the big house. I can't see why we couldn't just drive up to the front door. Parking is a bit of a bastard in Belfast but these country types will dump their cars anywhere. They probably just want to keep the riff-raff at bay or something. Pricks.

We have to line up at the side of the bus while they double-check nobody's run off. You'd be some sort of escapist genius to pull that one off in the seconds it took us to stretch our legs, but sure, when has common sense ever ruled anything?

Conan's beside me. He nudges my upper arm with his elbow and looks up to the sky. "Do you think it'll rain today, Danny?"

"Nah, mate. There's not a cloud in the sky."

"That's good."

But he looks nervous, like he's been tossed way out of his comfort zone. I'd read that autistic kids don't like to have their routines interrupted.

"You all right with all of this, big man?"

"I'm okay, Danny. I'm okay."

He looks awkward, though. Tense.

"You having one of your headaches?"

"No."

I get as close to his ear as I can manage without looking gay and say, "Don't worry, Conan. I'll be with you all day, right?"

His shoulders drop a few inches. The sun is shining. I feel good.

"This is a load of
shite
."

"Danny, shush."

"Sorry, Miss, but I feel like we've been conned."

My hands are sore, my T-shirt is damp with sweat and my trainers are fucking stinking. These National Trust gangsters should just get a big fucking chain and link us all together. They've got a solid hour of free labour out of us and we've not even been near the big house or seen anything half interesting. I've been picking green shit off the wall of some sort of barn thing and the ground is in the shade; slippery as fuck. Miss is standing in the sun, of course, watching me and Conan and a bunch of other suckered-in losers busting ourselves. They've made cunts out of us.

"It's not a con, Danny. It's a scheme."

"Sounds like the same thing to me, Miss."

"You didn't think you were getting a wee holiday, did you?"

I want to call her a bitch. Tell her to fuck off and not treat me like a moron. But even though I want to beat all around me, I can't lash out at her. She's not really the one in charge anyway. My real gripe should be with Alan, the fuck-wit. He sold this shite to me like it
was
a holiday.

"Sorry, Miss. I'll just get back to work here, will I?"

"No need to be sarcastic, Danny."

She tips me a playful wink. It keeps me going for another wee while.

I get bored pretty quick, though. "What do you think of this, Conan?"

The barbarian looks at me for a second then shrugs. He goes back to scraping the crumbling stone.

But I need him to talk to me. "It's not much fun, is it, big man?"

"We're not meant to have fun."

"Ach, we shouldn't be denied a bit of banter, surely?"

"Bad boys should be punished."

I don't like where Conan's mind is going. None of us here are really
bad
. We just got caught. I reckon we're unlucky more than anything else.

This scraping walls business is pure shite. I take my trowel-type thing and throw it at the soft ground. It sinks in like a throwing knife. I'm too cool.

"Can you do that, big man?"

Conan looks down and smiles a little. He nods.

"Show me."

I skip back a step. Conan's scraping thing sinks into the mud right between the footprints I've just left. I'm about to shout at him for endangering my toes, but the look on his face stops me. He's got proper mischief in his eyes.