Humber Boy B Read Free Page B

Mum slept off the booze or blues and Stuart was gone to sea again, with no notice of when he might return. Adam would take me to the toilet and fetch me water from the tap when I complained of hunger. The cartoon made me forget any of the bad things and we both liked that the programme was repeated, again and again, over weeks and months when he should have been at school and I should have been at nursery, but at least we could both say the lines of the Fat Controller, so we were learning something. We learned not to answer the door, too, after the social worker found us eating out-of-date Smash from the box, the only food we could find, and surrounded by empty milk bottles. She asked us how long it was that Mum had been in bed, and when Adam had last gone to school, and we told her the truth. When Stuart came back from sea he had to go to a meeting and he hated those. His muscly frame squeezed into a shirt, his bald head that looked tough on the dockside but thuggish in an office. When he came home he was in a foul temper and I got the worst of it. He said that if we ever, ever, told the truth to anyone again then we’d both be taken away and put into care. And even though I didn’t think I’d miss Mum too badly, and I’d be glad to get away from Stuart, I couldn’t let them separate me from Adam so I kept my mouth shut. I thought if I always kept my mouth shut then Adam and me would always be together. But it didn’t work out that way.
    Watching Thomas on TV wasn’t preparation for this. I haven’t been on a train, not ever, and I feel the warrant in my pocket again.
    The train arrives so fast I have to jump back from the edge. When the doors open I step inside, look around and take a seat next to a window. There’s no-one else on the train, just a man bursting out of a blue shirt and navy jacket walking towards me, brandishing a machine, something to check that I’m legal. Fat Controller comes to mind but I know that’s not right, that’s from years ago when I wasn’t Humber Boy B.
    I show him my warrant and he slides it into the machine, which spits it back out. Fat Controller looks down at me, he knows I’m from the prison. This must happen a lot, maybe it’s why they keep the train stopping at that station when all the locals must have cars and the village is tiny. He can’t see it, where my badness is hidden, can’t do anything but hand my warrant back and walk back down the train, a futile search for other people to check.
    The train rumbles along the track, rocking me. I feel a bit sick, then I remember I’ve felt sick since I woke so it’s not the train causing it, but still I worry about vomiting. What would Fat Controller say if I puked on the floor, would he throw me off onto the next platform? Then how would I get to Ipswich?
    Stuart had no patience with illness. “You think you feel sick, you wanna try being on a boat in a storm,” he’d say. “That’d stop your mithering.”
    The train pulls into Ipswich, the platform is busy with businessmen, women in dresses, kids in blazers and ties, all stood chatting and reading papers and drinking coffee. It’s early, before nine, and they’re going to work or school. I hitch my duffel bag over my shoulder and start to walk towards the town centre, to the probation office. My first task in my new life as Ben.
    I try not to think about my old life because it hurts. Since I got found guilty the nearest I got to Hull was Swinfen Hall Prison in the Midlands, though that hardly counts as north. Anyway, a prison is a prison and I never saw the outside world. I was near the Scottish border for two years but I never saw a loch or a mountain. The local news was my only way of knowing what the closest town looked like and I’d crane my neck to see beyond the newsreader for a glimpse of green or blue in the picture behind. But then they moved me to a Suffolk prison and the parole board thought it would be safest for me to be released here too. I’d like