Numbers

do. They think rules and routine and clean hands and minding your p’s and q’s will make everything all right. They haven’t got a clue.

He reached into his pocket. “D’you wanna smoke? I’ve got some, look.”

I stopped, and watched as he extracted a crumpled packet. “Go on, then.”

He handed me a cigarette and flicked his lighter for me. I leaned forward and inhaled until it caught, drawing in some of his stink at the same time. I moved back quickly, and breathed out again. “Ta,” I mumbled.

He drew on his cig like it was the best thing on earth, then blew the smoke out theatrically and smiled. And I thought, Less than three months to go, that’s all. All this poor bugger’s got is skiving off school and having a smoke by the canal. Not what you’d call a life, is it?

I sat down on a heap of old railway sleepers. The nicotine made me feel less edgy, but nothing calmed Spider down. He was up and down, climbing on the sleepers, leaping off, balancing on the edge of the canal on the balls of his feet, jumping back again. I thought to myself, That’s how he’ll go, the silly sod, jumping off something, breaking his bloody neck.

“Don’t you ever keep still?” I said.

“Nah, I’m not a statue. Not a waxwork like at Madame Tussauds. I’ve got all this energy, man.” He did a little dance there on the towpath. Made me smile, couldn’t help it. Felt like the first time in years. He grinned back at me.

“You got a nice smile,” he said.

That did it. I don’t like personal comments. “Fuck off, Spider,” I said, “just fuck off.”

“Relax, man. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Yeah, well…I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like looking at people, neither, do you?”

I shrugged.

“People think you’re up yourself, the way you keep looking down, don’t look no one in the eye.”

“Well, that’s personal, too. I’ve got my reasons.”

He turned and kicked a stone into the canal. “Whatever. Listen, I’ll never say nothing nice to you again, OK?”

“OK,” I said. There were alarm bells going off inside my head. Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world – to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, to not get sucked in. You get used to someone – start to like them, even – and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves. I looked at him jiggling restlessly from foot to foot, now scooping up some stones and chucking them into the water. Don’t go there, Jem, I thought. In a few months, he’ll be gone.

While his back was turned, I got up quietly from my perch on the sleepers and started running. No explanations, no good-byes.

From behind me I could hear him calling, “Hey, where you going?” I was willing him to stay there, not to follow. His voice faded away as I put some distance between us.

“OK, be like that. See you tomorrow, man.”

CHAPTER TWO

The Nutter was cracking the whip. Someone must have rattled his cage – whatever, he was definitely on our case. No messing about, no backchat, heads down, English comprehension test, thirty minutes. Trouble is, when someone tells me to do something, I have this problem. I just wanna tell them to piss off, I’ll do it in my own time. Even if it’s something I actually want to do. Which this wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I can read, sort of, but I’m not very fast. My brain kind of needs time to sort out the words. If I try and read quickly, everything gets muddled up, the words don’t mean nothing.

Anyway, I was trying my best, this time. I really was. Karen, my foster mum, had read me the riot act over bunking off school. You know how it goes, don’t you? “Time to knuckle down…important to get some qualifications…life’s not a rehearsal…” She’d been talking to the school, to my social worker – all the usual suspects – and I figured I didn’t need the hassle anymore. I’d go along with it all, keep my head down for a bit, get me some breathing space.

Everyone else was quiet, too, for a change. They’d picked up on the Nutter’s evil mood and decided not to push it. There was a bit of shuffling about and sighing, but basically everyone was sitting still and working – or pretending to – when, without any warning, something exploded into the room. The door swung back on its hinges and crashed into the wall behind, and Spider burst in like he’d been fired out of a cannon, stumbling on his feet, almost falling over. Instantly the mood was broken. Kids started cheering and jeering, shouting out to him.

The Nutter wasn’t impressed. “What do you mean by bursting in here like that? Go outside into the corridor and come back in like a civilized human being.”

Spider slumped forward with an exaggerated sigh and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Ah, come on, sir. I’m in now, aren’t I? I’m here.”

McNulty spoke quietly, but with force, if you know what I mean, like he was just managing to keep a lid on things. “Just do what I say, and we’ll start again.”

“What you doing this for, sir? I don’t need to be here, but I’m here. I’m ready to learn, sir.” An ironic look to the rest of us, met with an answering jeer. “Why d’ya have to give me all this grief?”

The Nutter took a deep breath. “I don’t know why you’ve decided to join us today, but something has brought you here. Now if you want to join in, and I hope that you do, you need to go out, come in quietly like I’ve asked you, and we’ll get on with the lesson.”

There was a long pause, while they eyeballed each other. The rest of us went quiet, waiting to see how it would play out. For once, Spider was almost keeping still, standing there, staring at the Nutter, with just one leg jiggling. Then he turned and went out, just like that. Every eye in that classroom watched him go and kept watching the empty doorway. Had he gone for good? There was a low murmur as he reappeared, drawn up to his full height, cool as anything. He paused on the threshold. “Morning, sir,” he said and nodded in the Nutter’s direction.

“Good morning, Dawson.” There was a wary look in McNulty’s eye, not sure how to take Spider’s apparent backdown. Worried that victory had been too easy. He placed the comprehension sheet, some paper, and a pen on Spider’s desk. “Sit down, lad, and do your best with this.” Spider sauntered over to his desk, while McNulty returned to the front and stood there, watching us. “OK, everyone, settle down. Twenty-five minutes to go. Let’s see what you can do.”

But Spider’s unexpected return had broken the mood. We were agitated now, a bit of a buzz going ’round. Everyone was fidgeting; there was backchat, chair legs scraping on the floor. McNulty kept picking away at people, trying to get back on top of things: “Eyes on the page, please.” “Keep your hands to yourself.” He was fighting a losing battle.

As for me, the words in front of me swam and danced. They were meaningless, a pattern, nothing more, like Chinese or Arabic. Because I couldn’t stop myself wondering if I was the reason Spider was back. Down by the canal I thought I’d felt the start of a connection, and it had scared me. I’d avoided him since then, but I’d no reason to think that Spider had given me a second thought, until now. Because I could have sworn that as he’d sauntered over to his desk, he’d winked at me. Bloody nerve. Who did he think he was?

After lunch, the Nutter had had enough. Against a background of noise, laughter, general chat, he suddenly stopped. “Right, books away, pens away, paper away. All of you. Now!” What was he up to? “Come on, get on with it. All your stuff away. We need to talk.” Rolled eyes, yawns – yeah, we got it, here comes the pep talk. We put our things in our bags or stuffed them into pockets, and waited for the standard bollocking: “Unacceptable behavior…Letting yourselves down…Lack of respect…” But it didn’t happen.

Instead he walked up and down between the desks, stopping and saying something to each of us before going on to the next one. “Unemployed.” “Checkout girl.” “Garbageman.” When he got to me, he didn’t even pause. “Cleaning lady,” he said and carried on walking. He worked his way back to the front, turned and faced us. “OK, how did that make you feel?”

We stared at our desks or out the window. It had made us feel exactly how he wanted us to feel. Like shit. We