“Oy! Not so fast!” Mr. Long called him back.
Andy retraced his steps, put the chair up on the desk.
“Show me.”
He thumped his bag down and pulled out his dog-eared maths book, flicked through the pages with force, and held it out for Mr. Long to see.
“All right.” He nodded. “See you again, laddo.” Mr. Long laughed, and Mr. Harris joined in.
Andy darted from the room and tore down the corridor, dodging a mop and hurdling a floor buffer as the cleaner swung it from left to right. I’ll show them, he thought, determined not to end up in detention again. Unfortunately, he was too impulsive to come good on his promise to himself.
Back home, Dan had just got back from footy practice, his kit covered in dusty soil, boots caked with mud. Their mother pointed at the stairs, and Dan went straight to the bathroom, stripped off and showered, leaving his kit strewn across the tiled floor. Still wet, he wriggled into a tracksuit and was back in the kitchen, raiding the fridge, less than five minutes later, his hair dripping soapy water everywhere. Andy had taken the last cheese triangle and crammed it in his mouth with half the foil still attached so that Dan couldn’t nick it off him.
“We could’ve done with you today,” Dan said. Andy nodded once. “They’ve rescheduled all the games, and we’re playing Parkside next week now.” Dan clenched his fists. “Got to beat that arsehole!”
“Daniel! Language!” his mother shouted. She was chopping an onion, and it stank.
Andy didn’t respond. He missed primary school. It was much more fun—lessons all in the same room, although he didn’t mind that bit really. Some of the first years were forever getting lost in high school, whereas he just used it as an excuse if he got to lessons late. Then there was the lunchtime ban on ball games. The PE teachers promised they were trying to sort it out, get them a fenced-off pitch so the neighbours wouldn’t complain about footballs landing in their garden all the time. Andy loved PE. The lessons were brilliant, plus they were learning to play hockey at the moment, and soon they’d be doing basketball. He even liked science—they had some weird old dude teaching them, who was shorter than most of the lads in their year and had crazy white hair that stuck up on end. He was OK, unless the class upset him. Then he would really fly!
No, what he missed most was Dan, and he couldn’t wait until next year, when they’d be back on the same football team again. Of course, he knew now from not-so-bitter experience that their arch rivals—Parkside Primary Under 11s—were their teammates of the future. He’d already had a run-in with some of the lads early on, but they soon realised that, now they were all on the same side, they were going to be formidable. Next year, with Dan, George, and Rob Simpson from Parkside on the team, as well as Aitch and himself and all the other lads, they’d be ready to take on the world. All right, maybe they’d start with the county and work their way up from there, but there’d be no stopping them.
***
“There we are, Mrs. Thurston.” The police officer opened the door, and Andy and Dan came through into the reception area. “The shop owner isn’t going to press charges this time.”
Their mother nodded gratefully. “Thank you, Officer. I promise you, they won’t know what’s hit them.” She grabbed both boys by the backs of their coats and dragged them outside. “Right. In the car, the pair of you.”
They skulked over to the car and climbed in, not a word from either of them. Their mother, however, continued to rant all the way home.
“Shoplifting! What the hell do you think you’re playing at? I work my backside off for you three, and this is the thanks I get? I wouldn’t mind, but you get plenty of money spent on you, not to mention pocket money, so why? You think you can do whatever you like, no thought for anyone else, well, I’ll tell you what! You’re going to get your comeuppance one of these days.”
She paused to make eye contact with Andy in the rear-view mirror. “And you, especially, should know better. You’re at high school now. You’re supposed to look after him—” she thumbed over her shoulder in Dan’s general direction “—not drag him into all sorts of trouble. Honest to God, you’ll be the death of me.” She indicated and turned left. “And your dad”—their stepdad, she meant—“is away, so it’s left to me to deal with you, yet again. You’re both grounded, for starters, and you can forget about football, too.”
“But Mum—” Dan began.
“But nothing. The team will have to do without you.”
“But we’ve got the fourth round next—”
“Not interested. You should’ve thought about that before you nicked all those sweets. I don’t even want to know what you were planning to do with them. Didn’t you get enough for Easter?”
The boys remained silent. The sweets weren’t for them. They were going to sell them. They’d made a fair bit of money over the past couple of months, and they’d been buying their stock legitimately, until last week, when someone had stolen their takings from Andy’s schoolbag. Their options: let down their regular customers and risk losing them, or find another means to get hold of some stock. Perhaps it hadn’t been quite the best idea they’d ever had in retrospect. Correction: the best idea Andy had ever had, but Dan had gone along with it only too willingly. Oh, well, another day, another punishment. Take it on the chin, move on.
***
Andy listened to the voices downstairs. His older brother had arrived home a couple of hours ago, locked himself in his room and cranked up his stereo to full volume. Twenty minutes had passed since he turned it off, went downstairs, talked to Mum, and left. Now she was on the phone, speaking so fast that Andy couldn’t understand what she was saying. He flushed the toilet and went back to the bedroom. Dan was on the top bunk, asleep, or pretending to be. Andy shook the frame. Dan shot up and lunged at him, leaping from the bed, the force throwing Andy to the floor.
For a few seconds, Andy was too stunned to fight back. He rallied and rolled so that he could pin Dan down. “What’d you do that for?”
“Get off me!” Dan spat.
“No way.” Andy knew if he let him go, he would start laying into him, and they were the same size now. Dan could easily take him in a fight, especially when he was like this. Andy kept a grip on Dan’s wrists and slowly lifted a leg. Dan jerked his knee and got him right in the balls.
Andy collapsed onto the floor, squirming in pain. Dan jumped to his feet and stopped dead. A car had just screeched to a halt outside. He stood on tiptoes so he could look out of the window and see who it was. Their dad. He slumped.
“Barb?” their dad called out as he came in the front door. Their mum came into the hall.
“Oh, Ian,” she cried.
Dan climbed up onto his bed and lay on his back, staring at the square on the ceiling left by Andy’s poster. He didn’t want the top bunk anymore. It was too high up, and it shook every time Andy got on or off the bed. He didn’t want to listen to his mum now, telling his dad what had happened. He heard the door to the living room close and sighed in relief that he couldn’t hear them.
Andy was still lying on the floor, their parents’ conversation incredibly clear with his ear pressed against the carpet. Mum was crying. Dad was angry. Something terrible had happened. Had someone died? No. That wasn’t it. Dan and Kris…the treehouse…didn’t touch them…great uncle…
Before the Easter holidays, they’d had a special assembly, with a woman from the NSPCC, who told them about a little girl from London who got locked in her room by her parents. Now she had new parents, but she nearly died because they didn’t feed her, or wash her, and things like that. The woman said that sometimes adults do things to children that are wrong, and that they all had the right to say no if they didn’t like what was happening to them.
Andy had only half listened, because he and his mates were messing around, poking the girls on the row in front and then pretending it wasn’t them. But he’d thought at the time that it was silly. Adults always looked after them, kept them safe. Ev
en when they got into trouble, their mum still gave them food and didn’t lock them in their rooms. He’d decided the woman was making it up. Now he realised that maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth.
The conversation downstairs had come to an end some time ago, and there was no further sound. Dan swung his legs off the side of the top bunk.
“Can we swap back beds?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Andy agreed without argument.
“Cool.” Dan jumped down, and they quickly switched their duvets and all of the other junk they kept on the ends of their beds.
“Want to play Subbuteo?” Andy suggested.
“OK.”
Andy cleared a space on the floor to set out the pitch, and they positioned their players, each watching the other to try and get the advantage on the starting formation. They kicked off.
“What’s high school like?” Dan asked.
“All right, I s’pose.”
“It’ll be weird being the smallest again.”
“Yeah.”
“With the older boys picking on you and stuff.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll just tell them to leave me alone.”
“Yeah?” Andy flicked his striker and scored. “Yeeeeesssss!” He waved his fists in the air.
“Offside,” Dan said, pointing at his defenders.
“You just moved him back!”
“Did not!” Dan protested, but conceded the goal was legal. “So, yeah. If those boys start on me I’ll just tell them. Leave me alone, or I’ll set my big brothers on you.”
Andy waited until the ball was back in play before he replied. “And I’ll be there, right behind you.”
“What, hiding, you mean?” Dan grinned at his brother.
Andy scowled and took a long shot, fouling one of Dan’s players in the process.
Dan scored from the penalty. “In the box. Thank you! Have it!”
“Crap,” Andy grumbled.
“Serves you right for playing dirty.”
Andy shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to.”
Downstairs, the living room door opened.
“Dan?” Their dad’s voice. “Can I have a word?”
Hesitantly, Dan got to his feet and walked across the room. At the door to their bedroom, he looked back at his brother, both trying to pretend they weren’t bothered. A second later, Andy followed.
“He didn’t want you,” Dan called up the stairs.
“I told you,” Andy said.
“Yeah, hiding, I remember.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs. Dan stopped in his tracks. Andy drew up behind him and waited.
“Dan!” Dad again. “I haven’t got all day!” He stepped out into the hallway. “Off you pop,” he said to Andy, and returned to the living room, fully expecting his sons’ compliance, even though he had rarely featured in their lives during the past seven years.
Dan stepped off the final stair and dawdled his way reluctantly across the hall, pausing outside the door.
“Hey!” Andy called. Dan turned and looked at him. Andy smiled. “You’ll be OK?”
Dan nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ve got your back,” Andy called after him. Dan went inside.
“Shut the door,” his father commanded. Dan did as he was told, glancing at his brother through the diminishing gap. Andy nodded and gave him a wink.
“I’ve always got your back, bro. And don’t you ever forget it.”
The End
* * * * *
About the Author
Debbie McGowan is an author and publisher based in a semi-rural corner of Lancashire, England. She writes character-driven, realist fiction, celebrating life, love and relationships. A working class girl, she ‘ran away’ to London at seventeen, was homeless, unemployed and then homeless again, interspersed with animal rights activism (all legal, honest ;)) and volunteer work as a mental health advocate. At twenty-five, she went back to college to study social science—tough with two toddlers, but they had a ‘stay at home’ dad, so it worked itself out. These days, the toddlers are young women (much to their chagrin), and Debbie teaches undergraduate students, writes novels and runs an independent publishing company, occasionally grabbing an hour of sleep where she can.
Contact / Media Info
Twitter: twitter.com/writerdebmcg
Facebook: facebook.com/DebbieMcGowanAuthor
facebook.com/beatentrackpublishing
YouTube: youtube.com/deb248211
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LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/writerdebmcg
Google+: plus.google.com/+DebbieMcGowan
Goodreads: goodreads.com/DebbieMcGowan
Website: debbiemcgowan.co.uk
* * * * *
By Debbie McGowan
Stand-Alone Stories
Champagne
Sugar and Sawdust
Cherry Pop Valentine
When Skies Have Fallen
Coming Up ~ co-written with Al Stewart
Of the Bauble
Checking Him Out Series
Checking Him Out (Book One)
Checking Him Out For the Holidays (Novella)
Hiding Out (Novella - Noah and Matty)
Taking Him On (Book Two - Noah and Matty)
Checking In (Book Three)
The Making of Us (Book Four - Jesse and Leigh - exp. 2016)
Seeds of Tyrone Series
~ co-written with Raine O’Tierney
Leaving Flowers (Book One)
Where the Grass is Greener (Book Two)
Christmas Craic and Mistletoe (Book Three)
Sci-fi/Fantasy Light
And The Walls Came Tumbling Down
No Dice
Double Six
General
‘Time to Go’ in Story Salon Big Book of Stories
Hiding Behind The Couch Series
The ongoing story of ‘The Circle’…
Nine friends from high school;
Nine friends for life.
The Story So Far…
in chronological order:
novellas and short novels are ‘stand-alone’ stories, but tie in with the series. Think Middle Earth—well, more Middle England, but with a social conscience!
Beginnings (Novella)
Ruminations (Novel)
Class-A (Short Story)
Hiding Behind The Couch (Season One)
No Time Like The Present (Season Two)
The Harder They Fall (Season Three)
Crying in the Rain (Novel)
First Christmas (Novella)
In The Stars Part I: Capricorn–Gemini (Season Four)
Breaking Waves (Novella)
In The Stars Part II: Cancer–Sagittarius (Season Five)
A Midnight Clear (Novella)
Red Hot Christmas (Novella)
Two By Two (Season Six)
Hiding Out (Novella)
Breakfast at Cordelia’s Aquarium (Short Story)
Chain of Secrets (Novella)
Those Jeffries Boys (Novel)
The WAG and The Scoundrel (Gray Fisher #1)
Reunions (Season Seven)
www.hidingbehindthecouch.com
www.debbiemcgowan.co.uk
All available from www.beatentrackpublishing.com
* * * * *
Beaten Track Publishing
For more titles from Beaten Track Publishing,
please visit our website:
https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com
Thanks for reading!
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