Until it's Over Read online

  When you do something like that, you don’t even get into trouble. It’s too big. It doesn’t fit into the system of punishments. After the nurse and the day in Casualty, I was summoned to see my form teacher and the headmaster at the same time. They talked to me in subdued, sympathetic voices. When I came out of the office, my mum was sitting on the bench, crying. I hugged her while looking over her shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t be spotted by anybody I knew.

  In the end, I was sent to see a doctor. He wore a sweater and had a room with brightly coloured posters on the wall and toys on the floor. He got me to look at pictures and talk about them, and then he asked me about my life. I was only eleven but I think I saw quickly what the rules were. He wasn’t a real doctor – he didn’t want to help me or to make me better. He wanted to test me to see if I’d give myself away, to show that I wasn’t like the others. It was like the bit in science-fiction films where you have someone who might be an android or might be a human being and you’ve got to ask them questions to see if you can tell the difference. That’s what he was doing with me. In the pictures there were two people or three people, and he wanted me to talk about the relationship between them. It was obvious that I was meant to see them as nice and normal. So I said about the first one that it looked like a mother and a child and that maybe she had just collected him from school. He asked where I thought the father was and I said he was probably at work. I looked at the doctor and he smiled and nodded.

  What is strange, when I look back, is that I clearly knew what not to say to the doctor. I told him that the stuff with the compass had been a mistake. I didn’t know what had come over me. That wasn’t a total lie. It had been a mistake. For once, I had let the mask slip. I had done something real. I had broken through the pretend game that everyone was playing and showed them blood and bone and they hadn’t liked what they saw.

  The doctor asked me about my father. He’d probably read my school file. I could see that the point was to seem sad but not too sad, to miss my father but not miss him too much. I said it had been a long time ago. That seemed good enough. One of the photographs showed a small child with a cat. He asked me if I had a cat. Even at that age, I knew what he was trying to get me to say. He wanted to know if I was cruel to my cat. I wasn’t, but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have told him. I just told him the truth, which was that I once had a cat and that I used to look after him and feed him and sometimes he would come and sleep on my bed. Then he changed the subject and starting asking me about other things, like hobbies and whether I had friends. I could see his interest gradually fading. He was looking for something juicy and I had to make sure he didn’t find anything. I needed to be normal and boring.

  I was always good at hiding, especially from my mum – though as time went on I could never be quite sure what she saw and what she didn’t. Sometimes I thought she was stupid: a big-boned, slow-moving woman with a large lap, thick hair coarse and pale like straw, a round face and a soft voice that had a kind of drawl to it because she came from Somerset. But there were other times when I’d look at her and see in those grey eyes an expression that gave me an itchy, uncomfortable feeling, as if, all of a sudden, my clothes were too tight.

  She was called Mary. She had left school when she met my dad and she had me before she was twenty, so she must have been young, really, but I always thought of her as old. Old and boring. So it was a shock when I heard Jerry Barker telling a mate of his outside the newsagent that she was a bit of all right. I remember that like yesterday: a bit of all right. I tried to see her through Jerry’s eyes, but it was no good. She was on the big side, she never wore makeup or had her hair done nicely, and she wore these clothes that hid her, like a tent. From what people said, my dad hadn’t been much of a catch, but she couldn’t even keep him for long. It was just her and me, day after day and week after week, and the dreary years went by. She worked at the florist’s during the day and at night she did other people’s ironing. She cooked meals with her coat still on but sat down with me to eat and tried to ask me about my day. I always told her what she wanted to hear, and then I could turn on the TV and pretend she wasn’t there, looking at me with her pale eyes. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she’d ask, in that soft voice of hers. And I’d always say, ‘I’m not thinking about anything at all, Mum,’ though I was, of course – I was thinking she had a face like a fish; I was thinking I’d like her to shut the fuck up and leave me in peace. She had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I could hear it when I lay in bed. Cough-cough-cough from downstairs where she was ironing; cough-cough-cough upstairs, in the little room opposite my bigger one.

  I tried. I really tried to be who she wanted me to be. Of course I always remembered her birthday but I remembered other things as well. Her wedding anniversary, plus the date he had gone. The anniversary of her dad’s death. I wrote them down, although I didn’t really need to. I have a good memory. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie in my bed and go over things in my mind to make sure I’ve got them clear. Other people’s birthdays, where they were born, their phone numbers, their favourite food and songs and TV programmes, silly things they’re scared of, stories they’d told me or I’d overheard. You never know when you’ll need things. You have to be ready, all the time.

  When I went to see the doctor, I had already stolen quite a bit of money but he didn’t know that. Not just money. I couldn’t leave a shop without putting a bar of chocolate into my pocket or slipping a magazine under my jacket. It wasn’t because I needed stuff or felt entitled to it. I took far more than I could get away with at home, but it didn’t stop me. Sometimes I’d dump a T-shirt in a bin outside the shop. I never got caught. I don’t know why. It’s not as if I was clever or had worked out a brilliant system. Maybe people just don’t notice me. Whatever it was, the buzz faded. I preferred it with people. Even then, the people I’d taken money from didn’t realize they had been robbed. That was the trick – to take just the right amount, so that they didn’t understand that anything was missing. Sometimes they would look a bit confused as they went through their pockets and wallets. ‘Where does it all go?’ they might say. But it was just a few coins here, a note there.

  I started with my mother. The first time I took a fiver from her bag. It was like a test, to see what would happen. Nothing did. So I edged up, bit by bit. Once, when I wanted to buy a pair of trainers, I took twenty and that evening when I showed them to her, I said I’d got them from a market stall for a tenner. I moved on to other people, but I was always very careful. It was hard work. Like being a spy.

  You decide what you’re going to do and then you do it. It can be that simple. I had a list of things I had to do. One was to have sex with a girl before I was seventeen. I did that. One was to be good at football. I used to take my ball to the bit of land by the railway and kick it against a wall and practise keeping the ball up in the air. Hour after hour. I was never going to be one of the best, but I was in the school team, which was good enough. It meant I belonged. I was one of the team. I was cool. I had gelled hair and scars on my legs and girls liked me, or said they did. Everyone’s faking it. The difference between them and me is that they don’t realize it. I do. That puts me ahead. I’m more honest than other people. I know who I am and I know that I’m alone.

  I always had friends and I even had a best friend, Jonathan Whiteley. I still keep in touch with him. He still lives in Sheffield. We phone each other up and text each other, and when we meet, we reminisce about the good old days. How we used to play tennis against the wall of his house. How we got drunk on cider when we were twelve. How we used to play up in maths. The time we went camping and he got chased by a ram; the time we went to the pop festival and lived on beer, crisps and marshmallows for three days; the time we set off the fire extinguisher on the school trip. But not the time I nicked his sister’s credit card. Or the time I lobbed a stone through his window late one night after an argument that I can’t even remember now. Or the time I took his favourite T-shirt, ball
ed up in my school bag between my physics and my art, and never let on. I’ve still got it. It’s one of my favourites. It doesn’t smell of Jonathan any more. It smells of me.

  I get headaches sometimes. I didn’t have the first until I was thirteen, and I didn’t know then what was wrong with me. Later, of course, I came to recognize the feeling and would know an attack was coming by the prickling of my skin, a tenderness in my body that made it hurt if anyone touched me. But with the first one, it started with a waiting feeling – not a headache, exactly, but knowing that a headache was creeping up on me. Then a sick throbbing above my left eye, as if something was being screwed into my temple. A clammy, shivery sensation that thickened into feeling sick. Lights flashing on and off. The pain got thicker and I had to lie on my bed with the curtains closed and press my arm over my eyes, but even so I could feel my eyeballs hammering in their sockets. In the end I got to sleep and when I woke the pain had melted away and I felt powerful, clean, more alert than ever before.

  For about three years, I used to have headaches once or twice a month and I looked forward to them because of the way I felt afterwards, like I was glowing. Bit by bit, they got less common. Now it’s only about twice a year that I get the pain and welcome the surge of energy it flushes round my body. I like having the headaches. I’m good at pain. That’s one of my secrets. I carry it with me and nobody knows. People are blind; they’re blind because they don’t want to see. People are fools; they’re fools because they don’t want to know. I like to be reborn.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  At last, after waiting so long, after years of training and knocking around, I was here. I was twenty-one and I was off and out. People come from all over the world to get to London. They escape on rickety boats, hide under trains and inside lorries. Not to get to Europe, not to England, but London, because in London you can either find people like you, whoever you are, whatever you’re like, or you can lose yourself. People arrive at Heathrow airport and rip up their identifying documents so they can’t be sent back. I’d have done that if I’d known how. I’d like to have washed up in London, naked and nameless, so I could have given myself a new name and created a new identity. Instead I got off the train at Euston and started again.

  One cold Friday evening, just a few days into the new year, I was sitting in a pub on the basin of the canal at King’s Cross. I was on my third pint of lager and starting to feel woozy. Then I saw my mate Duncan coming towards me with a girl I’d never met before. I saw immediately that she was the kind of girl who made me virtually unable to string together consecutive words. She was tall, with long legs and strong, slender arms, and in spite of the winter weather she was dressed in shorts and a brightly coloured T-shirt. She was tanned and her face was freckled from the wind and sun. Her curly dark hair was tied back off her face. She had very striking dark eyes, which shone with laughter at something Duncan was saying that I couldn’t quite hear. She was carrying a bottle of beer in one hand, a satchel and a riding helmet. They approached the table.

  ‘This is Astrid Bell,’ said Duncan. He looked at her. ‘This is the guy I was telling you about.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Astrid. ‘ Duncan says you’re looking for somewhere to live.’

  Astrid wasn’t like any of the girls I had met before. She didn’t flirt or flatter people. She wasn’t tremulous, devious or eager to please. She didn’t care if I liked her or not. I don’t mean she was unfriendly; far from it. She just knew who she was and she wasn’t going to try to be anyone else. There was no side to her and no trickery. I could see that she would never pretend to have heard of a band that didn’t exist, or laugh at a joke she didn’t understand, or act coy to get her own way. I could tell that about her even before she sat down at the table opposite me, cupping her chin in her hands and looking at me with her clear, dark eyes. I watched her at the bar as she ordered us drinks, ignoring all the men who were ogling her. And I watched her as she made her way back to me, holding the two glasses carefully so she didn’t slop them, turning her head to grin and say something to a friend who called to her from the cigarette machine. There was a clean-limbed gracefulness about her, in spite of her skimpy cyclist clothes. It seemed to me that she was more clearly outlined than anyone else in the pub, as if she was backlit, or the central focus of a photograph in which all the other characters were marginal and slightly blurred.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, taking a sip of her beer and wiping foam from her upper lip. ‘So, you’re looking for somewhere to live.’

  ‘Yes,’ I managed. ‘The place I’ve been staying in isn’t available any longer. I need to be out of there as soon as possible.’

  ‘This is a house in Hackney – is Hackney central enough for you? It’s a lovely house, really, a bit run-down maybe, with a big garden. There are six of us at the moment and we’re looking for a seventh.’

  ‘Is it you who owns it?’

  She laughed at that, throwing her head back. I saw her white teeth and the pink inside of her mouth. ‘Do I look like I own a seven-bedroom house? I’m a despatch rider, for God’s sake. All I own is my bike and a few changes of clothes. No, it belongs to Miles. He’s got a real job but you don’t need to be alarmed. He’s cool. Or coolish.’

  I tried to think of grown-up questions to ask. ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘Fifty a week. Which is nothing. But we share the upkeep, the bills, stuff like that. Even some decorating. Gentlemen’s agreement. Could you hack that?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘What about things like mealtimes? Do you eat together?’

  ‘It’s not like the army. There aren’t many rules… Perhaps there ought to be more. But it’s worked so far. And it’s fun. Mainly. Are you interested?’

  ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  ‘You’d have to meet everyone, of course. First, though, can I ask you a few questions?’

  ‘Like what?’ I felt nervous and dry-mouthed, but I tried to appear relaxed, pretending to take a sip of my beer. I didn’t want any more to drink just yet. I needed to be alert, vigilant.

  ‘What kind of work do you do?’

  ‘I’ve not been in London that long. I’ve been doing odd bits of -’

  Just then her mobile rang. She took it out of her pocket and flicked it open. ‘Hi, Miles.’

  She looked at me and smiled. ‘I think I’ve found someone for the room. Yes. I’m with him now in the Rising Sun… That’s the one – down by the canal… He seems all right to me, on the whole.’ She looked at me again. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Trustworthy?’

  ‘For what?’

  She laughed and resumed talking into the phone. ‘Why don’t you come and meet him?’ She raised her eyebrows questioningly at me, and I nodded vigorously. ‘Ten minutes, then.’ There was a pause and she listened, frowning. ‘Better and better. Bring her along. ’Bye.’

  She shut her phone and turned to me. ‘There. The big boss is stopping by. I hope that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Is someone else coming?’

  ‘Pippa. She lives in the house. The three of us – Pippa, Miles and I – have been there from the beginning. Everyone else kind of comes and goes, but we endure.’

  ‘So it’s like an interview?’

  ‘We’re not very frightening.’

  But she was wrong. She didn’t understand how someone like her could make a person feel small and scared.

  I knew it was them as soon as they came in. He was tall and rangy, with a closely trimmed beard, more like stubble, and a bald head that shone beneath the lights. He was wearing a suit of soft, dark material that looked expensive, with an overcoat on top, and carried a slim briefcase. He had a firm handshake, but his eyes only met mine for a second before he glanced at Astrid. He kissed her cheek and I saw how his face softened. I stored away the information: he fancied her. It was written all over him. But she didn’t fancy him. I was sure of it.

/>   The woman – Pippa – didn’t bother to shake my hand. Instead she touched my arm with the tips of her fingers and widened her eyes, smiling with perfectly painted pink lips. I could smell her perfume. I’m good at smells. I remember them. My mother smelled of grass. Pippa was as tall as Astrid, maybe taller, but fairer, slimmer, breakable like porcelain. She was wearing a cream suit and high heels. Her long hair was coiled on top of her head and every so often she would touch it delicately, checking it was still in place. She looked so demure, but ‘You must be fucking crazy,’ were her first words.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘To want to live in our madhouse.’

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to her,’ said Astrid.

  I offered to buy them a drink, thinking it would be money spent in a good cause, and as I stood at the bar I cast glances back at them. They leaned towards each other round the table and I heard a burst of laughter. Were they talking about me? Laughing at me?

  They asked me questions. I smiled and nodded and told them the things they wanted to hear. Yes, I was pretty easy-going. Yes, I had friends in London. Yes, I could pay the rent each month. No, I didn’t mind clearing up. And no, I had no intention of moving on in a few months’ time.

  ‘Do you like curry?’ asked Pippa, abruptly.

  ‘Yes. Love it,’ I replied, though I don’t. Too greasy and salty.

  ‘Let’s get a takeaway and go back to Maitland Road,’ she said. ‘Then you can meet the others. What do you say?’

  ‘Have I passed?’

  ‘She was meant to consult with Astrid and me first,’ said Miles, in a bit of a sour voice.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Pippa, and winked at me.

  ‘Shall I leave you to talk about me among yourselves for a few minutes?’