Flick (15 page)

KILL KYLE AND LET KENNY LIVE

It is at this exact moment that Kyle dances Bruce Forsyth style down from the opposite end of the street. “All right, Mr. Will Flicker!”

Shit. Kyle. Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up shut the fuck up.

“Here, have you been at Fez's? I've got some news about the deal, boyo! You wanna do it tomorrow?” Wanker.

“No.” I eyeball him angrily.

“What's wrong with your eyes? You all smacked up?” He laughs, making hurr-hurr breath noises. My brain rolls its eyes within my head and says darkly: Let's twat him.

“No, I'm not!”

“I was thinking of buyers and there's one at your fucking school, man—”

“Kyle, not now—”

“—who I bet could use some blow!”

“KYLE!” I yank him over to the front door of the house by the jacket as he bounces up and down in enthusiasm. “Kyle, I said I can't right now, Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What? Why?” Kyle looks so dejected I feel like I've kicked a puppy. A fucking annoying idiotic bastard puppy.

I stare at him wordlessly and my eyes slide to my right, where Rainbow is stood. He whirls around trying to see what I'm signaling at.

“What, what? What's happening? Is it the feds? DUCK AND ROLL!” He dives onto the gravel drive and throws a bag of pills into a nearby bush. “Hide the stash!”

“Get up,” I hiss, making an extreme effort not to strangle him. “Get up, you stupid twat.” The others look over. Kyle is cuddling my ankles and muttering something about being a sheep and repenting. I grin at the others, gesture to the lump at my feet and laugh. “Oh, Kyle, you're so fucking funny.” They look away and I grab his hoodie by the throat and pull him up.

He looks around. “Have the feds gone?”

“This is England, Kyle,” I growl. “There's no FBI here, you stupid twat. Now look at me and pay attention. I can't do the deal tomorrow. I'll be with my girlfriend.”

“But . . . we are going to do it this week, aren't we? Fez'll kill me if we don't. I already owe him three mini Mars bars. He's such a tightarse,” he moans woefully.

“Kyle! Jesus, fuck,” I say through gritted teeth, glancing at Rainbow, who's watching Danny's Girl speak but is clearly doing that thing women do where they listen to your entire conversation AT THE SAME TIME as talking to someone else. This is one of the reasons why the female of the species is to be held in awe, feared and worshipped, gentlemen of the congregation. I turn slightly away from her so at the very least she can't lip-read. “Schtop whining. We 'ill do it schoon. I will cawl yew when I get free.” Kyle looks blank. I sigh deeply and grit my teeth so hard my jaw starts to ache. “I
cawl
yew.” I eyeball him crazily. “
Soon.
”

“Ohhhh.” Kyle nods conspiratorially. A second passes. A puzzled look flashes across Kyle's face then, not so conspiratorially, but more in a loud and clear fashion: “You mean to arrange to sell it on?”

“FU-cking . . . yes, yes, Kyle, I mean to arrange to sell it on.”

“Eeeexcellent. Five by five, down hup. On the sly. No worries.” He winks and laughs and finally turns to go back into the house. “Oh, by the way.” He catches my arm. “Where d'you get that cut-up bruise on your head, dude?”

I look at him, wondering whether to say, but he'll only find out in a more terrifying Fez way if I don't let him know now.

“From Fez. He said if we didn't move it, he was gonna get in touch with you, so . . . We'd better get it done quickly. I don't know when he was expecting the cash by.” I shrug nervously, eyes flicking back and forth agitatedly to Rainbow.

“Oh.” Kyle looks up at me, seeming to remember something, and with a slow blink of his eyes that serves for a gulp of both realization and dread, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. The display shows seven missed calls. From Fez. “Whoops.”

HOME SWEET HOME

Rainbow doesn't talk to me on the way home. It might be just that it was a bit disturbing seeing me smack Kyle round the head and chase him into the house and then for Danny to have to pull me off and then for me to lie that I gave him thirty quid for a video game and he spent it on pot. It could also, however, be that she overheard our entire conversation and she's pissed at me. I ask her if she's okay and she shrugs, then shakes her head. I say, “I can't put it right if you don't tell me,” and she looks at me witheringly and nods at Danny and Danny's Girl, who are walking just beside us.

“I'll tell you when we get home,” she mumbles.

We get back to Rainbow's and fall immediately asleep without saying a word to each other. It would probably be one of those nights where I lie awake wondering what she's thinking but she's definitely unconscious and I'm fairly drunk so I zonk out quickly. When I wake up in the morning Rainbow is sat on the end of the bed. Her tense back tells me she is quietly furious. I can also tell because when I say good morning she doesn't start talking. We always talk. Constantly. It annoys people. We talk about everything.

I sit opposite her and tell her I'm sorry if she's upset and ask her what's wrong. She's worrying me. I'm ashamed to say it, but I start crying, just a little bit. And I never cry. There's something about Rainbow that just takes away your shell. I choke, start holding my breath, can't speak. She starts to whisper at me.

“I thought you were stopping taking stuff. But now you're dealing it too?”

“I'm not dealing it,” I answer back, automatically pleading innocent.

“Aren't you?” There is a pause. She stares at me coldly. I wonder how to make the best of the situation. I nudge her through tears, trying to smile.

“Not in the dark, foreboding, angel-of-death way that you say it.”

Rainbow rolls her eyes and raises her hands in exasperation. “Will! Who in their right mind would do that? How can you think it's okay to deal drugs and make jokes about it? It just honestly wouldn't ever cross my mind to ever do something like that. I would have to be out of my mind or a complete idiot, I mean, those things kill people. How can you wax lyrical about the NHS being so good and wanting to be fair and represent people as a politician when even by
taking
whatever you take, never mind
dealing
, you're supporting an industry that kills people? Jesus . . . It's just such an idiotic thing to do.”

We sit in silence for a moment on the end of her bed. I'm struggling to breathe, fuming. “So you think I'm a stupid idiot?”

“What?” Rainbow says, surprised. “No, Will, that's not what I'm saying, I think you're very clever—”

“Yeah,” I spit. “Clever in an underhand, deceptive, bastardlike way. Not intelligent. Just uneducated and stupid and ignorant.”

“That's not what I think at all—”

I talk over her with scathing sarcasm. “Yeah, maybe I am ill educated and smoke up occasionally but you know what, that's just life when you're fifteen. We weren't all brought up in the middle of the fucking . . . country!”

“I grew up in Hull! This
is
the middle of the country!” She gestures shakily out the window at the sea.

“OH—” I stumble. “You know what I fucking mean, you grew up in some pretty suburb and here is . . . just skanky fucking OSFORD—”

“Don't
swear at me
!” She puts her hands over her face and pulls her legs up to her chest.

“You think these are my choices?” I'm raising my voice now, almost shouting. “D'you think I want to be involved in this deal? D'you think I
want
to spend my life bored and stoned?”

“Well, you do anyway, Flick, no one makes you.” She moves further away from me, round the bed, closer to the wall so I can't see her face. “You can say no, you know. You don't have to jump off a cliff whenever one of your mates tells you to.”

“I do actually, because they're behind me with a fucking knife.”

“Then tell the police, get them locked up.” She gets up, exasperated, crosses the room, turns around and leans against the wall opposite me. “By the time they're out you'll have moved away.”

“No I won't.”

She pauses, looks down at her feet, seems to get ready to say something, stops, and then looks up again at me, defensive and scared. “What? You don't want to move away with me?”

The question stops me in my rant. We've planned to move away together, we've talked about it, but maybe I've just never been able to imagine it. Or believe it. How could I? No one leaves. And the only time I've been out of England was one coach trip to Spain when I was five. I shrug. “Yeah, of course I want to, but realistically . . .”

“Realistically what?” Tears drop down from her cheeks to her shirt and she asks in a very small voice, “Don't you think you'll be going out with me in five years?”

“Aw, Rainbow.” I get up and hug her. “I didn't mean that. You're amazing, sweetheart, you're the best thing that's ever happened to me, but . . . Even if I'm not here, Mum and Dad and Tommo and Nikki will still be here. All my friends will still be here. He'll just go after them. And in five years' time, say if he even got that long, though I doubt it, I'll only be twenty, maybe we won't have left yet. I've got to make money from somewhere, you can't support us both even if your parents will give you a bit to start up. No one I know'll be safe, and it'll all be because I didn't do this one favor for Fez. Fuck. Can't you see why I have to do it?” I put my arm close around her small frame and rest my head on her shoulder. I lean into her and my lips graze her skin. She smells like cinnamon. Suddenly my gut starts to ache and all I can think is I don't want to lose her I don't want to lose her I don't want to lose her. My voice comes out, trying to soothe her, muffled by her hair. “It's only one deal . . .”

She sighs, seeming to understand, but then she lets out a sob and shrugs away from me gently. “No. I'm sorry, Will, I can't be okay with this. You don't have to do it. You do have a choice. Anyone could say they've been threatened, anyone could say they've grown up with it, but these are reasons, not excuses. You're an adult, technically in two weeks' time when you turn sixteen, but you're already adult enough. And if you hadn't let yourself get involved in taking . . . all the things you take . . . then I'm sure you would never have been asked to deal anything. Can't you see the . . . what's it called . . . the snowball effect?” She sniffs and wipes her nose on the sleeve of her soft checked shirt. “I dunno. That sounds stupid but you know what I mean. If it doesn't stop now it'll never stop.”

I run my hands through my hair, trying not to blow up at her. None of this is my fault, I think. I hold my palm out, trying to reason with her. “I've just told you he'll fucking kill me if I don't do it, Rainbow. How stupid can you be to not realize that?”

Bow looks totally shocked and I'm not sure why. She shakes her head at me in something that seems to be disbelief and goes and sits at her desk on a chair covered with cushions. She grabs one and picks at the sequins on it. She starts to speak quietly. “Don't call me stupid. I mean it. My parents don't ever call each other names. Name-calling and being nasty just breaks things and crosses lines you can't uncross.”

“What are you fucking talking about?”

“Don't SWEAR at me! I'm saying I don't want to be with someone who would call me names and be horrible to me because then you'll start thinking it's okay to be nasty and it'll just get worse and worse and worse and that's EXACTLY THE WAY FAMILIES BREAK UP AND KIDS END UP ALONE.” She shouts these last few words in this aching, hollow voice that doesn't even seem to come from the Rainbow I know, but from somewhere else deeper inside her, somewhere she hasn't let me go, and she sinks her head down to her pillow and grips it tightly, curled into a ball like a hedgehog with its spikes out, unmoving.

I don't know what to do. I'm stunned. I'd say I'm lost for words, but I'm not really the kind of person to ever not have anything to say. I just don't know how to deal with her, how to make it better. Options fail me again. I go to the first thing I can think of, stunned. “You said you were fine about the adoption. You said you loved your mums.”

“Of course I love Aisha and Lucy!” An insistent mumble from the chair. “And I am fine about it, but I'm fine about it because I have to be, Will. That's an example of something where the person involved has no choice.
It
happened and I have to live with it. But this hasn't happened and you don't have to do it.”

“What is
it
, Rainbow? What happened?”

“Don't change the subject.”

“I'm not. I wanna know. Tell me.”

“It's none of your business. You're selfish to do drugs, Flick, you don't know what it would do to your mum if she found out. Or your kids, or the love of your life, if you one day had a relapse and they found you dead somewhere, because you OD'd or some cokehead thought you owed him something. You never think of all the people you could hurt. And you don't think about me. It physically hurts to think of your body going through the things you put it through. Your pink lungs turning black. You're just a child, Flick, we're just kids. You don't know, but it taints everything about you and every connection you have with other people for
the rest of your life
. And more than anything I just feel so sorry for you that you think it's okay. And so angry with you.” She lifts her head marginally from her lap and wipes her tears. “I'm
so angry
with you.”

Silence. I walk over to my clothes and pull on my jeans. “You know what? If it's none of my business why your real parents couldn't take care of you, then this is none of your business.” I sling my bag on my back. “You don't know anything about this stuff, Rainbow, so just stay out of it.”

“GOD!” She explodes viciously, suddenly throwing her head up and shouting at me crazily. “Eight thousand years into civilization, thousands of fucking years of getting high, and none of you fucking drugged-up fuckers have figured out that you stick your fingers in the fire and you get them
burnt
. You're like fucking
animals
. I haven't had to poison my veins with that
shit
to know that it's
fucking bad
for you
.”

“Whoa, what THE FUCK? What's WRONG with you?” I stare at her incredulously. She's lost her mind. What the hell? “I'm leaving.” I pick up my jacket and open her door and she runs to it and shoves it shut and pushes me into the wall so my head cracks on it.

“THEY WERE FUCKING JUNKIES LIKE YOU, ALL RIGHT? MY REAL PARENTS WERE JUNKIES
JUST LIKE YOU
.” She freezes, immobilized by her own words, and puts her hands over her eyes.

We stand in silence for what might be five minutes. Then I move slowly towards her and reach for her.

“No. No. Get out please. I want you to get out of my house.”

“But—”

“I don't want a stupid junkie in my house, FUCK OFF.”

“Fine.” I open the door again. “I will fuck off then.”

I open the door and she lets out a coarse sob. “Flick!”

“I didn't know that about your parents.” I pause at her door. “But I'm not being called stupid, I'm not being called a junkie, I've never even
done
heroin, and I'm not being compared to an animal . . .” I wipe away tears, feeling strangely embarrassed by her admission. I watch her tiny solid form and try to imagine how lonely it must feel to be connected to no one. “Rainbow. I'm not
going
going, I'm just . . . going for now. I love you,” I mutter. Then I leave her, standing in her purple jammies and slipper socks by her overflowing bookcases and half-finished paintings, a small, unmoving, lonely figure with two hands pressed childishly over a grieving, tear-soaked face.