Too Much Trouble (5 page)

‘Yes, yes, yes!' he said, when we found the right garden. He dropped down and I scrambled up, gripping on to the top of the fence and placing my feet flat against the panel. At the far end of the garden there was a large man. He wore a cap and a checked, short-sleeved shirt. The lower half of his body was obscured by a smoking barbecue.

‘Darling!' he shouted. ‘Darling, can you get me a tray? This chicken's done.' He stood listening, facing the house. No reply came and he barked, ‘Darling?'

He walked into the house, and without a
word to Prince I hauled myself over the fence.

I ran as fast as I could, and reached the barbecue, panting. Quickly I picked up as many chicken legs as I could carry. I tried not to scream as my knuckles were seared on the blackened metal bars. As I ran back down the garden, I thrust the sticky meat into my pockets. I slammed into the fence and again hurled myself over. I crashed into Prince as I fell down the other side.

That was the first thing I ever stole. It was terrifying.

***

It must have been nearly time for school to finish when we decided to head back to the house. We could hear the jingle of an ice-cream van at the nearest entrance to the park. It was a ten minute walk back to the house.

We decided to take a detour to the mini-supermarket on the green. We stretched our money carefully. A pack of six finger rolls, a big bag of nachos, some cheese slices, and a big bottle of cola pop. I had just silver coins left in my pocket. Prince wanted another Chomp or a Freddo,
but I knew that a little money in my pocket was better than slightly fuller stomachs.

As we walked the few minutes from the shop to our own alley and garden fence, you could almost hear us not mentioning what might await us. When we arrived, we both looked over the fence cautiously. There was no sign of my uncle or any of his friends, no lights on, no windows open. We both let out long breaths. You might have thought we'd been holding them for the last hour.

Prince climbed first. I passed over our bags and shopping. I hauled myself over and followed Prince through the jungle to the back door.

We went through into the kitchen. Prince threw his bag down in the corner and I walked over to the cupboard which held our three chipped plates. We were hungry and tired. We would eat and then go to sleep. I was so tired that thoughts of what tomorrow would bring were muted and distant.

As I swung the cupboard door open I heard Prince begin to scream, and I knew that trouble had found us.

In a moment I felt something strike the back of my head. I collapsed into the cupboard door and then down on to the floor. The cupboard door came
crashing on to my chest, having been pulled away from the unit. Prince's scream redoubled in my ears and then cut off abruptly as I tried to focus my swimming eyes.

Something struck me in the side and I heard my uncle growl, ‘Get up, you!'

I felt myself being lifted off the ground, my enormous uncle picking me up in one hand as he held Prince by the neck in the other. ‘What have you done, you stupid boys?' Before I could begin to answer, my uncle released me and then quickly struck another blow across my face.

This time I didn't stay on the ground for long. Prince was beginning to turn purple and I could hear soft, choking noises. I leapt up and grappled with my uncle's arm, plunging my teeth and nails into his muscled limb. That made him let go. I heard Prince gasp a breath as another blow swept across my face.

‘Get out, Prince!' I coughed, struggling to rise. The back door clattered as Prince rushed through it, then my uncle's box-fresh, white trainers connected with my stomach. I stopped trying to get up and just fought for breath.

‘Why am I getting phone calls to my house?' my
uncle roared, then kicked me again. ‘Your sons have run away from the school, they say!' He imitated a lady's voice as he kicked me again. The kick turned me over to face him. ‘You need to come and see us or we will come and see you, they say!' My uncle picked me up again and threw me on to a wooden chair, then took a step back as if to admire his handywork.

I looked over to the door and saw Prince peering in through the glass. I willed him not to come back in.

My uncle had turned away from me, letting out a long sigh. I tried to control my ragged breathing and my uncle turned back towards me.

‘You are my brother's son, but I cannot look after you any more. Here...' he said, thrusting a wedge of notes at me. ‘Now, get out. You will be gone before my friends come. You will not like what they will do when they find that you have brought trouble. Get out, Emmanuel, take your brother and go.'

With these words, my uncle headed for the door that led into the rest of the house, pulling a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket.

Prince opened the back door and looked at me, open-mouthed, the shock clear on his face.
He mumbled, ‘I'll get the stuff.'

That was the last time we ever saw that house. I've never missed it.

There had been four occasions, when my uncle brought us our allowance, that he had stayed to play with us. Just four in three years. Once he had brought us an old Playstation One. A scratched and chipped grey box with a circular lid. You pressed a button and the lid slowly raised so that you could insert games.

I knew it was nothing to boast about, compared to my friends' elaborate computer systems, but me and Prince had never owned anything like it. There was a game called Bust-a-Move. It was brilliant.

You had to shoot these different-coloured bubbles at other coloured bubbles and if you got them in a group of all the same colour then the bubbles
exploded. OK, that doesn't sound too fantastic, but it was two-player.

My uncle held a cigarette between his lips as he challenged me and Prince to play against him. You had to destroy more bubbles than your opponent. We didn't beat him once.

Every time he beat us my uncle laughed and called us funny names. Me and Prince came up with tactics for how we could win, and he laughed even harder. It was a very good day.

The computer console didn't last long. Me and Prince played on it semi-constantly the week after my uncle had left us. We were trying to get good enough to beat him. We hoped that maybe he would stay the next time he came.

But one evening, when we weren't busy with the bubble game, one of my uncle's friends found us somewhere we shouldn't have been. We had been playing hide-and-seek. I was ‘it' and Prince had decided to hide in one of the rooms with all the plants. I had gone in to find him when I heard the front door opening.

I froze in the doorway and Prince collided with me on his way out. We lay in a heap as footsteps approached. My uncle's friend grabbed us roughly
and threw us back into our part of the house. He phoned my uncle. I could hear their conversation, my uncle's replies muted and indistinct.

When he hung up, the man who had found us picked up the playstation, placed it in the middle of the room and stamped on it several times. It didn't work after that and we were much more careful about where we were found.

***

When I had the opportunity to look in a mirror I saw why Prince had looked at me with such horror.

After my uncle kicked us out, Prince quickly gathered our few belongings, then led me stumbling out of the back door. We didn't climb the fence. Prince kicked out the loose panel. We wouldn't need to worry about dogs in the garden any more. At the end of the alley we turned left, towards town. After a few steps I stopped by a car and glanced at my reflection. The failing, evening light bounced off the tinted windows and my face was clearly reflected.

The left side of my face was purple and swollen like a giant plum. Blood was seeping from my nose
and was visible between my teeth. There was a red line cut into my chin. I guessed that this last one was from where I had hit the cupboard door.

Prince had stopped with me as I inspected myself in the car window. I looked at him. He was shaking and his face was pale and drawn. I knew that I couldn't expect him to take the lead, but I had no idea what to do.

We started with the obvious. ‘Come on, let's get some plasters,' I said.

The notes that my uncle had handed me were more than our usual allowance and more than my father had given us when he had sent us away, but it was still not a lot.

At the entrance to the chemist's, I handed Prince one of the notes and instructed him on exactly what to look for. I didn't go in. I didn't want to risk the chemist asking me too many questions. We had no one we could trust.

I looked through the glass, watching a shell-shocked Prince walking up and down the aisles. He disappeared behind a taller shelf and I tried my best to stop the blood dripping from my chin. I opened my school bag. Prince had stuffed it with some of our things. A few pens, our two favourite
DVDs (my uncle had given us one every couple of months), a few school books and, bundled up in the bottom, most of my clothes. I pulled out a white sock and pressed it against my chin.

I looked down at the sock. Slowly a red ring appeared at the bottom of my vision. The arc of blood continued down the sock. My chin was bleeding a lot.

Up and down the high street, shops were beginning to close. Shutters were coming down. Shop assistants were walking or cycling home. I watched a man walk towards the entrance to the train station as dozens of people came through the other way.

This set me thinking. We couldn't go back to the house, my uncle had made that clear. We couldn't go to either of our schools, they would only call my uncle. If anyone from our schools saw us, we could be in the same trouble.

By the time Prince came outside with the plasters, I had made a decision.

‘Come on, Prince.' I picked up the bags, threw one to Prince and headed to the train station.

***

I bet you're wondering what our favourite DVDs were. You'll be surprised. Well, you'll be surprised at mine. Prince's favourite was a set of four
Sponge-Bob
episodes. That's OK for a nine-year-old, right?

Well, mine was
Finding Nemo
. When you're a twelve-year-old boy, you don't tell other twelve-year-old boys that your favourite film is a cartoon about a fish. But it always made me happy.

I loved the beginning, when Nemo's dad is really protective. He won't let him go out alone, or even to school. He just wants to be there all the time. And then when Nemo gets taken, his dad does everything to get him back.

I don't really like Nemo though, and you
should
like the main character. He makes me cross right at the beginning, when he doesn't do what his dad says.

But I like the blue fish. She's funny. She thinks she can talk to whales and she can't remember anything.

***

I've never had a problem remembering things. I can remember that day so clearly. The way the blood felt, soaking into the sock. The way the plasters kept peeling off my chin. An image of Prince, staring at his
shoes as I spoke to the ticket man. He was still pale. He seemed little, even littler than he was, I mean.

The train tickets were a lot of money. We wouldn't have much left. They would take us into town, and then all the way to London. We could have gone anywhere, but we knew that there were a lot of people in London. It's much easier to be invisible when there are lots of people around. Much easier to hide. And besides, we'd never been to London before.

The man at the ticket booth looked at us both very strangely. I thought for a moment that he might not sell us the tickets, but he did. There was obviously no rule against selling tickets to blood-soaked children. He tapped away on his computer and then they came shooting out of a slot into his waiting hand.

He slid the tickets, and our change, under the glass screen. The train wasn't going to arrive for fifteen minutes. We wandered into the little shop attached to the waiting room.

We looked around slowly, happy for our minds to be distracted by the bright and familiar wrappers of crisps and chocolate bars. We'd left the food we'd bought earlier in the kitchen, but neither of us felt hungry.

We'd been in the shop for maybe a minute when
the woman behind the counter growled, “Are you planning on buying anything then, boys?” We both looked at her blankly, then at each other. In the end we bought a big bottle of cherry pop.

Ten minutes later we were boarding a train. We knew that in one hour and fifty-four minutes we'd be in London, but we had no idea where we might end up.

I like trains. I'm not one of those people who take pictures of them but I think they're great. Buses are too slow. They stop all the time for people to get on and then they wait at lights and get stuck in traffic. We used to get a bus into town sometimes and it would take about half an hour.

In half an hour on the train we were further from the house than we'd been in three years. The day's events seemed to travel back in time. They could have been months ago.

Have you seen that
Superman
film where the lady has died, so Superman flies around the world so fast that time goes backwards? It felt like that.