Tramp Life

by Tony Telford

  As the weeks went by, the staring thing got worse and worse. There were days when he seemed to be there all the time, watching me the way a cat watches a bird. By now it was starting to really bother me, so I mentioned it to my form teacher, Mr Fairfax.

  He just laughed. ‘So Bernard’s discovered the opposite sex, has he? Take no notice of him, Pearly. It’ll pass.’

  But it didn’t pass. It went on day after day, week after week. Then other things started happening.

  One day in English, Mrs Worthley asked us to make a poster about our favourite story. It wasn’t exactly a popular project.

  ‘A poster about our favourite story?’ said Nicky. ‘Whoa, back to the 1980s, folks!’

  ‘And it’s not even part of our assessment,’ said Becky Straw.

  I don’t know why everyone complained so much. Most of them just copied stuff from the internet. Half an hour and they were done. Not me, though. I worked for days on that poster. I chose the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. First I wrote out the story by hand and pasted it to the middle of a big piece of dark-blue card. Then I photocopied some pictures of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur from my encyclopaedia of Greek mythology and stuck them all around the story. Finally, I bought some white acrylic paint and did a heading in Greek-style lettering: INTO THE LABYRINTH. It stood out nicely against the dark blue.

  Mrs Worthley was really pleased. ‘Ah, Pearly, now you’re showing us what you’re capable of. This is going up on the noticeboard by Reception—if you don’t mind, of course?’

  Next morning, I passed near Reception on my way to first lesson. A big, noisy crowd was gathered round the noticeboard. People were pushing and shoving as they tried to get a look at something on the board. ‘Oh my God, look at this!’—‘Jesus!’—‘Lemme see!’—‘What’s that thing there? Yuck!’ Then someone spotted me and they all scattered like a flock of frightened geese. I went up to the noticeboard. My poster was there, all right, but there were things stuck all over it. Hundreds of things: playing cards, pine cones, bits of string, match sticks, computer keys, bus tickets, paper clips, sweet wrappers, mushrooms, blobs of gum, autumn leaves, buttons, badges, a banana skin, a cracked CD, a photo of Mr Praiche with blacked-out eyes and fangs, half a sandwich, a plastic bag full of lumpy yellow liquid, a dirty tweed cap, the head of a small brown lizard with a nail through its forehead, a snail shell, a squashed ping-pong ball, a dead sparrow, a black leather glove, a large brown beetle, its legs still circling like little wind turbines…

  I didn’t know whether to cry or scream my head off. As gently as I could, I eased the beetle away from the poster, carried it outside and watched it crawl off under a bush, a scrap of blue card still glued to its back. Then I went back in, took my poster off the board and lugged it all the way across school to the recycling centre. It weighed a ton with all that junk on it. On the way, a little Year 7 kid asked me if it was ‘some kind of artwork.’

  Next day, as I was having lunch on my bench in the garden, Bernard O’Hare came sauntering past in his long black coat. ‘I think this is yours,’ I said, and held out the glove that had been pinned to the poster. He stopped, and without turning towards me looked down at the glove out of the corner of his eye.

  His lips stretched into a thin smile. ‘I think not,’ he said, and sniggered. His voice was high-pitched and nasal, and seemed to come from far away.

  ‘But you’re only wearing one glove,’ I said, pointing to his gloved hand. ‘And this one’s the same kind, isn’t it?’

  His eyes flicked up to my face. They were hard and sharp eyes, like a hawk’s, and there were tiny flecks of gold in the dark green irises. For ten, fifteen, twenty seconds he studied me. I started feeling hot. It was like having two green laser beams burning into me. And yet he was smiling… I shivered and looked away, and next second he was loping off down the path.

  I didn’t see him for a few days after that. But one afternoon, as I was walking home from school, I reached into my bag for something and found a photograph. It was a picture of me and Boo on the sports field near home. It must have been taken in the last couple of weeks, since I’d had my hair cut, but I couldn’t remember anyone taking it. I searched the other pockets of my bag. There were two more photos. One showed me having lunch on my bench in the little garden. The other showed me curled up on the sofa at home. It must have been taken through the front window.

  First thing next morning I went to see Mr Fairfax. I showed him the photos and told him about my poster. I said I was convinced it was all O’Hare’s doing.

  ‘He’s still staring at me, too. It’s really starting to scare me.’

  Mr Fairfax frowned and sighed. ‘All right. Come and see me at the end of the day. In the meantime I’ll have a word with Bernard.’

  All day I was wondering what would happen. Mr Fairfax hadn’t seemed too happy that I’d mentioned this thing again. In fact, it was almost like he was cross with me. But I had to say something, didn’t I?

  As soon as the bell went for the end of lessons, I hurried to Mr Fairfax’s room. As I approached his door I could hear him talking to someone else inside. I knocked and entered, and there was Mr Fairfax sitting with Bernard O’Hare. They were leaning towards each other, and it seemed like they’d been laughing about something, but when they saw me they leaned back and put on more serious expressions.

  ‘Ah, Pearly,’ said Mr Fairfax. ‘Come in, come in. Do sit down.’

  I perched on the edge of a desk near the door.

  ‘Now, Pearly,’ said Mr Fairfax. ‘Let’s talk about these little tricks that someone’s been playing on you.’ He looked at O’Hare. ‘Bernard tells me he knows nothing about it.’

  O’Hare was sprawled in his chair, legs wide apart, head cocked on one side as he studied a marble that he was rolling between thumb and forefinger. He glanced up as Mr Fairfax spoke, his eyes twinkling with amusement. ‘Nothing to do with me, gov.’ His voice was completely different now. Deeper and richer, almost like another person.

  Mr Fairfax nodded. ‘And to tell the truth, Pearly, it doesn’t really seem like Bernard’s style.’

  I just stared at him. O’Hare sat up and cleared his throat. ‘Some people can be so stupid, can’t they? But I wouldn’t worry about it too much, if I were you. I mean, you should have seen what someone did to poor Ellie Martin’s bag. The smell was appalling.’ He seemed so reasonable, so kindly and mature. He started talking about other pranks, rambling from one incident to another in that warm, sensitive, good-humoured voice of his, but I didn’t hear half of what he said. For the first time in my life I wanted to break something, smash it to a million pieces.

  Mr Fairfax glanced at his watch. ‘All I can suggest, Pearly, is that you keep a close eye on your things. And by all means, if you come up with any evidence of who’s responsible for this business, I want to hear about it.’

  He didn’t emphasize that word, ‘evidence’, but it kept going round and round in my head like a mocking little tune: evidence, any evidence, come up with any evidence. So that was what he thought. I’d come running to him making accusations against another student without any real proof. It was me who was in the wrong, not O’Hare. Suddenly my skin felt tight and itchy. I felt like one of those poor monkeys in a lab experiment, fastened to a chair under the blinding lights, brimful of pain and misery but with no one there to help.

  ‘Pearly’s quite upset about all this, as you can imagine,’ Mr Fairfax said to O’Hare.

  O’Hare nodded sympathetically. ‘I’m not surprised. The characters who play these tricks never stop to think how it feels for the victim. It’s as if other people don’t really exist for them at all.’

  I had to hand it to him, he was a pretty cool character. I could feel my face burning with rage. I opened my mouth to speak. ‘You can’t fool me, you liar, you creep’—that’s what I wanted to say, but the words dried up in my throat. He’d won, and I knew it. I couldn’t prove it was him, and insulting him would only make me look more stupid, more i
rrational.

  He was watching me now. Watching me and smiling gently. For one insane moment I wanted to tear at his face and wipe away that knowing little smile. But then I just had to be somewhere else, anywhere but there. I lurched to my feet and moved towards the door, stumbling against a desk, my eyes blurry with tears. Mr Fairfax called to me but I just kept walking—out through the door, down the corridor, past Reception, through the school gates, and down the hill towards my so-called home.

  2

  After that, nothing happened for about a week. Then one day I was having lunch on my bench in the school garden and suddenly, don’t ask me how, I knew he was there. I looked round. He was just a few yards away, leaning against a small tree. For once he wasn’t watching me, but he knew I was watching him, I could tell. Casually he took a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, slipped a cigarette from pack to mouth and lit it with a small silver lighter. With the cigarette drooping from his lower lip, he began playing with the lighter, making the flame leap up like a little orange genie. Then, very slowly, he lifted his other hand and held it palm down over the tall flame. He didn’t move his hand around, like when people waggle their finger through a candle flame. He just held it there. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up at his face, wondering how on earth he could stand it. He was watching me now from under his fringe of black hair. Watching me and smiling.

  I was out of there in ten seconds, and I never went back. From then on I spent lunchtime indoors, reading or catching up on work. But he still managed to find me. Some days it felt like his eyes were always on me, watching everything I did. Then other things started happening. One day I discovered that someone had taken a bite out of one of the sandwiches in my lunchbox. Another time, I found a toy llama in my pencil case—a tiny, golden, green-eyed llama. Then, one night at home, I opened my History notebook and discovered that someone had gone through the whole book adding crosses and question marks in dark green ink. There were even a few comments, in a thin, spidery handwriting that was nothing like the teacher’s. The comments were all critical, even mocking: ‘A little evidence wouldn’t go amiss here.’ ‘Sensible, if pedestrian.’ ‘Hi ho, hi ho! It’s off to the limbo of obviousness we go.’

  It could only be one person, of course. At first I was tempted to go and see Mr Fairfax again, but somehow I couldn’t face it. Just the thought of him sitting there chatting with O’Hare made me feel kind of sick.

  But still the strange things kept happening, and everywhere I went I felt those two green laser beams burning into me. By now it was really starting to get to me. I felt knotted up inside all the time. I couldn’t eat, and I kept getting this weird rash on my arms and legs. Once or twice I thought of telling Aunt Lucinda, but I knew it’d be a waste of time. The only people who mattered to her these days were the ones on telly. Plus she was back on the gin again.

  That left Mrs Worthley. I should’ve gone to see her before, I know. Don’t ask me why I didn’t. Maybe I just didn’t want to involve her in all that stuff. Anyway, one Monday morning, when I didn’t think I could face another week of it all, I went up to her room. There was no one there and the door was still locked, which seemed a bit strange. Never mind, I thought, maybe she’s at a meeting or something. But then who should come round the corner but Mr Fairfax.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Pearly. You’re not waiting to see Mrs Worthley, are you? She’s left—didn’t you know?’

  ‘Left? She couldn’t have just left. She was here—I saw her on Friday.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Fairfax laughed awkwardly. ‘It was all a bit sudden.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Is she ill?’

  ‘No, no, she’s just taken an early retirement.’

  ‘Retirement? But that’s ridiculous. She wouldn’t just leave like that, without telling anyone. She’s been here for years.’

  ‘Well, you see, there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle about this new curriculum, you know, and Mrs Worthley—’ He shrugged and pulled an awkward face. ‘Mrs Worthley wasn’t too happy about it all, to tell the truth, and I think in the end she just felt it was time for her to move on, and—Pearly, are you all right?’

  I turned and, for the second time in less than a month, fled from Mr Fairfax in tears.

  That was when I started thinking seriously about running away. It wasn’t just the Bernard O’Hare thing. Other people at school were turning against me, too. For so long I’d been invisible to them, but now, suddenly, they could see me, and it irritated them like you wouldn’t believe. Just to give you one example, Marie Devereux and her gang of celebrity clones had somehow found out that I was into environmental causes, so every time they saw me they’d launch into these little comic routines. ‘Omigod, it’s Hug Tree!’ (That was their name for me, Hug Tree.) ‘Quick, you guys, turn off the lights before all the penguins die’, et cetera, et cetera. I thought it was quite funny myself when they first started doing it, but it went on for weeks and weeks, and no one—I mean no one—ever took my side and told them to lay off. There was tons of stuff like that going on. It was as if Bernard O’Hare’s poison was spreading to everything else.

  What about it, then, I thought. What about if I went out on the road, moved from place to place, lived like a gypsy? Was it possible, or was it just the stupidest idea I’d ever had? Could anyone even live like a gypsy these days? I knew, of course, that I could’ve just caught a bus or train to some place and stayed there, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to feel like I was really moving, really travelling. I wanted unpredictability. I was sick to death of being pinned down in one place, living every day and night under one roof and knowing exactly what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month.

  One day after school, I stopped at a cash machine and checked the balance in the bank account that Aunt Lucinda had started for me when I was little. There was £840—more than I’d expected, but I knew it wouldn’t last me long on the road. The biggest problem was accommodation. B&Bs were obviously out of the question, and even staying in hostels would be pushing it. That meant I’d have to get some camping gear so I could sleep outdoors, but how much would that cost me? When I got home I made a list of the things I’d need: small tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, lamp, mini gas burner… The list filled a whole page of my notebook, and that was just the main things. It was depressing to think how much it would all cost. In fact, the whole thing seemed depressing. And overwhelming. And unreal.

  But starting that list did seem to help a bit, somehow. It was like the first small step. The very next day, on a sudden impulse, I took my ancient CD player and all my old CDs to the secondhand market in town and got £50 for them. The day after that, I carted a load of clothes and cuddly toys and no end of useless stuff to one of the op shops. From then on I tried to get rid of at least one thing every day. The gold necklace that Aunt Lucinda gave me for my fifteenth birthday fetched £20 at the pawnbroker’s, and someone at school gave me a few quid for that fancy chemistry set I’d never used.

  But it was easy ditching stuff like that. None of it meant anything to me anyway. My books were different. I knew I’d only get rid of them if I was truly serious about running away. Day after day they sat there on their shelves like faithful old friends waiting to hear their fate—the copy of Treasure Island in soft black leather, The Arabian Nights in midnight-blue, Graves’s collection of the Greek myths, the battered copy of Storm Boy that I’d found on a bus. And, day after day, I put off the big decision.

  But the situation at school was getting worse all the time, and one Saturday morning, after an especially horrible week, I looked at my books and knew it was now or never. I fetched some old shopping bags and slowly started packing the books inside. At first I couldn’t bring myself to include my favourites, but then I thought, this is ridiculous, they’re not the only books in the world, are they? One day, when I was settled somewhere else, I could get my own little collection again. It’s funny, though, I still felt like a traitor as I bundled them away in those bags. But in the end I did i
t. I loaded the whole lot into Aunt Lucy’s wheelbarrow and took them down to the charity shop—all except the Greek myths and The Arabian Nights.

  My next job was to sort through about five tons of old school yearbooks, notebooks, scrapbooks, letters, photos, sketches, half-finished poems, song lyrics, lists of favourite songs, et cetera. Nearly all of it eventually went in the recycling, but I took photos of lots of things before I threw them away. The only paperwork I kept was really precious stuff like my birth certificate, my diary, my book of poems and songs, and the three photos of me with Mum and Dad.

  By this stage my room was looking as bare as a prison cell. Every day I expected Aunt Lucy to ask where all my stuff had gone, but she never said anything. Not a word. It was really strange, actually. Didn’t she notice? Or was it just that she didn’t care?

  At the big camping store in town I bought gloves, a waterproof rucksack with cushioned straps, a metal water bottle, a waterproof foldaway poncho, a pocket torch, a little first aid kit, a penknife with a built-in pair of scissors, thermal underwear, a black woollen hat, five pairs of thick woollen hiking socks and various other odds and ends. The store had some one-person tents, too, but they were so expensive. I decided not to bother with a gas stove, either, because I couldn’t be bothered lugging the gas bottles around. I ‘borrowed’ a few other things from Aunt Lucy—a metal bowl and plate, cutlery, a mug. And one day while I was mooching around in the cupboard under the stairs I found a lovely old canvas satchel with two zip pockets and a brass badge of a griffin on the flap. ‘Oh, you can have that,’ said Aunt Lucy. ‘It was his.’

  That night, before I got into bed, I wrote out a list of absolutely everything I’d need if—or when—I ran away. Then I went through the list and ticked all the things I already had. There were seven items without ticks, and none of them were that important. Suddenly it dawned on me: I could leave right now, if I wanted to. That spooked me a bit, but not much. Even then, the whole thing still seemed like some sort of weird game.