Mr. Jacobs looked down at Jamie’s mud-splattered clothes. “It certainly looks like it.” The teacher held his hand out, and Jamie took it and pulled himself up out of the mud with a loud sucking noise. A couple of people in the crowd giggled, and Mr. Jacobs whirled round, his face red with anger.
“Get out of here, you vultures!” he shouted. “Get to your next lesson right now or I’ll see you all for detention at the end of the day!”
The crowd dispersed, leaving Jamie and Mr. Jacobs standing alone on the field.
“Jamie,” the teacher began, “if you ever want to talk about anything, you know where my office is.”
“Talk about what, sir?” Jamie asked.
“Well, you know, your father, and… well, what happened.”
“What did happen, sir?”
Mr. Jacobs looked at him for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to get cleaned up before the next lesson. You can use the staff bathroom.”
When the bell rang for the end of the day, Jamie made his way slowly up the school driveway toward the gate. His instincts were normally sharp, especially where danger was concerned, but somehow Danny Mitchell had crept up behind him during afternoon break. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.
He slowed his pace, drifting in and out of groups of children ambling toward buses and waiting cars, his pale blue eyes darting left and right, looking for an ambush.
His chest tightened when he saw Danny Mitchell off to his left, laughing his ridiculous laugh and waving his arms violently around as he made a point to his adoring gaggle of sycophants.
Jamie slipped between two buses and across the road, waiting for the shouts and running feet that would mean he had been seen, but they didn’t come. Then he was into the neat, identical rows of houses that made up the estate he and his mother lived in, and out of sight of the school.
The Carpenters had moved three times in the two years since Jamie’s dad had died. Immediately after it happened, the police had come to see them and told them that his father had been involved in a plot to sell intelligence to a British terrorist cell, classified intelligence from his job at the Ministry of Defense. The policemen had been kind, and sympathetic, assuring them there was no evidence that either he or his mother had known anything, but it didn’t matter. The letters had started to arrive almost immediately, from patriotic neighbors who didn’t want the family of a traitor living in their quiet Daily Mail-reading neighborhood.
They had sold the house in Kent a few months later. Jamie didn’t care. His memory of that awful night was hazy, but the tree in the garden scared him, and he couldn’t walk across the gravel driveway where his father had died, choosing instead to walk around the edge of the lawn, keeping as much distance between him and the oak as possible and jumping across the gravel onto the doorstep.
The face at the window and the high, terrifying laugh that had drifted through the smashed window of the living room, he didn’t remember at all.
After that they had moved in with his aunt and uncle in a village outside Coventry. A new school for Jamie, a job as a receptionist in a GP’s surgery for his mother. But the rumors and stories followed them, and a brick was thrown through the kitchen window of his aunt’s terraced house the same day Jamie broke the nose of a classmate who had made a joke about his dad.
They moved on the following morning.
From there they caught a train to Leeds and found a house in a suburb that looked like it was made of Legos. When Jamie was expelled from his second school in three months, for persistent truancy, his mother didn’t even shout at him. She just handed in their notice to their landlord and started packing their things.
Finally, they had ended up in this quiet estate on the outskirts of Nottingham. It was gray, cold, and miserable. Jamie, an outdoor creature, a country boy at heart, was forced to roam the concrete underpasses and supermarket parking lots, his hood up and pulled tight around his face, his iPod thumping in his ears, keeping to himself and avoiding the gangs that congregated on the shadowy corners of this suburban wasteland. Jamie always avoided the shadows. He didn’t know why.
Jamie walked quickly through the estate, along quiet roads full of nondescript houses and secondhand cars. He passed a small group of girls, who stared at him with open hostility. One of them said something he couldn’t quite hear, and her friends laughed. He walked on.
He was sixteen years old and miserably, crushingly lonely.
Jamie closed the front door of the small semidetached house he and his mother lived in as quietly as possible, intending to head straight to his room and change out of his muddy clothes. He got halfway up the stairs before his mother called his name.
“What, Mom?” he shouted.
“Can you come in here, please, Jamie?”
Jamie swore under his breath and stomped back down the stairs, across the hall and into the living room. His mother was sitting in the chair under the window, looking at him with such sadness that his throat clenched.
“What’s going on, Mom?” he asked.
“I got a call from one of your teachers today,” she replied. “Mr. Jacobs.”
God, why can’t he mind his own business? “Oh yeah? What’d he want?”
“He said you got in a fight this afternoon.”
“He’s wrong.”
Jamie’s mother sighed. “I’m worried about you,” she said.
“Don’t be. I can look after myself.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“Maybe you should start to listen then.”
His mother’s eyes narrowed.
That hurt, didn’t it? Good. Now you can shout at me, and I can go upstairs, and we don’t have to say anything else to each other tonight.
“I miss him, too, Jamie,” his mother said, and Jamie recoiled as if he’d been stung. “I miss him every day.”
Jamie spit his reply around a huge lump in his throat. “Good for you,” he said. “I don’t. Ever.”
His mother looked at him, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “You don’t mean that.”
“Believe me, I do. He was a traitor and a criminal, and he ruined both our lives.”
“Our lives aren’t ruined. We’ve still got each other.”
Jamie laughed. “Yeah. Look how well that’s working out for us both.”
The tears spilled from his mother’s eyes, and she lowered her head as they ran down her cheeks and fell gently to the floor. Jamie looked at her, helplessly.
Go to her. Go and hug her and tell her it’s going to be all right.
Jamie wanted to, wanted nothing more than to kneel beside his mother and bridge the gap that had been growing steadily between them since the night his father had died. But he couldn’t. Instead he stood, frozen to the spot, and watched his mother cry.
2
Jamie woke up late the next morning, showered and dressed, and slipped out of the front door without seeing his mother. He walked his usual route through the estate, but when he reached the turn that led to his school, he carried straight on, through the little retail park with its McDonald’s and its DVD rental shop, across the graffiti-covered railway bridge, strewn with broken glass and flattened discs of chewing gum, past the station and the bike racks, down toward the canal. He wasn’t going to school today. Not a chance.
Why the hell did she get so upset? Because I don’t miss Dad? He was a loser. Can’t she see that?
Jamie clenched his fists tightly as he walked down the concrete steps to the towpath. This section of canal was perfectly straight for more than a mile, meaning Jamie could see danger approaching from a safe distance.
