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Epub ISBN: 9781448188901
Version 1.0
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First published by Macmillan Children’s Books, 2004
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Copyright © Terence Blacker, 2004
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978 1 78344 575 2
TO MARION LLOYD
If this story was a Doors song,
which would it be?
‘Strange Days’?
‘Ship of Fools’?
‘Take It As It Comes’?
Maybe ‘Wild Child’ would do it …
I need you to hold it in your head, this picture of Sam Lopez when he first arrived at my front door. Keep it there while later, prettier pictures appear – Sam in a ponytail, Sam teaching Elena and the gang American football in the playground, Sam singing in his precious girl band, Sam, the ultimate class cutie.
Because this, I want you to remember, is the real, the true Sam Lopez.
He stood there, a beat-up duffel bag slung over his shoulder, in a coat about three sizes too big for him, baggy jeans sagging on to the step. His face was a wisp of paleness behind a curtain of lank, shoulder-length hair.
‘Hi, Matthew.’ My mother, standing just behind him, wore the strained, I’m-not-panicking-really-I’m-not look on her face that I know so well. ‘This is your famous cousin Sam.’
As I muttered a greeting, my cousin pushed past me, close enough for me to notice a) how small he was and b) that he hadn’t had a wash for a while.
‘Let me take your coat, Sam,’ said my father, who had been hovering behind me in the hallway, but he was ignored too as the newcomer ambled through to the kitchen. When we followed him in, he was looking about, almost sniffing the air like some kind of rat.
‘So this is my new home,’ he said, his voice hoarse but surprisingly high-pitched.
I remember how once, when my mother was talking about Sam’s mother, my Aunt Galaxy, she had referred to Sam as ‘an accident’. I hadn’t quite understood what she meant at the time but now, standing in the kitchen, I saw it clear enough.
This was what an accident looked like – an accident in human form, an accident about to happen.
I have never been more glad to be back home. When I saw Matthew, trying to look pleased at the arrival of his American cousin, and dear David in the hall, his polite, social smile in place, I almost burst into tears.
It had been a terrible trip. The funeral, the meeting with the lawyer, the journey back across the Atlantic with a moody, traumatised thirteen-year-old. It was not going to be easy dealing with Sam, but at least now I was back with my own little family. Together, we would make this thing work.
Eight days ago, life had been simple. The summer holidays had just started. I was kind of whacked out after the long term and was ready for many, many mornings lying in my bed, afternoons with my friends, evenings slobbing out in front of the TV.
Then the news came through from America. My mother’s younger sister, Galaxy, had been involved in a serious car crash. One moment she was in a bad way, the next she was in a coma, the next she was dead. Mum flew out for the funeral.
I knew I should feel upset about the whole dead-aunt thing but, since I had never met Galaxy and she had only been mentioned now and then by my parents in a slightly embarrassed and jokey way, she had never exactly featured in my life so far. In fact, all I knew was that she sounded decidedly weird.
My sister Gail became Galaxy at a rebirthing ceremony at the Glastonbury Festival when she was eighteen. She had always liked to be different from the rest of us.
A couple of years later, she went on holiday to America with a bunch of long-haired friends. When they came back, she stayed, having hitched up with Tod Strange, the lead guitarist of a rather unpleasant heavy-metal band called 666.
We lost touch with Galaxy until just after I got married and was pregnant with Matthew, when she sent me a postcard. Tod was history, she said. These days she was with a guy called Tony Lopez, a nightclub owner. Oh, and guess what? She was going to have a baby.
So we each started a family at more or less the same time – me in a house in suburban London, Aunt Galaxy, as she now was, roaming around America in a camper van. We received the odd card from her – photographs of her little boy, Sam, odd scraps of news. After a couple of years, she told us that Tony Lopez had left home ‘to go travel and find himself’, as she put it. Later we heard that he was in jail.
We kept in touch down the years, but the truth was that we had less and less in common; Galaxy living on the west coast with what we always imagined to be a rather undesirable crowd, us living our quiet but busy lives in London.
And then came the big, the terrible news.
I was surprised to find how upset I was. My sister and I had never been particularly close as children and, when she grew into this rather strange and irresponsible adult who was different from me in every way, I came to think of her almost as a stranger who had just happened to have been born into the same family as me by some kind of odd accident.
Now I realised that I would miss my sister and her weird ways. Flying out to America for the funeral, I thought not of Galaxy, the rock chick with her dubious friends, but of Gail, the little girl who was never quite in step with the rest of the world but saw that as the world’s problem, not hers. In spite of having my own lovely, close family, I felt lonely without her.
In San Diego, where she had been living most recently, I was met by a man called Jeb Durkowitz who turned out to be Galaxy’s lawyer. He told me that things were somewhat complicated. Sam, who had just turned thirteen, was alone in the world. In a letter to Durkowitz, Galaxy had made it clear that, should anything happen to her, the Burton family should look after him.
Poor Gail, poor Galaxy. Even in death, she had a talent for causing trouble.
My cousin stank, and I sensed that he didn’t care that he stank. It was as if smelling to high heaven was a way of showing right from the start that he just didn’t care what people thought of him.
He sat, slumped on one of the kitchen stools, gazing at his new family, his small, button-like eyes dark and glistening.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr and Mrs David Burton. At home. With their only son, Matthew.’
As he spoke, it seemed to me that there was more contempt in that American drawl of his than seemed exactly right or polite in a kid of his age.
I glanced at my parents, expecting some kind of cool put-down, but they both stood smiling at this hairball idiot as if he were the most special and adorable thing they had ever seen in their entire lives.
Eventually, my father turned to me. ‘Maybe Sam would like a juice from the fridge,’ he said.
‘Juice sucks,’ said Sam.
Dad smiled. ‘Fair enough,’ he said reasonably.
We soon discovered that everything sucked, according to Sam Lopez.
Driving around London to see the sights sucked. The meals that my father cooked for us sucked. All four of the Pantuccis from next door, who called in to say hello, sucked. British TV sucked big time (‘You got no cable? No digital?’ he said. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’). Going to bed at any time before midnight sucked, as did getting up at any time before midday.
By the second day, this attitude was beginning to get to me. ‘How come everything in your life sucks?’ I asked him over dinner.
He turned to me, his eyes wide and dark, and I realised too late that it had not exactly been the best thing to say to someone whose mum had just died.
‘Search me, cuz,’ he said quietly. ‘I ask myself the same question every day.’
It was a difficult time. We have always been a family that likes to deal with problems by talking them through together, but Sam preferred his own company. He spent hours in his room, alone, listening to music though his headphones or he sat in front of the TV, staring blankly at the screen.
When he did speak, it was often in a harsh, angry tone of voice that tore through what was once the easy atmosphere of the house like someone ripping fabric. He had an alarming turn of phrase for a boy of his age too. Sam may not have had much of an education but, when it came to creative swearing, he was pretty near to the top of the class.
But the way I saw it was this: the silences, the moods, the outbursts, the bad language were all a cry for help from a kid in pain. It was the duty of the Burton family to help Sam through this dark, dark time.
A word about my parents. To an outsider – Sam Lopez, say – they might have seemed kind of topsy-turvy. As long as I can remember, Mum has been the main wage-earner, working in an employment agency at a job which gives her a daily nervous breakdown.
My father works part-time from home, checking documents as a proofreader for a law firm, but his real love, his career almost, is looking after the home. Dad’s version of housework is not the quick, what-the-hell-it’ll-do version of most men – he really and genuinely takes pride in keeping things sparkling and clean. He is the true, official article: a house husband. He can spend a whole afternoon on a family meal. He has a special day for vacuuming. He can wear an apron without embarrassment. Now and then I watch him hanging clothes out on the line, carefully, slowly, the pegs between his teeth, and I just know that this, the family and the family home, are what matters to him more than any job or career.
Look at it this way. I have a mixed-up version of a so-called traditional family – not so much Dad and Mum as Mad and Dum.
For me, it was not the summer of Sam Lopez at all. It was the summer of hope, of romance, of secrets, of planning for a new future. It was the summer of Mark Kramer.
At Bradbury Hill School, everybody knew Mark. The boys wanted to be him. They tried to grow their hair long and floppy like his. They wore his style of clothes, liked the brands that he liked. Some of them (truly, sadly, tragically) imitated his smile, his sleepy way of talking.
And the girls? Obviously, they just wanted to date him.
Maybe I was kidding myself – I was going into my second year, he was soon-to-be king of the Lower Sixth – but, when he started talking to me while we were both queuing for lunch during the last week of term, I honestly thought it meant something. He had been chatting to Justin, a friend of his, about the new Cameron Diaz film they were planning to see. As it happened, I had just seen a preview (my mum’s in the business), so I casually mentioned that the film was OK. In fact, it was almost good.
Mark looked at me in that gentle, aristocratic way of his, as if seeing me for the first time, and asked me how come I knew so much about a film that had not been released. I told him that my mum was a casting director. In fact, she had met Cameron a couple of times at showbiz parties (which is true). Cameron was really nice, I said – very, you know, normal.
‘Showbiz parties, eh?’ Mark laughed and his friend laughed too. He said he was going to see the film the following Saturday, and I mentioned I wouldn’t mind catching it again.
‘Cool,’ he said.
Maybe I read too much into that look, into that ‘Cool’, but at that moment it seemed clear. Something secret and magical had passed between us – something which made words sort of irrelevant. I was going on a date with Mark Kramer, the date he had just set up without revealing our plan to Justin.
It was big news, a socko moment of the major kind. Normally, I would share any secret with my best friends, Charley and Zia, but this was different. They would either make fun of me or they would be jealous.
I so didn’t need that right then.
At that moment in my summer holidays, it seemed as if nothing was going to be good or simple or normal ever again. When our home had just been Mum, Dad and me, we had known where we were – like any family, we had our fights and rows and days when things were a bit rocky, but we had been around each other long enough to know, by instinct, how to straighten things out. We understood when you need to talk and when to keep quiet, when to say sorry – all the usual parent-kid stuff.
But when three became four, and the extra person had more rage and unhappiness in him than the rest of us put together, the whole balance became skewed. I would hear Mum and Dad having hissed, secretive conversations about Sam. Their smiles became forced and phoney. Everything they said and thought seemed to revolve around my cousin and how he was coming to terms with his new, motherless life.
Beside that great, throbbing tragedy, the everyday stuff of my little world suddenly seemed kind of puny and insignificant.
As for Sam, he had learned a useful lesson – being an orphan gives you power. So while my parents were around, he would do his silent ‘n’ moody act. Then, as soon as we were alone, he would set about winding me up.
We were sitting in front of the TV one afternoon, when he looked out of the window and noticed my father washing the car in the front drive.
‘What is it with that guy?’ he murmured, just loudly enough for me to hear.
I made the mistake of responding. ‘You mean my father?’
‘Always cleaning things and scrubbing and dusting. Has he got some kind of psycho hang-up?’
I stared at the TV, now determined not to be suckered into a row.
Sam turned to me. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’
I shrugged.
‘Because I was thinking, maybe your dad was a butler in a previous life. Or a cleaning lady.’
I clenched my teeth and said nothing.
‘Now my dad – he wouldn’t know what dusting was,’ Sam said suddenly. ‘He’s so cool that just hearing about him would blow you away. Your brain couldn’t take it in.’
I stared ahead in silence.
‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff we did together.’ Sam chuckled and shook his head. ‘Yup, he was a real father, you know?’
Without a word, I stood up, walked out of the room and outside the house to join my father. I’m not crazy about car-washing, but it was the only way I could show Sam where my loyalty lay.
‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this,’ I told Dad.
‘He’ll settle down when he goes to school.’
I groaned. ‘I can’t believe he’s going to be in my class. It’s going to be a nightmare, Dad.’
My father looked over the car, a sponge in his hand, and said the words which made my heart sink every time I heard them.
‘Maybe it’s time Sam met a few of your friends.’
We were in the park, at our normal place by the shed, waiting for Matt’s famous American cousin.
He was late. According to Matt, he was late for everything.
‘Maybe he doesn’t exist at all,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe he’s Matt’s imaginary friend.’
‘I wish,’ said Matt.
Time passed. Jake kicked a football against the wall of the shed. Matt and I watched the world go by, just like we had done a thousand times before. This was our territory. It may have been just a shelter in a children’s playground, but the three of us had been hanging out here for five years or so. In the early days, we would come here to take cover if it rained while we were on the swings or the slide. Now, we just sat and talked. Even if we were given the odd cold stare now and then by parents in the playground or passing by on their way to the public toilets around the back of the building, we didn’t care. This was our own private place.
When we were kids, we had taken to calling ourselves the Shed Gang half as a joke and half seriously. Somehow, the name had stuck.
‘Here we go,’ Matt said suddenly.
I followed the direction of his eyes.
Turning into the park was a small, long-haired kid. ‘That’s him?’ I asked. ‘Bit of a titch, isn’t he?’
‘And get a load of that hair,’ said Jake.
‘It’s like I told you,’ said Matt. ‘He’s a hippy.’
‘Looks more like a girl to me,’ said Jake.
And Matt laughed. ‘You wait,’ he said.
He swaggered towards us, his T-shirt and jeans and blond hair billowing behind him as if he were a very small ship under sail. When he reached where we stood, he slowed down and wandered up to us, hands in pockets. ‘How ya doin’?’ he said, flashing one of his rare smiles. ‘I’m Sam Lopez.’
Tyrone and Jake mumbled a greeting.
‘So this is the famous shed.’ Sam sat down on the bench and looked around him. I was expecting one of his trademark put-downs, but instead he clicked his teeth in a sort of approving way. ‘It’s OK.’
‘We like it,’ I said coldly.
‘So what goes on round here?’
‘Not much,’ said Tyrone.
‘D’you play football?’ Jake asked.
Sam glanced at the ball at Jake’s feet. ‘You mean soccer? In the States, it’s a girl’s game.’
‘That’s because in the States, you can’t play it.’ Jake kicked the ball hard against the wall.
‘Sure we could if we wanted to.’ Sam reached over, took Tyrone’s phone and casually worked the game with his thumb. ‘Thing is, we prefer real football.’ He handed the phone back. ‘There you go, you’re on to the next level,’ he said casually.
He stood up, spat on his hand and caught the ball as it came back off the wall. He held it for a second or two, then flipped it over. For a moment, the ball stuck to his hand before it fell.
‘Take a look.’ Sam stood in front of Jake, rolling his shoulders in relaxed, limbering-up movement. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is football.’ He bent at the knees, holding an imaginary ball in both hands, with arms outstretched. ‘Two! Sixty-five!’ He yelled the numbers so loud that the mothers across the playground looked up to see what was going on.
And suddenly Sam was off, dancing and jinking across the tarmac, shoulder-barging imaginary players aside, half-turning to take a long pass, then sprinting onwards for a few yards until, just past the seesaws, he made to throw the ball in the air in triumph.
‘Touchdown!’ he screamed. ‘We haaaaaaave a ball game.’
He danced along beside the metal fence, head thrown back, his little legs and arms punching upwards in crazed celebration like a demented, long-haired goblin.
We laughed. There was no other reaction.
‘Nutter,’ said Jake.
‘What planet is that guy from?’ said Tyrone.
Sam returned to us and slumped down on the bench, breathing hard. ‘That’s what you call football,’ he said. ‘It’s better with a ball, of course.’
Jake shook his head. ‘You are one crazy Yank.’
‘You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.’ Sam wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve.
You don’t become a head teacher of a large school without learning how to what I call roll with the punches, but when Mrs Burton, the mother of one of our younger boys, Matthew, rang with the news about his American cousin, I can’t say I was overly optimistic about our ability to help with a schooling facility.
Bradbury Hill is over-subscribed – we are a very, very successful school – and the idea of an American child turning up out of the blue at the start of our second year seemed like a bit of a non-starter to me.
But Mrs Burton is a very determined woman. She explained how Sam was alone in the world, exactly the same age as Matthew. She suggested that Bradbury Hill might gain some useful publicity mileage from the whole business.
Publicity mileage. I’ll be truthful here. That spoke to me.
As it happened, there was a gap in Year Eight which this Sam person could usefully occupy. Even when Mrs Burton explained that no reports were available to Sam because the mother – something of a hopeless case, by all accounts – had moved her child from school to school so often, I failed to hear the alarm bells in my brain.
I blame myself on this one. I simply should have been what I call more careful.
We’re close, we bitches. When we were at primary school, there was one unspoken rule – if you upset one of us, you had all of us to answer to.
Elena Griffiths, Zia Khan and Charley Johnson. We were like the different sides of one all-conquering personality. Apart, each of us was nothing special. Together we were unbeatable.
Elena was pretty, skinny, kind of ditsy, a bit too hung up on the whole celebrity business to be entirely normal. Zia was part of this big, successful Asian family.
Somewhere along the line she had learned that silence, the whole little-mouse thing, was as good a method of getting your own way as the louder approach that Elena and I use. Sensitivity, charm and a talent for playing the guitar – who could be surprised that Zia is top of the charts when it comes to Teacher’s Pet awards? And no one ever suspects that behind the innocent facade lurks the true Ms Khan – scheming, wild and dangerous.
I envy her the charm thing. It seems that I’m too big, too loud for that kind of stuff. On the other hand, I have been top of every class that I’ve attended and who needs charm if you have brains?
Elena broke the golden rule that summer. It was the one about boys.
Boys, we had decided when we were about nine, were a waste of time. Our enemies were a sad trio who called themselves (I promise I’m not making this up) ‘the Shed Gang’. They annoyed us and we gained our revenge by getting them into trouble at every opportunity. This was not difficult – they were boys, after all.
When the Sheds – Jake, Tyrone and Matt – started calling us names, we took their favourite word for us, turned it into a compliment and made it our own gang name. The Bitches.
All was just fine and dandy with the three of us until Elena decided to fall for the love god of the Lower Sixth, Mark Kramer.
You want the truth? I didn’t mind him at first Matt had been telling us these horror stories about his cousin over the past few days and I admit the guy looked a bit of a fright, but when he did that crazy jig around the playground the first time we met, it occurred to me that he might be a pain but at least he would liven things up.
Summer holidays can sometimes drag. You sit around, you check out new video games, you chat, but then what? The answer to the question was that we found out more about Sam Lopez.
There was something about the American that shook up our little group, that made us talk about ourselves in a way that we normally never did.
Why? Because, however strange and out of whack our lives might have seemed, it was nothing to what Sam had on offer.
So, as he was catching his breath after his American football exhibition, he chatted about how he had played back home at one of his schools.
‘How many schools have you been to?’ I asked.
Sam frowned, and counted on his fingers for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Twelve? Thirteen? My mom and I moved around a bit. Something like that.’
Tyrone whistled, impressed.
‘Matt said she was a bit wild,’ he said.
Sam gave a little gasp, which might have been surprise or pain.
‘Tyrone means wild in a good way,’ said Matt quickly. The American smiled, then began to laugh softly. ‘That was Mom all right,’ he said. ‘Wiiiiild.’
And so we started talking. There was something about the stranger’s, whole dead-mother, multi-school situation that seemed to make it easier to open up about ourselves.
I talked about how my mum and dad had split up last year, how I felt out of place at home with just my mother and my older sister. I saw Dad once a week but that was no picnic either. We’d go to a film or sit in a restaurant, making small talk about everything except what was really on our minds. Suddenly, it was as if we were strangers.
Tyrone chipped in with the story about how he had never met his father on account of his having taken a holiday back in the West Indies soon after he was born and never came back. He talked about his weight problem – how they used to call him ‘Jumbo’ and ‘the Tank’ at school, how his mum was forever trying new diets on him, how they made him feel weak and ill but never worked.
Matt even joined in, fessing up that he felt embarrassed when his dad did the housework and went around in an apron or when his mother rang up the school to complain about something or other.
‘Loser City, man.’ Sam winked and there was something so easy and grown-up about his manner that the three of us found ourselves laughing. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you guys do for kicks around here?’
I’m not going into the Mark Kramer thing. The way I see it, what happened (what didn’t happen) between me and Mark has nothing to do with anybody. It’s simply not relevant. End of story.
All right, maybe you need to know a little, just the basics. I showed up for the Cameron Diaz film that Saturday. So did Mark. When he walked into the foyer, I went up to him, blushing sweetly beneath the make-up that had taken me about two hours to put on. Then I saw Tasha, a girl from his class, was behind him. She linked her hand through his arm and for what seem like half a lifetime the three of us stood staring at one another, each of us lost for words.
Eventually, it was Tasha who broke the silence. ‘And your problem is?’ she said.
I turned and ran, through the swing doors, out into the night. I hated Tasha, I hated myself but, above all else, I hated Mark Kramer. In fact, I hated all boys.
So maybe, come to think of it, the whole thing wasn’t quite as irrelevant as I thought.
Over the next few days, as we showed Sam around what he insisted on calling ‘the hood’, he talked about his life back home. The way he told it, every day was spent hanging out with bike gangs, cruising the projects, getting into fights, and every night he was backstage at some rock concert with his good old mum.
We listened to these stories, trying not to look impressed. Until then, we had liked to think that we three were tough enough to handle ourselves should things get a little iffy in the park, on the streets, or in the school playground. We were as bad and hard as it took for teachers now and then to express concern to our parents about our ‘attitude problems’.
But Sam, if half of his tales from back home were true, was in a different league of badness, harder than we even wanted to be. In San Diego, his posse shoplifted for fun. They nicked cars, carried knives. They had frenzied, bloody gang fights just like in the movies. They were known to the police.
The more we heard about the wild and wacky world of Sam and his posse, the less comfortable we felt with him. Either he was a lying fantasist or he was a mini-criminal. Whatever, he was trouble – and each of us had quite enough trouble of our own to be going on with.
And that was before the bust-up at Burger Bill’s.
If I had my way, I’d ban all kids between the ages of twelve and eighteen. They’re nothing but trouble, particularly the boys.
Particularly those boys.
We were sitting there in this cafe called Burger Bill’s, when Jake started talking about his dad. Mr Smiley had been missing custody visits with Jake recently and now it looked as if father and son would be meeting up even less often.
Two nights previously, Mr Smiley had been driving back to his flat after a business dinner when his car had been stopped by the police. He had been breathalysed, failed the test and been kept at the police station all night.
I noticed that, as we talked about all this, expressing our sympathy, Sam was unusually silent. He looked around him, drumming the Formica table with his fingers as if nothing could bore him more than the story of Jake’s dad.
‘So what happens round here if you drive when you’re on the sauce?’ he asked out of the blue. ‘You get slammed up or what?’
‘Mr Smiley could lose his licence for a while,’ I said.
‘And my dad needs his car to get over to see me,’ Jake added miserably.
Sam sniffed. ‘Excuse me while I cry,’ he said.
We all looked at him in surprise. He sat back in his chair and raised both hands. ‘Hey, face it, it’s no biggie,’ he said. ‘So Jake’s old man spent a night in the pen and can’t drive for a while. Big tragedy.’
Jake leaned forward over the table. ‘Don’t push it,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a joke.’
‘Who’s joking?’ Sam ran his fingers through his hair and tugged at it in a distinctly unfriendly gesture. ‘You know, Jake, I think you’re in danger of confusing me with someone who gives a good goddam what happens to your daddy.’
‘Easy, Sam,’ said Tyrone.
But Sam continued to stare deep into Jake’s eyes. ‘You see, when you have a dad who’s spent most of his life in the slammer, who’s there right now, then the idea of someone spending a few hours behind bars…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, it doesn’t exactly break my heart.’
‘Sheesh,’ said Tyrone. ‘What did your dad do?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Stuff. That’s what he did. Big stuff. When I was born he had a few nightclubs. He got involved in a few things that maybe weren’t strictly on the level. One night he fell out with a colleague. The colleague had an accident. He got kind of smeared. Dad took the rap. Like I say – stuff.’
He had done it again. Even when something unusually dramatic had happened in one of our lives, Sam managed to come up with something bigger, scarier and more dramatic.
‘That’s…’ Bravely, Tyrone was trying to find the right words for one of those tricky occasions when you discover that your friend’s dad is in jail for murder. ‘That’s…I mean, that’s really terrible.’
‘It’s the way it goes, ole buddy.’ Sam slurped at his drink through a straw. ‘My old man ain’t been around since I was five years old. Now and then I’d hear about his latest little scrape with the law from my mom. She’d make a joke of it – she called it the Crash Bulletin.’
‘Crash?’ said Tyrone.
‘That’s his name. His real name’s Tony but, what with all the busts and accidents and stuff, everyone calls him Crash – Crash Lopez.’ Sam spoke the words with pride.
There was silence for a moment. Then Jake seemed to tune into the conversation for the first time in a while.
‘Crash,’ he said, and I could tell from the look on his face that he was still angry about what Sam had said about his father. ‘Bit of a weird name, isn’t it?’
Sam looked warily surprised. ‘Waddya mean weird?’ Jake laughed. ‘What’s he got – a couple of brothers called Bang and Wallop?’
Sam gave a sort of yelp of rage and, before we could do anything, he was out of his seat, lunging across the table, scattering the polystyrene cups, his hands pummelling at Jake’s face.
‘Don’t diss my dad!’ he was screaming. ‘Diss my dad and you die!’
Bill, a fat, sweaty guy who is the manager of the burger bar, hurried over and pulled Sam off Jake. Ignoring the American’s screams and curses, he marched him to the door and threw him out as if he were a stray cat. He locked the door, then walked back to the table.
He looked down, resting two meaty fists on the table. ‘What are your names, you three?’ he asked.
‘Smith,’ said Tyrone. ‘We’re all called Smith.’
Bill stood there for a moment, as if considering what to do next. Then he walked briskly back to the door and unlocked it. ‘Get out,’ he said with a jerk of his head. ‘And don’t come back unless you want me to take you down to the police station myself.’
We scurried past him, Jake with a hand over his eye.
Outside we looked around us. The shopping precinct was deserted. There was no sign anywhere of the crazy son of Crash Lopez.
I was scared, and I’d lay money that Matt and Jake were scared too. It was one of those occasions where events slide out of control and suddenly you feel lost, helpless and small.
We wandered down the empty precinct until we were a safe distance from Burger Bill’s. ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Matt, his voice shaky.
Jake sniffed and wiped his nose. ‘It was only a joke,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘He’s too much, that Sam. All those schools and gangs, his mum in a car crash and now his dad turns out to be some kind of psycho killer.’
‘He says,’ muttered Jake.
‘It’s not his fault, I suppose,’ said Matt.
‘It’s not ours, either!’ It was an angry wail that came from Jake. ‘Just because his life’s a mess, why does he need to mess up ours too? I’ve got enough problems without this.’