Wasted Years

Thirty-Six

Keith had to hand it to his dad-ever since the day he’d decided to stop drinking stop was what he’d done. If Ladbroke’s had been offering odds, Keith would have been down there with every penny he could muster, happy to put it all on his old man to be back on the bottle before the week was out. After all, hadn’t he grown up hearing his parents lob promises like hand grenades between them? Listen, you’ve got my word … That’s the last time, I swear … I’ll never ever … Cross my heart and hope to die. “Promises,” his gran had said once, her sour commentary on the whole affair, “are like pie crusts-meant to be broken.”

But here it was, not yet ten in the morning, his father had already stripped the paper from three of the walls in the bathroom and was moving in on the fourth. Consistently, the house was being transformed. The last of his dodgy lodgers had found his belongings, such as they were, stacked against the front wall. Instead of stale beer and puke, it smelled of disinfectant and fresh paint.

“Set the tea to mash,” Rylands called from the bathroom door. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

In the kitchen, Keith delved his hand into a packet of Honey Nut Cheerios and started eating them dry.

“Why don’t you sit down, have a proper breakfast?” Rylands said, rinsing his hands beneath the tap.

“Not hungry.”

“There’s plenty of bread. You could make yourself some toast.”

“I said …”

“Okay, okay.” The kettle coming to the boil, Rylands made the tea himself, swilling hot water round the inside of the brown earthenware pot and emptying it out before dropping in two tea bags, thinking about it, adding a third. “What you going to do today?” he asked.

Keith pushed the cereal packet back in the cupboard and shrugged.

“I could use a hand in the bathroom. Those tiles …”

“No thanks.”

None of the cups and saucers seemed to match and all of the mugs were chipped or cracked: he would have to chuck them out, get himself to the market and get them replaced.

“How about work?” he asked, pouring the milk.

“Huh?”

“I thought you said this week you were going to look for a job?”

“There are no bloody jobs.”

“Pork Farms, they need people on the night shift.”

“Don’t think I’m working in some factory, coming home stinking of meat.”

Rylands poured the tea. “Suit yourself.”

“If you don’t like it, I’ll move back out.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

“Well …”

Rylands passed Keith his tea, sat at the kitchen table and started to leaf through the Mirror. “Sure you don’t want any toast?”

“Sure. Have some yourself, I’m not stopping you.”

“Had mine a couple of hours ago.”

“What d’you want, a medal?”

Rylands looked at his son, sipped his tea; all that belligerence in the boy’s face, clenched fists, his stance. A young lifetime on the defensive, warding off those who were bigger, older, stronger. From the first day Keith had stepped into the secondary school playground he had been bullied, made fun of, an easy mark. The few friends he had were usually lower on the pecking order than he was himself: a timid boy, part-Indian, part-Chinese, with silky skin and long dark eyelashes that curved; an asthmatic lad with glasses thick as the bottoms of half-pint mugs. Either that, or they were using him for their own ends.

“Seeing that Darren today?”

“Maybe.”

Rylands nodded and turned to the sports pages.

“Why d’you want to know?”

“No reason.”

Keith was standing close against his father’s elbow. “Don’t like him, do you?”

“Do you?”

“What sort of a stupid question is that?”

Rylands took hold, not roughly, of his arm. “One it wouldn’t hurt for you to think of an honest answer to.”

Keith shook him free and stood away. “I’m off out.”

“All right,” Rylands said. “I’ll be here.”

Darren had been watching her, Lorna. Nothing regular or consistent, not methodical, just whenever it came into his head, if he was at a loose end, didn’t have anything better to do. So he knew the route she took to work, the corner shop where she would stop off to buy a paper and occasionally a packet of cigarettes, more often than not some magazine; he knew the way she walked back, sidetracking sometimes to call at the minimarket and pick up something for her supper-frozen calorie-counter meals and Slimma soups, she went in for a lot of that. Not that Darren could see why.

He’d sneaked up close to the house once, the one where she had her flat; shinned over the wall and stood in the back garden, not really a garden, more of a yard. Leaned against the flimsy shed and watched her undress. Not all the way, not before she’d crossed the room to switch out the light, but far enough to see the last thing she had to worry about was being overweight.

Maybe he should tell her, casual like, in the newsagent’s when she was picking up her copy of Today. Helpful words from a friend. No. Let it wait until he was ready to put right what went wrong before. Drift in off the street and saunter over to the counter. Lorna Solomon? You’ve got a really good body, you know that? Oh, and while you’re doing nothing, just empty all of that cash you’ve got there into this sack.

Real cool: he liked that.

Standing in front of the boarded-up shop down the arcade from the building society, he looked at his reflection in the darkened glass and grinned at himself as he repeated the words. Practice makes perfect.

Taking his time, Darren wandered towards the building society office and looked through the glass door. Fat woman who worked there-now if anyone needed her calories counting, she did-explaining something to this old couple, expression on her face suggesting that she was going through it for at least the third time. And Lorna alongside her, laughing suddenly at something the man in front of her had said; counting the bank notes out carefully before passing them under the glass. For an instant she looked towards the door and in that instant Darren instinctively dodged back so that neither of them was ever sure-Darren whether he had been spotted, Lorna if she had seen who she had thought she’d seen.

The square was riddled with bikers and hippies and punks with swastikas tattooed onto their faces with blue Biros or shaved into the top of their close-cropped hair. The same old woman stood amidst the same grubby pigeons and scattered them with bird seed and stale crumbs.

Keith and Darren sat on the low stone wall, sharing a piece of flabby pizza, Darren taking drags from a bummed cigarette. What Keith wanted to do was walk into the Park Estate and nick a car, one of those Ferraris or Mercs with personalized number plates that were always so invitingly there. Get onto the motorway going north and see what it really could do.

But Darren wasn’t having any. Stupid, he reckoned, to take the risk. Get caught over a bit of fun when they had serious plans. Keith kicked his heels, unable to extract from Darren precisely what these plans were.

“You don’t worry. You’ll know what you need to know soon enough.”

He would never have dared say so, but there were times when Keith doubted Darren had any real plans at all. Except for the gun. That was the one thing it always came back to, almost the only thing he ever talked about now, aside from that woman who worked in the building society and how he wouldn’t mind giving her one, how any day now he was going to get hold of a gun. The look on Darren’s face when he said it, as though somehow that was going to change everything, change the world.

“Got any cash?” Darren asked. “I fancy a Coke.”

Keith shook his head.

“Jesus!” Darren said, flicking away the butt of his cigarette as he stood clear of the wall. “I hate that. Not even enough between us for a drink when you want one.” He jerked his head in the direction of the nearest underpass. “Come on,” he said.