Num8ers (2 page)

The Nutter was cracking the whip. Someone must have rattled his cage — whatever, he was definitely on our case. No messing about, no backchat, heads down, English comprehension test, thirty minutes. Trouble is, when someone tells me to do something, I have this problem. I just wanna tell them to piss off, I’ll do it in my own time. Even if it’s something I actually want to do. Which this wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I can read, sort of, but I’m not very fast. My brain kind of needs time to sort out the words. If I try and read quickly, everything gets muddled up, the words don’t mean nothing.

Anyway, I was trying my best, this time. I really was. Karen, my foster mum, had read me the riot act over bunking off school. You know how it goes, don’t you?
“Time to knuckle down…important to get some qualifications…life’s not a rehearsal…”
She’d been talking to the school, to my social worker — all the usual suspects — and I figured I didn’t need the hassle anymore. I’d go along with it all, keep my head down for a bit, get me some breathing space.

Everyone else was quiet, too, for a change. They’d picked up on the Nutter’s evil mood and decided not to push it. There
was a bit of shuffling about and sighing, but basically everyone was sitting still and working — or pretending to — when, without any warning, something exploded into the room. The door swung back on its hinges and crashed into the wall behind, and Spider burst in like he’d been fired out of a cannon, stumbling on his feet, almost falling over. Instantly the mood was broken. Kids started cheering and jeering, shouting out to him.

The Nutter wasn’t impressed. “What do you mean by bursting in here like that? Go outside into the corridor and come back in like a civilized human being.”

Spider slumped forward with an exaggerated sigh and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Ah, come on, sir. I’m in now, aren’t I? I’m here.”

McNulty spoke quietly, but with force, if you know what I mean, like he was just managing to keep a lid on things. “Just do what I say, and we’ll start again.”

“What you doing this for, sir? I don’t need to be here, but I’m here. I’m ready to learn, sir.” An ironic look to the rest of us, met with an answering jeer. “Why d’ya have to give me all this grief?”

The Nutter took a deep breath. “I don’t know why you’ve decided to join us today, but something has brought you here. Now if you want to join in, and I hope that you do, you need to go out, come in quietly like I’ve asked you, and we’ll get on with the lesson.”

There was a long pause, while they eyeballed each other. The rest of us went quiet, waiting to see how it would play out.
For once, Spider was almost keeping still, standing there, staring at the Nutter, with just one leg jiggling. Then he turned and went out, just like that. Every eye in that classroom watched him go and kept watching the empty doorway. Had he gone for good? There was a low murmur as he reappeared, drawn up to his full height, cool as anything. He paused on the threshold. “Morning, sir,” he said and nodded in the Nutter’s direction.

“Good morning, Dawson.” There was a wary look in McNulty’s eye, not sure how to take Spider’s apparent backdown. Worried that victory had been too easy. He placed the comprehension sheet, some paper, and a pen on Spider’s desk. “Sit down, lad, and do your best with this.” Spider sauntered over to his desk, while McNulty returned to the front and stood there, watching us. “OK, everyone, settle down. Twenty-five minutes to go. Let’s see what you can do.”

But Spider’s unexpected return had broken the mood. We were agitated now, a bit of a buzz going ’round. Everyone was fidgeting; there was backchat, chair legs scraping on the floor. McNulty kept picking away at people, trying to get back on top of things: “Eyes on the page, please.” “Keep your hands to yourself.” He was fighting a losing battle.

As for me, the words in front of me swam and danced. They were meaningless, a pattern, nothing more, like Chinese or Arabic. Because I couldn’t stop myself wondering if I was the reason Spider was back. Down by the canal I thought I’d felt the start of a connection, and it had scared me. I’d avoided him since then, but I’d no reason to think that Spider had given me
a second thought, until now. Because I could have sworn that as he’d sauntered over to his desk, he’d winked at me. Bloody nerve. Who did he think he was?

After lunch, the Nutter had had enough. Against a background of noise, laughter, general chat, he suddenly stopped. “Right, books away, pens away, paper away. All of you. Now!” What was he up to? “Come on, get on with it. All your stuff away. We need to talk.” Rolled eyes, yawns — yeah, we got it, here comes the pep talk. We put our things in our bags or stuffed them into pockets, and waited for the standard bollocking:
“Unacceptable behavior…Letting yourselves down…Lack of respect…”
But it didn’t happen.

Instead he walked up and down between the desks, stopping and saying something to each of us before going on to the next one. “Unemployed.” “Checkout girl.” “Garbageman.” When he got to me, he didn’t even pause. “Cleaning lady,” he said and carried on walking. He worked his way back to the front, turned and faced us. “OK, how did that make you feel?”

We stared at our desks or out the window. It had made us feel exactly how he wanted us to feel. Like shit. We all knew what sort of futures were waiting for us after school, didn’t need a puffed-up little tit like him to remind us.

Then Spider blurted out, “I feel fine, sir. It’s just your opinion, isn’t it? It don’t mean shit. I can do anything I want, can’t I?”

“No, Dawson, that’s the whole point, and I want you all to listen. At the moment, with the attitude you’ve all got now,
that’s where you’re heading. However, if you apply yourselves a bit more, concentrate, make the best of your last year here, it could be different. If you get some certifications, get a good report from school, credits toward a degree, you can achieve so much more.”

“My mum works on the checkout.” That was Charmaine, two seats along from me.

“Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but, you, Charmaine, could be the store manager if you wanted to. You all need to look a bit further, realize what you can achieve. What do you see yourselves doing? Come on, what are you going to be doing in a year, two years, five years? Laura, you start.”

He went ’round the room. Most of the kids hadn’t got a clue. Or rather, they knew his first assessment had been pretty accurate. When he got to Spider, I held my breath. The boy with no future, what would he say?

Of course, he rose to the challenge. He sat on the back of his chair, like he was addressing a crowd. “Five years’ time, I’m gonna be cruising the streets in my black BMW, got some vibes on the sound system, got money in my pocket.” The other boys jeered.

McNulty looked at him witheringly. “And how, Dawson, are you going to do that?’

“Bit of this, bit of that, sir. Buying and selling.”

McNulty’s face changed. “Theft, Dawson? Drug dealing?” he said coldly. He shook his head. “I’m almost speechless,
Dawson. Breaking the law, peddling in misery. Is that all you can aspire to?”

“It’s the only way any of us are going to get any cash, man. What do you drive, sir? That little red Astra in the parking lot? Teaching? Working for twenty years? I’m tellin’ you, I ain’t driving no Astra.”

“Sit down on your chair, Dawson, and shut up. Someone else, please. Jem, what about you?”

How could I possibly know what was going to happen to me? I didn’t even know where I was going to be living in a year’s time. Why was this man torturing us, making us squirm like this? I took a deep breath and said, as sweet as I could manage, “Me, sir? I know what I want.”

“Oh, good. Carry on.”

I made myself look him right in the eye. 12252023. How old was he now? Forty-eight? Forty-nine? He’d go just around the time he retired, then. On Christmas Day, too. Life’s cruel, isn’t it? Christmas spoiled for his family for the rest of their lives. Serve him right, the cruel bastard.

“Sir,” I said, “I want to be exactly…like…you.”

He brightened for a second, a half smile forming, then realized I was taking the mick. His face shut down, and he shook his head. His mouth was a hard line, you could see the bones sticking out as he clenched his jaw.

“Get your math books out,” he barked. “Wasting my time,” he muttered under his breath. “Wasting my time.”

On the way out of class, Spider high-fived me. I didn’t do
that stuff normally, but my hand went up to meet his like it had a mind of its own.

“Like your style, man,” he said, nodding his approval. “You got him good. Result.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Spider?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t do drugs, do ya?”

“Nah, nothing heavy. I was just winding him up. Too easy, innit, sometimes? You walking home?”

“No, got detention.” I needed to hang back for a couple of minutes, let the crowds of kids thin out. Karen would be waiting outside the gate. She was walking me to and from school at the moment, just until I’d “earned her trust.” No way I was going to let any of this lot see me with her. “See ya around, then.”

“Yeah, see ya.” He drop-kicked his bag through the classroom door and swung out after it, and as I watched him I thought,
Stay away from drugs, Spider, for Christ’s sake. They’re dangerous.

It was one of those gray October days when it never really gets light. The rain wasn’t exactly falling — it was just there, hanging in the air, in your face, blotting everything out. I could feel it soaking through my hoodie, starting to make my shoulders and the top of my back go cold. We were ’round the back of the shopping center, where the concrete slabs of its walls met the dull green streak of the canal.

“We should go in the shops, at least it’s dry,” I suggested. Spider shrugged and sniffed. Even his movements were subdued today, like the weather had sapped his energy.

“Got no money. Anyway, those security guys are on my case.”

“I’m not staying here. It’s cold and rank and boring.”

Spider caught my eye. “But apart from that?”

“It’s crap.”

He snorted in appreciation, then spun ’round and started off down the path. “Come on, let’s go to mine. It’s only my nan there, and she’s OK.”

I hesitated. We’d kind of drifted into hanging out together, after school and on the weekends, since Karen had loosened the
reins a bit. Not all the time — Spider sometimes went ’round with a gang of lads from school instead. From what I could tell, he’d run with them until they had a row, or even a fight, then he’d keep clear for a bit. There’s always something going on with boys. It’s like animals, isn’t it, monkeys or lions, sorting out the pecking order, who’s the boss? Anyway, for whatever reason, he wasn’t with them this Saturday, he was with me, and we were bored as hell. There was nothing for us to do.

Going to someone’s house was a big deal for me. I’d never been asked before. Even when I was little, I was never one of those girls who skipped out of the classroom in pairs, holding hands sometimes, giggling, excited. Having friends over for tea parties didn’t fit in with Mum’s lifestyle.

“I dunno,” I said reluctantly. Like usual, I was worried about meeting anyone new, not knowing whether to look at them or not. People think I’m shifty because I don’t like looking at them, but really I’m just trying to keep out of their lives — TMI.

“Suit yourself,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and setting off on his own.

The rain was getting in my face, annoying me now. “No, hold up!” I shouted, and ran to catch him up, and we walked along together, hoods up, heads down, in the filthy London drizzle.

It took about five minutes to get to his place, one of those maisonettes at the front of the Park Estate projects. It was in the middle of a row, on the ground floor, with a little square
of garden at the front. The garden was something else — some grass and a few flowers and that — but the great thing was all these little statues and things: gnomes, animals. It was hilarious.

“Cool garden,” I said, half taking the piss, half meaning it. Spider made a face.

“It’s my nan,” he said. “She’s crazy.” He vaulted over the low wall and picked his way through the concrete crowd. He swung his leg at the head of a particularly ugly gnome.

“No, don’t,” I called out.

He stopped midkick.

“They’re nice. Don’t hurt them.”

“Oh, God. Not you as well.” He shook his head and waited while I opened the peeling tubular metal gate and walked up the path. Then he pushed in the front door — it must have already been open — and shouted out, “Only me, Nan. I’ve brought a mate.”

Nervous as I was, I clocked that, him using the word
mate.
And I liked it.

There was a narrow hallway and then straight into the front room. Every shelf, every surface was covered with stuff: little china animals, plates, vases. Think of every garage sale you’ve ever been to, all the stuff left over at the end that no one wants, and you’ll get the picture. The overpowering smell of cigarette smoke made the air thick. No windows open, obviously. A plume of it wafted through from the next room, and I followed Spider through there. His nan was perched on a stool
at a breakfast bar, newspaper in front of her, cup of tea at hand, ciggy lit. She didn’t look nothing like her grandson. She was small, white, like me, with short spiky hair dyed a dark shade of purple. Her face was lined, hard-looking. I watched as he stooped to peck her cheek, and thought that if you saw them in the street you’d never know they were family. But that’s the way now, isn’t it? The days of family photographs — Mum, Dad, two kids, all dressed up, all looking the same — did that ever happen? Is there anywhere that still happens? Not here, anyway. Families ’round here are what they are — just your nan, like Spider, or no one, like me — black, white, brown, yellow, whatever. That’s how it is.

As Spider stood back up, his nan looked at me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Val.”

I tried to keep my eyes down, but for some reason I looked up briefly and, instantly, she held my gaze. I couldn’t look away. Her eyes were amazing — hazel, set in clear white, despite the smoke. And it wasn’t like she was just looking, like anyone else. No, she was taking me in, she was really seeing me. I clocked her number, 02202054: forty-four years to go with a heavy smoking habit. Respect.