‘Where you going?’ Mustafa looked at my companion suspiciously.
‘Far,’ I said in an important voice. He put on a worried face. With the toffee binding my teeth I could not add to my report.
Resuming our walk, I followed Bobby past my old nursery and the infant school I’d joined the previous year. Each time we had to cross a road, Bobby would go first and wait impatiently on the other side, signalling with a jerk of his head when it was safe for me to cross. I could hear other hammers at work behind high walls, and sometimes I peeped through gaps in enormous iron gates. I still didn’t spot a hammer but I did see dark-looking men lowering, on a chain, a gigantic ship’s anchor. One man worked the chain and several others guided the anchor onto the tray of a truck. If it fell it would have crushed them. I felt a knot in my stomach, knowing I was far from home. I wouldn’t know how to find my own way back. My aching jaw from the hard-going toffee was making me feel sick.
As we approached the Mash Tun public house, Bobby and I crossed to the other side of the road. The pub was a square building with wooden picnic benches commanding a thin strip of yard next to the pavement. Skinheads in boots, tight jeans and bomber jackets stood outside drinking out of tall glasses. Each wore a long chain folded over at the hip. Spotting us, they stopped and stared. One scratched under an armpit in imitation of a monkey. They mouthed words at us — Wog, Paki — exaggerating the lip movements so their meaning was impossible to miss. Bobby shrank back against a wall as though it would afford him protection. One of the skinheads, swinging his chain frighteningly fast at his hips, mouthed the word Later, and they all laughed. Among them, sitting on a low stool, was a boy, Adrian Hartley, a bully I recognized from school. He nodded to me and ran across the road towards us. I stopped warily as he approached.
‘You wagged school then?’ Adrian’s hands were deep in his pockets. With his feet planted firmly on the ground his body swayed from side to side while his head nodded as though he could hear a song playing in his ears. I was worried that he might punch me, but his hands remained in his pockets.
‘I’m not wagging. Mum says I’ve got a tummy ache.’
Adrian looked at Bobby and smiled, his white teeth dazzling in his pale round face blotched with blue and black stains, maybe dirt. ‘I’m not wagging either.’ He jerked his head towards the Mash Tun. ‘My dad said I could skip today on account of my black eye.’ His stubby finger traced the blue circle around his bloodshot left eye.
The skinheads shook their heads, and digging their thumbs into tight denim pockets they slunk off into the pub, through a swinging door like in a cowboy film. Bobby stood perfectly still exactly five steps in front of Adrian and me. He dug one thumb into his belt and twisted his long hair around a finger of his other hand. His feet were spread wide. He turned his head to the side and a bolus of spit shot out of his mouth to land fizzing on the hot tarmac.
Adrian gazed hungrily at the stub of Highland Toffee in my hand. ‘Have it,’ I said, offering him the gooey mess. ‘You can buy twenty Highland Toffees with a pound, and I know how you can earn a whole pound.’
‘Really?’ said Adrian, his eyes wide. ‘In the Mash Tun with a pound I could drink Tizer all day.’
Bobby squinted as though examining some detail on Adrian’s skin. ‘The white boy your friend?’ he called.
A white friend, I thought, and nodded proudly.
He whistled, sucking the air through his teeth. ‘You have good friends.’
It grew warmer as we walked on, and each successive street was quieter with fewer houses. Adrian kept turning to me, squeezing out a nervous smile, and I reciprocated with a reassuring nod. At what was to be our final turn, the view before us was like that of a country village. The road sloped lazily downwards, lined on each side by trees. A sign on one side read Lye Park, and a set of low gates led onto grassland. In the distance the grass sloped gently upwards, and on the crest of the hill was a playground, incongruous in its orange tubular metal construction. Emanating from it were the excited shrieks of preschool children and the guarded, muffled voices of their mothers.
Lye Park was huge, and after walking some way in the opposite direction to the playground, Bobby stopped and scanned the view. We stopped too, waiting. He dropped to the ground, and we followed, the three of us crawling on our knees and elbows over the warm earth like soldiers, towards a small dense orchard of crab apple trees. The fruit was tiny and wouldn’t ripen until the autumn. Pointing to the base of one tree, Bobby instructed me in a harsh whisper to stay there as a lookout. I sank to my haunches, my legs quivering.
Bobby led Adrian by the hand to a nearby tree, one with a low canopy of dense green leaves. ‘It looks like a camp in here,’ I heard Adrian say excitedly as he disappeared underneath the thick mass of overhanging green. Bobby wriggled in after him. His big feet stuck out, their red rubber soles lolling out like tongues.
There was some sort of argument. Adrian’s boots were ankle high and green with red laces and took him ages to get off. They were thrown, as though discarded, to the edge of the foliage, a Union Jack stitched on each side.
The sunlight was strong and it shimmered through the few spaces between the leaves. Bobby spat a lot and cursed and the wind shook the leaves on the tree. Then Bobby squashed Adrian underneath him and then he seemed to be propped up on his knees. He spat some more, rubbed himself and made gentle murmuring sounds as though he was coaxing a baby to sleep. Finally he let out a subdued grunt, and Adrian, pulling up his trousers, wriggled out feet first from underneath the bush. He leapt for his boots, looked inside them and then at Bobby, on his face an expression of confusion and betrayal.
*
Smarting again at the memory, I reach across and untangle a stray hair on Grace’s brow. At the parting her hair is darker, almost black, like a water stain that re-emerges however many times it is scrubbed clean. Even in sleep her face looks thoughtful and disappointed as though she is about to cry. I wonder what she dreams about.
‘That’s not the whole story,’ I tell her. ‘Adrian looking so hard done by: that was because of me. I took the pound that Bobby had paid him. I slipped it out of his boot when he was inside the bush, and as soon as I stole it I felt a dullness, a despair I hadn’t felt before. I knew that if I replaced the money the hopelessness would go away, but I didn’t. For a reason unknown to me, at the time and even now, half a lifetime later, I feel I am in need of that despair.’
I expect Grace at least to stir, but there is only the shallow rise and fall of her chest and a gentle vibration as the breath passes across the Cupid’s bow of her upper lip. All of me wants to touch her body, softly at first until she wakes up, and then I want her to say again that I can fuck her.
4
Bobby walked briskly away, and Adrian and I were stranded, wandering aimlessly until Adrian recognized a pub from which he was able to navigate, pub to pub, back to the Mash Tun. I tried not to look at him, out of fear of what he might report, and he carried a limp. A few times, suddenly remembering, he cursed the pound he had been cheated out of. I was glad when he went into the pub.
I got back to find Mustafa in the middle of the road, exactly halfway between his house and mine, which stood facing each other. Mustafa trembled and covered his eyes with his hands, muttering, ‘Allah, oh Allah!’ As though oblivious to the boy’s panicked presence, a dog chased a cat in circles around him. The cat, I thought, would lose the dog. It would leap through a small opening in a fence or do an about-turn far too quickly for the lumbering dog, and scarper. The animals changed direction and disappeared, and Mustafa, slowly uncovering his eyes, looked cautiously around. His chest swayed rapidly and seeing me, a thin spray of tears ran down his cheeks.