Luca, Son of the Morning

by Tom Anderson

  My dad looked up. Jeff straightened, too.

  ‘Come on,’ said Haz. ‘That’s not what we…’

  ‘Tall order to sell bullion to first-timers today,’ said the second man. ‘You and I both know that, Haz. But… but… How about a trial sale of a small bar? Then we can do a load more when we next melt. We’ll make the margin good. We’ll make it great.’

  ‘What are we talking?’ said Jeff, just about pushing Haz out of the way.

  ‘Small stake, big margin,’ said the man. ‘But you go through us, not this guy.’ He pointed at Haz, who looked about to object, before the man added, ‘He can just have a finder’s fee once we sell the lot.’

  Haz seemed slightly happier with this.

  ‘How much?’ said Jeff.

  I looked again at the guy with the automatic weapon, as the main speaker in the group thought about Jeff’s question.

  ‘You put in one and a half grand,’ said the man sat in the middle. ‘We’ll show you the coins you’re buying. We’ll melt. That’s a grand for the coins, five hundred for the minting, and the bar you can take will be worth well over six K. Sell it for anything near that – to show us you can run a metals business, and we’ll melt as much as you want with your initials on it.’

  ‘Done,’ said Jeff.

  ‘Yeah,’ added my dad. ‘Good, coz we can raise twenty-five to forty, depending on credit.’

  ‘Well, hold your horses, yeah,’ said the second man. ‘We can’t have the stuff not selling, see. Too much risk of comeback on us. If you guys have lumps of this lying around, together.’

  ‘It’ll sell,’ said Jeff.

  ‘We need to be sure. Our paperwork will be fine for it,’ said the man, ‘but the whole trick relies on the metals moving quickly. Now, I’ll show you the coins, and the bars we turn them into.’

  This time there was something much more eerie about the display. ‘Seventeen-hundred and a package like this is yours,’ said the second man, as he slipped a small, velvet lump of cloth out of his trouser pocket, as the gun behind hovered in the dim, stuffy air. He unfolded the rag carefully, and the glow filled the room. Even from three small coins and a bar the size of a credit card, you could see right away that this was a substance people could worship. The perfectly pressed surfaces shot a glint in all directions, as if light multiplied when it hit the gold. It looked alive – and like it was made with something better than us.

  ‘Done,’ said Jeff.

  ‘Cash,’ the man added.

  ‘Of course.’ And, trying not to look at that fourth, armed man in the back of the room, my dad flicked the notes out of his money clip, five at a time.

  I watched the bills go back into the first Congolese man’s pocket, along with the coins and the velvet wrap, trying to think of all the other things which that money could have got instead. For my dad and Jeff though, it was only a tiny bit of what they hoped to hand over soon.

  The move from that room back to the carpark seemed to sort of pass through us, almost like my journeys through the sea at night. With no words at all, the three of us drifted, zombie-like through the current of traders and suited con-men towards the van we’d come up in. Only once we were inside, with the doors safely slammed and locked, did anyone speak – and when they did, it was a far off the way I was feeling as anyone had ever been, yet.

  ‘I’ve got bloody good senses on this one, Jeff,’ said my dad as he turned the ignition. ‘Something’s telling me it’s a real go. I’m thinking how I can raise more. I’d stake the house on this, way I feel now.’

  Part 3

  Chapter 19

  ‘Hey, Dr Wentloog, what’s the DSM 5?’

  My mum was quizzing him in the corner of the room, out of my sight as I tried to watch a telly that was fixed on E4. I’d been out of bed for a couple of days by that point, and the energy to leave was building. This was before his notebook idea, before the contract thingy, before any of his ideas. My mum had been reading around, you know, like, the mind and all that. She’d found out all about him by now and his gigs talking around the world about stuff only he could spot.

  ‘It’s a basic manual,’ he was telling her.

  ‘I know that. But do you use it?’

  ‘It’s not something we would use as such, Ms James. That’s not its purpose. I think self-diagnosing or reading too much at this stage isn’t a great idea.’

  ‘I’ll read what I bloody want,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. It’s a hazard of the internet, though, the fact that information which is better explained by professionals is so readily available to anyone. Ms James, the DSM 5 is a simple categorisation system. I think cases should only be correlated to it after treatment.’

  That was the first time I ever heard him say that word – treatment – and it shut my mum right up for all of ten seconds, so it must have seemed heavy to her too.

  ‘For the time being,’ Dr Wentloog went on, ‘every case remains unique. That’s a pillar of our practice.’

  My mum rustled some papers, and then asked him another question:

  ‘So does violent behaviour always mean someone’s got something on that list, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Violent behaviour needs addressing in this case.’

  ‘But does it mean Luca needs, you know, help? Treatment, like?’

  ‘It means he needs to stay here until he can explain it.’

  ‘I can hear you both,’ I yelled. ‘If you’re gonna call me a psycho maybe say it to my face? And anyway, I haven’t actually done anything, have I?’

  My mum walked around the sofa to stand between me and the telly, and Dr Wentloog pulled her aside gently. He had a thing about not obstructing things I wanted to look at. That was why he always sat in the side of your vision.

  ‘No,’ said my mum, ‘but…’

  ‘Luca, are you angry?’ said Wentloog.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘If I was to ask you to think of one time you were angry, what would be the first occasion to pop into your mind?’

  ‘That question’s not fair,’ I said. ‘You know we’re all thinking about the same thing, now. You know it.’

  * * *

  As me, Dad and Jeff drove home from Birmingham that afternoon, with a pathetic ingot and its oversized case in the back, I think I was already looking for ways to pick a fight with him. I watched my dad’s hands on the wheel, thinking about how right now would be the exact moment I was meant to be in BTEC sitting by Ella Bowen.

  Maybe it was the fact they were ragging on me all the way back about ‘where was I when them Congolese men got jumpy’ and ‘why wasn’t there one of your wisecracks that make those guys giggle, Luca’. Maybe it was my dad’s own stress at seeing a weapon that had probably killed people in Africa at some point in its history. Anyone thought of that one? And also, he was going back down the motorway having just spent over a grand on a strip of shiny metal off the people carrying that thing. I was also pretty sure he’d just about committed, in front of those men who could have been anyone, to also spending enough money to move house, or buy me and my mum a nicer life, or start a real business or… Ah, I can’t think about it, even now.

  Well, I went at him, he says, with a hammer. But – if it happened at all – then I think it was because I reckoned he would do for me first. Did he tell Wentloog that? Because it would be pointless me telling them. Wentloog and my parents, and others too, are all saying I don’t remember things like this correctly, that I can’t be trusted, see.

  This is how I remember it, anyway:

  So, he’d been on about how it felt to weigh the gold, and he just kept repeating something about it. Jeff was niggling us to stop at the pub on the way through, and blurting out more of the smelly stuff he says about whichever women he’s trying to get it on with. Meanwh
ile, I was minding my own business trying to forget I’d seen a gun that day by remembering how annoying it was that I had missed catching up with Ella, and stressing about how it was pretty much exactly twenty-four hours now until Friday night. I had so much to try and do before then if I was going to get that invite sorted as real – and I had even more to do before I’d be able to actually act on that invite and find the frame of mind to go to Jackdaw’s house and not seem like some kind of little creep sat in the corner.

  Jeff – I swear he was listening to my mind – then chose that exact moment to turn on me out of nowhere and go, ‘So how come Lukee doesn’t have so many friends and when is he going to get into going out and chasing the birds?’

  And that was the first key moment, right there.

  I’ll admit maybe there are little bits I don’t remember so well. Jeff’s words there… They just filled me with that boiling feeling, and then came the chest, then the fizzing of the veins in the sides of my head. My eyes felt heavy and hot. Then there was a flash, like the ones under the sea, and next thing I knew is that I’ve fully lost my rag with him and my dad has had to stop the van and pull me out the side of the door into the cold night, because I’m clawing at Jeff and trying to hit him again and again and again. There’s more bits that go blank then – but I know Jeff was laughing at me and that my dad told him off.

  ‘Jeff! Come on, man. You can’t laugh at shit like this. Come on! Hannah will lose it as bad as him if we’re not careful.’

  Then Dad turned to me.

  ‘Get in the van, Luca,’ he said, and I waited to see if he would repeat it, firmer. But then he said ‘Please?’, and all the rage sunk out of me, through my heels into the ground, and I climbed into the cockpit and gazed straight ahead as he put my seatbelt on for me.

  Jeff was dropping f-bombs under his breath as he climbed back in, door side of me, and neither of them spoke right up until my dad dropped him off outside the pub back in Chapel Shores.

  Once we got home, though, it kicked off again, and this time I remember all of it. My mum was out, and my dad seemed pissed off about that. I think he’d been excited about seeing her and was convinced she would want to hear more about the gold. Anyway, without her around he had no chance of getting his tone right with telling me off – he never does that sort of thing – and just got aggro with me instead, straightaway:

  ‘Luca. What the hell was that shit all about!’ he yelled. ‘D’you realise how embarrassing that was? Jeff Rafferty is my mate! You just can’t get like that. He’s only messing about when he gives you a bit of stick and then you go a flip on him like that? Don’t ever put me in that position again, or…’

  And he ran out of energy – at least as far as words go. He was still trembling with anger, his shoulders square, fists clenched and weight on his slightly bent front leg.

  I was stood by the drawers in the kitchen, and I wanted to pull one of them out and make a mess. That’s the first thought I had. I looked at the crap he had strewn around our living room, and then the stupid, pointless order that my parents kept in their kitchen, where the CDs were lined up next to their over-sized stereo, and where no plates or dishes or food hardly ever got to lay about because they were always eating takeaways or microwave food, which I knew from PSE meant they were lazy and unhealthy. I thought about how clean and proper they made themselves look, and just wanted to drop something to the floor.

  But when I pulled the draw next to me open, there was a hammer inside, and some other tools – an unopened spanner in cardboard case and an electric drill. I acted before I could change my mind, and watched half-interested as my hand lifted the hammer, and flung it, spinning through the air towards him.

  He ducked, and it floated in slow motion towards the wall, where it hurt nothing and broke nothing, just leaving a tiny dent in the dirty plaster.

  My brain was back boiling, immediately, and the next thing I know was that he was running at me, yelling at me to ‘Stop!’ and to ‘Be still!’ His eyes were wide with fear, and I knew he thought he should hit me but would stop before he got there.

  Inches from my face, he stood there and screamed ‘STOP IT NOW. STAY WHERE YOU ARE!’ And then he was yelling for my mum, ‘Hannah! Hannah! Please!’

  Then he walked out the house, slammed the door and marched up the street.

  My mum didn’t really need to calm me down by the time she was back. I drifted through a space of no thoughts and no worries for however long it took. When she said, ‘Go to bed, Lukee,’ I almost managed to reply that I didn’t need to sleep anymore – whatever I could think of to make her worry most – but then I started to feel that heat in my lungs again, and the breath came panting out of me, so much quicker than I could suck it back in.

  She grabbed me tight, as if trying to trap the air inside me, and whispered to me that, ‘It’s all okay, Lukee’, which meant it probably wasn’t.

  Three steps up and I was feeling dizzy.

  I’ve been asked about it since, but I can’t really come up with anything to make sense of it. When I get like that, the thoughts become kind of a mystery. They always will be. Wentloog can try and guess them but he’ll never manage. The way my nerves were buzzing though… Now that is a memory alright. Funny how nerves can remember things, isn’t it? It’s got nothing to do with my head, trying to recall the rest of it from there. It’s all in the senses, and it gives me those little chicken-skin chills even here and now to try and close my eyes, see it, feel it, remember the moments when my mum left me again to go downstairs, trying her hardest not to cry – and the soaking cold that shook me from head to foot once the light-switch was hit and I was shivering in the growing dark.

  * * *

  ‘Have you tried to write about the angry moments with your father, yet?’ Dr Wentloog asked me, way back when he first gave me the little blue book. ‘And what about that drawing?’

  ‘No,’ I told him.

  ‘But you will, right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you want to, yet?’

  ‘There’s nothing to write,’ I remember telling him, for about the fifth time that day.

  ‘You mean you’re not ready?’

  ‘No. I mean it never happened.’

  He looked at me for a full minute when I said that to him.

  ‘There’s no drawing either,’ I added, and tried to look back at him, too. Longest I think I’ve ever stared at anyone without freaking out. Maybe that was the plan, I thought.

  ‘Those things never happened?’ he repeated.

  ‘No,’ I said, knowing full well the mountain of issues it would probably make him think I had.

  ‘Okay then,’ he said. ‘If that ever changes, let me know.’

  * * *

  ‘Lucifer son of the morning!’

  How many kids d’you know who fix their iPhone to sing them a Bible verse first thing in the morning? Mind you, half the world’s best reggae lines are probably Bible verses, or some sort of other famous spell and we just don’t know it. I used it that Friday morning anyway, the day after the market and whatever other stuff came after, to charge up for the day – and night – ahead. It was proper creepy, rolling around in this hanging, deep sleep only to hear that shrill cry slamming through my skull after I’d left the earphones in overnight. That’s what I’d done, though, somewhere in that crazy fit of love, fear and hate – I’d stuck on the song, jabbed my phone into the mains and listened to it on repeat at least half the night, as well as setting it as my alarm for the morning.

  Now, first thing, it felt like playing the song to myself again might have almost worked.

  It needed to have worked, too. It was going to be the most important day of my life. I’d decided it.

  I would have to get my plans sorted by seeing Ella in school, but outside of class. A full-on test of whether or not she was genuinely genuine. Today, if any, was the day t
o take on such tests. Whatever had come for me last night, it had lost – or so I thought – and now the world was there to try and tame.

  I went with UB40 again and ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ as my gate tune, and then, rather than spend hours psyching up to it and probably working down my chances of finding the balls to do it, just went straight up to Ella as we filed from assembly – me to Art and her to Media Studies.

  ‘Um, Ella?’

  She spun around, lifted her silky straight hair away from a carefully shadowed eye, and smiled.

  ‘Hey! LLJ! How’s it goin’ lad?’

  I sniffed a quick laugh, polite but firm enough to show her I was aware of the sarcasm.

  ‘Okay. How’re you?’

  ‘I’m alright, like. Hey, fella you weren’t in BTEC yesterday. Nightmare! I had to swear at Mr P.’

  ‘Really? Wow. Sorry.’ I wasn’t sure whether to be gutted or glad that I’d missed that one.

  ‘Yeh. Called him a fuckin perv and he looked like he was gonna cry!’

  ‘Wow. That’s heavy, Ella!’

  ‘Nah. He got over it. He was tryin to rip my phone out my hands, so I stuck it on my chest, like.’ She clasped her palms together and held them theatrically against her heart, fluttering her long, black eyelashes as she did so.

  ‘He was laughing by the end of the lesson, though, so no harm done,’ she added. ‘And anyway. Was tryin to find a way of reaching you! Dude, you’re hard to get to, online, ain’t you. And Gaby wasn’t replying when I asked for your number.’

  ‘Uh, okay. Sorry. Had to go to work with my, er, dad,’ I said, trying to sound way prouder than I was.

  Ella didn’t seem to notice anything odd or wrong about that, and just said, ‘Cool. Well, anyway, I was tryin to get the deal to you about Jackdaw’s tonight, see. Coz you weren’t in Science I was worried you’d miss it.’

  ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you this morning,’ I said.