Blood Family

by Anne Fine

  Still, I was on my best behaviour that first day, and when Jaz realized I had nowhere else to go, she let me stay. ‘Just for tonight, mind.’ But Barry had been right when he said that his mother wanted him to bring home mates. She clearly worried about him being the sort of boy who found it hard to make friends. (They’d called people like Barry ‘dafties’ in my school, and they were all the same. Too keen. Too willing. Sort of desperate.)

  And Barry wasn’t very bright. He said the same old silly things over and over, till you stopped listening. I think his mum was bored in any case. She was ‘between jobs’. My arrival made some sort of change. She offered straight away to put my grubby stuff into her washing machine, and asked all sorts of questions. (I told all sorts of lies.) She even sent Barry off next door to borrow their camp bed so I could stay the next night.

  And the next.

  I think Jaz had me down as ‘interesting’. First, from the way I spoke – all ‘booky’, as she put it. And secondly because I seemed to her to know a lot. Over the next couple of days I helped her fill in the form to get back Barry’s child benefit which had been going to his dad. I helped Barry with his homework. (It was so simple that I realized he must be in a special class.) I even knew enough from all the hours I spent helping Alan in the shed to show Jaz how to sort her window box.

  Both of them thought that I was wonderful. Almost exotic. A rare animal. Even the way I vanished all the time when Barry was at school interested Jaz. ‘What do you do all day?’

  I’d shrug. ‘I wander around the city. Look at things.’

  In fact, I drank. I’d very quickly fallen back into my old leave-the-exact-right-change-and-rush-from-the-shop technique. I’d offer Barry the occasional swig. He’d shake his head, ‘No, thanks,’ and reach out for the bottle of sweet orange fizz I’d bought for him while I was picking up my rip-off Russian vodka. ‘Your stuff just hurts to drink.’

  I introduced my bottles to the house. (It was a risk, but the alternative was long dry evenings.) Jaz took a sip or two now and again, but only after drowning it in Coke. And once or twice she ticked me off when we were watching telly. ‘Go steady, Ed. That’s half a bottle already.’

  The days passed. Talk of when I would move on just seemed to die away. I paid my way with food. And since what they liked eating was the cheap stuff – bread, pies and pizzas, with the odd take-out curry for a treat – the money that I’d stuffed into the money belt saw me through day after day. I think that Barry thought I was producing bank notes magically. But Jaz was on my case. ‘Where does it come from, Eddie, all that money?’

  ‘I earned it. I washed cars every weekend and saved the lot.’

  She didn’t miss the chance to put in her pennyworth. ‘Then you’re a fool to dribble through the whole lot, pickling your brains.’ It was quite obvious my charms were wearing thin. After a few more days she’d had enough of tripping over empties and finding me still slumped in one of her armchairs when she came down in the morning.

  I wondered if I should go home. I wanted to go home. I looked around Barry’s cramped and dingy bedroom and thought about the cheerful, spacious place I’d left, with its bright desk and matching shelves. The covers on the bed that Barry slept in must have been a thousand years old. The ones on the camp bed were grey.

  I was embarrassed, though. To crawl home! To admit I couldn’t cut it in the outside world.

  To have to shuffle through the door and face the three of them – Natasha, Nicholas and Alice.

  Cue for another swig.

  Nicholas

  Someone had put the music back in the wrong sleeve. I thought that I had slid in Kraftwerk.

  Out of the speakers came that Roxy beat he used to love so much. I swung round. Was he just sitting there grinning? Had he come back?

  What a grim mess! Natasha, swivelling between furious and worried sick. The police, initially confident – ‘You’ll see. He’ll soon be back’ – and then consoling.

  And poor, poor Alice, filled with guilt.

  Eddie

  I reckon that I must have stayed at least three weeks at Barry’s house. My being there made him so happy that, irritated as she was by all my drinking, Jaz still put up with me. I tried not to be too much of a pain. I thought of things to do. I got so bored I even cleaned the windows one day. And several times I went with Jaz to the shops to carry all the heavy stuff home in my backpack.

  While I was pulling out the last few things one day, Barry began to sniff. ‘What’s that weird sickly smell?’

  He pounced on a buckled side flap I hadn’t thought to empty out before the shopping trip. ‘What’s this in here?’

  I looked, and he was holding up The Devil Ruled the Roost. ‘What does it look like? It’s a book.’

  ‘You’ve read it, then?’

  ‘Of course I’ve read it.’

  ‘Good, is it?’

  I didn’t feel like trying to explain, so I just said, ‘It’s brilliant. Why else would I be lumping it about?’

  ‘Read it to me?’

  I had already realized that Barry was useless with books, so the idea of reading to him didn’t seem that weird. And Jaz, who had been scowling at the bottles I’d nagged her to put through the till for me, looked really pleased. So over the next few nights I read The Devil Ruled the Roost to him, chapter by chapter, until he’d start complaining that I was slurring my words too badly for him to follow, or reading the same page twice.

  Reading it out loud made the story sound a little different. More grim. It also gave me time to think about the ways in which the boy’s life started the same way as mine, and set me wondering once again about my mother.

  And that gave me an idea of how I could let everyone know I was all right without sounding feeble or sorry. I bought a postcard and addressed it to Lucy at Ivy House. ‘Just to let you know everything’s fine,’ I wrote. ‘I’ll see you soon. I hope you’re well and happy. Sorry about not bringing cake.’ (I only wrote the last bit because there was still loads of room and since I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I shoved that in to fill space.)

  I added, ‘Love, Eddie’, and stuck on a stamp. The postcard sat in my pocket for a couple of days until I found myself outside the bus station, beside a coach that said ‘Leeds’. The driver had just opened the doors.

  I picked out a frost-top lady who looked sensible, and just as she was clambering up the steps I thrust the postcard at her. ‘Will you post this for me? It’s stamped and everything.’

  She pointed over my shoulder. ‘See that pillar box? Why can’t you post it yourself?’

  ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘It will stop my mother worrying.’

  I knew she’d understand that. I shoved the postcard at her once again, and then I fled. I was quite confident that it would be delivered. Nicholas and Natasha – and probably the police as well – would have told everyone at Lucy’s home that I was missing. The message would immediately filter back that I was alive and well.

  In Leeds.

  And I was glad. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back and facing everyone. But I had long since stopped enjoying the idea of Nicholas and Natasha lying wide awake night after night, imagining my body sprawled in some wet ditch. And from that very first train ride north, I had felt bad for Alice. For all that she’d been such a bitch with that stuff about the Beast, I didn’t want her going round feeling so miserable and guilty she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Nicholas and Natasha batting around an empty house while she went away to college.

  So off the postcard went. I wandered back to the estate. By then, I was bored stiff with Barry. He was such a twerp. But still, the house was cosy and it’s not as if I had anywhere better lined up.

  But Jaz, it seems, was getting even more fed up with me. That night I threw up on her knotted rug. Next day, she sent poor Barry off on some fool’s errand, and sat me down.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘I thought you were a good lad when you came. And you were nice to my son.
But now I think you’re just a terrible example. I want you to stop drinking in this house. That, or you have to go.’

  I suppose that was my second chance to drop the habit. (And to go home, a new boy.) But I was driven by the stuff that I was pouring into me. I didn’t feel that I had any choice. I lied, of course, promising the bottle I was halfway through would be my last. But Jaz was neither as busy as Natasha nor as trustful as Nicholas. She let just one day pass, and then, while Barry and I were out, she rooted through my stuff and found my stockpile of emergency supplies.

  When we got back we found her waiting in the doorway, my backpack resting against her knees.

  ‘Go in,’ she said to Barry. ‘Go in now.’

  He obviously knew that tone of voice. He went past like a lamb.

  She rolled the backpack forward, off the step. ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘Everything you came with is in there. Don’t come back again. And if I find out you’ve been lying in wait for Barry anywhere between here and his school, don’t think I won’t phone the police. I expect they’ll wonder what you’re doing mucking about with someone his age. I wouldn’t try it.’

  I knew what she was getting at. I stumbled off.

  A warm bed and three meals a day must make a massive difference to how booze works on you. The day she threw me out I walked about for hours, around areas I had despised before, looking for somewhere I could spend the night. I wasn’t brave enough to go to any cheap hotel in case my face had been on telly. So I made my way to a maze of little streets behind the bus station. I had seen alkies and dossers there – druggies my age as well – and reckoned I could follow them to find out where they slept.

  It was in doorways and in empty houses – ones that the council boarded up, where somebody had broken through the chipboard to get in. Sometimes some technical whizz had even managed to tap into next door’s electricity, or turn the water back on. But usually, I found out, after dark it was just candles, booze and drugs that got the people in there through the night.

  I must have gone downhill astonishingly fast. All I remember is my sheer contempt for everyone round me. Look at this guy! He’s turned his arms into pin cushions. He has scabs all over. He is disgusting. That alky pees his pants. This new guy stinks. And he can hardly speak. I don’t think I’d an ounce of sympathy for any of them, all driven by the crap they were injecting into their veins, or pouring down their throats. All slumped and useless and smelly.

  Not like me. I might have fetched up in a grotty flat, along with a strangely shifting gang of pallid deadbeats. But I was still convinced I had my standards. I started doing quite odd things, like fretting about germs in the pot noodle tubs we used as cups. What was my problem? I was already pickling my liver and mashing my brain. How could I possibly have got things so out of proportion?

  Was I smashed all the time?

  Yes. Yes I was. I ran through Natasha’s money faster than you’d imagine, considering the only thing I did was drink, and I drank gut-rot stuff. The very cheapest. When all the cash ran out, I took to what the others had been doing all along, trawling through supermarket end-of-day toss-outs, and finishing the half-chewed pizza slices left in the boxes people had abandoned on bins or in the gutters.

  We all had ways of getting by. Shane sometimes smartened himself up enough to go round houses collecting the milk money ‘early’. Mogger and Tabs went ‘line shopping’ – nicking things off people’s washing lines that they could sell. No one who lived round there was foolish enough to leave their clothes out overnight, so you’d have thought they’d have been caught. But there was little sign of the police on the Donmar estate. Too many wild boys having wacky car races up and down the streets. Tiresome to chase and book. Unruly in the cells. And let out with a caution anyway the following morning. What on earth was the point?

  Mostly we lived by what we called ‘five-fingered discounts’. Shoplifting, that was. Mogger and Shane were good at staying awake all night, glued up to the eyeballs. They’d pass the time doing the stupidest things, like dropping lighted cigarettes down holes in the mattresses and bouncing up and down on them, trying to get the smoke to puff into rings, laughing like glaze-eyed hyenas.

  Then, at what Shane always called ‘daft o’clock’, they would go out through the window, down to the Supermart on the next corner. Only one woman ever worked in there before the rest of the staff came in at eight, and she was always on the check-out. Mogger and Shane had walked out carrying heaped wire baskets sometimes, and came home with astonishing amounts of stuff.

  Then Skeeter took a shine to some weird girl called Mags whose uncle ran a club. She nicked a key for long enough for Skeeter to get it copied, and after that we were away. So long as we lifted stuff in tidy cratefuls rather than single bottles, nobody seemed to notice. Mogger and Shane didn’t drink. They called it ‘loopy juice’, and stuck to what they called ‘sparking a cloud’, or sniffing anything that came their way – glues and butane mostly, but I saw them getting off on varnish, petrol, weird industrial sprays and even some room freshener whose smell hung in a sickly fog above the reek of everything else.

  ‘Why do you do that stuff?’ Skeeter kept disapproving. (Like me, he was a drink man, though he stuck to cider.)

  ‘More fun,’ said Mogs. ‘You and Ed-boy are missing out on a lot.’

  So once again I had a go, and that time it was all right. In fact, it was good. I lay down on the floor and I could see up through the ceiling. Truly. I saw the whole kerbang, down to the toys on the floor of the bedroom above us. They told me afterwards that I kept jumping up to touch the ceiling to make sure it was still there. And they were laughing their heads off. Everything made us laugh. My stomach hurt from it.

  Gradually I must have started coming down. That’s it, I kept on thinking. And then the walls would start to swing about again, and we would laugh some more.

  But there were so many times I looked around and thought, What am I doing? I’d glance across at Shane, curled on his grotty mattress – a sort of raft upon a sea of rags and chip papers and torn-up pizza boxes. He would be cutting himself, and crying. I’d look at the burned messes Skeeter had cratered in the pans with the result that no one else could cook. I’d see the filthy pants that Mogger peeled off in the night after an accident, and never bothered to chuck out.

  I would begin to heave. I’d stagger out, shocked by the cold fresh air, to walk around and clear my head.

  But all the grimness was still there. Slimy grey brickwork, so many broken windows stuffed with rags, the paintwork peeling. Every third house was boarded up, their gutters choked with weeds. The streets were thick with litter, slippery with dog mess, and sheets of metal grating covered all the shop fronts. (We called them Donmar curtains.)

  Between the screech of tyres and the raw bursts of music blasting out of people’s flats, there was a dismal silence all around.

  Everywhere always looked terrible.

  And so did I. I know because, when I was shoplifting one morning, I glanced up at the closed-circuit screen above the aisle, and barely recognized myself. My hair was grey with filth, my skin looked doughy and I had a wide clown’s smile from massive cold sores on each side of my mouth.

  I might not have believed I looked like me, but clearly someone else did. I heard a voice behind me. ‘Excuse me. Are you Edward Stead?’

  Six months before, I would have legged it out of there. But I was in such a state I barely managed to shove a couple of the other customers into her path and reach the door.

  She didn’t chase me, but I’d seen her uniform, and once in the maze of local alleys, safe again, I gathered my wits enough to realize that my photograph must now be on some local cop-shop display. Skeeter had once explained my big mistake had been to leave home a week or so before I was sixteen. That had made me a missing minor, not a runaway, and passing sixteen after that made very little difference.

  So I knew, now she’d spotted me, they would be asking around and she, or some other officer, would soon
be back, shining a torch in my face as I shuffled down the street back to the communal pest-hole.

  How had they known where to look?

  And then the penny struck. It was the woman on the bus to Leeds. I’d been too good at picking someone sensible. She’d been so sensible, she must have written on the card to Lucy, ‘Given to me to post at Manchester bus station.’

  Perhaps she herself had had a son who’d been a runaway. I couldn’t blame her. But even in my hopeless state, I realized that either I would be picked up and taken home, or I would have to move on.

  That night, I dreamed of home, as clear as paint. I dreamed I walked to the front door and Alice opened it. She wore that slinky green frock that Natasha bought to cheer her through her last exams.

  She threw her arms round me. ‘Eddie! Yeah, Eddie!’ and spun round to Nicholas at the table. ‘Guess who’s come back!’

  Nicholas was serving out some strange spaghetti shapes I’d never seen before. He looked up, smiling. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be late,’ he said. ‘I told Natasha.’

  I woke up. I was cold and damp. I looked down at myself and cried.

  Alice

  I kept expecting him home. Of course I did. I couldn’t believe that he could put us out of his mind like that. For weeks. Well, actually months. What did he think we would be thinking? I know Natasha nearly went out of her mind. She felt so guilty. ‘I should have realized. Rob Reed did warn us. I should have insisted that Edward talked to someone.’

  Nicholas practically took to drink himself. Before, he’d always stuck to one large gin and tonic in the evening. But after Eddie left, he often drank some wine as well. I’d see the bottle in the morning, neatly rinsed and put in the recycling.