How To Be a Boy

by Tony Bradman

  “That’s about twenty quid’s worth,” I told him.

  His face… I wanted to take a picture. Denny thought it was the funniest damn thing he’d ever seen.

  We walked away, didn’t run. We shouldered past the little kids, left them standing there in the puddles, and walked towards the pool building, letting our long leather coats catch the wind. I reckoned if they ever made a movie of us, they’d do this bit in slow-mo.

  The car park around the back was almost empty. We were laughing by the time we got there. There’s a red fire-exit door tucked into an alcove along the pool’s back wall and we ducked into it to shelter from the rain. It was where the staff went to sneak a quick fag and there was a load of crushed butts on the wet ground.

  “You’re mad,” Denny told me. “Snapping his phone. That was just mad. His face when you just gave him half.”

  I grinned because I liked it when he called me and the things I did mad. I still had the other half of the silver mobile. I was going to keep it. Maybe I’d get it out one day and make Denny laugh and call me mad again.

  “Twenty quid.” Denny uncrumpled the note then folded it into neat quarters. “Not bad. D’you reckon he had any more on him?”

  “Maybe.” I thought of Blondie’s scowl and clenched fists. “Probably. But who cares? We can always get somebody else and get some more, right?”

  Denny pulled the rusty screwdriver out of the plastic bag. “Yeah. Easy money.”

  A voice said, “Careful where you wave that.”

  We hadn’t heard them follow us. It was the two older lads from the bus stop. The one in the denim jacket had his shoulders hunched, his collar turned up, his hands in his jacket’s pockets and an unlit cigarette waggling between his lips. The one in the black T-shirt had a pizza face and his hair was a wet mop on his head, but he didn’t seem to even notice the cold and rain. His soaking T-shirt clung to his muscles.

  “Saw what you did to those little kids,” Denim Jacket said. He had a sharp face, too many teeth, like a shark. “Saw you take their money.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Denny told him.

  The two of them stepped closer. I tried to take a step back but I was right up against the red fire-exit door.

  “What did you do?” Denim Jacket asked. “Threaten to stab them with your screwdriver?”

  T-shirt took a knife out of the belt loop at the back of his jeans. A wicked silver blade. My belly went cold looking at it.

  “Did you say, ‘Give us your money or we’ll stab you’?” Denim Jacket asked. He rolled the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “Is that what you said to them, yeah?”

  I thought of the runty kid with the glasses, because the knife’s blade was spotted with rain just like his lenses had been.

  Denny was trying to act tough, trying to show he was mean too. He was gripping the screwdriver. “It’s got nothing to do with you,” he said.

  Denim Jacket shrugged. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said. “I like your coats. Do you like their coats?” he asked his mate. “Give me your coat,” he said to me.

  I knew I was trapped. “What?”

  T-shirt lunged at me, the blade slicing raindrops in half as he thrust it towards me. “He wants your coat.”

  I jumped back, smacked my head hard against the door behind me. I was so scared it didn’t even hurt. I thought I was going to puke. “I can’t. It’s my brother’s.” I said it soft. I didn’t want to look at Denny. He’d know how scared I was and I didn’t want to see how he was looking at me. “My brother, he’ll… Tam Conners. This is his coat – Tam Conners’.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  T-shirt lunged again, grabbed me, even as I tried to get away. He grabbed my sleeve and with a quick stab sliced the blade all the way through the cuff, missing my wrist by millimetres. My eyes bulged and I squealed like a mouse in a trap. I couldn’t stop myself. And he slit the leather halfway to my elbow.

  “He won’t want it back now, will he? Now that you’ve gone and damaged it.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off his knife as he jerked and pushed me around, dragging Tam’s coat off my back by the collar. And I just let him.

  Denim Jacket draped Tam’s coat over his shoulders. “Think yourself lucky that yours probably won’t fit me,” he said to Denny. “But you can give me the money you took from them kids, right?”

  “You can’t do that,” Danny said. “You can’t have it. Who says we even got any—”

  But T-shirt punched him in the stomach, doubling him over, making him cough and spit. The older lad lit his cigarette while he waited for Denny to get his breath back. He held out his hand and Denny put the twenty pound note into it.

  “Twenty quid,” Denim Jacket said. “Jesus. Was it worth it? But thanks anyway.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the front of Denny’s leather, burning a crispy black hole in it. The look in his eyes was the meanest look I’d ever seen.

  But that was it. He turned and walked away across the rain-splashed car park with Tam’s coat over his shoulders. I watched the knife slide back into T-shirt’s belt as he followed. They weren’t interested in helping Blondie and Glasses; they just wanted the money for themselves.

  I sagged and tried to calm my breathing. My legs could hardly hold me up. I’d thought I was going to get stabbed. I’d thought I was going to die. I bit my lip, sharp, to make sure I didn’t cry. Tam’s cannonball fists were going to make me pay for his coat, but that would be better than T-shirt’s knife.

  Denny was fuming, spitting lava, swearing. He gouged at the fire-exit door with the screwdriver. Kicked at it with his boot. He glared at me like it was my fault.

  Then, “Come on,” he said. He stalked away back the way we’d come.

  “What? Denny, where’re you…” I just wanted to go home. I was shaking. I had icy adrenalin sloshing in my belly; it had put out any fizz or fire.

  Denny didn’t wait for me, so I had to run to catch up with him back around the front of the pool building. I saw Blondie and Glasses were at the bus stop on the corner of Karras Street.

  “Come on,” Denny said again. “I’m not letting them get away with it.”

  “Get away with what? It wasn’t them,” I said. “They didn’t do anything.”

  But I knew that look on Denny’s face. He wanted to take it out on someone. He wanted to explode at someone. It was a look I knew so well. It was the look Tam got when Dad had a go at him – and after Dad had finished, Tam wanted to pass it on to me.

  I saw it in my head: Dad, then Tam, then me. I saw Denim Jacket and T-shirt, then Denny and me, then Blondie and Glasses. Like lines of people just passing it along. Like these chains of meanness.

  “You coming or what?” Denny couldn’t understand why I wasn’t on his heels. The two kids at the bus stop had seen us. Glasses was pulling at Blondie, wanting him to run. Denny was clutching the screwdriver tight.

  “I don’t know,” I said to Denny. “It’s not their fault. Why don’t we…”

  “Why don’t we what?” He looked at me like I’d told him I was from Mars or somewhere. “Come on. What?” He jabbed the screwdriver at me. “Listen, right: are you any good at Maths?”

  Now it was my turn not to have a clue.

  “You any good at Maths?” he repeated. “Or any lesson at all? You’re not, are you? I know you’re not. I sit next to you in every lesson and we’re not any good at any of it, are we? How many exams are we ever gonna pass?” He was snarling at me. “So what are we supposed to do? It’s sink or swim, right? You’ve said so, too.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I shivered without Tam’s coat. Just feeling cold, not cool, standing there in the rain.

  Denny swore when he saw Blondie and Glasses had run off. No way he’d catch them now. He rubbed rain out of his hair. I thought he was going to stick me with the screwdriver, but he turned it around and offered me the handle.

  “I’ll keep watch this time,” he said. “Plenty more lock
ers, right? Plenty more little kids to rip off for every damn penny they’ve got. Not our fault if they’re not mean enough.”

  I didn’t take the screwdriver. “Plenty of bigger kids who are.”

  Denny shrugged. “You choose the locker, OK? This time we’ll get enough cash to get you your own leather. One that makes you look real Italian-gangster mean.”

  I looked at the screwdriver he was offering me. Then back up at him.

  He grinned his grin at me. “Got to be easier than Maths, right?”

  THE FAMILY TREE

  Mal Peet

  I WAS SHOCKED. No, upset. Like when you upset a glass or something, and everything spills out.

  I thought, The New People haven’t looked after it. How could they have let it get into this state?

  Then I thought, It’s probably not the same New People. We left here almost twenty years ago. My God. The house could’ve been bought and sold any number of times since then.

  And then I thought, You shouldn’t have come back. You should never go back.

  In fact, I hadn’t intended to. It’s just that I was driving past the end of the lane, coming back from a job, and decided to come and have a look. I hardly ever find myself in this part of the world. So let’s call it a whim. Let’s not say that it was as if another hand, an invisible hand, had reached across and turned the wheel.

  There’s a little pull-in fifty metres or so past the house. Trees, half-bare, and beyond them a ploughed field, regular as corrugated cardboard. I parked the van and got out. There was a squashed KFC box and two Sprite cans in a puddle. I walked back to where I could see into our old garden without being seen from the house. There’s a long black railing that separates the garden from the lane. The big old – no, ancient – beech tree is at the far end of the railing. It stretches some of its arms across the lane. It stretches others towards the house, over the lawn. The Nest is built into these branches.

  What am I saying, is built?

  My dad built it. It took him weeks. Or months. Time’s bendy when you’re little.

  I stood there looking at the scruffy wreckage in the tree’s lower branches, hanging there like a mishap.

  * * *

  “Now then, Benjamin,” Dad said. “That is what you call a tree. A serious tree.”

  I picture myself holding his hand and looking up. I wish I could remember myself. What I was wearing, and so forth. But I can’t. The tree was a huge grey tower holding its canopy of pale green leaves up against the sky. The sun kaleidoscoped light through it. Behind us, Mum’s voice was telling the removals men where to put things.

  Dad let go of my hand and put both his hands on the trunk of the tree and looked up into it.

  “Yes,” he said, as if he was talking to Mum. “Hmm. I think so. This will do nicely.”

  So, when Mum was on to him to do other stuff, he spent time building me a tree-house. He built a platform about three metres above the ground, sawing bits of wood into angles, fixing them together in a complicated way. He’d apologize to the tree every time he hammered a nail or drove a screw into it. Then a floor, walls, and a roof that he covered with gritty black stuff to keep future rain out. He took the ladders away and built a flight of steps up to the first fat horizontal branch, then another up into the back of The Nest. (That was its name. Dad had carved it into a little wooden board nailed above the entrance.)

  I remember the day he finished it.

  He stood at the top of the steps and put his arms out and said, in a loud voice, “I hereby declare this tree-house open!”

  I applauded, looking up at him.

  He climbed back down without looking at the ground. I thought, I’ll never be able to do that.

  “Stay here,” Dad said, and went back to the house.

  I sat on the bottom step while the sky went pink. I was dying to go up. Something swiftly shadowy above me screeched.

  He came back carrying a load of stuff. A sleeping bag, sandwiches in a plastic box, a can of Coke and candles in his pockets, a bottle of wine under one arm, a pillow.

  “Come on, then,” he said, so I followed his confident arse up the steps and entered the Nest for the first time. One end of it, the end we faced, was a big window with a door in it. The door opened onto a little balcony with a rail and balusters made of sawn branches. My dad was magic to have created such a thing. The landscape unfolded itself into the distance, layers of green and brown and lavender, with the last light of the sunken sun beyond it. The air smelt of sap and clean wood with a slight whiff of cow manure.

  Dad drank wine from the neck of the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “So. What do you think of your nest, then?”

  I thought it was wonderful. Outrageous.

  I said, “Is it for me?”

  Dad looked at me, frowny-smiling. “Of course it is,” he said.

  I fell asleep by candlelight, thinking, trusting, that he would carry me back down and across the lawn and up the stairs to my bed via my mother’s kiss. But he didn’t. I woke up feeling cold, then panicky.

  Dad put his hand on me, saying, “Shush, Ben. Listen. The dawn chorus.”

  I needed a pee. The birds sounded as anxious as my mother.

  I was nine years old. Ten, that summer. Me and Dad spent evenings in the Nest, lighting candles against the dark. He’d made improvements, as he called them. A shelf for books. Hooks on the wall for our coats and his binoculars. A nifty little plywood box with a rope handle where we stashed our Essentials – two plastic plates, two knives, two forks, a bottle of water, his Swiss army knife with the corkscrew, my comics.

  He read me The Wind in the Willows and Tom’s Midnight Garden. I loved it all so much. Some nights, the Nest would shift and creak as the old beech adjusted itself to the weather.

  And I wanted to say, after that first time, “Let’s stay here, Dad. Let’s sleep here.”

  But he would say, “Don’t be daft, Ben. Mum’ll be wondering where we’ve got to. Come on.”

  And down we’d go. And when we went into the house, Mum was usually on the phone.

  That’s how I remember it, anyway.

  Months went by. Christmas, Easter. We’d lived in the house for almost exactly a year on the morning I went downstairs for breakfast and found the kitchen full of silence. There were none of the usual sounds. No mumble from the radio, no soft roar from the kettle, no ticking from the toaster. And no Dad. There was only Mum standing staring out of the window with her arms folded. When she heard me, she turned round and I saw that she was smoking a cigarette.

  “Mum? Where’s Dad?”

  Mum walked to the sink and drowned the cigarette end under the tap and dropped it into the compost bucket.

  “Up that bloody tree of his,” she said, not looking at me. “Get your clothes on and tell him breakfast’s ready and that he’s got a bloody job to go to.”

  There was the kind of low mist that hangs on to your legs, but I left it behind on about the fourth step up to the Nest. Dad was sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bag, staring out of the window.

  I could see, and smell, that he’d slept the night there. At the time, I felt cheated rather than worried.

  “Wotcha, Ben.”

  “Hello, Dad.”

  The mist rolled away into the distance. You couldn’t say where it ended and the sky began. The trees looked like they’d been painted onto the landscape, then blotted before the paint had dried.

  Dad said, “It’s like flying, sitting here, don’t you think? Like the mist is clouds and we’re above them.”

  He stretched his arms out and rocked them gently, like a coasting bird. He had his eyes closed.

  I said, “Mum says breakfast’s ready and that you’ve got a bloody job to go to.”

  He didn’t answer.

  After a while I said, “Dad?”

  He nodded his head and said, “Yeah. I heard you.”

  He carried on nodding his head as though he had no control of it.

/>   “Dad?”

  He looked up at me, just for a second, and I saw that he was crying. Not making any noise, just tears running down his face into the stubble on his jaw. I didn’t know what to do, so I was glad when Mum’s voice cut through the moment.

  “Sean? Sean! For God’s sake! For God’s sake!”

  I wasn’t clever enough, or perhaps just not old enough, to work out what was going on. And anyway, when you’re young you’re so wrapped up in yourself, aren’t you? Everything that happens to you is so important, so absolutely unique and brightly lit. Parents are just wallpaper. The background.

  Summer came round again, like the quick hands of a huge clock. The school holidays. It didn’t seem odd that Dad also stopped work. We’d gone away in the summer, the years before that year. To Auntie Jan’s in Cornwall, or on planes to Spain or Greece. But that year we didn’t go anywhere. Nothing was planned or talked about. Mum carried on going to work. Dad and I messed about in the garden or went to the supermarket in Okehampton or did bits of work on the Nest. Sometimes we would lie on our backs on the lawn and repeat the stories that the passing clouds told us. Mum came back later and later, usually when Dad was asleep in front of the telly. I’d see the lights of her car rake the windows and then hear her tyres brake on the gravel and then I’d go up to bed before she fumbled with the door latch. I didn’t want to hear what they said to each other, her kind of angry and him mumbling and sort of laughing like he was telling bad jokes.

  Once, though, there was a row. Shouting. I wanted to go down because my head was full of the word please but didn’t. It went on a long time, starting up again when I thought it was over. Then I heard Mum come upstairs and use the bathroom. I was rigid in the dark, listening. She opened my door but I kept still. She sort of sighed my name then went to the bedroom. I waited for Dad to come up, but he didn’t. After a while I heard the back door open and close. I counted slowly to fifty then tiptoed down the corridor to the spare bedroom, stepping carefully over the floorboards that creaked. The window looked over the lawn. The black lump of The Nest had a yellow rectangle drawn on it. Dad’s candle, showing through the narrow gaps around the door. The full moon sat on top of the tree like an escaped balloon.