Numbers

Rachel Ward Numbers

The first book in the Numbers series, 2009

FOR OZZY, ALI, AND PETER

CHAPTER ONE

There are places where kids like me go. Sad kids, bad kids, bored kids, and lonely kids, kids that are different. Any day of the week, if you know where to look, you’ll find us: behind the shops, in back lanes, under bridges by canals and rivers, ’round garages, in sheds, on vacant lots. There are thousands of us. If you choose to find us, that is – most people don’t. If they do see us, they look away, pretend we’re not there. It’s easier that way. Don’t believe all that crap about giving everyone a chance – when they see us, they’re glad we’re not in school with their kids, disrupting their lessons, making their lives a misery. The teachers, too. Do you think they’re disappointed when we don’t turn up for registration? Give me a break. They’re laughing – they don’t want kids like us in their classrooms, and we don’t want to be there.

Most hang about in small groups, twos or threes, whiling away the hours. Me, I like to be on my own. I like to find the places where nobody is – where I don’t have to look at anyone, where I don’t have to see their numbers.

That’s why I was pissed off when I got to my favorite haunt down by the canal and found someone had got there before me. If it had just been a stranger, some old dosser or junkie, I’d have gone somewhere else, easy, but, just my luck, it was one of the other kids from Mr. McNulty’s “special” class: the restless, gangly, mouthy one they call Spider.

He laughed when he saw me, came right up to me and wagged a finger in my face. “Naughty, naughty! What you doing here, girl?”

I shrugged, looked down at the ground.

He carried on for me. “Couldn’t face another day of the Nutter? Don’t blame you, Jem – he’s a psycho. Shouldn’t be allowed out, that one, should he?”

He’s big, Spider, tall. One of those people who stand too close to you, doesn’t know when to back off. Suppose that’s why he gets into fights at school. He’s in your face all the time, you can smell him. Even if you twist and turn away, he’s still there – doesn’t read the signs at all, never takes the hint. My view of him was blocked by the edge of my hood, but as he loomed up to me and I moved my head instinctively away from him, our eyes met for a moment and it was there. His number. 12152010. That was the other reason why he made me feel uncomfortable. Poor sod – he doesn’t stand a chance, does he, with a number like that?

Everyone’s got one, but I think I’m the only one that sees them. Well, I don’t exactly “see” them, like something hanging in the air; they kind of appear in my head. I feel them, somewhere behind my eyes. But they’re real. I don’t care if you don’t believe me – suit yourself, I know they’re real. And I know what they mean. The light went on the day my mum went.

I’d always seen the numbers, for as long as I could remember. I thought everyone did. Walking down the street, if my eyes met someone else’s, there it would be, their number. I used to tell my mum people’s numbers as she pushed me along in my buggy. I thought she’d be pleased. She’d think I was clever. Yeah, right.

We were making our way rapidly along the High Street, on the way to the Department of Social Security to pick up her weekly money. Thursday was normally a good day. Soon, very soon, she would be able to buy that stuff from the boarded-up house down our street, and she would be happy for a few hours. Every taut muscle in her body would relax, she’d talk to me, even read to me sometimes. I called out people’s numbers cheerily as we hurtled along. “Nothing, two, one, four, two, nothing, one, nine!” “Nothing, seven, nothing, two, two, nothing, four, six!”

Suddenly, Mum jerked the stroller to a halt and swung it ’round to face her. She crouched down and held both sides of the frame with her hands, making a cage with her body, clutching so tightly I could see the cords in her arms standing out, the bruises and pinpricks more vivid than ever. She looked me straight in the eye, the fury clear on her face. “Listen, Jem.” The words came spitting out of her face. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I want you to stop. It’s doing my head in. I don’t need it today. OK? I don’t need it, so just…bloody…shut…up.” Syllables stinging like angry wasps, her venom fizzing all around me. And all the time, as we sat there eye-to-eye, her number was there, stamped on the inside of my skull: 10102001.

Four years later, I watched a man in a scruffy suit write it down on a piece of paper: Date of Death: 10.10.2001. I’d found her in the morning. I’d got up, like normal, put my school things on, helped myself to some cereal. No milk, because it stank when I got it out of the fridge. I left the carton on the side, put the kettle on, and ate my Coco Pops while it boiled. Then I made Mum a black coffee and carried it carefully into her room. She was still in bed, kind of leaning over. Her eyes were open, and there was stuff, sick, down her front and on the covers. I put the coffee down on the floor, next to the needle.

“Mum?” I said, even though I knew she wouldn’t reply. There was no one there. She was gone. And her number was gone, too. I could remember it, but I couldn’t see it anymore when I looked into her dull, empty eyes.

I stood there for a few minutes, a few hours – I don’t know – then I went downstairs and told the lady in the flat below us. She came up to look. Made me wait outside the flat, like I hadn’t already seen it, silly cow. She was only gone about thirty seconds, and then she rushed out past me and was sick in the hallway. When she’d finished, she wiped her mouth on her hankie, took me back to her flat, and rang for an ambulance. Then all these people came: people in uniform – police, ambulance men; people in suits – like that man with the clipboard and paper; and a lady, who spoke to me like I was stupid and took me away from there, just like that, the only place I’d ever known.

In her car, on the way to God knows where, I kept going over and over it in my mind. Not numbers this time, words. Three words. Date of Death. Date of Death. If only I’d known that was what it was, I could have told her, stopped her, I don’t know. Would it have made a difference? If she’d known that we only had six years together? Would it? Hell – she would still have been a junkie. There was nothing on this earth that could have stopped her. She was hooked.

I didn’t like being there under the bridge with Spider. I know it was outside, but I felt closed in, trapped there with him. He filled the space with his gangly arms and legs, constantly moving – twitching, almost – and that smell. I ducked past him and out onto the towpath.

“Where you going?” he shouted behind me, his voice booming off the concrete walls.

“Just walking,” I mumbled.

“Right,” he said, catching up with me. “Walk and talk,” he said, “walk and talk.” Drawing level, too close to my shoulder, brushing against me. I carried on, head down, hood up, a blinkered patch of gravel and trash moving under my sneakers. He loped along beside me. We must have looked so stupid, me being small for fifteen and him like a black giraffe on speed. He tried to chat a bit, and I just ignored him. Hoped he’d give up and go away. No chance. Guess you’d have to tell him to piss off to get rid of him, and even then he probably wouldn’t.

“So you’re new around here, yeah?” I shrugged. “Got kicked out your old school? Been a bad girl, have ya?”

Kicked out of school, kicked out of my last “home,” and the one before that and the one before that. People just don’t seem to get me. Don’t understand that I need my space. Always telling me what to