“I’m the headhunter. Run!” and he gave Toby a shove in the correct direction. He kept this up until the sheer repetition of the exercise took Toby’s legs to the correct hiding places.
During all of this, Neal Wyatt and his crew kept their distance. They gave no trouble to either Joel or Toby, and Joel was beginning to think that they’d actually moved on to tormenting someone else when they resurfaced, like hungry sharks returning to their feeding area.
What they did was follow. They took this up one day as Joel walked Toby to the learning centre. They emerged from a video shop across the road, and when Joel first saw them, he was certain they would vault the railing, dash through the traffic as they’d done before, and chase him and Toby down. But instead, they kept their distance across the street, stalking along the pavement and making soft hooting noises, as if they were signalling someone to jump out of one of the shops that Toby and Joel passed.
When he saw them, Toby grabbed the leg of Joel’s trousers, saying, “There’s dem blokes’t broke my lava lamp,” and he sounded frightened, which he was.
For his part, Joel stayed as calm as he could and merely reminded his brother about jungle explorers and headhunters, asking him, “Where’d you run, Tobe, if I wasn’t here?”
Toby responded correctly: to the charity shop, to the back room, into those bins, and no stopping to tell Aunt Ken what he was doing.
But Neal and his crew didn’t do anything more than follow and hoot on that day. On subsequent days they merely followed, doing their best to unnerve their quarry. Surprise was well and good for some kinds of contests. But for others, psychological warfare worked better to soften up the foe.
That was exactly what it did to Toby. After four days of being trailed by the silent crowd of boys, Toby wet his trousers again. It happened right on the steps of Middle Row School where he was obediently wait ing for Joel. As Joel came round the corner from the bus, he saw Neal and his crew directly across the street from the school, gathered around a pub called the Chilled Eskimo, their eyes fastened on Toby.
Nothing in Joel’s experience had prepared him for such a degree of extended cleverness on the part of these boys. This type of individual he’d previously seen as the kind to jump, to clobber, and then to run. But now he understood that Neal was quite clever. There was a reason, then, why he was the one to run the crew.
Additional wisdom was called for: another way to handle the situation. Kendra could not be spoken to about it lest she worry even more. Ness—a peculiar change having come over her—was too involved with the drop- in centre. Dix was out of the question, as was Carole Campbell. That left Ivan Weatherall. Joel went at it through verse, which he gave to Ivan the next time he saw him.
Ivan read it during their mentoring session at Holland Park School, where they still met as they’d done during the previous term. After he’d read the poem, Ivan spoke for a few minutes about emotive language and artistic intentions—as if he and Joel were at Wield Words Not Weapons or at the poetry class Ivan offered at Paddington Arts— and after a bit, Joel thought he meant to ignore the subject of the poem altogether.
Finally, though, Ivan said, “This is it, I dare say.”
“What?”
“Why you’ve not taken the microphone at Wield Words. Why you don’t participate in Walk the Word either.”
“I still been doing poems.”
“Hmm. Yes. And that’s to the good.” Ivan read Joel’s piece another time before he said, “So exactly who is he? Are we speaking of Stanley?
This is a fairly apt description of what appears to be his frame of mind.”
“The Blade? Nah.”
“Then . . . ?”
Joel reached down and retied his shoe, which didn’t need retying.
“Neal Wyatt. You know.”
“Ah. Neal. That altercation in Meanwhile Gardens.”
“There’s been more stuff. He’s vexin Toby. I been tryin to think what to do to stop him.”
Ivan set the poem on the table. He lined it up with the edge precisely, which allowed Joel to notice for the first time that Ivan’s hands were manicured, with trimmed and buffed nails. In that moment, the vast difference between them became emphasised. Joel saw those hands as extensions of the world in which they lived, one where Ivan Weatherall—for all his good intentions—had never known labour in the way that Joel’s own father had known it. This lack of knowledge created a chasm, not only between them but between Ivan and the entire community. No poetry event could span that chasm, no classes at Paddington Arts, no visits to Ivan’s home. Thus, before the white man responded, Joel had a good idea what he would say.
“Neal’s abandoned his art, Joel. Piano would have fed his soul, but he wasn’t patient enough to find that out. This is the difference between you. You have a greater means of expression now, but he does not. So what’s in here”—this, with a fist to his heart—“is experienced here”—the same fistlowered to the paper on the table. “This gives you no reason to strike out against others. And you’ll never
“But Toby,” Joel said. “I got to stop them vexin Toby.”
“To do that is to engage in the circle,” Ivan said. “You do see that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“‘Stopping them.’ How do you propose to do it?”
“They need sorting.”
“People always need ‘sorting’ if you insist upon thinking within the box.”
Circles. Boxes. None of it made sense. Joel said, “Wha’s that s’posed to mean? Toby can’t defend himself ’gainst those blokes. Neal’s crew’s waitin for a moment to get him, and if dat happens . . .” Joel squeezed his eyes shut. There was nothing more to say if Ivan could not imagine what it would be like for Toby should Neal’s crew put their hands on him.
Ivan said, “That’s not what I meant.” They were seated side by side, and he pulled his chair closer to Joel’s and put his arm around Joel’s shoulders. This was the first time he’d ever touched the boy, and Joel felt the embrace with some surprise. But it seemed like a gesture meant to comfort him and he tried to take comfort from it, although the truth of the matter was that nothing would truly be able to soothe him until the problem of Neal Wyatt was seen to. “What appears to be the answer is always the same when it comes to dealing with someone like Neal. Sort him out, have a dustup, give him a taste of his own medicine, do unto him exactly what has been done to you. But that perpetuates the problem, Joel. Thinking within the box of doing what’s always been done does nothing more than keep you going round the circle. He strikes, you strike, he strikes, you strike. Nothing gets resolved and the matter escalates to the point of no return. And you know what that means. I know you do.”
“He’s set to hurt Toby,” Joel managed to say although his neck and his throat were stiff with holding back everything else that wanted to come out of him. “I got to protect—”
“You can do that only up to a point. After that, you’ve got to protect yourself: who you are at this moment and who you can be. The very things Neal himself can’t bear to think of because they don’t gratify what he wants right now. Strike out at Neal for whatever reason, Joel, and you become Neal. I know you understand what I’m talking about. You have the words inside you and the talent to use them. That’s what you’re meant to do.”
He picked the poem up and read it aloud. When he was done, he said, “Not even Adam Whitburn wrote like this at your age. Believe me, that’s saying a lot.”
“Poems ain’t nuffink,” Joel protested.
“Poems,” Ivan said, “are the only thing.”
Joel wanted to believe that, but day after day in the street proved otherwise and Toby’s retreating into Sose—communing with Maydarc and afraid to leave the house—proved even more. Joel found himself ultimately at the place he never thought he’d be: wishing that his little brother could be sent away to a special school or a special place where, at least, he would be safe. But when he asked his aunt about the paperwork that Luce Chinaka had sent home to have filled out and what this paperwork might mean for Toby’s future, Kendra made it clear that no one was going to scrutinise Toby for love or money or anything else.
“And I expect you can work out why,” she said.
So the long and short of it was that Toby was going nowhere and now he was afraid to go anywhere.
