Nothing For The Kids
“Honey, what’s wrong? You’re shaking!”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing… just some fucking kids.”
Jodie and Luke, on the corner of Carlisle Street where the council have been fixing the pavement again, but already there’s another stone loose. Behind them in the window, a poster reads ‘Last Few Days Of Sale’. It’s been there three years now and the blu-tac’s given up on one of the corners. The streetlights make the whole scene look like a hesitant traffic light.
“Where? What were they doing?”
“Just mucking about, running round on the precinct, knocking into people, shouting out the c-word like they just invented the fucking thing, calling people names…”
“Calling people names?” Jodie pouts.
“I know, I know – I shouldn’t have… I should have just walked on past, ignored ‘em…”
“What did you…? God, your heart’s going ten to the dozen. Take a breath. Take a breath. Slowly…”
Luke makes a mouth like a pregnant woman and tries to breathe the tension out. It isn’t enough.
“Old bastard, dickhead, cocksucker…”
“Wow. Is that the best they could come up with? No imagination, kids these days.” She’s trying to lighten his mood. Luke understands that. It isn’t working.
“There was a young woman with a pram – one of them stops right in front of her, thrusts his hips, points at the pram and says, ‘Can I give you another one, love?’”
“Well, that’s just…” And now Jodie notices Luke’s forehead, wet – but not from the rain. Has he been running? What has he…? No, it’s Luke. Luke who doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body. Luke who’d walk away from any fight. She’s never had to worry about him that way. “But it’s just kids, hon’. It’s what kids do. Didn’t you ever…?”
“Not like that. Not… I had respect, I had…”
Jodie’s face goes all lopsided, like someone’s stuck a pin in her cheek and she’s enjoying the sensation. “Oh, come on – you sound like your granddad. You’re telling me you never…? I was a right little sod, me. We used to play this game, wait by the zebra crossing – start to cross when we saw a car coming, only we’d get about half way and then stop. Just kinda dawdle, taunting the driver, seeing how far we could push it… how long we could make them wait, before…”
Luke takes a step back, looks down at the newly laid paving stones. Already patched with chewing gum. Already someone’s scratched initials in the concrete round the base of the lamppost. An empty fag packet augurs premature death.
“Oh, right,” Jodie says, “you were an angel! Come on…” They’re walking now, her arm lacing his, though neither of them’s really sure where they’re heading. They were meeting for a drink, but now Jodie’s not so sure. Knowing Luke, that’s unlikely to improve his mood. Maybe they should go see a film: something to take his mind off it.
“No,” Luke replies. “No, I wasn’t an angel. I did stuff. I took dares. But I lived in fear whenever I did. Forget ‘respect’ then, if that’s too archaic a concept for you—“
“Lu-uke!”
“No, no, it’s OK. Let me… I remember this one time, we were messing about in the churchyard up Berry Brow, and we heard someone inside, playing the organ. So we started this dare – and I admit, when we were kids, originality wasn’t our forte either – all it was, we’d sneak up to the church door, hammer on it really loud with the palms of our hands, then run and hide ‘til it was safe to do it all over again. And we did this two, three, four times, and each time the organ stopped and the door opened – only from where we were hiding we couldn’t see who it was opening the door. Then the last time we did it, he caught us. And it was old Harry Bean, our deputy head – this guy, this guy had the power to crush your balls in his fist as soon as look at you, and…”
“And so he gave you a bollocking. And I bet the next weekend, you’d forgotten all about it, and you were out egging cars and setting off bangers in the bus shelter and–“
They hesitate outside a Weatherspoons at the edge of piazza and Luke shakes his head. “No. This is what I’m trying to…Yeah, he told us off – threatened to call the police and all our parents – but I didn’t take it lightly. He had me terrified. I didn’t sleep for like… I’d lay awake at night, waiting for the police to come lock me up, and in the end I had to tell my mum.”
“So she slapped your legs and sent you to bed without treacle…” This isn’t a real expression: Jodie’s made it up. She does this sometimes, to play with him. They’re from opposite sides of the Pennines, born less than 30 miles apart, but with the idiosyncrasies of dialect, sometimes it’s like they’re talking a different language. Luke says snow sticks; Jodie says it settles. When Luke was little, he used the verb ‘pump’ instead of fart (I pumped, You pumped, Who pumped?), while Jodie used ‘poop’. After they’d be going out a while and the most obvious of their linguistic peculiarities had been aired, Jodie began to invent new ones, to see if Luke would believe them. Sometimes she lets the pretence go on for weeks, just to see if she can get Luke using her bogus colloquialisms too, like the time she had him referring to breakfast in bed as ‘bedfast’, or calling her nipples ‘cherry bobs’ (though that one wasn’t as much fun, because he wouldn’t do it in company).
But Luke isn’t playing. Not today. “Yeah, Mum was angry, but I don’t think it was as much with me as with old Harry Bean. She saw how scared I was. I was shaking…”
Like you were when I met you today, thinks Jodie, and she wonders again just what happened with those kids on the precinct. What did they do? What did Luke do? She’s almost afraid to ask. But she does…
“I don’t know what it is, but I have this reaction when I’m faced with kids acting up like that… Something drags me down to their level.” He watches a street sweeper swirl through the gutters over the road, beacon lights striping the buildings. “I know I should take the mature, adult response, but all I want to do is scream, grab them round their scrawny little necks, tell them to fucking, FUCKING—“
He stops because he sees the way she’s looking at him. But even now, he wants to scream. Wants to kick at the air and cry ‘it’s not fair!’ Wants someone older and wiser to come and make it better. Shit: he wants his mum!
“What did you do?” Jodie asks again, all levity ditched.
A bus goes by filled with dour-faced prisoners. Pensioners. An obese man leaves the Spar carrying a 24-pack of cheap beer and an Extra Size tube of Pringles. The light of the street sweeper blocks across Luke’s face.
“I just… I just… I shouted at them. That’s all, I just… I told them. I told them to—“
Jodie doesn’t see them coming ‘til it’s too late. Afterwards, she’ll ask herself all the obvious questions. Where did they come from? Had they been following Luke the whole time? Why would they–?
It’s done quick, Jodie’s not even sure she sees the knife. Not even sure it was a knife. So quick she doesn’t even have time to scream. She hears them though, their grown-up words choked by childish laughter as they scatter into the night. God she thinks, their voices haven’t even dropped. They’re only children.
