by S. L. Powell
‘What’s your name?’ asked the man.
‘Gil. Gil Walker.’
‘Gil, eh? Cool name.’
‘Oh. Thanks. Who are you?’
‘Jude,’ said Jude.
‘Jude who?’
‘Just Jude. It’s simpler that way.’
‘How do you . . . manage? I mean, do you come down from there at all?’
Jude laughed. ‘You’re wondering how I go to the toilet, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘All the kids ask me that.’
Gil opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t a kid, but then he closed it again.
‘That’s what the bucket’s for,’ Jude went on. ‘Although sometimes I do pee straight out of the tree if no one’s around.’ He laughed again. ‘It’s not like anyone’s using the park now.’
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a packet of tobacco, then swung himself round to sit on the branch. Gil watched Jude roll a cigarette carefully between his fingers. He licked the edge of the thin paper and pinched it together, then lit the end and took a big sighing suck of smoke. He looked as comfortable as if he was sitting in a deckchair. Another bus pulled up at Gil’s bus stop, and after waiting a minute or two it drove off again.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Jude. ‘You’re thinking I shouldn’t smoke.’
‘Uh – I guess not,’ said Gil, although the thought hadn’t entered his head.
‘It’s a risk. I know that. But at least it’s a risk I only take for myself. Pollution, now – that’s far worse than smoking. If you drive a car you’re poisoning the air for the whole planet. Anyway, life is full of risks. Falling out of a tree is a risk.’
Jude blew smoke through the bare branches. He didn’t look for one second as if he was about to fall.
‘Really though, don’t start smoking,’ he said. ‘It’s expensive, for one thing, and – oh, I’m sure you’ve heard all the other arguments . . .’
‘Yeah,’ said Gil. ‘I have.’ He stood up straight, folded his arms and gave his best impersonation of Dad delivering a lecture.‘Smoke from cigarettes damages the cells in your body, especially cells in the lungs. Or rather, it damages the DNA inside the nucleus of the cells. Scientific research shows it is this damage that leads to the mutations that can cause cancer.’
Scientific research . . . blah blah blah . . . Of course he knew that smoking was addictive and dangerous and stupid, but recently Gil had felt an overwhelming urge to try it just to wind Dad up.
Jude was staring, amused. ‘Holy moly,’ he said. ‘Where was that from?’
‘My dad,’ Gil said. ‘He sounds like that all the time.’
‘Some kind of doctor, is he?’
‘No.’ Gil stopped. Was he a doctor? All his letters came addressed to Dr Matthew Walker. ‘Actually I really don’t know. He’s a scientist now, but he might have been a doctor before that. He’s always going on about cells and DNA and stuff like that.’
‘Doesn’t interest you, huh?’
‘Not really.’
‘He works at the university, does he?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘You should take more notice,’ said Jude. His smile had gone, and his voice was quieter. ‘Some of the stuff those scientists are doing – it’s going to affect us all. It’s going to hit us as hard as climate change.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, forget it for now,’ said Jude. ‘Let’s concentrate on winning this little battle, shall we?’
Quickly he stubbed his cigarette out on the branch and dropped it into the bucket above him.
‘Mustn’t get done for littering,’ he said brightly, jumping to his feet. The branch bounced and Jude balanced like a tightrope walker. ‘Gil, would you do something for me?’
‘Yes, of course!’
‘You’d need to be careful. The police are finding just about any excuse to crack down on people who try and help me.’
‘I’m not scared.’ Gil waited with his heart thumping for Jude’s instructions.
‘Could you go and buy me a bottle of water? A big one?’
Was that it? Gil felt a flicker of disappointment. It didn’t sound very subversive.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Gil said.
‘You need some money?’
‘No, it’s fine, I’ve got plenty.’
The light was beginning to fade as Gil hurried up the road to the twenty-four-hour supermarket. It was crowded with people grabbing shopping on their way home from work and he stood in the queue for what seemed like hours, his arms aching under the weight of the two-litre bottle of water. When he got back to the park with the bottle in his backpack it was almost dark, and the police were nowhere to be seen.
‘You’re a total hero!’ called Jude softly out of the tree. ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got a bag on a rope somewhere.’ He started ferreting around in the branches.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ Gil said. ‘I can throw it up to you.’
He heaved the bag off his back, pulled out the bottle and stepped over the low wall and on to the grass under the tree.
‘Here! Catch!’
Gil swung the heavy bottle. It slipped out of his hands a fraction too soon and flew upwards into the tree. Jude made a snatch at it as it spiralled past him like an out-of-control satellite. Then the bottle dropped slowly, lazily, back to earth. It smashed on to the brown grass, the cap blew off, water exploded out of the bottle and soaked one of the placards.
‘Aaaah!’ yelled Gil in frustration.
Jude started to cackle, and after a moment Gil began to laugh too.
And then Gil felt a hand fall on his shoulder.
‘I think you’d better come with me, laddie,’ said the policeman’s voice.
As the policeman led him away, all Gil could think about was the hand gripping his arm so tightly it hurt. Far behind him, or so it seemed, Jude was yelling from his perch in the tree. ‘Oi! Leave him alone! He’s a kid! He hasn’t done anything! You bunch of complete —’
Jude trailed off into a string of swear words. The policeman took absolutely no notice. He marched Gil into a side street where there was a police car waiting, and threw open one of the rear doors.
‘Get in,’ he said.
Gil crawled in, feeling sick. There was another policeman in the driver’s seat who didn’t even look round. The first policeman slammed the door on Gil, sat down heavily in the seat in front of him and immediately locked the doors.
There were no windows that Gil could open. The car smelt of other people’s bodies. There was no way out.
‘So,’ said the policeman after a while, sounding almost friendly, ‘how old are you?’
Gil wondered if he should lie. He was tall for his age, and might be able to get away with saying he was fifteen or even older, but it quickly seemed like a bad idea.
‘Nearly fourteen.’
‘Fourteen, eh? Not too young for an ASBO, you know.’
‘Um . . . I’m not sure . . . what did I do, exactly? I mean,’ Gil added hurriedly, ‘I’m really sorry, but I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.’
‘Well, there are several things we could get you on. Aiding an illegal protest, for example. Or littering.’
‘Littering?’
‘I saw you deliberately throw a plastic bottle into a public park. That constitutes littering. It carries a hefty fine these days.’
‘I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .’
Gil took a deep breath. The policeman was beginning to morph into Dad. He had to get a grip on himself. ‘I was trying to help Ju— I mean, the man in the tree. He needed some water, that’s all.’
‘As I said,’ snapped the policeman, ‘aiding an illegal protest. After you’d received a formal warning.’
There wasn’t anywhere else for the conversation to go, so Gil kept his mouth shut.
‘I think we’d better take you home,’ said the policeman. ‘Have a little word with your parents. Or parent. Or whoever. Where do you live?’
Gil t
old him.
‘Well I never,’ said the policeman. ‘Nice area, that is. I had you down for a yob off one of the housing estates. Put your seatbelt on.’
The police car purred off towards Gil’s home.
Gil leaned his head against the window and flicked the seatbelt that pulled too tightly across his chest. You idiot, he told himself. You total idiot. OK, so he wanted to wind Dad up, but he hadn’t meant to go quite this far. Not all at once, anyway.
But when he saw the look on Dad’s face as he opened the front door, Gil began to think it might have been worth it.
The policeman started to explain to Dad why it had been necessary to give Gil a police escort. It took ages. Gil stood on the path, blinking in the light from the hall, saying nothing, even when the policeman made it sound as if Jude was some kind of dangerous child molester who liked to lurk in trees so that he could kidnap any young person who happened to wander too close. It was pointless contradicting the policeman. Gil knew he needed to save his energy for Dad.
‘But as I say, we did formally warn your son not to go in the park,’ said the policeman. ‘In my view, if he’s going to get up to this kind of thing in future, it might be wise not to let him go into the city centre on his own.’
‘He’s not allowed to do that anyway,’ said Dad. ‘I’m deeply sorry you’ve been put to this trouble. We’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
Dad and the policeman nodded to each other stiffly like a couple of penguins. Gil finally stepped inside, and the door closed behind him.
‘So, what’s for dinner?’ Gil said, more brightly than he felt. ‘I’m starving.’
He waited for the storm, but it didn’t come immediately. Dad put a hand in the centre of his back and propelled him into the kitchen. Mum was sitting at the table. As Gil came in she pulled a tissue out of the box in front of her and pressed it to her face with both hands. There was no noise, but Gil could see she was trembling.
Oh, God. He hadn’t thought about Mum the whole time he’d been in town. Maybe if he’d just made a quick phone call to say he was OK . . .
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Gil said. He meant it.
‘Sit down,’ said Dad. He sounded dangerously calm. Gil could hear a faint hiss in his voice, like the noise you hear when you put your ear to a can of fizzy drink that’s been shaken violently. Any second now, when you lift the ring-pull . . .
Gil sat down. Dad began.
‘So, putting aside for the moment the fact that you’ve just come home in a police car, let me tell you how things have been here for the last couple of hours. Your mother phoned me at half past four, frantic with worry. She’d already called Louis’ house and found that you weren’t there. Louis told her he’d seen you walk off towards the bus stop after school. He said he’d tried to stop you, but you’d taken no notice of him. And so we deduced that you had disobeyed us and gone somewhere on your own.’
Well, Louis would be over the moon, thought Gil. He’d stand there at skating tomorrow like one of those stupid little Mr Men, Mr Know-It-All, going, ‘Told you it was a bad idea. Told you so.’
‘I just —’ Gil started to say, but Dad hadn’t finished.
‘As soon as your mother told me you were missing, I left a meeting – a very important meeting – and came straight home. We have spent the last hour and a half waiting for you to contact us or turn up. Your mother has been to hell and back. At the point where you arrived home we were considering phoning the police, which is pretty ironic, as you happened to be stepping out of a police car at the time.’
‘I wasn’t missing,’ Gil said. ‘I was totally safe.’
‘Which is obviously why you nearly got arrested,’ said Dad.
‘Dad, the police were completely out of order. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was just —’
‘Where’s your school bag?’ interrupted Dad.
‘I don’t know. I must have . . . I probably left it at school.’
It was under Jude’s tree. Gil saw it clearly, lying exactly where he’d dumped it while he threw the water bottle, just before the policeman had marched him away. And his wallet was in the bag. Crap.
Dad rolled his eyes. ‘You didn’t even have the decency to phone us to say where you were.’
‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry, but —’
‘It’s our fault because we won’t let you have a phone? Is that what you were going to say? Well, there are still a number of public telephone boxes in the city centre, I believe,’ said Dad. ‘But of course it would be beneath you, wouldn’t it, to make a call from a grubby payphone?’
Gil rocked his chair backwards and gripped the edge of the table to steady himself. The table was bare apart from the box of tissues, which was just as well, Gil thought, because he wanted to throw something hard and heavy at Dad again. There was a pause. Mum took a deep, shuddering breath and finally peeled the tissue away from her face. She looked terrible. A tiny flame of guilt began to burn in the middle of Gil’s chest, but Dad’s next attack snuffed it out altogether.
‘Your mother has spent most of the day at Oakwood, do you realise that?’
Dad paused again for effect. Here we go, thought Gil. Oakwood. That was really meant to guilt-trip him, because Oakwood was the nursing home where his granny lived. Mum went roughly once a week. Gil had never been allowed to visit. He’d given up asking to see his granny years ago, because the answer was always, ‘No, she’s not well enough.’ If she’d been ill all that time, why wasn’t she dead yet? It couldn’t be cancer, so what was it? Whatever was wrong with her Gil didn’t understand why he couldn’t see her. It was just like the going-into-town-after-school issue. His parents had decided he wasn’t allowed to, and that was that.
‘That’s Mum’s choice, isn’t it?’ he said, swaying on two legs and looking at the kitchen floor.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dad’s voice was icy-cold.
You’re the only one, said Louis’ voice in his head. That’s why they’re so protective.
Gil dropped the chair forwards with a crash and went for it.
‘You know what the problem is with you two?’ he said. ‘You’re just so bloody over-protective. You don’t let me go into town on my own, you won’t let me visit my granny, you say I can’t have a phone – you treat me like a baby, and it’s all because I’m an only child, isn’t it?’
‘That has nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ said Dad.
But Gil was gathering momentum, like a rock rolling down a hill. ‘It’s your fault. Why didn’t you have more children? I never asked to be an only child. If there were more kids in this house at least you wouldn’t be ganging up on me all the time. Oh, I know. You were just too selfish to have more than one child. You thought it would mess up your nice tidy lives, didn’t you? You thought —’
Mum suddenly stood up, her eyes flashing like lightning, and Gil stopped.
‘Oh, you have no idea . . .’ she said, so fiercely that Gil was almost scared. She was staring as if she could see a ghost hanging in the air.
‘That’s right,’ said Dad quickly, ‘he has no idea. Let’s leave it like that, Rachel. Gil, go up to your room, will you?’
Gil hesitated. He watched Mum sit down heavily in the kitchen chair and put her face back in her hands.
‘What . . .?’ he began to ask.
‘Just go,’ Dad said. ‘Now.’
Gil got up slowly and started to go upstairs. Halfway up he stopped and listened. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, not even the sound of Mum crying. Gil tried to think of something that he could go back and say but his mind was empty, and in the end he just climbed the rest of the stairs to his room.
The room was still a mess. His homework desk stood right behind the door where he’d left it that morning. Gil squeezed past it and dropped on to the end of his bed. He ought at least to put the desk back where it belonged and pick a few things off the floor, but then Dad would notice he’d done it and say I see you’ve obeyed me on something, and e
ven the thought of it made Gil begin to buzz with irritation. He sat for a long while gazing at the desk without moving it and wondering what the hell had just happened with Mum downstairs in the kitchen.
Oh, you have no idea . . .
No idea about what?
‘Oh crap,’ he said at last.
Somehow he’d stepped over a line that he didn’t even know was there. In all the rows they had, Gil always knew exactly how he was winding Mum and Dad up, even if he didn’t manage to make the argument go his way. He knew which rules he was breaking, and which buttons he needed to press to trigger a reaction. But this time it was different. The look on Mum’s face had been awful in a way that he wasn’t prepared for. He didn’t have a clue what he’d done.
Maybe they hadn’t wanted him to be an only child, thought Gil. Maybe they hadn’t been able to have any more kids. But if that was true, why didn’t they just tell him up front? Why did they hide together in corners and whisper things he wasn’t meant to hear?
Mum and Dad were so wrapped up in themselves. They behaved as if life was one huge agonising problem that Gil wasn’t grown-up enough to understand. They joined forces against him, all the time. He’d started to notice how Dad always spoke in the plural, like Queen Victoria. It was always ‘we’, and the word ‘we’ never seemed to include Gil. We are not going to put up with this. We are not prepared to discuss it. We are not amused, Gil. We are not amused.
Gil felt the anger begin to creep back into his guts. Dad hadn’t let him tell his side of the story, about the way the policeman had jumped on him for practically no reason. Now he would probably never get the chance to explain himself. Nothing would change. Dad would come up with various punishments and life would wander along from day to day until he went insane with it.
Gil rolled over on to his back and looked at the window. The curtains were still open, though it was completely dark outside now. Gil thought about Jude. He imagined him lying in his hammock under the cold March sky, guarding the tree against the chainsaws and the bulldozers, not afraid of falling, not afraid of the police, not afraid of breaking the rules. Not afraid to leave his cosy bed and put himself on the line to fight for something he believed in.
