Too Much Trouble

by Tom Avery

  Jamal fell back into conversation with Prince and Ibby, and before long they were all laughing. I looked back to find Terri. She was right at the back of the line, her head down. I walked the rest of the way deep in thought.

  Chapter 14

  I was practised at being silent. I had spent many hours of lessons trying to be invisible. Silence was important to me.

  There was a group of boys at my primary school who began to notice me. They even made up a game with me. They would try their hardest to make me break my silence. They were trying to get me noticed. It was horrible.

  One lesson we were being taught about how other children in the world lived.

  ‘In some parts of the world,’ the teacher was saying from the front, ‘children have to go to work at the age of five.’

  One of the group of boys sat next to me at my table. As the teacher turned to click to the next slide on the board, he poked me. Not hard but right in the ribs.

  I didn’t react but looked up at the slide. It was a picture of a boy and girl with bare feet carrying a load of rocks on their backs.

  He poked me again.

  ‘Why do you think these children have to work?’ The teacher said and a few hands went up. The teacher picked a girl.

  ‘Because they’re slaves, Miss?’

  ‘Some of them might be, Shelley. Good idea. Why else might they have to work?’ The teacher then picked a boy across the other side of the classroom.

  ‘Because they’re really poor, Miss.’

  The boy next to me poked me again and I could hear his friends sniggering.

  ‘Is being poor funny to you, Ali?’ The teacher addressed one of the boys from the group.

  ‘Sorry, miss,’ Ali said.

  The teacher continued, addressing the boy who had answered. ‘You’re right, they’re very poor, they can only just afford enough food to survive.’ Another poke. ‘They don’t get new clothes.’ Poke. ‘Or computer games.’ The teacher looked around at some of the boys as another poke hit the same spot. ‘Or make-up.’ She looked at some of the girls. Another poke. She turned round to show another picture. Poke, poke, poke.

  I still didn’t react.

  The next picture was a group of children standing in front of a little building. The building looked like the first pig’s house. You know, made of straw.

  ‘Some of these children,’ the teacher continued, ‘have to look after their whole family.’

  One boy shouted out, smiling, ‘What, no adults, Miss?’

  Everyone laughed while I received another poke.

  The teacher smiled along with the class, then said, ‘That might sound like fun for a while but imagine the responsibility of looking after your family, no mum and dad to look after you. Imagine you had to do that.’

  One more poke and I exploded.

  I screamed in rage, threw my chair backwards and leapt on the boy. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ I shouted at him. I was so angry.

  This was one of the times that my school did try to call home. They got no answer. The boy admitted that he had been poking me. I didn’t get in too much trouble. The teacher kept us in at lunchtime. We both had to say sorry.

  I remember feeling angry and shaky for hours. I don’t know why. They had tried poking me before.

  Chapter 15

  Mr Green took us all to a really wide, long road. Both sides were lined with shops. It was as if I’d been shrunk to half my size, then put in a normal-sized high street, it was that big.

  We took the bus to get there. Again, I guess the bus driver assumed we were on a school trip. We took up most of the top deck. Jamal and his friends spread across twice as many seats as they needed. Prince sat with me for some of the journey, then Jamal called him over.

  It was a sunny day. A day for being outside.

  When we got off the bus Kieran approached me. ‘So, have you done this before?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, stolen stuff, picked pockets, thieved things?’

  ‘Erm, not really. I’ve stolen a few things. But I’ve not done this,’ I replied.

  He didn’t look worried at my lack of experience. He smiled at me, a wicked grin. ‘No problem, it gets easy. You can just watch me for a while if you like. Be a look-out and that.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. Being a look-out did sound easy, but something was worrying me. ‘Is it dangerous?’ I blurted out. ‘Could we get caught?’ My uncle’s face flashed before my eyes. Standing over me, holding out the last wedge of money he’d given us. ‘I don’t want to get caught,’ I finished.

  Kieran looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, ‘It can be dangerous, if you act like an idiot. You see Ibby?’ He nodded towards his friend. Ibby was in a revolving door of a posh-looking shop. A security guard was telling him to stop but he was still going round and round, laughing the whole time.

  I smiled at Kieran and said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, Ibby sometimes acts like an idiot. A few months ago he tried to nick this guy’s laptop. The guy was working on it at the time. The guy tripped him and held him down. You know how he got away?’

  I shook my head.

  Kieran answered his question with two words. ‘Mr Green. Like I say, it can be dangerous, but you make money for Mr Green and he’ll look after you.’

  I looked over at Mr Green, who had been on the phone all this time. All the kids had scattered between the bus stop and the shop fronts. Mr Green still seemed pretty great, but I couldn’t help but wonder what he did to the guy with the laptop. As I was looking at him, Mr Green hung up his phone and started gathering us all by the bus-stop. When we were together he looked around. I guess he was making sure that no passers-by were too close.

  ‘Right, you lot, listen up.’ We pressed in closer. ‘Same rewards as normal, best steals mean first in the new house and first pick of the food. Listen to each other and keep your eyes open. Back here at three o’clock. And people,’ he said with a grin, ‘have fun.’

  Most of the others started to disappear. Carla and Sofina went off, giggling. Dwayne, Michael and Ibby sloped off in a little knot. I looked for Terri but couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Mr Green had one more thing to say. ‘Jamal, Kieran, you look after these two, all right?’

  Jamal answered him. ‘Of course. We’ll make them into proper little thieves by the end of the day.’

  Somehow, Jamal’s words were comforting, and we parted from Mr Green, grinning. In spite of my earlier worries about stealing from people, I couldn’t help but be excited. We were learning to be thieves. It was like a TV programme.

  I enjoyed watching Kieran work on that first day. We’d wander until he found a likely target, someone too busy to notice or too slow to stop him. He took all sorts of stuff, phones, wallets, a passport. Sometime in the middle of the morning he pinched some chocolate bars for us.

  We had agreed to meet Jamal and Prince at one o’clock for lunch. It was nearly time, when Kieran said, ‘Right, now it’s your turn.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Come on, it’s time to step up. You’ll be fine.’

  We spent five minutes looking out for an easy target for me. Kieran spotted a lady with a back-pack, a side pocket unzipped.

  ‘Just dip your hand in,’ he said, ‘and see what you get. Lucky dips are sometimes the best.’ He grinned at me.

  My heart was already racing.

  I dropped into the flow of people walking along the high street and quickly caught up with the lady. I kept with her step for step for about a minute. Suddenly I knew I had to do it right then or I would never do it. My hand darted into her bag, like it had darted across the table and taken a wallet, like it had darted out and picked up some chicken from a barbecue. Into the bag and out; grasping something hard and smooth.

  I didn’t look at the object, but thrust it into my pocket. I turned and walked towards Kieran, who was watching and waiting. He was smiling at me. I gave him a thumbs-up sign. His smile got even bigger. />
  When I was a few steps away from him he said, ‘What have you got then?’

  I pulled the object out of my pocket and found myself proudly holding a brown hair-brush. Kieran burst into laughter, then imitated my thumbs-up sign. I started laughing too. My first ‘real’ steal was a hair-brush.

  ‘Come on, let’s get some lunch,’ Kieran said.

  Strangely, we didn’t steal our lunch. We paid for it out of the money from stolen wallets. Jamal said it was because we couldn’t work over our lunch breaks. I guess that made sense.

  Prince’s morning had been much more successful than mine. He had picked a wallet and a phone. He was beaming with pride. Jamal sang his praises as he told us about the two steals. Kieran clapped him on the back to congratulate him.

  We all laughed over my hair-brush.

  That afternoon I pinched two phones and the tips that had been left on a restaurant table. At the back of my mind it still felt wrong, taking other people’s things.

  ***

  Father used to tell us what was right and what was wrong, and not just when we got into trouble. Usually when we were out, walking or running, Father would stop to look at something and talk to us about it. If we saw someone wasting water, or litter on the ground or even just a plane in the sky, we’d stop and my father would tell us the right and wrong of it.

  I remember one day when we had gone into town. Prince was little and had stayed at home with our mother, so it was just me and Father.

  The market was busy. Some people were selling and buying but most people were chatting and laughing. We kept stopping. Lots of the men wanted to talk to my father. They asked him questions and he usually made a joke. They would clap each other on the shoulders and laugh, then say goodbye and we would walk on, trying to find the items my mother had sent us to buy.

  We found the first item, a ball of string at a market stall covered in useful-looking things. Scissors, rope, hammers. Some things were worn and old-looking, others new, like the scissors that glinted in the sun. I moved my head back and forth so the gleam of light shone in and out of my eyes as my father talked about the price of the string. It took a long time.

  When we walked on, the string in my hand, I asked my father, ‘Why did you have to talk about the price, Dadda?’

  My father scratched his nose and replied, ‘You see all these things, Emmanuel?’ He stretched out his arms to take in the whole market.

  I nodded and said, ‘Yes, Dadda.’

  ‘All these things have a price, Emmanuel, they are all worth something.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sometimes we don’t want to pay the price, we think they are worth less than the price. You understand?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘And sometimes we can’t pay as much as the price. So we have to talk, we have to come to an agreement.’ My father finished there but I had another question.

  ‘What if you can’t pay the price, Dadda, and you can’t come to an agreement? What do you do then?’ I said.

  ‘Then you must walk away empty-handed and maybe work a little harder. Everything has a price and we must work to meet that price. You have to work hard, Emmanuel, then you can have all the best things you can think of. If you don’t work hard, then you must go empty-handed. That is why you must carry all the things we buy - and then I will give you a sweet.’ My father laughed. ‘That is the price,’ he said. ‘Do you agree?’ He offered his hand to me.

  ‘What if I carry half of the things?’ I replied with a smile, and offered my hand in return.

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him. He kissed me on the top of the head and said, ‘It’s a deal.’

  ***

  So it really felt wrong taking other people’s things. But even so, there was something fun about it.

  It starts with a slightly sick feeling as you look for your target. That’s the worst bit. Then as soon as you’ve decided who to go for, your heart starts beating so hard and the sick feeling turns into butterflies. The beating and the butterflies get stronger and faster as you approach the target. Then comes the moment when you know you’ve got to act and you think your heart is going to burst out of your chest. Then your hand moves and the moment is gone and you feel like you’ve scored the best goal ever.

  Yeah, robbing stuff had an upside.

  At the end of the day, we all met by the bus stop we’d started from. Each person handed over to Mr Green what they’d taken. I don’t know if some of the kids kept stuff back for themselves, but I handed everything over, even the hair-brush.

  Mr Green held it up and smiled at me. ‘Lucky dip?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well done, Emmanuel,’ he said, when I gave him the mobile phones and the loose change.

  He made a big fuss of Prince’s haul. By the end of the day Prince had stolen two phones, like me, three wallets, a watch and a laptop.

  ‘Wow!’ Mr Green said. ‘That’s some good work, Prince. He’s nearly as good as you, Jamal.’

  Jamal was standing next to Prince, his arm round his shoulders. ‘I don’t know about that, Mr Green, but he is good. He took that pretty much right out of someone’s hand,’ he said, pointing at the gold-coloured watch.

  ‘OK,’ Mr Green said loudly, ‘I want to talk to you two.’ He pointed at Freddie and Sastre.

  The whole group was silent, and the two boys who had been singled out went white.

  ‘Apart from that, well done,’ Mr Green called out, and there were sighs of relief that no one else was in the same position as Freddie and Sastre. ‘I think we have our winners for the day. First picks at the new house go to Jamal and ‘lightning fingers’ Prince.’

  There were a few cheers and some groans.

  Prince was really making a name for himself.

  Chapter 16

  Prince had learnt to fit in quickly. When we arrived in England, so much changed. We went from parents to an absent uncle. From a home to a house that we feared, but clung to as our little shred of security. From being looked after to looking after ourselves.

  It was cold when we arrived. Compared to the blistering heat of our home village, where the sun beat down on the top of your head and the ground blistered your feet, a windy English summer is so cold. We got off the plane into a vast airport, but I don’t remember much except the cold.

  We were asked questions about who we were travelling with and why our parents weren’t with us. Prince remained silent and I explained that we were visiting our uncle. My parents had put in place the pretence of a visit to see my uncle, and I kept it up for Prince’s sake.

  I told them that my uncle would be waiting for us in the airport. I showed them his phone number and address. That seemed OK with them.

  As soon as we found a phone I used the telephone number that my parents had given us. My uncle was not surprised to hear from us. My father had written to him weeks before. He told us how to find him.

  Dazed, we wandered through the airport. So many new sights: vast shops, enormous television screens and people of so many different, pale colours.

  We soon got used to all these things. We were both good at adjusting, but Prince was better at fitting in.

  ***

  By the second night with Mr Green’s gang, Prince had fitted right in. It was probably then that they started calling him ‘Flash’. Jamal, Ibby, Kieran and Flash. In no time at all Prince was shining like he always did. That first day was not the only time that he was the best thief of the day. Suddenly, he was right at the centre of the gang, while I found myself on the edge.

  If there had been a list of who was in charge of the gang, after Mr Green, Jamal would have been at the top, with his friends just behind. Me and Terri would have been at the bottom.

  It wasn’t that I did anything wrong. I got on with everybody, I stole things as well as I could and I was nice to the right people. I think I was right at the bottom for three reasons. One, because stealing never came naturally to me like it did to Prince. Two, because J
amal took a dislike to me. And three, because I was friends with Terri.

  We continued our conversation about books on that second evening in the new, empty house that Mr Green had taken us to.

  I found Terri beside me, with a whisper in my ear. ‘Follow me.’ She took hold of my hand with two fingers and her thumb - her little, white hands pinching my dark skin. She led me out of the back door, to a bench at the bottom of the new house’s garden. None of the neighbours could see into this garden, so Mr Green had said that we could use it.

  ‘So, your favourite Narnia book?’

  I had forgotten where our earlier conversation had stopped and I had to think back carefully.

  ‘Erm, The Horse and his Boy, I think,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, that’s a good choice. I like The Last Battle.’

  For all the time I knew her, me and Terri’s conversations were often like that. She would start from wherever we’d been interrupted earlier in the day, or where we’d fallen asleep the night before. Her memory was amazing. She never forgot what we’d been talking about.

  Terri’s favourite things to talk about were books and stories, but we talked about other stuff too.

  ‘I found this in the house,’ Terri said, holding up a book with a picture of a pig’s head on it. It was called Lord of the Flies. ‘Have you read this?’

  I took it off her and stared at the cover. It looked a bit scary. I had not read it and told Terri so.

  ‘Shall we read it?’ she asked. ‘I’ll read some to you and then you can read to me. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ I smiled at her.

  Terri read well. Her quiet voice made the characters come alive. She never stuttered or stumbled over words. I didn’t do as good a job as her, but she didn’t mind. She said that she loved listening as much as she loved reading. Maybe there had been someone who had read to her before.

  I never found that out though. Somehow, in all our hours reading and talking, me and Terri hardly ever talked about our families. We avoided the subject of our pasts, except to tell little stories about school and friends.