The first time they attacked him, he went home covered in bruises and scratches, with blood oozing from his mangled lips. His father told him to fight back next time. He did.
Three of the boys went home crying to their mothers, and Logan was suspended the next day. His father had to work hard and pull strings at the factory to get him back into class.
As Logan struggled at school, and tried to stay as far from the other kids as he could, his father started coming home later, and drunker, every night.
Dad spent more and more time drinking in the community pub with his new colleagues after work before he returned home. Which was a relief, because, when he did get home, he’d spend the rest of the evening in a drunken shouting match with Logan’s mother.
Logan made do by covering his head with his pillow as he tried to sleep.
He went back to the old neighbourhood one Saturday, but everyone there knew he was no longer one of them. Even Jason claimed he wasn’t home when Logan knocked on the door and asked to see him.
But why should they trust him?
He’d left the street without any warning, and returned as a manager’s kid. They had every reason not to. A few words from a toff could consign any of these families to living rough on the streets.
He took to climbing over the ‘No Entry’ barriers at the seafront end of the decaying old pier near the marina, walking out over the sea on the uneven wooden planks, past the boarded-up theatre and stores, then sitting at the end, all alone, watching the ships pass the town out to sea.
A police patrol saw him one day, but one glance at his new ID was enough to convince them to leave him alone with just a warning about the dangers of the old, rotten wood that had been exposed to the ravages of weather and sea for centuries.
He’d listen to that wooden floor and the tall wooden legs of the pier creak below him as he stared out across the cold, green waters of the English Channel. Out to where the water met the sea at the horizon.
The sounds of the town, and the sounds of his troubled life, seemed to fade away when he walked out along the pier, above the sea. The sunlight glinted from the white wings of seagulls squawking in the sky, and the stench of dead fish, old mud, and rotting seaweed filled his nose.
He’d shade his eyes from the sun with one hand, and stare out across the waves at the grey blobs of the Royal Navy and French ships patrolling the dark water that separated England from France.
One clear summer night, when he was eight years old, Dad had taken Logan, Malcolm and Alice for a walk up into the hills beyond the town, and shown them the lights in the distance. The lights of France, on the far side of the Channel, and the lights of the navy ships moving slowly as they faced each other off in between.
Alice thought they were pretty, but she was more interested in the flowers and trees. Logan sat on a rock at the top of the cliff, and stared out across a space that seemed larger than that between him and the stars. Men had crossed that vast, dark space and returned, but he’d never heard of anyone crossing the Channel. Let alone coming back.
He was looking at another world, completely disconnected from his. Were there even people over there like the ones he knew? Or were they as alien as his new classmates at school?
He’d made no friends in his new life, and no longer had any left in his old. If he was lucky, in a couple of years he’d get a management job in the same factory as his parents. Marry one of the less desirable girls in their suburb, who’d failed to catch one of the better-connected boys who taunted him at school, or a pretty girl from the chav estates to whom he could offer a new life of luxury that she’d never imagined she could have. Make some kids. Work for the toffs every day until he died, the way his parents would.
If he was unlucky, he’d never find a job, and be left with a choice between living off UBI, or joining the masses of chavs who lived hand-to-mouth every day on the streets of the big cities, stealing or worse, to make enough money to survive. Until they were finally caught doing something bad enough for them to be executed.
There had to be something better than this. A place away from the toffs, away from their constant interference, where he could live a better life. A place where he wouldn’t have to make such hard choices, where he could expect something more from his time in the world than a tedious job followed by long nights drowning his sorrows at the pub.
He packed his bag that evening. He took one last look at his mother sleeping in her bedroom, then crept down the stairs to the sound of his father’s snores, as Dad tossed and turned in his armchair. A moment later, Logan stepped out into the cold night air. The curfew would begin soon, but fog was coming in from the sea, filling the streets with a thin haze that would help him hide as he moved toward the shore.
He nodded to the guards as he strolled out of the gate, then stayed in the shadows, and away from the staring cameras and the buzzing of drones, as he made his way to the seafront. Sirens whined in the darkness, but the police had better things to do than worry about a kid running away from home.
He found Jason’s father’s dinghy where he’d last seen it months before. Tied up at the quay, floating low in the water with the sail furled, and the sides of the hull tapping against the rubber lumps that hung between it and the plasteel wall.
He tossed his bag into the dinghy, untied it from the quay, and climbed down. A few minutes later, the sail was fluttering in the wind above him, and the boat began to move.
He crouched low, expecting to be spotted at any moment, as the dinghy sailed out across the marina, between the yachts anchored in the water. Then he was past the quay, and the shadowy English coast faded as the boat entered the fog bank.
The lights of the town followed him for a few minutes more, their bright glow burning through the haze. Then they too were gone, and he was alone in the dark night. He pulled his flashlight from his bag. France was a long way away, but all he had to do was watch the compass that was mounted in the floor beside the mast, and keep it pointing south.
He couldn’t miss France if he kept heading that way.
His old life was over. Tonight, he was going to start a new one, or die trying. Whichever it happened to be no longer much mattered. He couldn’t continue living the way he was.
For hours, he sat in the stern of the dinghy, shivering as the damp sea air cooled around him, holding the tiller tightly in the darkness as the dinghy bobbed up and down on the waves, and watching for any sign of ships.
After a couple of hours, the luminous glow of the compass needle faded, and he took to turning on the flashlight every few minutes to check that he was still going in the right direction.
A low buzzing noise rose over the hissing of the wind. Somewhere up above, a drone was flying through the fog, searching for boats doing just what he was planning to do. He crouched low in the the dinghy, below the sail, for what good that might do. The fog would block the drone’s cameras, and there was little metal in the dinghy for it to detect, but who knows what other sensors it might have?
The droning buzz grew louder.
Then the dinghy stopped. The bow rose high out of the water, then it sank back, and the dinghy turned sideways in the wind. But it wasn’t moving any more, as though he’d run onto a beach on the far side of the channel. But it was surely much too soon for that? He’d be lucky to reach France before dawn.
He waited as the buzzing reached its peak, then faded away as the drone passed by. When he could no longer hear anything above the wind and the scraping from the side of the boat, he clicked on the flashlight, and shone it into the darkness around him. Wherever he pointed it, he could still see water as far as the fog would allow.
The dinghy tilted to the right as the sail billowed in the wind. Something long and black was pressing against the hull, just below the waterline. Logan reached down, and gasped with the shock of the sudden temperature change as his hand entered the cold water. He wrapped his fingers around the black thing, and pulled.