Boy A Read Free

says he was ready to give up until Terry came along. And Jack will say that he knows how this feels.
    Each day for fifteen, Terry is going to pick Jack up at 7:30 am, the time he will soon be picked up for work, and show him another alien angle on life. And every night Jack is going to close his eyes and not believe this is happening to him.
    Every hour, whether with Terry or alone, he will practise his story. Learn his legend. Focus on the things he needs to do to make himself a little less a fish on the riverbank, a little more the man a different boy might have become.

B is for Boy.
A Boy named B.
    Child
B
was exactly the kind of boy that your mother told you not to play with. Probably his mother would have too, had she been there. Had she given a fuck. He had shoulder-length hair that fell naturally into tight scouse curls, and even at nine a faint bum-fluff moustache on his upper lip. He looked like a juvenile, scanky, Bobby Ball. But he was too thick to be funny. Stupid not through lack of native wit but from a determined resolution to remain ignorant. Ignorance was his armour. He walked with a swagger, advertising a readiness to fight that was ridiculous for his size. Legs spread wide, feet splayed outwards, fists balled. A strut adopted from his older brother. A brother known around town as a man not to be messed with. Who none the less messed with
B
.
    He was a loner, child
B
. Not like some, because of natural inclination. He was a loner because he carried an aura, something beyond even his walk and his constant spitting. Something that kept other children at bay like wolfsbane or garlic might ward off monsters. Children can be monsters too. We know that now. But once children were just children.

    Child
A
, before he even knew
B
, knew more than most what poisons might be concealed inside angelic frames. Of course he was to see, in glorious Technicolor, the depths to which a child could fall. But he’d already had inklings. He had experienced first-hand some of the cruel possibilities. Growing up in a run-down mining town, where the pits were everywhere.
    Once
A
had walked home with one shoe. Ripped junior Y-fronts stuffed into the pocket of the trousers that he’d managed to rescue. His other shoe was still thickly lodged in a tree; impervious to sticks and stones and names and all the other things that
A
felt so deeply. He trudged with a sock sodden from the pavement, and a lopsided swaying like the plastic boy on the Barnados boxes would walk, his legs imprisoned in torturous iron callipers.
    It was long dark when he made it home, shivering from the tear-cloaking drizzle. Aching from rabbit punches and dead legs and hours of futile efforts to rescue his shoe. His mother hugged him before she started shouting.
    ‘We’ve been worried near enough to death. Where the bloody hell have you been?’
    He’d rehearsed the story in his mind. He couldn’t tell them the truth. Some bitter shame locked it in him. He knew with cockeyed childish intuition that they wouldn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend the depths of his anguish. He firmly believed that his tormentors would increase his suffering if he went to adults. Maybe they would have.
    ‘I was playing football with my friends,’ the word made him wince. ‘The ball got caught in a tree and we all threw our shoes to get it down. But mine got stuck, and that’s where I’ve been, trying to get it down.’
    His mother stroked his hair, and this kindness was almost more than his body could take. His lip began to waver, but he caught his father’s eye and managed to check it.
    ‘Come on,’ his dad said. ‘Let’s go and get the bloody thingbefore it really starts pissing it down.’ He broke off to get his keys. But in that instant of eye contact, when he had been about to cry,
A
had seen his father’s disgust.
    They both sat in silence with their shame, as they drove to the field by
A
’s school. Water pooled with the cement dust in the back of the