Luca, Son of the Morning

by Tom Anderson

  Anyway, it was what the guy who wrote my song was on about. That was what he meant. That was its message.

  I still wasn’t going to click the Bible verse link, though. No way.

  My sixth run of ‘Concrete Jungle’ was coming to an end, and through my now silent earphones I could hear some kind of indie pop from downstairs.

  I wondered how much good there was in my parents. How much evil, too?

  Were they where I got mine from? And how much of it all was in me?

  How much of my mum’s good? How much of my dad’s? And how much of the evil in them? Was there evil in them? And was there evil in me, then?

  Was I really Lucifer, Son of the Morning, some of the time?

  Maybe not for me to say, you know. Maybe I should let the Doc decide. Would be interesting to hear what he thought, anyway.

  * * *

  Next day was all about keeping my good and bad under control. Funny how it worked out like that, don’t you think?

  I woke up just after lunch and there was my dad, chewing on a pie from the chippy that he always went to round the corner. My mum was digging into a sandwich she’d made, and you could see on their faces the moment I came down that something had happened which they were going to rate as good.

  The watches had sold. Sold quickly, too. They only had four left, and my dad was eyeing up a wedge of cash on the kitchen surface.

  ‘Add this to our savings and we’re over the line anytime soon,’ he kept saying. ‘Ell of an appetite for wholesale on those babies at the market! Dropped in price a bit, but I can shift more of them next week. If I did this for a month we could buy twice as much of Haz’s gold!’

  Jeff Rafferty was on his way over, too.

  I looked at my mum for some kind of sense, but you could see there wasn’t going to be any. No use. This was happening.

  I thought about what this might mean for me now – more trips to Birmingham, more sketchy geezers trying to flog stuff through my dad. More afternoons like this, with Jeff and the pair of them playing loud music and singing like kids in the year below me.

  That seemed to be Sunday in the Lincoln-James house these days. Parents counting money from market watches and planning to spend it all, and more, on dodgy gold – as they sipped rum and swayed like they were on an ancient galleon in high seas.

  Perhaps they’d all kidnap someone soon, too, and hold out for a huge ransom from some posh family with too much money of their own. Then my parents would finally be as bad as Gaby’s. Or as bad as Gaby thought hers were since less than twenty-four hours ago.

  No. Hang on… Kidnapping? Ransoms? That would make my folks just a little bit clever. They’d never do anything like that, then. My folks and clever didn’t go together.

  There. That’s the main part of them that was in me: not being clever. Good or evil were too ambitious for this family. There you go – the real reason I was bad at Maths. I wasn’t evil enough!

  Maybe that was my destiny, I realised. Was I meant to be one of these people who couldn’t create because you were neither good, nor bad, but just grey and boring and empty? Maybe that was it, I thought, dragging myself upstairs to wait for the day to be over and Monday to come and get me with all the savage glory that it seemed to have no problem creating out of nothing.

  Chapter 16

  I didn’t feel like Bunny in the mornings the next week. There was too much out of sync in my head to even dare approaching the gates of Chapel Shores Comp with my usual routine. Mr Kleener would need to be warded off with something else.

  I flicked on ‘shuffle’ for most of the Monday walk to school, only settling on ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ by UB40 right at the last minute. It seemed to have just the right message for where I was heading right now. Long shadows cut their way across the yellowy dawn ground, as the herd of kids pushed through the gates. It was one of those cold, crisp mornings you get in the spring, with no wind and the air really sharp.

  We had a new supply teacher for Reg, and this time it was a much older woman who wasn’t going to put up with any crap. She was thin and tall, dressed in blue trousers with a white shirt and a long, dark green coat over – one of those coats you could kind of wear indoors and not look silly. Her hair was straight and neat, dyed dark brown with grey roots just showing. Straight away, I missed the grumpy young teacher we’d been having for Reg. She never bothered us to do any of the stuff we were meant to. This lady, though, was working through the register checking up stuff like who’d missed lessons in the week before and asking them questions about where they were.

  It was my turn to get it easy for once, or so it seemed. I was on time this morning, and my only day off – to go to the market with my dad and Jeff – was authorized by the last supply already. Still, it wasn’t much fun listening to her laying into us all first thing in the morning, when everyone knows kids my age are crap.

  ‘I taught for thirty years,’ she was saying. ‘Retired and happy to go. But your Mr Kleener is a dear friend, so I’ve agreed to come back until the summer and you lot are through your exams. Don’t worry. I won’t go away. It’s going to be stability from now on.’

  Stability sounded okay, before I realised it was just a decoy for something much worse.

  ‘Oh, and…’ reading off a screen, she squinted and announced: ‘Luca Lincoln-James, Bethan David, Harrison Storer and Robert Singh? Are you all here?’

  Three of us were. Harrison Storer we had never actually met. We wondered who he was, ever since he ‘joined’ in year nine but hadn’t ever actually showed up. But the rest of us were in, and she knew it.

  The rest of our form piled out for the day and me and the other two sat, tired, behind our desks in this dim room for someone we’d never met to come out with exactly what we were expecting.

  ‘Now, you three – we don’t know where Harrison is, do we? – no. Never mind. You three are here now, because the school has asked me to keep an eye out. You’re very important to Mr Kleener and to the school, and I’ve promised him I’ll check in on you every couple of days. You see, you three have been flagged up as kids the school’s a little worried about, as in you might be at a little risk of maybe not quite meeting your potential in one or two subjects…’

  And I drifted off. It was the only way to cope with that speech. We’d had it off a million adults by now. Ride it out until they reach the bit about…

  ‘…Now your attendance is very important at this stage, and well done for being here…’

  …and then you knew they were near the end.

  * * *

  Break rolled round and as soon as I saw Gaby my head was filling up with questions, but there she was, quiet and oblivious to my existence once more. She wouldn’t even catch my eye.

  I wanted so badly to talk to her about the picture she’d shown me, but Saturday to Monday can be such a long time in Chapel Shores for a kid like me, and it was as if the person who had shuffled up to me in that coffee shop, sharing secrets of her family’s criminal history was long gone.

  Now, there was just this smart-looking girl, whose uniform was ironed and whose hair had been straightened to cling close to her cheeks. This girl who seemed like five years older than the rest of us, riding a taunt of ‘Gabo, give us a kiss’ from some muscle-bound rugby kid with a gentle sneer in his direction, while two of the other girls who were too grown up for anyone to approach called her ‘Gabe’ as they showed her some pictures on a phone that seemed to be of immense interest.

  I had a theory to hit her with, though, and it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t just ask to speak to her. Those other girls with her – they looked kind of sound, didn’t they? Maybe they’d be like Ella Bowen, who had turned out to be fully approachable and nowhere near as scary or hard as people claimed. Maybe, through some sort of weird mixture of pity and general humanity, they might also decide it was fine to hear me out, and that their gre
at mate ‘Gabe’ should be cool to me too.

  No. Never going to happen.

  ‘Fair’ was an idea that got left at the gates of Chapel Shores Comp. I knew that by now, and no amount of Bunny Wailing or UB40-ing or anything else would ward off the natural order of things. A natural order that said No. She is Gabrielle Carranero and you are Luca Lincoln-James and you two cannot mingle when the social order is at play.

  But what about my theory! Come on, Gaby. It’ll interest you! It will.

  If only I could get to tell it to her.

  I reckoned she knew it already, anyway. She had to. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to knock out that picture the way she had done – with it seeming so real. With the silhouettes of the other guys following him. With each figure in the queue casting a shadow down onto a surface that, even in the shaky charcoal of Gaby’s ‘impressionist’ style, looked so much like sand at night that it couldn’t be anything else.

  We had Art two lessons later, as well, which they let me go to this time instead of extra Maths, and where it should have meant I got a break from simultaneous equations. Instead it came as even more of a stress as I had to watch her being perfect, getting told so by Rogoff at every opportunity. Gabrielle Carranero the impressionist. Gaby Carranero the sculptor. Gabe the fashionista, the avant-garde, the prodigy. Gabe the genius. Gabo the girl the rugby boys took a pop at from time to time because sooner or later one of them thought they were going to get somewhere.

  ‘All Art chicks are mental,’ I remembered Joe Poundes saying once in a corridor, behind her but so that she could hear. ‘It’s so sexy, innit!’ I’m sure he’d been rewarded with a chuckle from his mates for that one. I hadn’t seen her reaction, though, and knew by now not to meddle if she was getting grief in school – not that I could have done anything at all about it. In Rogoff’s room, though, she had her refuge, every single time.

  It was the highlight of my day, that Art lesson, as they always were whenever Kleener let me go to them instead of Maths. How sad that this kind of thing is my highlight, though? Getting to sit there watching Mrs Rogoff rave about Gaby’s work, and a few others’ work too just to make it look balanced, while feeling like a moron myself for having such a crap idea. I sat there, adding pointless licks of paint to my pop-art collage, while Mrs Rogoff occasionally ‘popped’ by and pretended she was trying not to look disappointed or unimpressed.

  Yeah, Gaby was right to steer clear of me in school.

  And then my parents ignored me once I got home too.

  * * *

  The next morning I was back in the extra Maths classes – which was just as crap, because it meant missing Art, where being an underwhelming failure was kind of cool, to go to a place where being at any risk whatsoever of not succeeding meant you got harassed and hassled to the point of near death.

  ‘Any of these mathematicians getting near that C-grade yet?’ bellowed Mr Kleener, when he visited half way through the lesson. ‘It’s the golden ticket, Year 11!’

  Golden ticket? Did that make it real, then? Did that help it exist?

  ‘What was that, Luca Lincoln-James?’

  ‘Er, nothing, Sir. Just talking under my breath. Sorry.’

  Then it was BTEC Science again, and that meant my second chance of the week to imagine a world where kids in my year were kind and sensitive, where people liked you for who you were and had no secrets or motives to hide. In other words, it was my second weekly hour sat next to Ella Bowen.

  ‘It’s LL Cool J and his sweetie music,’ she laughed, as I arrived and unpacked.

  ‘How you doin, little man?’

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘I’m good. Thanks for asking, brawd.’ She smiled big and flicked a curved thumbs-up at me, her finger nail, pearly-white today, rising out of her tanned hand like an antennae.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘been hearing a lot about you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course?’

  ‘What, from Gabrielle?’ Not knowing which of the shortened versions of her name to use in this situation, I just went for the full one.

  ‘Obviously. Yeah, man! Gabe won’t stop going on about you.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like it when I’m in this place,’ I said. Somehow, it seemed okay to say those kinds of things to Ella.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry about that,’ said Ella. ‘She’s a funny bitch with all of us here. She’ll tell you herself. It’s always been like that, though. She’s got funny ideas, see, hasn’t she.’

  I didn’t say anything more, but flicked to the next page of my BTEC booklet. Ella did the same, then added:

  ‘Yeah. Thing is with Gabe, see, she’s all into this thing about how she only comes here to pass her exams and get a job and all that, like. Suppose she’s kind of right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘She just wants to get amazing results then escape Chapel Shores and become like some kind of famous designer or something.’

  ‘Does she say that?’ I said. ‘Coz she’s always told me about how she likes it here and, like, the way it’s, like, you know… The way it’s kind of quiet and dead-endey here.’

  ‘Nah. She don’t really believe that, though. She’s changed her mind now anyway. Did she tell you about her parents arguing?’

  ‘Er, sort of.’

  ‘Bad, innit.’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘I mean, like, her dad sounds like a full-on murderer waiting to happen, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘Er… I’ve not really met him.’

  ‘Yeah, but getting all in their faces like that? You know? Like he did the other night. That’s harsh, eh?’

  ‘Er, yeah. It’s pretty bad.’

  I pretended to know what she was on about.

  ‘Did you hear about the crazy shit she discovered about her dad?’ Ella went on.

  ‘Uh, about…’

  ‘Yeah, that he’s like some gangster guy whose great grandpa was some sort of, like, money… What’s the word. You know, “money laundromats” isn’t it?’

  ‘Money launderer,’ said our teacher, Mr Powell, arriving just late enough not to hear the rest.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it! Thanks sir!’ Ella grinned and fluttered her eyelids at him.

  ‘Not quite sure where money laundering comes into the BTEC Science syllabus,’ said Mr Powell, frowning and smiling at once. Ella could get that from people. Teachers loved her, especially male ones. She just had that way that meant they couldn’t stay annoyed with her.

  ‘It is, sir. Trust me.’

  ‘I’m not as sure as you, somehow, Ella. Come, on. Get on with your workbook.’

  As he strolled away, Ella winked at me. ‘Cool, though, int it! Gabe wants to run away and earn her own money now. She don’t want her dad’s, see. That’s why she’s so on it in school, like. Why she’s so intense at the moment.’

  I wanted to say that she’d been that intense in school for, well, since ever, really, for me, but I didn’t want to incur Mr Powell’s wrath for distracting Ella during the one sentence of the hour that she’d decided to write into her workbook. He wouldn’t be so cool with me for not getting work done. So I just turned to my own workbook, and waited for her to choose when to lose her concentration next.

  It was about thirty seconds.

  ‘Hey. She’s gonna have a break at Jackdaw’s party next weekend, anyway. You’re coming, aren’t you?’

  ‘Party?’

  ‘Yeah, man! You know Jackdaw, don’t you? From the year above us. He didn’t stay on, though. Works with his dad now. They’re builders. D’you know him?’

  Of course I knew of this guy. He’d been a proper badass when he was in Year 11 last year. They kicked him out before his exams, so working with his dad was probably his only option – if he didn’t become some kind of drug dealer or other
crim.

  ‘His full name’s Jack Dooley?’ said Ella, as if I didn’t know of this local celeb. ‘His dad’s van has Dooley’s Driveways written on the side of it? Me and him used to go out a bit but then we worked better as friends. He liked Gabe, too, but she was only with him for like a week and nothing happened. He wasn’t her type. Anyway, his mum’s going away and it’s only him and his dad in the house, so his dad said he could have a party. Last one he did was mega. They had hot tubs and live music in the garden.’

  ‘It’s not very warm right now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but that don’t matter. Have you been in a hot tub on a cold night? It’s lush.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied, again.

  ‘Anyway. Gabe wants you to come. She told me to tell you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Course she does, LLJ! Bring some booze too.’

  ‘BRING SOME WHAT?’ yelled Mr Powell, timing his pass perfectly.

  ‘Sorry, sir. I said bring some, er, clues, sir. Like, clues for how to find the melting point of, er, aluminium. Me and LL Cool J’re gonna catch up after school.’

  The class buckled with laughter, and Mr Powell couldn’t stay mad at her after that:

  ‘Catch up? You pair have hardly started! You’re getting on too well, I reckon.’

  The class laughed again, with a few hoots and whistles.

  ‘I don’t mean…’ said Mr Powell.

  ‘So what, sir? Maybe he is my boyfriend.’

  Then she grabbed me with both arms and hugged me hard in front of the class. It seemed to shut them up, and Mr Powell too.

  Ella had that power. The natural order had given her the right to make herself the butt of a joke, and to end or grow the joke whenever she wanted. For me, it was a freebie. I could get laughed at here, and because it was Ella, there was the kind of unspoken rule it couldn’t get picked up outside of class by anyone.