Num8ers - By Rachel Ward Page 0,2
cigarette and flicked his lighter for me. I leaned forward and inhaled until it caught, drawing in some of his stink at the same time. I moved back quickly, and breathed out again. “Ta,” I mumbled.
He drew on his cig like it was the best thing on earth, then blew the smoke out theatrically and smiled. And I thought, Less than three months to go, that’s all. All this poor bugger’s got is skiving off school and having a smoke by the canal. Not what you’d call a life, is it?
I sat down on a heap of old railway sleepers. The nicotine made me feel less edgy, but nothing calmed Spider down. He was up and down, climbing on the sleepers, leaping off, balancing on the edge of the canal on the balls of his feet, jumping back again. I thought to myself, That’s how he’ll go, the silly sod, jumping off something, breaking his bloody neck.
“Don’t you ever keep still?” I said.
“Nah, I’m not a statue. Not a waxwork like at Madame Tussauds. I’ve got all this energy, man.” He did a little dance there on the towpath. Made me smile, couldn’t help it. Felt like the first time in years. He grinned back at me.
“You got a nice smile,” he said.
That did it. I don’t like personal comments. “Fuck off, Spider,” I said, “just fuck off.”
“Relax, man. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Yeah, well…I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like looking at people, neither, do you?”
I shrugged.
“People think you’re up yourself, the way you keep looking down, don’t look no one in the eye.”
“Well, that’s personal, too. I’ve got my reasons.”
He turned and kicked a stone into the canal. “Whatever. Listen, I’ll never say nothing nice to you again, OK?”
“OK,” I said. There were alarm bells going off inside my head. Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world — to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, to not get sucked in. You get used to someone — start to like them, even — and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves. I looked at him jiggling restlessly from foot to foot, now scooping up some stones and chucking them into the water. Don’t go there, Jem, I thought. In a few months, he’ll be gone.
While his back was turned, I got up quietly from my perch on the sleepers and started running. No explanations, no good-byes.
From behind me I could hear him calling, “Hey, where you going?” I was willing him to stay there, not to follow. His voice faded away as I put some distance between us.
“OK, be like that. See you tomorrow, man.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Nutter was cracking the whip. Someone must have rattled his cage — whatever, he was definitely on our case. No messing about, no backchat, heads down, English comprehension test, thirty minutes. Trouble is, when someone tells me to do something, I have this problem. I just wanna tell them to piss off, I’ll do it in my own time. Even if it’s something I actually want to do. Which this wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I can read, sort of, but I’m not very fast. My brain kind of needs time to sort out the words. If I try and read quickly, everything gets muddled up, the words don’t mean nothing.
Anyway, I was trying my best, this time. I really was. Karen, my foster mum, had read me the riot act over bunking off school. You know how it goes, don’t you? “Time to knuckle down…important to get some qualifications…life’s not a rehearsal…” She’d been talking to the school, to my social worker — all the usual suspects — and I figured I didn’t need the hassle anymore. I’d go along with it all, keep my head down for a bit, get me some breathing space.
Everyone else was quiet, too, for a change. They’d picked up on the Nutter’s evil mood and decided not to push it. There was a bit of shuffling about and sighing, but basically everyone was sitting still and working — or pretending to — when, without any warning, something exploded into the room. The door swung back on its hinges and crashed into the wall behind, and Spider burst in like he’d been fired out of a cannon, stumbling on his feet, almost falling over. Instantly the mood was broken. Kids started cheering and