Crossing the Line (6 page)

Besides, my dad never saved me from getting the crap kicked out of me.

Exhibit A in my dodgy defence: Calum Sinclair. Let's take Calum Sinclair into consideration.

I was never that friendly with Calum at primary, but at Craigmyle High, for the first few weeks, we gravitated together. We came from the same part of town. Our parents knew each other vaguely. We liked the same films, we liked the same games, we pretty much liked the same music. I'd given him half the songs on his iPod, so I suppose I took it personally when some thick ape from third year tried to take it off him.

We were outside the school gates but it was a quiet time of day and the two of us were backed up against the wire fence. Josh the Ape wasn't that bright but he had a reputation, and large friends, two of whom flanked him as he held out his hand for the iPod, making beckoning motions with his fingers. I scowled at him.

Calum wasn't scowling; Calum, from the look of him, was about to soil himself. There were tears of fury in his eyes, but he was about to hand over the iPod, I could see his hand going to his pocket. I couldn't believe what I was not-quite-seeing.

‘Don't give it to him!' I blurted, and one of the side-apes grabbed me by the throat and kicked my knee hard. I
went half down, my leg crumpling, but now I was as mad as a cat with a firework up its arse. Calum had frozen in terror, so I lurched for his arm and grabbed it to stop him giving away the iPod. I got kicked in the side for that, which made me lose my grip. Calum was knocked down and away from me, and it took two kicks in his belly before he was shoving the iPod at them, gasping and squeaking at them to take the frigging thing.

Understandably, they did.

They were still kind of enjoying themselves, so they set to with a bit more kicking and punching – well, what passed for punching with a pack of rock apes – and I was roaring and whacking them back when one of them was yanked off me and thrown back.

‘Oy,' said Mickey Naughton. ‘Piss off out of here.'

They were about to, and no hanging about, when he added: ‘And give us that.'

Meekly one of them handed over the iPod, and they scarpered.

Mickey didn't hand over Calum's property, but turned it in his fingers. I was still panting and snarling with rage. I looked at Calum, expecting some sort of reflection of myself. Instead, there was only familiar, tearful, impotent fury. My stomach went cold. If you stuck a ponytail on him, and twenty years, and a Jeff Buckley T-shirt…

Smiling, Mickey dangled the iPod by its earphone cord. ‘Whose is it?'

‘His,' I said, jerking my head at Calum.

‘Oh, aye?' He looked from me to Calum and back again. ‘If it wis yours I'd give it back. You're the one that wis fighting for it.'

I was still enraged enough to say, ‘Give it to him.'

Mickey tilted an eyebrow. ‘Seeing as
you're
asking.' He tossed it disdainfully to Calum, and winked at me. ‘You're a good lad.'

I was sweating and wiping blood off my nose and gasping for breath, but what I remember most clearly about that moment is my whole body puffing up with macho pride as Mickey walked away without a backward glance. I turned to Calum. Maybe I was expecting a little admiration. Maybe I was expecting a little gratitude.

Oh, aye. I was forgetting he'd suddenly turned into a clone of my dad. The only expression on his bruised face was resentment.

‘What did you do that for?' he snapped.

I was speechless.

‘It's only a frigging iPod,' he yelled, though tears brimmed at the corner of his eyes. ‘You don't fight back! Everybody says that. They might have had a knife or something!'

I stared, fascinated, as he stormed off.

My dad threw hissy fits
just
like that.

You don't fight back.
Right. I'd better remember that. I didn't get these life lessons at home. Except, of course, by watching.

I kept right on watching. I wasn't committing myself,
not in these early weeks, though Kevin Naughton was suddenly trying to be my best friend. He shouted out to me in the playground, asked me where I went to primary school, which teams and bands did I like, what did I think about
her
or
them
or
that
? He flattered me with questions I'm sure he knew the answers to already.

‘My brother thinks you're great,' he'd say. And I'd think about Mickey, so cool and couldn't-give-a-damn, so smart and professional, so brutal and frightening. I should have been wary. Instead I was chuffed out of my skull.

Meanwhile, Calum was giving me the cold shoulder, and I realised I didn't care, especially when it clicked that he was now a little scared of me. Truly, I did not go to school with the intention of getting into the wrong crowd. I did not pack my fall-from-grace into my backpack on day one. But I'd heard Craigmyle High chewed you up and spat you out, and many things determined what shape you were when you sat dazed in the pool of its spittle at the end of your school career. Teachers were the least of it.

I intended to remain human; well, humanoid. Nick-shaped. I wasn't going to be stamped into something unrecognisable or even, God forbid, something Dad-shaped. Like my ex-friend Calum …

You don't fight back
. Well, well. There was a lesson that worked two ways.

I'd like to be one of life's good guys, who wouldn't? But I was not going to be one of its victims. I was not going to
be humiliated and bullied every day of my life, then go home with the shame simmering in my embittered heart and take it out on my kids. I was not going to be small that way. I was never going to grow a tragic ponytail just so people could pull it.

Don't get me wrong: the first time my dad hit me really was the last time, but I'll never forget the red shame and rage in his eyes. I was eleven: it was my last day of primary and I suppose I was a bit full of myself.

Dad had fallen out with Mum, in the wake of an argument with his boss. He was always having those, and he always wound himself up to the point where he threatened to leave if he didn't
get a little more respect around here
. Since his long line of employers must have found that demand as impossible as I did, it always ended the same way: a month's notice and a P45. Well, it had happened again, and I suppose Dad was in no mood to be looked at the wrong way. It's what happens when you let the world sit on you too long.

I was shocked at the time, though. I was shocked by his expression, by the smell of midday whisky, and most of all when he spun round and his knuckles connected with my cheekbone just below my eye socket. I was so astonished I didn't even feel the pain to begin with. I didn't hit him back and I didn't run away; I just couldn't believe he'd done it to me, and all because I'd made a stupid unfunny joke about getting a season ticket to the Job Centre. Too near the knuckle, I suppose: for him and, as
it turned out, for me. He stood there until he couldn't look at me any longer and his eyes hunted all over the room for something else to focus on. He mumbled an apology and we told Mum I fell downstairs. He never smelt of whisky at lunchtime again and he never hit me again. I never let him. I was never going to let anyone hit me again.

I'd promised myself that, and now, many months on, I'd proved it. The respect of people like Mickey and Kev, I discovered, was a lot more gratifying than respect from the likes of Calum.

So the survival instinct I was born with was by now very well honed. What's more, I was always tall for my age, I was always well built, and I always had menacing eyes. That isn't my fault, but never look a gift gene in the mouth, and I knew if I threw in my lot with Kev Naughton I'd be fine. I'd be protected from the lesser thugs of life, and I was sure I'd be of use to Kev. And I was.

But like I said: it's complicated.

I thought it was a game, the way you do when you're twelve. I didn't exactly think it was play-acting but I was starring in my own little movie and the sad thing is I wasn't even a headline act. Kev swaggered and bullied; he threatened and intimidated, but he was also funny, and he could be surprisingly kind if he wasn't concentrating on being an arse. I didn't think he was all that bad, and to be honest I thought he needed protecting from himself.

So here's how it happens. Here's how it happened for
me.

You start by sorting out people you don't like, people nobody likes. Other smaller yobs and bullies. You teach them a lesson. You and your pals aren't bullies: you're the Three Musketeers, the Fantastic Four, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

It's all too easy. You get the better of someone and you like the feel of it so much, you want that feeling again. You want no one ever to get the better of
you.

So you wake up one day and you're the arbiter of morality, the arbiter of cool. Now you're punishing people for things that wouldn't have shown up on your radar a week ago: wearing the wrong trainers, liking the wrong music, carrying the wrong phone, giving you the wrong kind of look. In the end you're doing it for your image, your status, your pride.

Just for the hell of it.

I suppose Kev was like me. He was thinking Vinnie Jones or Samuel L Jackson: more anti-hero than villain. He didn't want to be the guy who gets splattered in the second scene; he wanted to be there when the credits rolled. DVDs, I tell you: God's apology for you being born too late, God's way of letting you catch up on all those films you missed.

Kev might have liked to be one of life's heroes too, but not Mickey. Mickey Naughton wasn't like Kev, but then he wasn't like anyone I'd ever met. He had places to go in
the world and he was smart, well dressed, charming to little old ladies and no doubt to frustrated Friesians too. Mickey's boss thought the world of him.

Mickey Naughton was an evil shit.

When I saw him beat the crap out of his little brother, that was my tipping point. I could have tipped one way or the other, I suppose. I hadn't made up my mind. I still had time to save my soul, to be one of the good guys, one of the victims, one of the losers.

I'm not sure what Kev had done and I never liked to ask him, but I don't think it was all that serious. Mickey was still knocking him into shape, that was all. Maybe Kev had chickened out of a challenge, maybe he'd failed to deliver a message or tried to keep a stolen phone for himself, or maybe he'd just answered his brother back on a bad day. Whatever, I turned the corner on my way home and there they were, in the copse of sickly trees where a footpath wavered alongside the school wall.

When a computer superstore was built next to the school, the council made them keep that copse of trees because it had Amenity Value. I wish they'd just concreted it over and extended the car park, because what it really has is Ambush Value, Assault-and-Battery Value. A quiet green space like that is asking for trouble, and that was what Kev was getting.

I didn't feel I had to run. I stood like a lemon, and Mickey took no notice of me whatsoever, just went on
slapping Kev's face, coolly and deliberately. Kev was crying but his lips were clamped hard together so he wouldn't make a sound. On his school trousers there was a dark stain where he'd wet himself. With good reason, as it turned out, because when Mickey had finished slapping him, he took hold of Kev's head and brought it snapping down on to his raised knee, then kicked him in the stomach and left him curled on the ground. A dog walker appeared, ambling down the far end of the footpath, quite a tall middle-aged guy, but when he saw us he turned on his heel and hurried away in the opposite direction, dragging a yapping Jack Russell that was obviously keener for a scrap than he was.

Mickey took no notice of the walker or the dog. He smoothed his hair and dusted a speck of bark off his jacket before hooking it over his shoulder. As he passed me he paused, put a hand on my shoulder and smiled.

‘You're a clever lad, Nick. Smarter than he is. Tougher and all.' The hand patted my shoulder lightly. ‘Take care of him, eh? He needs looking after.'

I was too shocked to say a word, but Mickey didn't wait for one. He got back into his company Mondeo and drove away.

When he'd gone I hovered near Kev, not at all sure he'd want me around but not quite willing to leave him there alone. A tiny whimper seemed to be coming from another dimension, but I suppose it was coming from Kev. When he saw my feet he fell silent, eyes burning with tears, jaw
clenched with humiliated rage. There was a stain of reddish purple on his cheekbone and eye socket that was going to be a lovely bruise. I'd never seen anything so pathetic and vulnerable.

‘Y'all right?'

‘Aye. Fine.' He half sat up, spat out a gobbet of blood.

‘What did you do?'

He gave me a wary look. ‘S'fine. Nothing. I was cheeky. Asking for it.'

‘Oh, aye?'

‘It wis
my fault.
I'm fine. Listen, you, don't go and tell …'

‘Nah. Course.' I liked the way he wasn't whingeing. Taking a bit of responsibility, too.

Still, I was smarter than Kev was, and that was official. Tougher, as well. He needed looking after. His brother had told me so. His evil, cool, clever brother.

I glanced at the deserted footpath, then at the road. Then I turned back to Kev.

‘It'll be fine,' I said.

I meant: I won't tell anyone, and no one's coming, and nobody else saw.

But I also meant: we need each other. We can use each other. I'll look out for you.

And that's how I sold my soul to the devil.

I never saw Kev brought that low again. Whatever he'd done wrong he didn't repeat it, instead applying himself
with determination to becoming the man his brother wanted him to be. By his third year he was big and mean enough to intimidate most of the school, including a lot of older kids and half the teachers. He didn't scare McCluskey, obviously, and I don't think he scared the head either, but only because the Brain pretended he didn't exist. I became Kev's principal bodyguard, henchman and enforcer, and while I'm not proud of it, I survived and my phone never got nicked. It's a jungle out there.