How To Be a Boy (11 page)

I used to play chess with my dad but I’ve never seen anything like this. Every piece seems to have its own personality. That fox there, with the mobile phone and the low-slung trousers, she’s obviously talking with the black girl who’s on her mobile, too, over by the rook – or where the rook should be – but in this case it’s a stubby Securicor van. Excellent.

The door jingles. I glance back towards the front of the shop. A woman stands in the doorway in jeans and a denim jacket, with a yellow bandana around her head. She looks around – doesn’t see me in my sacred glade. She closes the door.

Still no manager. Weird.

I turn back to the chessboard. I notice the price tag: eight hundred quid! If I did want it, I’d
have
to nick it! One piece at a time.

I crouch a bit so I can see the faces. And here’s the first piece I’d take: this black girl standing with a fist on one hip and a super-sized Slush Puppie in the other – must be orange because her lips are orange. She’s in flip-flops, a short yellow summer skirt and a blue halter-top, her midriff bare. She’s all attitude. All “Watch me. See if I don’t!” Her chocolate hair is in neat cornrows. I’m in love.

I hear a noise from the front of the shop. The woman in the bandana has opened a glass case on the wall and she’s taking stuff out: jewellery – necklaces and bracelets. I watch her put each item into a cardboard box.

Where the hell is the manager?

Now she closes the case, lifts up her box of swag in two hands and heads for the door.

“Hey!”

It’s out of my mouth before I know it.

She stops and looks back into the shop, weaving her head around to try to make out who’s there.

“Oh, hello,” she says and then turns and heads towards the door.

I run and get there just as she’s balancing the box on her knee to grab the door handle.

“Thanks,” she says, as I reach for the handle, but I slip in front of her, blocking the door.

“What are you doing?” I say.

She frowns and then her eyes light up like she gets it.

“Oh!” she says. “You think I’m stealing this stuff?”

“Looks like.”

She laughs. “I’m Jenny Moore,” she says.

I’m like, So what?

She nods with her head towards the jewellery case she just emptied. The sign in the case says
JENNY MOORE
.

“That’s you?”

“That’s right.”

“So this is
your
stuff?”

“Yes, I made this ‘stuff,’ as you call it.” She smiles. “I’ve got a big craft fair this weekend. So I’m taking some of the stock from the centre. Anyway, looks like you’re the main suspect round here.”

She’s grinning at my forehead. I’d forgotten all about Carla’s handiwork. In aubergine. Christ!

I look in the cardboard box at all these little royal-blue jewellery cases. I guess I’d never thought of someone actually making jewellery.

There’s a noise from the loft and there’s the manager heading for the stairs.

“You again?”

He’s glaring right at me.

“Was he giving you any trouble?” he says to Jenny.

“Hi Roger,” says Jenny. “On the contrary, he was trying to stop me from robbing the joint.”

He’s reached us now. I step back.

“Sorry, Jenny,” he says. “I was in the toilet – a call of nature.”

I smirk.

“Yes, well, you would find it funny,” he says.
Glare, glare, glare
, his eyes flicking to my forehead. Then he turns his attention back to Jenny and he’s all nice and polite. “I would have locked the door, normally, of course, but it was a quiet-enough afternoon and you’d said you’d be here at four. I just couldn’t wait, sad to say.”

“Are you OK?” she says.

“I’m right as rain,” he says, but he doesn’t sound very convincing.

I cough into my hand. I guess neither of them hears the word the cough was only partially meant to disguise.

Roger opens the door for her and she heads out.

I decide to leave after her. The manager looks me over as I walk by him. Looking for bulges in my pocket. I feel I should turn them all inside out, maybe strip or something – right there in the doorway. Maybe do a little naked dance – youth gone wild! But I’m in a hurry now.

I see Jenny trying to open the door of a Smart car. I offer to hold the box for her while she finds her keys.

“Thanks,” she says.

“He was smoking pot,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“Weed. The manager. I smelt it as soon as I walked in.”

She frowns, shakes her head, sighs. “Poor man,” she says.

“Huh?”

Then she reads my forehead. “What’s with the logo?” she says.

I’d forgotten about it. I shrug. What’s the use of explaining?

“Well, it should say
SECURITY
not
CRIMINAL,
” says Jenny. “Thanks again…”

“Gordon.”

“Thanks again, Gordon.”

She puts the box down on the back seat and closes the door. She looks back towards the shop. Roger is standing inside, his hand on the doorknob. He waves then disappears back into the shadows.

“He’s not well,” she says.

I give her a look like, That much I’d worked out.

But she shakes her head. “No, what I mean is that the pot – the marijuana – is medicinal.”

I’m confused.

“Self medication,” she says. “He’s got cancer.”

“Oh.” It’s like someone gave me a smack.

Jenny pats me on the arm. “It’s OK,” she says. “How would you know? And besides, he’s always been grumpy.”

I shrug. Watch her climb into her Smart car and drive off.

Woo hoo. Gordon saves the day.

That night I think about the chess set, the girl with the cornrows – Alicia, I name her. It’d make this great little one-act play: all those characters stuck in their routines on a stage painted up like a chessboard. Somehow Gordon the alien wanders out into the lights.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” says Alicia. “Thought I knew everybody around here.”

“I’m new,” I say.

She nods, squints to read the word on my forehead, laughs. “Yeah, right,” she says.

That’s when the copper arrives. “You two can’t stand on the same square,” he says.

I jump back. Shit. That’s all I do any more.

He frowns, shakes his head. “You can’t go backwards, either.”

“Bloody hell,” I say. “How about I just keel over and die?”

But Alicia gives me a love punch on the shoulder.

“It’s cool,” she says. “All he means is you have to go forward. One square at a time. It’s a game, right?”

I stare down the board towards the other players waiting at their end. It all seems so pointless. I mean, what are the chances of getting anywhere? Some copper will probably arrest me for picking my nose. Or I’ll get run over by a lorry, lectured by some holier-than-thou priest. Or one of those other kids down there’ll sideswipe me on his skateboard and I’ll be done for.

Alicia must be reading my thoughts. “Hey Gordon, man. If you make it to the end, you get to be a queen.” She laughs this rich laugh as bright as an orange Slush Puppie. I laugh. The copper just shakes his head at us and moves two squares up and three squares over.

What a wanker.

I tell the gang what happened with Jenny and Roger. I tell them about the chessboard, too.

“Pawns,” says Crawley. “That about sums it up.”

“I’d have bitten his head off,” says Carla. “Fag.”

“The guy’s dying,” I say.

“Yeah, and that’s our fault?”

I shrug, look away.

Crawley – mind-reader – says, “You thinking about your grandad?”

I nod.

“His grandad got all mental angry before he died,” he says.

Carla rolls her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “About your grandad.” But you can tell she’s still pissed off about how Roger treated me. Which is nice. I poke her in the arm.

She pokes me back. Sweet – we’re on poking terms.

Hicks gives me grief for slouching.

“Out defacing property last night, Gordon?”

“What?”

“Sit up, boy. Pay attention.”

I sit up. Pay attention.

“And wipe that glower off your face.”

Which is when Carla pipes up. “A really close friend of his is dying, OK?” she says. “Cancer.”

For a moment Hicks looks like he might give a shit. Then he smirks. “Pull the other one,” he says and turns back to the board.

Carla’s mouth hangs open. She looks at me like, What are you going to do? I glance at Crawley. He’s shaking his head. He can see right inside my brain and he’s warning me don’t do it, Gordon. Don’t give the bastard any more ammo.

But it’s too late. A pawn’s gotta do what a pawn’s gotta do.

I get up, gather my stuff together.

Hicks stops writing. His head swivels to watch me as I head towards the door.

“Giving up?” he says. “Got an appointment with your probation officer?”

I wonder for just one split-second how many years you’d get for Hickicide, but I shake it off. “Just a call of nature,” I say.

He glances at the clock. “Well, nature can wait for ten more minutes, Gordon. Sit down.”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure it can wait – nature, I mean.”

“Sit. Down.”

But I won’t. I’m thinking about what Alicia told me:
Go forward. One square at a time. It’s a game, right?

The bell over the door of the craft shop jingles. Roger’s at his post behind the counter, writing in a ledger. He looks at me and then up at the ceiling – where the god of craft stores hangs out, I guess – like he’s thinking, Cancer, and now this.

“Shouldn’t you be in jail?” he says.

Such a charmer.

“I wanted to ask if you need any help,” I say.

He’s taken aback. But he’s wary. He looks at me like there’s some kind of angle, a punchline, a trick. What’d Jenny say about him?
He’s always been grumpy
.

“You want work?”

I shake my head. “We have to do community service. It’s this thing at my school.”

He stares at me. “Are you serious?”

I nod. “It’d have to be after-school hours. I could, you know … whatever.”

He closes the ledger. “I can’t pay you,” he says.

“It’s community service. Free. I volunteered to paint the town red, but the council wasn’t interested.”

There is the smallest hint of a smile. He crosses his arms and gives me the evil eye. “What are you up to?” he says.

I want to say, “About here,” and hold my hand very near the top of my head. Because I am so tired of being ‘up to something’. He really, truly is a dickhead. I think, Why bother. I think, who cares? I want to serve him up a few choice obscenities, a mention or two of where he might shove various sharp articles in the shop. But I’m tired of stepping away from the car.

“I reckon it would be a good opportunity to rob this place blind,” I say. “It was Jenny’s idea, actually.”

“Jenny Moore?”

I nod. “I phoned her just now. Phone her yourself if you don’t believe me.”

He just stares as if he’s never talked to a pawn before, just passed them by on his way up the board. Didn’t know they spoke the same language.

“In case you need, you know, time off, or whatever.”

I’m not saying any more. I’ve said enough.

He blinks. His eyes get watery. “Is this…?” He doesn’t go on, but the tone of his voice is different now, and I can guess where he was going and why he didn’t want to go there.

“Yeah,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. So I find a pen and write my name and phone number on a scrap of paper. Then I turn and head towards the door. I stop and turn back.

“I just want to look at something,” I say.

He nods, manages a watery smile.

I head to the back of the shop and the sacred glade, where the chess set sits. The pieces are all over the place, like last time, but this time I realize that it’s a game in progress. Two or three of the pieces are lying on their sides beside the board, with this expression on their face like, What happened? Meanwhile, the black queen looks like she’s getting close to putting the white king in checkmate. Maybe Roger plays against himself when no one’s around.

I find Alicia. She’s three-quarters of the way down the board and her path is clear towards becoming a queen.

“Good on you,” I say, just to her.

She looks up at me and winks.

WE WERE AS BAD AS EACH
other, so people said. Denny and Jake; Jake and Denny. People knew us. We had a reputation. We lived up to it. Fizzing with attitude like skinny sticks of dynamite, one of these days we were going to explode.

A rubbish and boring October Saturday afternoon, cold and wet, and we were skint. But Denny had a plan. Denny always had a plan. Now we were outside the newsagent’s on Karras Street, staying out of the rain as best as we could, keeping an eye on the main doors to the swimming-pool across the other side, waiting for a pair of suckers to come out.

Cars blew by on the road, throwing up spray. We were wearing our leather coats – long, black and mean. I liked the way the wind flapped them at our legs as we stood there. Mine hung a bit baggy on my shoulders but I reckoned it still looked cool. It was my older brother’s, and Tam was taller than me, wider than me. He was seventeen, I was fourteen, but I still filled it pretty well. Tam didn’t know I wore it, would probably kill me if he found out. I didn’t care. It made me feel cool. Denny had bought his new a few weeks back and he’d been sleeping in it at night to give it the proper creased look. We knew we looked mean wearing them, standing side by side – like mafia, like gangsters. They were our trademark. People saw us coming.

Someone banged on the newsagent’s window behind us. It was an old bloke and he pushed his gargoyle face up against the inside of the glass, glaring around the edges of a
WE SELL STAMPS
poster. He waggled a wrinkly hand at us, wanting to shoo us away. I looked to Denny, but he just shrugged. We turned our backs on the old git. We weren’t fussed. We knew we looked like trouble.

Two little kids came out through the swimming-pool doors.

“That them?” Denny asked.

I craned my neck and squinted to see between the traffic. The kids pushed their way out of the heavy glass doors and came up the short path to the gates. They pulled up hoods and turned towards town.