You Against Me

carvery to get their main course and veg. ‘Tyler will look after you,’ she told them. ‘He’ll get you drinks and desserts and anything else you need.’

Mikey stood there watching them settle themselves down. They completely ignored him. The little kids fought over the free pencils and drawing booklet, the woman folded their wet coats onto the backs of their chairs and the bloke kept checking his mobile. Mikey smiled at the woman, wanted her to see he knew what an idiot her husband was. He didn’t want to be there, it was obvious. The woman smiled back. ‘What’s at the starter bar?’ she said.

The bloke picked up his menu and scanned it, like maybe he could answer the question, but Mikey jumped in first. ‘There’s different salads, melon, or hot soup.’

‘What flavour?’ the woman said.

‘I’ll find out.’

The bloke looked up. ‘Shouldn’t you know?’

He didn’t notice his wife smiling at Mikey as if she was sorry. She knows he’s a git, Mikey thought, and she wants us all to forgive him. He recognized the look from his mother’s face. She wore it whenever she got pissed and started getting nostalgic about some old boyfriend. Mikey wished he could gob in the soup. And that would just be for starters.

Back in the kitchen he envied Jacko, sweating now from the ovens, turning the parsnips off their baking tray, emptying steaming piles of peas into bowls. Dex was sprinkling cheese over the finished lasagne. It was familiar in here.

‘How’s the real world?’ Jacko asked.

‘Full of tossers.’

‘Could have told you that.’

Which was a small moment of warmth.

Maybe Mikey had been imagining the bad vibes, maybe everything was still OK between them. Just to check, he said, ‘I’m going to get the bastard, you know. I promised Karyn and I haven’t given up on it.’

Jacko shrugged. ‘You need to hurry up, that’s all I’m saying, or it’ll never be done.’

He made it sound as if he was in charge, as if Mikey hadn’t spent days churning all the details round in his head.

‘All right,’ Mikey said, ‘what about Saturday?’

Jacko nodded. ‘I’m up for that.’

‘We both get a half day. We’ll do the golf-club thing.’

They high-fived to seal the deal. Mates again.

Seventeen

Ellie sat on the harbour wall watching the boats bob up and down and listening to the rigging wires sing. She was cold and bored, because although the tide was going out and revealing the beach, nothing else was happening. The bloke fishing on the end of the jetty hadn’t caught a single thing in the last ten minutes, the sun wasn’t coming out and the mist wasn’t clearing.

The odd thing about it was that somewhere up there, the weather was fine. The sun was simply trapped behind a cobwebbed sky. Only a mile or two down the coast, the day was probably blazing. Perhaps Tom was enjoying a sunny game of golf with Freddie, or sitting in the clubhouse with a pint of cold cider in his hand.

She was still furious with him for leaving her in the middle of nowhere with only a fiver. There wasn’t a bus for hours and maybe he’d known that. He’d definitely known there was no way she was going to tell their parents he’d dumped her, because she’d get a massive bollocking for bunking school if she did.

She’d start walking back into town in a minute. It couldn’t be more than three miles and she thought she remembered the way. She’d wander round the shops, or maybe go to the library until school was out, then go to the gate and see if any of the girls in her year wanted to hang out. It was about time she had some friends. Maybe she’d even tell them about the river and the gatecrasher to make herself seem more interesting. They might not believe her of course, because no one believed her when she said she’d kissed Danny at the Christmas party. Sometimes she even wondered herself if any of the good things that happened to her were true, because they seemed fleeting compared to the bad things.

Even her amazing plan had gone wrong. She’d thought of it almost as soon as Tom had dumped her, and had immediately put it into action – the gatecrasher had said he worked in a pub by the harbour; well, then she would find him and spend the rest of the day sitting at the bar chatting to him.

The first pub she tried was the White Horse and it was full of old men clutching pints. They turned round en masse to stare at her when she opened the door, and although she managed to stutter that she was looking for someone who worked there, they all laughed at her, because the man behind the bar was about a hundred years old and was the only employee.

In the Earl of Mowbray, she was braver, even made it to the bar to ask if a boy worked there. She described him – dark, tall, about eighteen. The barman gave her a lewd smile and said, ‘Won’t I do, darling?’

She blushed furiously, and again she was laughed at.

‘What’s his name then, love?’ the barman said as she made her way back to the door. And Ellie realized that she still didn’t know, and the whole enterprise suddenly seemed ridiculous and humiliating. She’d wanted to walk in and see his smile, to sit down with him and have a drink. She’d imagined he’d give her a lift home, that they’d arrange to meet later. This day had seemed such a gift, but it was turning out to be worse than school.

She stood up to collect her bag, but was distracted by a sudden movement down on the jetty. The fisherman was unhooking his rod from its tripod and he must’ve caught something big, because the whole line was bending. Ellie leaned right over the harbour wall to see better.

And there, through the mist and cloud, a fish shimmered silver against the sky before crashing at the man’s feet. He bent down and grabbed it round the neck before it could slip back into the water. With his other hand he reached blindly down next to him and brought up a large stone.

Ellie leaned forward. He was going to kill it. Weren’t you supposed to chuck them back in?

The man lifted the stone above his head and, without even hesitating, smashed it down so hard that the fish’s head caved in. Even from where Ellie was standing, she could see its brains ooze onto the jetty.

She was stunned. One minute the fish had been thrashing and wild, gasping in air. And now it was dead. For the first time, the man looked up and noticed her.

‘Mackerel,’ he shouted.

Like knowing its name made a difference. She pretended she hadn’t heard because she didn’t want to have a conversation with a psychopathic fish-killer. She kept an eye on him while he put the fish in a bucket, then retied his line and whipped it back out to sea. Only when he sat down on his little seat, took out a lunchbox and unwrapped a sandwich did she stop watching him.

She sat back down on the wall for a second and wondered what would happen next. Maybe she’d plummet into the sea and get hypothermia. Or maybe psycho-man would creep up behind her and bash her on the head with his stone. Or maybe she’d be overcome by a vegetarian fury and creep up on him instead and kick him off the end of the jetty. Maybe she’d do something even braver than that – like steal a boat and sail to Scandinavia.

It began to amuse her. It was like that film Sliding Doors, where the tube doors closed on Gwyneth Paltrow. In one version of the story, she caught the train, met a lovely bloke called James and got home to find her boyfriend, Gerry, in bed with another woman. In the second version, she missed the train and ended up getting mugged.

Ellie had choices, didn’t she? Loads of them. Today, she’d expected to go to school, yet ended up at the harbour. Later, she’d go home and her parents would ask about her day and she could lie or tell the truth. Which course of action she chose would make an entirely different set of events occur.

That’s why Tom was mad at her – she could choose, and he couldn’t. She could agree to be his witness and say she saw nothing, or she could refuse. Maybe he was right and the police would question her again. They might even force her to go to court, but she didn’t have to open her mouth and say anything. How could they make her? What could they do?

She got up from the wall, determined. Here she was feeling sorry for herself, when all the time she had this