Boy A (11 page)

A
nodded again.

‘Don’t just nod. You say “Yes, sir”.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We’ve had them all in here, you know: Rat Boy; Spider Boy; Blip Boy; Safari Boy, every one of those tabloid touted toe-rags has passed through Feltham. And do you know what? None of them was any different to any other little thief. But you, you and your young friend were responsible for a genuine bloody national tragedy. Don’t, for one second, ever make me regret helping you to hide in here.’ His mouth twisted as though to let
A
see what it would look like in rage. ‘Because they would tear you apart.’

Then in an instant the screw’s entire countenance changed. He closed the folder in front of him, and with spread fingers, pushed it to the side of his large desk. ‘Oh, on the governing governor’s orders you’re going to continue to see a psychologist once a month. Looks as though I should probably get you to a dentist too. Now, have you anything that you would like to raise?’

A
looked at the man. How he leaned forward with a deliberate smile, as if he cared. He didn’t care,
A
knew. But he also knew this might be all the help he was going to get.

‘I don’t know whether I can make it,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think I can take years of this. I don’t see how I can do it.’

‘That’s not a problem.’ The screw laughed his little joyless laugh again. ‘You just do what you can.’ He pushed a button that buzzed the door open. ‘I’ll see you do the rest.’

Time flies when you’re having fun. When you’re young. Days passed
A
and
B
by, in the days when they were together. There was no maths and no spelling; Fridays were pretty much the same as Tuesdays. And though there were plenty of games, there was only ever one team.

They would meet at the same crossroads where their ways parted again at night. The first there would hang around on a bleached bench that had been presented ‘With love to the memory of Bernard Debbs’. Once
A
tried to erase those words while he waited, scribbling over the brass plaque in a stolen red marker. But the engraved letters collected more ink than their surroundings, and became, if anything, more defined. Usually he would hold on until
B
arrived before doing much. No point in using up a good idea on your own. Most things he found were much better now he had a friend. And it was together that they carefully carved their initials all over the bench. Using the powerful retractable blade of
B
’s Stanley knife. Stonelee knife he called it.

Sometimes
B
brought other tools with him, borrowed from his brother’s box. Pliers, screwdrivers, spanners, wrenches. On days like these they would spend their time looking for things that could be undone, in acts of careful vandalism. Other days they just smashed and stole stuff.
Once
B
brought with him a ball of thick wool, a trowel and an old darning needle.

‘For killing eels,’ he told
A
. But he wouldn’t tell him more until they got to the right bit of the Byrne.

A
had never been down to the Byrne before. He’d watched it from a distance, seen the water run red then white. Leaving Stonelee stained with iron and aluminium salts. It congealed nearly to black in the flatter sluggish section, flowing under the unfinished ring road. It was here that
B
wanted to go, under the bridge like trolls. It was where eels lived, he said.

This was the Byrne at its worst, concreted like a canal. But disused, overgrown, steep stone sides crumbling and dangerous. Clogged with weeds and lumped with dumped mortar from building the road a decade ago. Blocks of stone still uneroded by the slow flow.
A
had been forbidden ever to approach this part of the Byrne. Which was in itself reason enough to go there. Some mothers preferred to say that evil lurked under the bridge. And sometimes it did.

B
picked up a used condom with his trowel and wafted it at
A
, making him shrink back from it. But not actually trying to get him with it. Not like when he’d been held down and smeared with shit from a nappy that the boys in his class had found in a skip. Although he could tell it was to be avoided,
A
wasn’t really sure what the condom was.

‘Is that from an eel?’ he asked his friend.

B
laughed and dropped the skin-like tube at his friend’s feet, so that he could inspect it unafraid. ‘It’s a rubber-jonny,’ he said.

A
nudged it with a scuffed school shoe, not much the wiser, knowing only that he had on occasion been compared to such a thing.

‘You put it over your dick so you don’t get slime all over you when you shag a woman,’
B
explained.

It looked impossibly large for such a purpose to
A
, but he knew his ignorance next to his worldly companion. He kicked the jonny into the Byrne. Where it floated, no doubt due to its slime repellency, on the water’s dismal skin. Watching the jonny’s sorry progress was like trying to see the minute hand of a watch move. The debris-choked channel drifted at the precise border between flow and stagnation. It wasn’t long before they took to trying to sink the rubber-floater with rocks. The Byrne swallowed them with disdainful ease; eventually sucking down the jonny too.

‘Come on then,’
B
said, brandishing his trowel. ‘We’re going to need a lot of worms if we’re going to go eel-bobbing.’

‘Eel-bobbing,’
A
repeated, hoping this wasn’t going to resemble the apple-bobbing he had done one Halloween.

B
selected a spot where the earth was soft and began to dig.
A
joined him when he’d found a flat lump of wood and a rusty six-inch nail, which he used as shovel and pick. The worms came quickly, it had rained early in the morning, and
B
placed them all on a plastic hubcap, so they couldn’t escape. He tried to divide them into big ones and small ones, but the two groups kept squirming together. One worm they found was so large that, as it clung in its hole, it stretched in
B
’s hands to well over a foot before its flesh ripped and it snapped. Even shrunk back and in half, it was the biggest worm they had. So they carefully excavated its other section, which still burrowed frantically, shitting out the dirt it ate through the wound where the rest of its body had been.

When he judged they had enough large worms
B
showed
A
how to thread them. He selected a fat one, which writhed in his grip, growing and twisting, and poking its blind head all around; in what seemed to be either pathetic attempts to escape, or else very proficient attempts to be so disgusting that it might be thrown away. The efforts were futile.
B
lifted
his threaded darning needle before his glinting eyes and worked it through the whole length of the worm, so that it hung on the thick wool. He repeated the action with a second worm, and continued until a good three-foot section of string was covered entirely by worm.

Often the worms he pierced splurted a clear liquid which would fly on to his bomber, or his grubby school shirt.
B
would laugh at this, and assured
A
that it was good luck if some landed in your mouth.
A
kept his mouth firmly closed and took his chances with bad luck.

Next
B
wrapped the worm-coated wool around the span of his hand, and tied all of those loops together at the top. To create a big clump of dead worms at the end of a long piece of string.

With the Stonelee knife they turned a green branch into a rod, and then attached the heavily baited wool.
A
still couldn’t understand how they were going to catch eels with no hook. But he didn’t question his friend.

B
’s patience was amazing. Normally he got bored of any activity after a few minutes. But he sat there for half the morning on the bank of the Byrne, gently bobbing the clump of worm carcasses just off the water-bottom.
A
sat beside him, occasionally, as directed, throwing in a couple of the smaller worms as ground-bait. A few times he was allowed to take the rod for a while, on the strict condition that he pass it straight over if he felt a bite.

‘The strike’s got to be just right,’
B
explained. ‘You got to be quick, but really steady, and then eely’s little teeth get snagged in the wool, and if you’re good you can get him over the bank before he untangles his self.’

A
didn’t feel a bite, but he felt a bit like Tom Sawyer when he held the rod; with his friend as Huckleberry Finn, whose adventures he’d seen on TV. The feeling would have been stronger if they were allowed out in the sunshine, but
B
insisted that eels liked the darkness under the bridge.
Periodically, articulated lorries would labour over the road, and everything would rumble as if the whole world was going to come down on them.

While they waited,
A
watched an ant dragging at a lump of dead worm, six or seven times bigger than itself. It was making slow progress, but it wouldn’t give up, just kept pulling, a millimetre at a time, in the direction of an unseen nest. On a generous impulse,
A
pushed the prize forward a few inches, careful not to harm the ant as he did so. The ant went frantic. Leaving the worm-meat altogether, it ran round and round in panic, and then fled, in the opposite direction.
A
didn’t understand what had happened, why his attempt to help seemed only to have flung the ant into the throes of insanity. He figured that the ant must have seen his hand as the hand of a god, something huge and powerful. And for a moment he felt huge and powerful.

A
realized from
B
’s face that he hadn’t really expected to catch the eel. Even so,
B
struck just as he had described, smooth and steady. But when he swung the eel over the bank they both realized that they had nothing to put it in. They had reached the end of their plans. The end of the line. But they couldn’t just let it go, not after all that trouble. The eel felt danger, it thrashed on the woollen trap to free its teeth, and dropped to the concrete. Both boys just looked on, as it started to writhe its way back towards the water. Flecks of rust and brick-dust sticking to its lithe slimy body. It must have been able to smell its home, just feet away. But it saw the boys in front of it and changed its tack, heading left towards the deeper shadows, and the softer foe.

‘Grab it,’
B
yelled.

And
A
, knowing that he had to, did. Disgust twisted through him with every twitch of the thick, slick, fish-snake. But he held it, with one hand around its throaty gills and the other on its tail. It struggled and glared and gasped at him, showing tiny dagger teeth tangled with streams of red wool.

‘Get something to hold it down, quickly,’ he said.

B
appeared, with their digging tools. He slid
A
’s flat wood beneath the eel, and pushed the point of the nail just slightly into its oily back. Then, with a half-brick, he banged it home. The eel hissed wetly, and bucked its head upwards, as the nail passed through it and into the wood. Fatty blood splattered. One small drop went in
B
’s mouth.

The eel fought for an hour, while its tormentors shared
A
’s pack-lunch. They always shared.
B
got free school meals, but the scrap-saving, flap-armed dinner ladies didn’t do take-outs. He tried to feed the eel a bit of Mighty White crust, only for some reason it wasn’t hungry. It twisted around to bite at the nail though, tearing the hole in itself larger and larger, yet still unable to get free.

When it finally gave up the ghost,
B
ripped it from the board and threw it into the Byrne. It sank for a moment, and then inexplicably rose to the surface again. They pelted it with stones like they had the jonny. But it wouldn’t go away. Eventually it drifted out of sight.

Even after lunch, and half a flask of lemon-barley,
B
was sure he could still taste the drop of eel blood. It moved somewhere inside him. And his hands felt dirty from where they had touched it. Like when he’d had to touch his brother, who was also slimy. Sure that the sticky secret was still on him. Sure that the next day’s light would reveal where translucent globs had clung while in the dark.

They left the rod where it lay, and climbed back up to the road.

B
had always been an Outlaw, just like Just William. But somehow high jinks are not acceptable from certain people. If your hair isn’t ruffled, but greasy and uncut. If you’re dirty, not from climbing trees, but because you don’t wash. If you have thin pursed lips instead of a cheeky grin. But there was more than this too. He could sing the lyrics, but he couldn’t
understand the melody. There was something missing from this boy called
B
, something broken maybe, or never allowed to grow. People could feel the empty bit. And they were wary of it. He was a starer,
B
, and his stares created discomfort. Uneasy himself, he was a vector of unease, spreading it in slow ripples. His teachers tended to ignore his absences, because everything became much pleasanter when he wasn’t there. The tension was gone, the thick heavy air that you get before something happens. This is what they said afterwards, anyway.

On
B
’s estate all the buildings were fused into termite rows of tenements; unevenly heighted, with tunnels twisted through their midst into unseen yards and further blocks. Washing hung from tightrope lines, which traversed above the streets at unnatural angles. Most of the clothes were too grimy with age to ever be properly cleaned, and the air felt too cold and damp to dry them. Technically the area was condemned, due for regeneration. But the project, like Stonelee, had run out of money. There were hardly any children still living there. Families were prioritized for escape.

B
’s brother liked it, though. And as the bread-stealer of the house, his views went. The estate was almost impossible to police: a lattice of courts in which you couldn’t be trapped, because each was linked by alleys to four others. The permutations were simply impossible to investigate. So many flats were disused that there were always plenty of holing places, even for those too knackered to keep running. Once inside the estate you were safe. Provided of course that you could ever feel safe in such a place. The brother did. He ran with a gang, who didn’t seem to like each other much, but who worked as a co-operative for burglaries and beatings. They called themselves the Anthill Mob. After the cartoon, not as admission of their insignificance.