by Stuart David
“You did it, Jackdaw,” he says disbelievingly. “It’s all here. You really did it.”
For one awful moment I think he’s about to kiss me, but then it passes.
“So we’re on?” I say. “You’ll take the rap for the Chris Yates fight now?”
“First thing in the morning,” he replies. “Just like I said I would. I’ll be waiting outside Bailey’s office before the bell rings for registration.”
I try to slow him down a bit.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I say. “We need to hold off until lunchtime. I haven’t had time to square it all with Cyrus McCormack yet. I have to make sure he knows who he’s supposed to have fought.”
Harry shakes his head. “I’m not waiting,” he says. “This is my chance now, Jack. I don’t want to risk anybody else coming forward and spoiling it.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Two days ago, we had all the time in the world apparently. Now he won’t even let me get the plan straight.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask him. “You said you were willing to wait as long as it took me to get the iPad back.”
“Only because I knew that would make you get it back,” he says. “I was still going to Bailey first thing in the morning whether you brought it round tonight or not.”
“You bastard!” I say. “I almost had a stroke trying to work out how to get it back for you. And I’ve landed myself with an interview at my dad’s factory into the bargain.”
I lie back on his bed. My brain is whirring again. I need to find a way to convince him not to go to Bailey first thing in the morning. I need time to square the whole thing with Cyrus McCormack, or it’ll turn into a complete disaster. And I don’t even know Cyrus McCormack. I don’t know the first thing about him.
A terrifying scene starts to take place behind my eyes. I see Bailey calling Cyrus into his office, and as Cyrus stands there Bailey points to Harry, who’s sitting over by the window.
“Is this the boy I caught you fighting with?” Bailey asks. “Is this the boy you’ve been protecting?”
Cyrus looks over at Harry and wonders what’s going on. He imagines Bailey must have been fed some false information by one of Yatesy’s henchmen, and he wonders if he should just go along with it to save himself getting another beating, and to save the school trip. But then he thinks about the punishment Harry will receive if he lies, and he shakes his head.
“It wasn’t him,” Cyrus says, and the whole world crumbles to dust. Yatesy isn’t off the hook, and my app lies in ruins. All my work has been for nothing. Harry has destroyed everything.
“You’ve got to give me till lunchtime,” I say to Harry. “It won’t work otherwise. Cyrus won’t know what’s going on, and he’ll tell Bailey it wasn’t you. Then you won’t have a hope in hell of getting to university, and you’ll probably get suspended for lying.”
“It’s a chance I’m willing to take,” he says. “It’s a bigger risk to leave it till later. Someone’s bound to go to Bailey in the morning.”
“No they’re not,” I say. “No one’s gone to him yet, have they? What difference will a couple of hours make? Just give me that.”
“I can’t do it,” Harry says.
My brain whirrs. I search desperately for something, anything at all.
“How about this?” I say. “What if I have a word with Yatesy tonight? Ask him to tell his people to spread the word that the school trip’s safe. That someone’s coming forward at lunchtime to take the blame. Then no one else has any reason to go to Bailey.”
He thinks about it. “Could you do that?” he asks. “Would that work?”
Of course it wouldn’t.
“Of course it would,” I say. “Yatesy’s crew has managed to make sure no one’s come forward so far. This would be pimps.”
He goes back to his desk and sits down. He studies the pieces on the chessboard and moves one of them to a different square. Then he picks it up and moves it back again.
“Okay,” he says, “I’ll give you till lunchtime. But no longer than that.”
I feel a huge wave of relief washing over me. I stand up and reach out to slap him on the shoulders, but before I even make contact we both jump like we’ve been electrocuted. There’s an almighty crash from downstairs that sounds like the ceiling falling in. We stare at each other in complete shock, and neither of us speaks. My hand remains outstretched but still not touching his shoulders. Harry’s face is chalk white. Then there’s another almighty crash, and we hear the sound of a muffled shout.
“Trucking banker!” it sounds like, or something like that, and we both head for the door and make a run for the stairs.
15
“Not a word,” my dad says. “Agreed?”
We’re back sitting outside our own house, with the car engine still running, and my dad pulls down the sun visor and opens up the mirror on it.
“Hell’s teeth!” he says. He takes out a handkerchief and starts rubbing his face with it, then spends a while fixing his hair and zips his jacket all the way up to his chin.
“Agreed?” he says again, and I nod. He nods too and turns the engine off. “No point in worrying your mum,” he says. He looks in the mirror once more, then folds the sun visor back into place, and we get out of the car and head inside.
Mum’s sitting in the living room watching TV. She doesn’t have the twisty rubber things in anymore, but her hair looks curly now, though Dad doesn’t seem to notice any difference.
“Where were you?” Mum asks. “I was starting to get worried about you both.”
“We were round at Ray’s,” Dad says, and Mum makes a pleased little noise.
“I didn’t think of that,” she says. “Did you have a nice time?”
“Cracking,” Dad lies.
“How about you, Jack?” Mum says. “Did you have a nice time with Harry?”
I think of the moment where I asked Harry if he was ready to stand in for Yatesy and he told me he was. I just focus on that and try to forget about everything that happened afterward, to keep the right kind of expression on my face.
“Brilliant,” I say, and Mum looks thrilled.
“Look at my two boys,” she says. “Out there having adventures together.”
If only she knew the half of it.
When Harry and I got downstairs at Uncle Ray’s place, my dad and Uncle Ray were both lying on the kitchen floor, and one of the wooden chairs was all smashed up, over by the sink. Uncle Ray had one hand in my dad’s hair, and the other beneath his chin, trying to push my dad’s face away. My dad had both hands on Uncle Ray’s collar, and his feet were kicking along the floor at Uncle Ray’s feet and shins. My dad’s nose was bleeding all over the place, and the cut on Uncle Ray’s chin from the other day, which had looked a lot better when we arrived earlier, was bleeding onto his shirt again, and they were both making strange grunting noises and swearing a lot.
“Dad!” Harry shouted, and they looked round and saw us standing there, and almost at once the struggling stopped. Uncle Ray tried to smile, which looked quite strange under the circumstances, and then he glanced at my dad very briefly.
“Just a minor tussle,” he said. “Just a bit of fun, boys. I imagine you were doing pretty much the same thing upstairs.”
Even my dad looked baffled, but he got to his feet along with Uncle Ray, and Uncle Ray put an arm round my dad’s shoulders and pulled him close while they both stood facing us.
“So that’s how you do the Buckle,” Uncle Ray said to Dad. “It’s an old wrestling move,” he told us. “Your dad thought it went differently, Jack, but he was thinking of the Double Slam.”
“You’re a moron, Dad,” Harry said, and he left the room and headed upstairs.
“Go and borrow a suit from Harry,” my dad said. “For the interview. Then we’re leaving.”
I hurried after Harry, and while I was up there some more shouting started, and there were another couple of bangs. But when I got back down
, my dad was standing at the door, holding it open and signaling to me to get outside.
“Don’t be a stranger, Jackdaw,” Uncle Ray shouted from the kitchen, and I told him I wouldn’t.
Dad grabbed the suit off me and pushed me outside. Then he threw the suit onto the back seat of the car and reversed out of the driveway without even checking to see if there was anything coming, the tires screeching when we reached the road.
He drove like a maniac until we had to stop at a set of traffic lights, and then he rolled the window down and stuck his head outside, shouting, “You’re a madman, Ray. You’re totally insane.”
Given that we were about three streets away by then, I doubted if Uncle Ray could hear him, but I didn’t say anything about that to my dad.
When the lights turned green again, he started slamming the steering wheel with the palms of his hands as he drove away.
“That bampot!” he said through gritted teeth, and then he turned to me. “Sorry, Jack,” he said. “That was just . . .” and then he made a kind of roaring sound. “I’m okay,” he said, “I’m okay. Calm down, Andy. Get a grip on it.” He wiped his nose with the back of a hand and then looked down to see all the blood there. “Buggeration,” he said, and he started doing that thing to the steering wheel again for a little while.
We were almost all the way home before he’d calmed down enough to stop being mental. He pulled over at the side of the road on the street before our own, and he took some deep breaths, saying, “I’m okay,” over and over again. He tipped his seat back a bit, stretching out on it, and he started rolling up one of his little cigarettes.
“I can’t believe that idiot,” he said, while he spread the tobacco out on the little piece of paper. “He’s out of his mind. He seems to think we’re still about ten years old. Fighting! Two grown men!”
He licked the bit of cigarette paper to make it sticky, and rolled it up tight.
“Not a word about any of this to your mum,” he said. “She’d go through the roof.”
“What were you fighting about, anyway?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “I told him that black eye was his own fault for refusing to stop singing. Something like that. He told me his singing brings joy to millions, lights up people’s lives. So I asked him why he had the black eye if that was the case. Then he asked me if I wanted to ‘go at it.’ Go at it! Heavenly Christ. He’s like a big stupid kid. He’s a bampot.”
“Does that mean we won’t be seeing him again?” I asked, and my dad hunted around in his pockets for his lighter.
“It’ll all blow over in a couple of days,” he said. He lit up his cigarette and started smoking it, rolling the window down slightly. “Ray’s probably forgotten about it already.”
We sat there without saying anything else until the cigarette was almost gone, and my dad dropped it out the window. Then he fixed his seat back up and drove round the corner to our own place.
“Not a word,” he said when we pulled into the driveway. “Agreed?”
You know the rest . . .
Upstairs, I lie on my bed for a while, staring at the ceiling with a brain that feels burnt and tight after all the thinking it’s done over the weekend. It occurs to me I should go and look to see if Cyrus McCormack has a profile online, and just as I have that thought I also remember I could check for Elsie’s red rectangle while I’m there. I imagine myself getting up off the bed to do it, but in reality I just keep lying there. I hear my dad coming upstairs and going into the bathroom. Then I hear him unzipping his jacket and the tap being turned on hard. I listen to him splashing about noisily and just keep staring up at the ceiling.
Eventually, though, I manage to drag myself off the bed and over to the computer. It isn’t really worth the effort. There’s still no red rectangle from Elsie, and Cyrus doesn’t seem to have a profile. If he does, I certainly can’t find it. And on top of all that, I have another message from Drew Thornton to contend with.
“Hi, Jackdaw,” it says. “Hope you had a good weekend. What did you get up to? I went to the Warcraft fair at Forbidden Planet. See you tomorrow. Drew.”
I let my finger hover over the mouse for a while, with the cursor sitting on the button to delete Drew as a friend. I don’t have the heart to go through with it, though. Instead, I open up a reply box and start typing.
“Hey, Drew,” I write. “The Warcraft fair sounds awesome. I just did the usual stuff. Got attacked by an old witch man while I was trying to work out whether Elsie Green had killed herself or not, and consigned myself to a life of sticking labels onto whiskey bottles for the next fifty-odd years. I scammed my cousin’s iPad back from Gary Crawford and single-handedly saved the school trip by convincing my cousin to stand in for Chris Yates. Then my dad had a punch-up with his brother about a punch-up his brother had had with someone else. Just the usual boring stuff. Take it easy, Jack.”
I don’t have any intention of sending it, but I sit staring at it for a while, trying to take it all in. I find myself starting to wish I could just pay attention in class and study properly for the exams. Life would be a lot simpler. I add in another bit after the bit about Elsie killing herself that says “over her love for you,” and then I backspace most of it away and write a proper reply.
“Hey, Drew,” it says. “Hope you enjoyed that Warcraft fair. My weekend was good. Mostly just vegging out at my cousin’s. Beat him at chess. School tomorrow—bad news. Jackdaw.”
I check it over and click on send, and just as it disappears there’s a knock on my door. I get up from my desk and it’s my dad with Harry’s suit.
“You left this in the car,” he says, and he comes into the room and closes the door behind him. “Everything good?” he asks, and I tell him it is, even though I’m not sure what he’s talking about. He’s changed his shirt, and his hair is back to normal now. There are no signs of blood left around his nose.
“Good,” he says, then puts a hand in his back pocket. “I forgot to give you this earlier,” he tells me, and holds out a piece of paper. I take it and try to work out what it is. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
“Is it a form?” I ask him.
“An application form,” he says. “For the job. Fill it in and I’ll come and get it before I go to bed. I’ll hand it in at the office in the morning.”
I look the thing over. “It asks about qualifications and experience and stuff,” I say. “What will I put there?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “It’s just so they know who you are. Regulations. Just put in whatever you think. Make sure it’s neat.”
He disappears and leaves me to it, and I put the form on my desk and go back to sit on my bed. I look from the form to the suit, and then from the suit back to the form again. It doesn’t make me feel good, and I don’t see a particularly restful night ahead.
16
For the first time in my life, I get to school as early as I possibly can and stand near the gate, waiting for Cyrus McCormack to come in. I see Drew Thornton quite early on and hide behind a bin before he sees me. I watch carefully as he wanders down to the playground and disappears into the crowd, lost in a world of his own, probably still dreaming about his Warcraft fair. Then I decide to stay behind the bin for the time being. There are quite a few people I’d rather not have to talk to, and I tick them off as they come in: Gary Crawford, my cousin Harry, Chris Yates. All the dominoes from the middle of my sequence. But by the time the bell rings for registration, there’s still no sign of Cyrus, the domino that will set the whole thing in motion, and there’s no sign of the one it’s all leading up to: Elsie Green. I give it a few more minutes, watching latecomers and strays hurrying through the gate with their bed hair still on, then decide Cyrus and Elsie must have arrived at school before I got there, and head for my class.
After registration, it’s a double boredom of history, with Sergeant Monahan. The first bit zips by in quite a spritely fashion because it turns out we had homework
, and I’ve forgotten to do it. Monahan powers up the proceedings by choosing randoms in no particular order and getting them to read out what they’ve written for the benefit of the whole class. Waiting on my name to be shouted gets my adrenaline pumping quite sufficiently, and the time seems to pass at a rate of knots. I’m only saved by Eric Beadle’s name getting called before mine, and he very clearly hasn’t applied himself over the weekend either. He makes an admirable attempt at putting something together while he talks, but Monahan sees through it and hauls Eric along the corridor to see Bailey, the headmaster, leaving me free to copy Elaine Cochrane’s work while he’s gone, and to mix it up with some of what I’ve already heard while I wait for my name to come out of the hat.
From here on in, though, the time drags like a week at my aunt Margaret’s place. Monahan uploads terabytes of data about an ancient guy who was found in a muddy bog, perfectly preserved. It all sounds quite gruesome, from what I manage to catch. Something about seeds he’d eaten being found in his stomach, and something about a rope tied around his neck. Something about him being over a thousand years old. Not the sort of thing you want to be thinking about first thing in the morning. Monahan even shows us a picture at one point, but I don’t look at it. I think there’s probably some charity or organization I could contact to get him put on a list of some kind, for attempting to psychologically damage minors.
I spend a good part of the rest of the lesson thinking about that, and it helps the time to pass less painfully.
During break time, I run all over the school trying to track Cyrus down. I come across people who tell me they’ve seen him but can’t remember when, and others who tell me exactly where he is, and then he turns out not to be there. When the break ends, I’m beginning to get frantic, and I move amongst the crowds in the corridors, hoping desperately to catch a glimpse of him.
