Something Wicked Read online

  You should never judge by appearances.

  Fairfield looked better than I thought it would, but I guess that was because the sun was shining. It was still a bit chilly – I had my charcoal-grey fleece on. It’s sad, in a way, that I don’t even have to describe Fairfield to you. Not because it’s notorious, but because you’ve seen so many places like it. Assemble in your mind’s eye a few lines of maisonettes with women hanging around outside, two or three grey stone high-rises, and pubs with fat blokes sitting outside on wooden tables, supping beer. But funnily enough, there’s a kind of village atmosphere there, because Fairfield is a place a short distance from the centre of town, the nearest we have to a no-go area. So once you’re there, it encloses you. You feel part of it. I felt part of it, anyway. I didn’t even mind the women eyeing me.

  I knew the community centre was a bit further down the road, a one-storey breeze-block building with bars over the windows. As I approached it, I was surprised to see stacks of withered Cellophane-wrapped bouquets of flowers and a couple of damp-looking teddy bears on the pavement outside it. I was trying to read the names on the cards inside the flowers when I heard Ritchie’s voice.

  “Hi.”

  I turned. “Hi. What happened here?”

  “Some kids crashed a car last month. A couple of them snuffed it.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what to say.

  Ritchie was dressed in an olive-green hooded fleece and jeans. Standing there by all the dead flowers made me feel very alive, spared from something. Almost invulnerable.

  “Did you know those kids?” I asked Ritchie.

  “No. They weren’t from round here.”

  I put my hand in my jeans pocket then and gave him two ten-pound notes. He took them and muttered some thanks. I tried to make light of it.

  “No sweat. I’m always borrowing money off my mum.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said.

  “Whenever.”

  There was a moment of awkwardness. I thought I ought to go back home but I didn’t want to. Ritchie looked different in the sunshine. His shaved head made him look hard, accentuated his jawline and cheekbones. But his eyes – soft, brown eyes – almost seemed to belong to a different person – a shy, uncertain one.

  Just at that moment two lads arrived on mountain bikes. One leapt off his bike and stood in front of Ritchie, as if he was barring his way. Ritchie thrust the two tenners at him and he grabbed them. In a second he was back on his bike – it was all over so quickly that if you’d asked me to pick him out from an identity parade, I couldn’t have done it.

  “I feel shit about taking that money off you,” Ritchie murmured.

  “Why should you? You were going to rob me of it last night.”

  “Yeah – but that wasn’t personal. Now it is.”

  For some reason, I liked the way he said the word “personal”. I smiled, and still put off saying goodbye. I noticed he wasn’t moving either. I wondered if I should suggest we do something. Though God knew what. He didn’t have any money and neither did I.

  And then the guys on the bikes returned. This time, knowing who they were, I felt my stomach somersault. Wasn’t the money enough? Were they going to beat him up after all?

  But I was wrong. These were different boys.

  “Hiya, Ritch!”

  The first one who screeched to a halt and got off his bike didn’t look like my idea of a dealer. He wore a local football shirt and had messy blond hair.

  “Hi yourself,” Ritchie said, looking pleased to see him. The boy with him looked younger – but might just have been shorter. He had a black puffa jacket.

  “We’re going to Woodsy’s place,” the football shirt said. “You coming?”

  Ritchie hesitated for a moment. Then he said to me, “D’you wanna come?”

  You bet.

  We walked to a block of flats which looked about ten storeys high. Grey stone, white window frames: not in bad nick, but not the sort of place you’d want to live in. It was dull, uniform, prison-like. I don’t know if the lifts were working or not, as the lads made straight for the stairs and ran up them. Have you noticed when lads get together they behave differently from when they’re alone? Now that Ritchie was with his mates, he was larking about, competing with them – they were racing up the stairs, calling out good-natured abuse to each other. Luckily I’m quite fit and was able to keep up with them. They – we – ran all the way to the top. I was panting by then. I knew we’d reached the top as in front of us was just a red door and a corridor to our right where the doors to the flats were. But the lads didn’t turn right. Instead, the football shirt – Ritchie called him Loz – was messing around with the red door. I didn’t see what he was doing, but finally he heaved himself against the door and it gave. It opened to a few more steps, leading to a small room with brick walls and some tanks.

  Loz opened another door, and then we walked out on to the middle of the roof.

  I watched the lads as they made their way towards the edge. I stayed close to the door; I noticed the place we’d come from was a bricked-in, covered area you could walk all the way round, a self-contained block on top of the roof. Ritchie and the others were at the edge now. I didn’t want to follow them. There was no railing, just a sheer drop to the bottom. A CCTV camera peered down to the ground and a couple of aerials stood forlornly.

  Then there was the thump of more footsteps and another lad joined us, carrying a stereo. While they were all greeting each other I tried to get over my vertigo. I looked out over Fairfield to the shopping precinct, the covered market and the main road. I turned and could see the park. From up here the whole of Fairfield and its people were insignificant. Being up high gives you a feeling of power. Maybe it was the feeling of power that was making me dizzy. I strained my eyes further to the horizon and saw the hills: tired, worn-out flat hills with the TV mast just a faint line on the horizon. I would have expected it to be windy up on the roof but it wasn’t. I could even feel the sun warming my face, making me feel it was all right to be where I was. Bit by bit I left the wall, no longer feeling afraid, but exhilarated. Even, if you like, on top of the world.

  “Who’s your girlfriend?” one of the lads asked Ritchie.

  “She’s my mate,” he said. “Anna.”

  Yesss! I was his mate. Ritchie introduced me properly to the lads. The little one was called Tanner. Loz I’d already worked out, and the boy with the stereo was Woodsy. I hoped I was going to remember their names. You know how it is when you meet people for the first time – you’re so bothered about what they think of you, you don’t focus on who they are. I was wondering what they made of me, and hoped they’d think I was OK. I just wanted to be accepted by them.

  I was. The boy called Loz handed me a can of Carling from an Asda carrier bag.

  “Cheers,” I said, and tugged at the ring pull. I reckoned I could make as if I was drinking it – the last thing I wanted to do was to say in front of these lads that I don’t drink. They’d think I was such a square.

  We all sat down together, the boys sprawling all over the place, jostling each other sometimes. Loz switched on the ghetto blaster and some R&B played – nothing mainstream, I didn’t recognise it. I decided not to talk much. It’s better when you join a new crowd just to take note, not to make a complete ass of yourself.

  They shared out the Carling and Loz was trying to spray some of the others. They jumped up and ran all over the place. I got a bit nervous when Tanner was close to the edge but I was determined not to show it. Once they settled down, the lads just chatted. Loz was going on about being in town last night and the pub they were thrown out of.

  “I thought you didn’t have any money?” Ritchie asked.

  “I gave my brother a hand in the afternoon with some jobs he was doing,” Loz said.

  “A hand job, was it?” Woodsy said. Everyone liked that and tried to follow it through with some more comments. I smiled.

  “Nah,” Loz interrupted. “Stop messing. W
e did some cars.”

  “Oh yeah?” Woodsy assumed only casual interest, but you could tell his ears had pricked up.

  “Some radios and stuff. I just looked out. Dead easy.”

  “Nice one,” Tanner said, looking impressed.

  Loz burped, as loud as he could. The others all groaned. Tanner said, “Watch it, Loz. We got a visitor.” He grinned at me. It was a friendly grin.

  “Sorry,” Loz said. “Where’d you meet Ritch?”

  “School.”

  “That new school you’re going to?” Loz asked Ritchie.

  He agreed. I noticed he wasn’t saying a lot. Was he always quiet like this, or was he just being quiet with me? Even when the conversation moved on to football he didn’t join in, but smiled when someone was being funny. Woodsy was going on about someone they knew who’d got in a fight with what sounded like a neighbouring gang. I couldn’t quite follow.

  But what I noticed was that they’d accepted me. I mean, whoever was talking sort of included me with his eyes. With some of the gory stuff about the fight – this guy lost four teeth – they specially looked at me to see my reaction. No one was playing any games. I thought of Karen and how she used me, and of all the girls at school and their allegiances and bitchiness. In contrast, these lads were dead straight. They weren’t clocking me to see what I was wearing, they weren’t ignoring me, nor were they putting me in the spotlight. I know you’ll have them down as a band of yobs, petty criminals and all that, and I’m not denying that they were, but they also had good manners. They put me at my ease. And it was great up there on the roof, in the sun, away from everything small and petty. I didn’t even need the Carling to feel drunk.

  Tanner was explaining how to get to someone’s house when we could hear more footsteps. This time the lads looked bothered. They began to curse and we all leapt up, realising we’d been discovered. And there was only one way down.

  “Where are you, you buggers?” came a gruff, angry voice.

  “Come and get us,” Ritchie taunted.

  Then he pulled me round the building to the door, guessing rightly that our pursuer would chase us in the direction of his voice. The other boys followed. We ran round the building, shot back inside and headed for the stairs. As fast as we could, almost tumbling, we catapulted ourselves down the foul-smelling concrete stairwell, round and round, down and down, until we hit the lobby.

  “Let’s split,” Ritchie said.

  Everyone ran off in different directions. Ritchie took my hand and walked slowly away with me. I could see what he was doing – making out as if we had nothing to do with trespassing on the roof, just a boy and a girl taking a stroll. Appearances were everything.

  It didn’t matter, as no one came to run after us. We walked towards the precinct, not that the shops were open. I was feeling great – adrenaline was coursing through me and it created a big surge of happiness. At the back of my mind a rather tinny voice prattled, You shouldn’t have gone on the roof. It was trespassing and it was dangerous. But I didn’t care. I thought – what harm did we do anyone else? Why shouldn’t we go on the roof?

  Once we reached the precinct Ritchie dropped my hand, and commented that we were safe now. He laughed, and I could tell he was in the same mood as me. If anything, the weather was sunnier. I just wanted the day to go on and on. When Ritchie suggested the park just outside Fairfield I tried not to sound too eager.

  We walked up to the main road, crossed at the lights and made our way to the park entrance.

  “So they’re your mates?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, they’re all right. Tanner’s all right.”

  “Did they go to your old school?”

  “No.”

  We reached the park gates. An ice-cream van was outside with a straggling queue. I was remembering what Loz had said about breaking into cars. The slight jolt it had given me had gone. It left me curious to know more.

  “So where did you meet them?”

  “Around. We hang out together during the day – used to hang out together when I first moved here, before I went back to school.”

  “They wagged it?”

  “No. They just didn’t go to school.”

  We were walking along the main path that led to the centre of the park. Ritchie turned off to the left on to a narrower path that led to the lake. The ground was slightly uneven and I had to watch my footing. Once we came to the lake, it was easier. We headed for a bench and sat there. Further down a man and a boy were fishing, a dark green tent beside them.

  “But I thought everyone has to go to school by law?” I questioned.

  “Yeah, but not everyone does.” Ritchie lit a cigarette, and with each drag he became more talkative.

  “I hated my last school. Everyone had it in for me. The teachers, right, you can tell they have favourites and I wasn’t one of them – no way. It was quite interesting, some of the stuff we did, but then half the time some old teacher would rush through the explanation when you were copying from the board or when the class was talking, and then refuse to repeat it, so I didn’t understand what was going on. Then they tell you off more and call you stupid. And you get to believe it after a while.”

  I told him that was dreadful and St Tom’s wasn’t like that, but I knew I was lying. A few of the teachers treated us as if we were pretty hopeless, thinking that would encourage us.

  “So I used to wag it,” Ritchie continued, “and then everyone would be on at me, so I’d go back to school, but by then I’d missed so much I couldn’t be arsed to catch up. And even the other kids treat you funny, like you don’t really belong. So you find you’re acting even more of a prat in order to get accepted.”

  Ritchie laughed to himself.

  I prompted him. “Go on.”

  “Like this. There was this one teacher, Conner, taught science, who kept picking on me all the time. He really pissed me off. He asked me questions when he knew I didn’t know the answers, he made jokes about the stuff I was wearing and if anyone was talking, he’d be, like, ‘Ritchie! Get out!’ I hated his guts. So what I did, I got myself locked in the lab one lunch time and loosened the tap on the front bench. So when we had our lesson after lunch, he starts this experiment and goes, ‘… and you have to add some water’, turns on the tap and it shoots off right up in the air, and he gets soaked with water. Completely drenched. All over his face and shirt. It was just brilliant. The class was in hysterics.”

  “Did he know it was you?”

  “I didn’t wait to find out. I legged it and didn’t go back. I reckon they didn’t think it was me as there was nothing on my records when I started at St Thomas’s. It was all about having to come in every day. Making a commitment, all that crap.”

  “I’m still surprised our school agreed to have you.”

  “You wouldn’t be if you’d met Wendy – my mum. She was the one who arranged it. All that stuff about you’ve got to give him a second chance, and he needs a good school, and look how high his SATs marks were.”

  “It’s good your mum cares about your education,” I commented.

  “Yeah. She cares, all right.”

  “Do you get on with her?”

  Ritchie looked baffled for a moment, as if no one had ever asked him that question before. “Yeah, yeah. I do. She can be hard to live with, but she’s my mum.”

  I could relate to that. I was quiet for a bit and stared ahead at the lake. Then I thought it was sad that Ritchie hadn’t had a proper education up till now, and then I thought that a so-called proper education wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Half of what I was learning for my GCSEs was going to be useless to me. And so much of the time I switch off in lessons – we all do. It unsettled me, the way Ritchie was making me see things differently. I had to admit he might be right about schools. But surely it couldn’t be right to steal, and that’s what he and his mates did. You see, at that point I still felt things like stealing and vandalism were wrong.

  Ritchie carried on talking, telling
me about his mates. None of them went to school either. Tanner had been relentlessly bullied and the school couldn’t stop it. Loz had been excluded lots of times. Woodsy used to go to a special place for kids thrown out of school, but he even refused to go there.

  I asked him what they did all day. Ritchie lit another cigarette.

  “Hang out in town. And we watch what’s going on, where they’re careless about security. We’ve nicked a few things. We know some people to pass them on to.”

  I could tell he was trying to impress me. There was a slight swagger in his speech. After having admitted he’d opted out of school I suppose he felt the need to show me he was smart. But I told him he’d get into trouble, and you couldn’t defend theft. He turned then and looked me straight in the eye.

  “Listen. In my life what have I taken? A few packs of fags, stuff that’s been left around where any fool can see it, cash if I can find it. And what’s been taken from me? Everything. I’ve got no future – I know that. I live in a stinking hole of a flat with my mum, who was kicked out of her job because the pub landlord wanted a younger barmaid – he robbed her of her income.

  “Everywhere you look, people are on the game. Businessmen, politicians, builders – everyone’s on the make, everyone’s only out for number one. Even the bloody Big Issue sellers pretend they haven’t got change if you offer them a fiver. So tell me why I should be any different?”

  At that moment a toddler set up a wail near us and I heard his mother screaming at him. But his wail drowned her voice. I tried to think what I could say to argue against Ritchie and came up with nothing. Looking at life from his point of view, I could see why he’d made his choices. They now seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

  “My mum’s out of work too,” I offered. “Through stress. She’s normally a practice manager for some doctors, but she gets periods of depression, ever since my dad left. He lives in Exeter with my brother. I don’t get to see them very often. Do you see your dad?”