Boy A Read Free Page A

battered pick-up, a ladder looming over the windscreen.
A
felt like a condemned witch when he climbed it, a broom in hand, and a big hangman’s bough above him. The rungs were treacherous, slippery even in his dry trainers. Lightning flashed like a cheap horror gimmick. And
A
knew, what his father forgot or ignored, that up a wet ladder under a tall sycamore was a harmful place. A route that belonged to the storm. His dad held the ladder steady, as if in a half-hearted suicide pact. And
A
worried, more even than death, that his father would see the ripped pants still bulging in his trouser pocket.
    It went on for months like this. Years, in child time. A small boy being bullied by a group of such diversity and size that he seemed to have no moments of freedom. No respite save at home, where he tried desperately to hide his engrossing unhappiness. He lay awake much of most nights, plagued with anxiety. Sometimes he fell asleep in class.
    His teacher, Mrs Johnston, née Grey, disillusioned and going through divorce, thought him lazy like his left eye. She noticed that he always seemed to be dirty, and looked like he’d been fighting. Other children told on him, even some of her nicest girls. There could be no smoke without fire. Besides, he had the same startling blue irises as her filthy, philandering fuck of a husband. Though she neglected to mention this last point at the trial
.
    After a while
A
ceased even to protest while he was punished for imagined misdemeanours. He bore all with a stoical silence. Soon he just stopped going to school.
    The alternative was dull, but painless. Wandering the streetsof an old coal town. Mostly
A
could stay out of the way of the few other primary kids that bunked. Stonelee was a hard hilly culture, cold and mindless, mineless. Under-employed or unemployed, the positions available.
A
’s father, an occasional demolition foreman, was firmly middle class. The Eveready battery factory floundered and failed. Other punier attempts at rejuvenation died outright, or lived briefly like the summer stingers on the slag heaps. Even the pound shop struggled. Tumbleweed Kwik Save crisp packets blew down the empty market street. Alternate Thursdays the fruit and veg stall still came. The butcher, famed for his pork sandwiches, was closed by E. coli. When
A
read this in the
Northern Echo
he thought E. coli was a bailiff. Bailiffs flourished.
    ‘How d’you get five hundred cows in a shed?’ said a boy that
A
vaguely recognized.
    From his seat on the gravestone,
A
looked at him. He was from the year below, rough. His eyes were staring, burning.
A
, not sure if it was a trap, spun around, poised to flee. But curiosity kept his buttocks on the cold, grey slab.
    ‘How d’you get five hundred cows in a shed?’ the boy asked again. His voice was deep, though of course unbroken.
A
wondered if he was putting it on.
    ‘I don’t know. How?’
A
said slowly, earnestly, hopefully. He wanted this to be a real joke, not a trick or an excuse to punch him.
    ‘Put up a Bingo sign.’ The boy laughed, much more than the joke merited.
A
laughed as well, as hard as he could.
    The boy kicked at a stone cross with the flat of his foot. It rocked slightly in its foundation hole. He kicked it again but it moved the same little way and no more. Looking around, as if for some new way to impress, the boy saw a brown glass bottle, left by the churchyard’s night-time clientele. He picked it up, and
A
knew that he would smash it; but the boy wished to demonstrate an abandon far beyond that. Hesailed the bottle grenade-like, through the trees and over the church wall, towards an unseen road. Before it had even landed
A
felt the attraction of this abandon, the exhilaration that it could offer him. He could just hear the pop of the bottle as it exploded, then the brakes of a car and a crunch, and more broken glass. Then came horns and slamming doors. But they were already running.
    The boy ran like he walked: fists balled,