Robin Hood

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Robin is excluded from school for four days,’ Mr Barclay told Ardagh, half an hour later. ‘I want to see a two-thousand-word essay about what Robin has done wrong and what he plans to do to improve his behaviour. He’ll be on after-school litter patrol for the next half-term. And I’ve called a locksmith to replace my damaged lock, so you can expect a bill for that too.’

  Ardagh nodded and spoke softly. ‘Mr Barclay, of course. I’m more than happy to pay for any damage my son has caused.’

  ‘Can I type the essay on a computer?’ Robin asked.

  Mr Barclay cracked a mean smile. ‘By hand. In your best handwriting, and I expect excellent spelling and grammar.’

  Robin had never written anything half that length before, and felt daunted. He imagined jumping on the desk, defiantly kicking over the stacked files, telling Mr Barclay where to stick his essay and making a heroic leap out the window to freedom.

  But he just nodded sourly and said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘OK, mister, let’s go,’ Robin’s dad said, sounding so weary it was like he was the one with two thousand words to write.

  Robin didn’t think Wednesday afternoon could get worse, but somehow it did.

  Leaving Mr Barclay’s office coincided with the change of lessons. The hallways heaved with students, and they bumped into loads of kids from Robin’s year at the bottom of the main stairs. His face turned red as they pulled faces and teased.

  ‘Here’s the bad boy!’

  ‘Naughty, naughty, Robina!’

  And, ‘Fallen out of any windows lately, dumbass?’

  Then four alpha-male thugs – the kind of guys you never wanted to stand near in a locker room – started on his dad. Ardagh made an easy target, since his turquoise jelly shoes repaired with plumber’s tape, cut-off denim shorts and tie-dyed short-sleeve shirt were a first-degree crime against fashion.

  ‘How come your dad’s a hippie, Robin?’ one jeered.

  A guy shook his head. ‘Nah, he’s Jesus.’

  ‘Too short for Jesus. He’s a garden gnome.’

  And rock bottom finally came with white-teethed smiles and mean laughs from Tiffany, Bethany and Stephanie. Three popular girls who looked at Robin the way they’d look at gum stuck to their shoe, on the rare occasions when they deemed it worth looking at him at all.

  Ardagh saw his son squirming and placed a hand on the back of his neck.

  ‘Rise above it,’ he said airily. ‘Always be the better person.’

  Dad is a hippie, Robin thought, as he jerked and pushed the hand away.

  ‘Dad, don’t touch me,’ he snapped angrily. ‘Could you be any more embarrassing?’

  5. IT’S COMPLICATED NOW WE’RE OLDER

  When you’re little, it’s easy. You see your dad, you run out of school and give him a hug. He tells you he loves you and you don’t give a damn who hears it.

  Then you’re almost thirteen. Sat in the passenger seat of your dad’s chugging Ford sedan with a lot of different feelings.

  Sorry for what you’ve done.

  Freaked out that you almost got killed.

  Cursing the bad luck that meant you got caught.

  Mortified that everyone in your class saw your dad wearing shoes held together with sticky tape.

  Knowing that your dad is a gentle soul and you crushed him when you told him he was an embarrassment …

  Robin couldn’t look at his dad, so he stared out of the window at his hometown, or what was left of it.

  Locksley had been a car-making town. At its peak there were sixty thousand auto workers on good union wages. Rival assembly plants faced each other across the River Macondo and a car rolled off a production line every twenty-eight seconds. One million cars per year …

  But the factories moved to sunnier climes, with cheap workers and solar energy. People left to find work. Neighbourhoods emptied, leaving houses worth no more than the electrical cables and copper pipes that could be stripped out and melted for scrap. Locksley High had been built for three thousand kids and now had less than six hundred.

  When people and companies left, so did the taxes they paid the City to fix roads, maintain parks, and pay cops, teachers and fire officers. So the town started falling apart, which made more people move away, and then there was even less money …

  Robin had grown up seeing media reports about Locksley’s spiral of decline. He saw plenty of evidence as they merged onto a high street of boarded-up shops, empty parking bays, crashed-out addicts and the warped steel frame of a burnt-out Eldridge’s department store.

  ‘This isn’t the way home,’ Robin said, breaching the awkward silence as they stopped at a red light. There were no shoppers wanting to cross, and a postal truck going the other way didn’t bother obeying the signal.

  ‘I was at work when Mr Barclay called,’ Ardagh answered. ‘I have a stop to make, then a class at the library. You can sit at the back and make a start on that essay …’

  Robin sighed. ‘How do I write two thousand words?’ he moaned. ‘Saying sorry is five sentences, tops.’

  Ardagh smiled slightly as the light went green. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to hack Mr Barclay’s password and change your report card.’

  Robin gulped.

  Dad’s clever, but how the hell?

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ Ardagh teased. ‘I noticed you’d been spending a lot of time looking at hacker forums on the web and wondered why you’d downloaded database software on the computer in the back room.

  ‘I didn’t figure it out, until I realised there was nothing worth stealing in Mr Barclay’s office, and noticed that the power cable on his PC was pulled out, like someone had switched it off in a hurry.’

  ‘Ahh …’ Robin said weakly, then asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell Mr Barclay?’

  Ardagh shrugged. ‘You might get away with it.’

  Robin screwed up his face with frustration. ‘Or Barclay might punish me more when he finds out.’

  ‘You’re certainly facing a dilemma,’ Ardagh agreed. ‘Perhaps you could make your two-thousand-word essay into a full confession.’

  ‘You’re my dad – tell me what to do!’ Robin begged.

  ‘This world is full of sheep,’ Ardagh said thoughtfully, as he slowed the car and indicated to turn off. ‘I’ve always set loose boundaries because I want you and John to learn to think for yourselves. But I won’t always be around to bail you out.’

  Robin squirmed cluelessly in his seat.

  ‘Why don’t you message some of your cool friends and see what they think you should do?’

  Robin groaned. ‘I’m sorry I said you were an embarrassment.’

  Ardagh stared at the road, ignoring the apology.

  ‘Dad, none of those kids you saw are my friends. I’m the brainy titch. I like archery and computers. I have a rubbish phone and unfashionable trainers. Nobody apart from Alan speaks to me.’

  Robin got distracted as they turned off into a parking lot.

  They’d reached the liveliest remnant of Locksley High Street, a strip mall, across from the abandoned light-rail terminal where you could once have ridden a tram fifteen stops to the centre of Nottingham.

  Hipsta’s Drive Thru Donut had mums and tradies seeking caffeine and sugar, and the Curl Up and Dye salon kept busy fixing up elderly ladies who’d starve sooner than cancel their regular hairdo. But they rolled past these and stopped by the aquamarine frontage of Captain Cash.

  ‘What are we here for?’ Robin asked. ‘You hate Captain Cash.’

  6. GROUND-FLOOR OPPORTUNITY

  Captain Cash was the most successful business to come out of Locksley in the twenty years since the car plants closed. Its colourful stores offered to pay instant cash for stuff like laptops, smartphones and jewellery, or short-term loans at crippling rates of interest.

  There were now more than a hundred Captain Cash branches, but it had been founded in a shuttered fried-chicken joint, by three seventeen-year-olds in their final year at
Locksley High School.

  The first partner was Guy Gisborne. He was the well-brought-up son of a librarian and a dentist, but he’d always fancied himself an outlaw. As a teenager, he’d had several scrapes with the law and served four months in juvenile detention.

  Everyone hoped founding a successful business would straighten Guy out. Instead, Gisborne used his share of Captain Cash profits to build a criminal empire, slowly taking over every racket in Locksley and getting most of the town’s cash-strapped police force under his thumb.

  Marjorie Kovacevic was the second teenaged partner, and the brain to Gisborne’s brawn. She turned down places at top universities to run Captain Cash, and six years later masterminded the sale of the business to the multi-billion-dollar King Corporation. With twenty million in her pocket, Marjorie set her mind to politics.

  She became Sheriff Marjorie, the youngest person ever elected as Sheriff of Nottingham, which made her boss of an entire county and guardian of the vast Sherwood Forest to the north.

  Completing the trio of seventeen-year-olds who didn’t listen when adults told them Captain Cash was a stupid idea, was Ardagh Hood. To raise money for the business, he’d worked three after-school jobs, begged his grandfather for a loan and spent an entire summer holiday with Guy and Marjorie, scrubbing grease out of the abandoned chicken shop, patching its leaky roof and hand-painting Captain Cash’s first brightly coloured pirate sign.

  But Ardagh’s vision of an ethical local business that helped hard-up people get a small loan or free up cash by selling stuff they didn’t need, was at odds with Marjorie’s ruthless quest to squeeze profit out of every customer, and Gisborne using the shop to fence stolen goods and sending thugs to terrorise people who missed a loan payment.

  ‘Your dad would be a very wealthy man if he’d held on to his share of Captain Cash instead of his principles,’ Robin’s Auntie Pauline often joked.

  Ardagh looked irritated every time his sister mentioned this, but Robin often imagined an alternative life, where they had millions in the bank instead of frozen economy burgers and hand-me-down clothes.

  But Robin didn’t think about any of that as they stepped inside, because the super-catchy Captain Cash radio jingle was playing on repeat and took over his brain.

  Don’t take fright when money’s tight.

  Cos Captain Cash will set you right!

  Captain Cash’s Locksley branch had long since moved from the former chicken joint where it began into premises ten times the size.

  Its illuminated glass cabinets were filled with stuff people can live without when times get tough. Games consoles were stacked like house bricks. Also for sale were pre-loved examples of the smartphone every kid had wanted two years earlier, digital cameras, ping-pong tables, fishing gear, barbecues, wedding dresses and drones.

  One entire wall was lined with cool musical instruments like drums and electric guitars that adults buy for themselves, and the ones like flutes and oboes that they nag kids for never practising.

  Robin had only been in the store a few times before. The place was always busy and even at three on a weekday afternoon there were eight people queuing to cash cheques, borrow or sell.

  A sturdy man in a farmer’s overall at one counter was stressing because they were only offering eighty bucks for his chainsaw.

  ‘Can’t you double check?’ he begged, flapping a pink Tool Shack invoice in the air. ‘This cost over eight hundred bucks. Ninety-six CCs and a diamond chain!’

  The weary clerk drummed raspberry-coloured nails on the counter. Her name badge had a cartoon of Captain Cash with a parrot on his shoulder and read, Hi, I’m Rhongomaiwenua.

  ‘Sir, we only pay the price that comes up on the computer. You’ve got my queue backed up. So kindly accept my offer, or step aside so I can serve another customer.’

  Robin saw the big man’s tendons go tight, turning his deep-tanned neck into a lizard collar. At the same time, Ardagh got furious looks as he bypassed the queue.

  ‘Sir!’ Rhongomaiwenua snapped at Ardagh.

  ‘I need to see the manager,’ Ardagh said gently.

  Rhongomaiwenua gave Ardagh the exact look Tiffany, Stephanie and Bethany gave Robin when he got a hundred per cent on a Maths quiz.

  ‘There is no manager here,’ Rhongomaiwenua said. ‘If you wish to make a complaint you need to call head office in Nottingham.’

  ‘Isla is a friend of mine,’ Ardagh insisted. ‘Says there’s a bunch of computer stuff out back to collect.’

  Before Rhongomaiwenua could process this, a sweet-faced woman in a shoulder-padded business suit came out and opened the counter flap.

  7. HUNKS OF JUNK TO PUT IN THE TRUNK

  ‘This is my boy Robin,’ Ardagh told Isla.

  ‘Out of school early,’ Isla noted, as Robin followed his dad behind the counter.

  ‘Long story,’ Ardagh sighed.

  Robin jumped out of his skin as a huge bang erupted on the counter he’d just stepped through. The giant farmer had raised and smashed down the chainsaw before leaning way over the counter and shouting.

  ‘You people are thieves!’ he spat at Rhongomaiwenua. ‘Take your offer? You can roll it into a ball and shove it up your …’

  Robin saw Rhongomaiwenua pressing a red alarm button and two armed security guards shot out of a staff break room.

  ‘Does that happen a lot?’ Robin asked, as Isla unlocked a door and took them down a short flight of steps to a store room.

  ‘Only six times a day,’ Isla laughed. ‘People come in when they’re desperate. They don’t like it when we offer less money than they need. But when you’ve worked here as long as I have, it goes right over your head.’

  Robin could hear the security guards and the big farmer in a muffled shouting match as Isla showed them a stack of tatty computers, aged screens, laptops and a black bin-bag stuffed to bursting with cables, mice and keyboards.

  ‘We had a big clear-out of stuff we’ll never sell,’ Isla explained. ‘Some of this works, some doesn’t. Take anything you want; the rest will go in the trash.’

  Ardagh looked chuffed as he walked around the stack of aged IT gear.

  ‘I’ll take as much as I can fit in my car,’ he said keenly. ‘I teach a computer repair course at the library. We always need gear for the students to tinker with. Anything we clean up and get working is donated to a charity that supplies computers to schools in Congo.’

  ‘Beats going in the trash,’ Isla said brightly. ‘I’ll open up the back door, so you don’t have to carry all the stuff through the zoo out front.’

  ‘Ready for some lifting, son?’ Ardagh asked.

  Robin grabbed a couple of laptops. ‘If these work, they’re better than the one I’ve got at home,’ he noted.

  His dad spoke with unusual sharpness, as Isla found a hand trolley they could use. ‘Does today seem like a good day to be asking for a new laptop?’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Robin answered defensively.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to my office to make some calls,’ Isla said.

  ‘No problem,’ Ardagh said. ‘Before you go, did anything happen about the system-security report I wrote?’

  Besides his badly paid part-time job retraining unemployed auto workers in IT, Ardagh did freelance work as a white hat, a type of ‘good’ hacker paid to find weaknesses in security systems by trying to break into them. Robin was fascinated by anything to do with hacking, but shocked that his dad had written a report for Captain Cash.

  ‘I had to get an independent security audit for our insurance company,’ Isla explained, lowering her voice so nearby employees couldn’t hear. ‘Your report told me what I already knew: that our security here is hopeless. But when I called headquarters in Nottingham a month later … Nothing. They said there’s no budget allocation for IT improvements at this branch.’

  Ardagh nodded and spoke so quietly Robin could barely hear. ‘When I’ve done other reports for King Corporation companies, I’ve had people take me aside and t
ell me to make sure I don’t find the very security problems I’m being paid to find. All management cares about is hitting quarterly profit targets and getting their bonus.’

  Isla nodded. ‘King Corporation made 4.5 billion dollars last year, but my staff have to bring in their own pens, and I don’t think there’s a single chair in this branch that isn’t broken. It’s ridiculous … But listen, I’ve really got to go make this call. I hope the computers prove useful.’

  ‘They will, for sure,’ Ardagh said, as he started loading desktop PCs onto the hand trolley.

  8. SENSATIONAL SCENES AT THE LOCAL LIBRARY

  Irene led a straight life until she was thirty. She went from high school to a well-paid but mind-numbing assembly-line job that lasted until the car plants closed. Her husband was one of the lucky ones who got transferred to a plant in another town, but after a couple of years he stopped coming home on weekends, then stopped coming home at all.

  The second half of Irene’s life had been a personal version of Locksley’s downward spiral. Drugs, depression and four years in prison after setting up a business selling stolen car parts.

  Now Irene was out on parole, and on Wednesday afternoons the tattooed sixty-year-old went to Locksley Library & Learning Centre for Ardagh Hood’s Computer & Device Repair course.

  ‘Laptops and phones and stuff are hard to fix because each one is different,’ Robin explained, as one of the rescued Captain Cash computers started up on a workbench between himself and Irene. ‘But desktops are modular. So, now I’ve plugged in the display card from that other machine, hopefully …’

  The screen flickered with a Windows logo, as Ardagh approached.

  ‘Your boy knows his stuff,’ Irene told Ardagh cheerfully.

  ‘Our house has been full of computers and junk since Robin was born,’ Ardagh explained. ‘He’s always had a knack with them, though right now he’s supposed to be sat at the back writing an essay explaining why he can’t behave himself at school.’