Day 12
2,721 words tonight / 21,117 words total. I’m about 550 words behind where I should be, and probably won’t be able to do anything tomorrow. Will need to have a big night on Thursday!
34. Rowan
Rowan had meant what he said: it wasn’t for anyone else to rob from his family. He didn’t think his mum often got things right, but she got this right—there were kids out there these days that had no respect for anything.
Sure, Rowan had done a few things in his time that other people could consider anti-social. He knew that, he wasn’t stupid, no matter what anyone said. Some bastard like Rod or Jim or his Year 5 teacher saying he was stupid did not make him stupid. He was smart, and he was justified. That was the important thing as Rowan saw it. Justification.
And now, more than ever, he would have justice on his side. These kids, he would find them, and he would teach them a lesson. Rowan avoided fights, generally, but this was an exception. It wasn’t that Rowan didn’t like violence, it’s just that most of the time when he was involved in violence, it wasn’t a fight: it was him hitting someone. But Jim had said there were three of them. That, to Rowan, sounded like it might be more of a fight than normal.
He headed down Compton Street, right onto Oakley Avenue and up Grove Hill. There was no sign of anyone at all. Eventually, after walking for another twenty minutes or so, he turned back.
The blood was pumping hard through his veins. It was no longer about just finding the bastard kids that did for Jim. It was about the whole fucking world, the way it worked. Rowan was so often in this position for one reason or another: one moment he’d be doing one thing and the next something entirely different, having been swept along by events outside of his control. That was the way it worked. If Jim hadn’t been attacked, Rowan wouldn’t be so pissed off now. He’d be at home with a full stomach, in front of the television, swearing casually at his mum or Camille or one of the others. It was as if the world set out to annoy him: that was the way it worked. As he walked, he shook his hands as if ending an exercise class. He was so full of energy: directionless energy.
He hadn’t calmed down by the time he’d reached home, so he stopped outside the front gate. There was a battered cigarette in his pocket. He wasn’t sure if it was smokable but sure enough, it lit. He paced as he smoked. For the first time, he felt the cold. He was shivering, in part from the temperature, and in part from the abuse his body had taken over the past days. This feeling—this sensation of being stretched, he knew it well. It was the way he felt when he was at the end of his tether, when he couldn’t take anymore.
There was the biting cold, the rushing blood, the mangled cigarette… he looked into the front room where Jim was being nursed by their mother—Jenkins had gone—his pitiful fucking brother having his pitiful fucking head iced… then there was the navy blue, the rouge lipstick, the blocked toilet… he watched his mother leave, to make tea no doubt, he could hear her voice in his head, her whiny voice… then there was the flame hair, the oncoming car, the crunch of tyres over bone…
Rowan’s breathing accelerated, breath expelled through his nose in two great puffs. He was like a bull, squat and hunched, nostrils large, oxygen fuelled, nicotine fuelled, ready, ready, ready…
35. Jump
It was as if a sudden vacuum had been created in the front room of the Barrett family home. The window seemed to crack and—WHOOOM—the glass was pulled right in. Jim instinctively pulled a cushion over his face; Valerie, who was just walking through the door, threw the cup of tea she’d made across the room in shock.
Of course, there was no vacuum. It had been a rock, or a brick even. A large stone, at any rate.
Jim slowly uncovered his face and looked around. There were shards of glass everywhere and the lamp by the window had been toppled. He looked to his mother. She was unhurt, but she was shaking uncontrollably. “Come and sit down,” he said, softly.
Yes, and despite it all, Valerie smiled. Those were the first truly kind words she’d heard in a long time.
Jim, with his back to the window, didn’t see the flurry of movement that Valerie did. She nearly screamed. She got as far as opening her mouth in fact, but she promptly shut it again. She’d only caught a glimpse of the man outside, but it was enough.
A woman recognises her own son.
“It must have been those thugs that mugged you,” she said, convincingly. “They must have come back…”
Jim turned nervously to the window. “Well,” he said, “there’s no-one out there now.”
Then, Valerie experienced something she hadn’t had in years: the sensation of hugging one of her children. “I’m scared,” she said, holding Jim tightly and reaffirming in her mind his status as favourite child.
“It’ll be okay, mum,” Jim said, although he was uncertain that was true.
But of course, Valerie knew it would be okay. For once in his rotten life, Rowan had done some good.
36. Just As The Window Caved In…
While the glass rained down across the carpet at home, Camille was lost in her own little jiggly world in the club. Meanwhile Jack, the bigger and squarer of the two friends they’d picked up, gyrated awkwardly at arm’s length. Sara, sitting by the the bar, was now more than half turned away from Samuel. They hadn’t spoken in five minutes.
Eventually, Camille’s feet started to hurt and she suggested that she and Jack should get a drink. “What are you having?” he asked. A larger, she told him. Then she demanded that he buy a vodka for Sara. “I would have done that anyway,” he insisted.
The four of them stood around drinking for a while. They would have done so in more or less total silence, had it not been for Jack, who was desperate to raise the mood. He kept casting disapproving looks at Samuel, conveying the words, “I expect more from you, mate,” perfectly in quick glances and small muscle movements. Samuel, in return, raised his eyebrows slightly, non-verbal code for, “I’m doing my best, you bastard.”
His best, however, wasn’t cutting it. Jack decided to interject. “You seem quiet, Sara,” he said brightly. “I suppose Samuel’s enough to get anyone down…” He laughed at his own joke, weakly. Camille had taken her shoes off. She was balanced on one leg, flamingo-like, massaging her foot. “Cheap trainers,” she explained.
Sara got to her feet and left, walking right between the other three without saying a word. “Where are you going?” Jack asked after her, but she was already gone.
“Toilet, probably,” Camille said. “Anyway, who cares? Next round’s on me… it’ll be a cheaper one now!”
Sara hadn’t gone to the toilet, she’d gone to the cloakroom. She collected her jacket and left.
Camille wasn’t far behind her sister in leaving the club. She and the two men fell into a cab and headed back to Jack’s place.
His flat was a tiny studio in Finsbury Park. The three sat round for ten minutes or so, eating burgers they’d picked up on the way and drinking warm canned beers. When they were finished, Camille leant over to Jack, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Meanwhile, she reached out for Samuel, eventually finding his hand and gripping it tightly. “Now what?” she asked them both.
37. Sara’s Journey Home
Sara left the club, relaxed instantly by the freezing air. She was drunk, but not drunk enough. The streets were alive with people getting cabs, getting kebabs, kissing, pissing… satisfying their bodies in every which way. Sara observed that all the mess: the vomit she had to jump over, the beer-bottles, the burger wrappers; and all the disorder: the argument over whose cab it was, the repentant sobbing on mobile phones to boyfriends and girlfriends, the drunken zombie-like lurching—she observed all this mess and disorder in the whirlwind of urbanity around her. Yet she wasn’t disgusted by it. Quite the opposite, for Sara it represented mankind at its most honest.
Conversely, in the flats above the 24-hour convenience store, for instance, there was probably a 2.5 family tucked up in bed asleep, having had a wholesome night of boardgames and TV. A pleasant wind-down from a week of drudgery, a week of hard labour. Sara drew her jacket closer around her, unsettled by the thought of those people’s lives. Mostly, she was unsettled at the prospect of ending up like that herself. What of Mark, her boss, whose whole life was invested into a job that meant nothing? Nothing! He dealt with money—money: nothing more than a symbol, a representation. Paper cash in itself had never meant anything even in it’s height of the 20th century. Now even that paper it was printed on was even further devalued: money existing only in numbers on a screen. Life filtered down to the point where all that is left is concept: insubstantial, intangible and valueless.
A man appeared out of nowhere and staggered past Sara, who managed to sidestep him at the last moment. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his forehead and underarms sweaty, his shirt untucked. And Sara again wondered: what relationship was there between the sanitised office she shared with Mark on the second floor of a glass monument to abstraction, and this shoddy state of a man, this reality, this humanity?
It was with these thoughts that she staggered reluctantly into another bar, and another, and another, and another, each closer to home, to bed.
38. Motherly Secrets or, Rowan Goes Crazy and Runs Away Again
Rowan rattled his keys in the front room. Valerie stood. “Jim, go to bed. You need your rest. I’ll come and check on you—”
“I don’t need checking on, mum,” Jim protested in a childish, whingy voice. In the space of a few hours their relationship had regressed to that of a first time mother with her toddler son.
Rowan stood by the door, watching.
“I take it you didn’t find them,” said Jim, pointing at the window.
“No,” Rowan said.
“Come on, Jim, go to bed,” Valerie urged..
Jim allowed himself to be ushered out of the room. He got himself a glass of water and went upstairs.
“His head’s fine,” Rowan said. “He’s not even bleeding.”
Valerie sipped from a cup of tea. “Sit down for a moment, would you Rowan?” Rowan looked at her uneasily but did as he was asked. Valerie continued, gently: “I know you put the window through, Rowan. I saw you. I—” Rowan began to try to defend himself, but Valerie carried on, talking over him. “I don’t care. Listen to me, Row—Rowan, listen—Rowan! Be quiet and listen to me a moment! It doesn’t matter about the window. I want to ask you something… I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I want you never to tell anyone it was you who did the window.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why, Rowan. I’m asking you: if anyone questions you, you say you don’t know anything about it. You say it was probably the lads who attacked Jim. Do you understand me?”
Rowan shrugged, spinning his keys in his hand nonchalantly. “Whatever.”
“Good,” said Valerie.
Rowan reflected on the treatment that Jim had got—for what? Being a coward, a victim? His mother hadn’t so much as asked Rowan if he’s okay. The fact was, he wasn’t fucking okay. He was pissed off. Frustrated. And not only that, he was second best, too. Jim was always the favourite.
“What?” said Valerie.
Rowan looked at her in surprise. “Hmm?”
“What did you say?” Valerie asked.
“I said, er, ‘whatever…’”
“No, after that.”
“Nothing.”
Valerie leant in close to her son. “I don’t have favourites, Rowan.”
Rowan, for the first time in a long time, was genuinely shocked. “I didn’t say that…” he stuttered. He had thought it, he hadn’t said it.
“What do you mean, ‘I didn’t say that’? I heard you! ‘Jim was always the favourite.’”
Rowan recoiled, stunned. His keys fell on the floor. He was scared. Was he mad?
“Some excuse!” Valerie said.
Rowan stared at her, slack jawed. “Am I mad?” he asked. His heart was racing again, his hands shaking. Valerie looked on, starting to become concerned. Why was he so confused? And why was he repeating himself? It was all too much for one evening. First Jim, then the shock of the window, now this… “Go to bed,” she said. “You’re stressed.”
Rowan felt he had every right to be stressed. As he saw it, one of to things was happening to him: either his mother could read his mind, or he was speaking his thoughts without realising it. But how can you speak without knowing..?
“I’m no mind-reader,” Valerie said, trying to be reassuring.
Rowan looked at her in absolute horror, and then, in a flash, he was gone. Valerie ran after him into the street, waving his keys and shouting, “At least take these,” but in reality, she was glad he was gone for the night. She consoled herself with a familiar fantasy: nineteen years ago, there had been a terrible mistake… Comforted at least a little, she went upstairs, kissed a sleeping Jim on the forehead, and went to bed.
It had certainly been a long night.
39. A Very Odd Thing
At four in the morning, Rowan was back on his bench, asleep. He was the only member of the Barrett family not in bed in the family home. Even Camille had got back safe and sound, her diarised drawings of the night neatly laid out by her bed. It didn’t matter how drunk she got, the pictorial journal was a ritual she never forgot.
At five past four in the morning, a very odd thing happened. Every child of the Barrett family had the same dream—not just similar, but identical. And it came to all of them simultaneously: Camille, Sara, Jim and Rowan.
In the dream, they were standing in the kitchen of the family home. They were looking for some seeds. Plant seeds. It was crucial that they got the seeds, but they couldn’t find them anywhere.
In real life, incidentally, none of the Barrett family were remotely interested in horticulture… except, arguably, for Rowan, who had once grown weed with the intention of replacing Valerie’s basil with it when it was ready, for a joke. He was thirteen at the time.
In the dream, they raided every cupboard, threw food and glasses and bottles around—even ripped handles off drawers—in their desperation to get the seeds. Then, the each spotted one cupboard they hadn’t seen before, right in the corner of the kitchen.
In real life, incidentally, the cupboard they hadn’t seen before not only didn’t exist, but could’t exist, as it was where the back door was. To be precise, it was where the cat-flap in the backdoor was. The Barrett family didn’t own a real cat; Camille had a make-believe one as a child, that she named Neo. The cat-flap was put in at her insistence. “How else,” she asked, “can pretend Neo get out to see his pretend friends?”
In the dream, they delved deeper and deeper into the cupboard until their whole body was inside. They couldn’t find the seeds. The cupboard had almost everything else in it, though. Crisps and sweets and fizzy drink and so on. Mostly food and drink from their childhood. Eventually, unable to find the seeds, they gave up and pulled themselves out… slowly, slowly, slowly. Once back in the kitchen, it took their eyes a few minutes to adjust to the light, but when they did they saw something they never expected. It was enough cause each one of them to wake, screaming.
It was the enraged and bloodied face of their father.
