Nicholas Dane

  Nick looked so glum, Mr Creal put his hand gently on his back. ‘But that doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen, just.. .well, don’t pin all your hopes on it. What we can do is arrange a visit. We don’t have visits on site but you could go to stay with her for a weekend, perhaps. Would that be good?’

  Nick was unable to speak. He nodded his head.

  ‘You know the system for visits?’

  Nick did. It was a points system. Three points, you could go home one weekend a month. Six points, two weekends a month. Nine, three weekends and if you got full marks, twelve, you could go home every weekend. Nick, of course, had none.

  ‘I’d be minus if Toms had his way,’ he complained. Mr Creal nodded grimly. ‘Right, well, I’m giving you three points right now, so if you can hang on to those, you know you have a visit in three weeks. It’s the best I can do. If I give away too much, Mr Toms will complain to Mr James, and then I’m in trouble. Mr James might think of it as favouritism, and he doesn’t encourage that. Quite rightly, I think. Still. Better than nothing, I suppose.’

  Three weeks seemed an awfully long way off. ‘I’ll be dead by then,’ croaked Nick. Mr Creal laughed and told him so long as he had his sense of humour, there was hope.

  ‘I know you shouldn’t be in here, Nick,’ he went on. ‘I’m going to do my best, but you have to understand that there’s a limit to what I can do. Mr Toms is your house tutor. I can overrule him as deputy head, but not all the time, and discipline in his house is up to him. It’s a shame I was away when you arrived or I might have been able to swing it for you to go to one of the better masters. It’s because you turned up with a black eye. Mr James always puts the fighters in with Mr Toms. But one thing - have you heard of the Flat List?’

  Nick hadn’t, and Mr Creal explained. It was a plan of his own to give some boys ‘the chance to see a bit of ordinary home life’, as he put it.

  ‘It’s for some of the more sensitive boys who might benefit from it,’ he said. ‘The head is right behind it, so the likes of Toms can’t do anything about it, however much they hate it.’

  Three or four times a week, Mr Creal pinned a list of names to the notice board in the school. The boys named came to his flat in the evening after dinner to watch TV, play games, chat, listen to music and generally relax.

  ‘I don’t let just anyone in here,’ said Mr Creal. ‘Most of them would just take advantage. But I think you’re different from the others, Nick. Now, I’m not promising anything - you’ve got yourself a bad name very quickly, and I can’t give treats to one of Mr Toms’ lads if he thinks you don’t deserve it. The fights have to stop. I know, I know - it’s not your fault, but that’s the way it is. You see that? Good lad! You stay out of trouble and I can be a good friend, as you can see. I just need your cooperation.’

  Nick didn’t see how he could avoid getting picked on, but he agreed to try. But now it was getting late. Soon, the crocodile would be forming outside the school. It was time to go back to hell.

  Mr Creal led him to the door. Nick looked round the flat before he left.

  ‘It’s the only place fit for humans,’ he said.

  Tony Creal looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re a bright lad, aren’t you?’ He laughed. ‘Fit for humans - very good. Very good.’ Chuckling, he led him to the door and opened it. He pulled a face.

  ‘Back to the farmyard, Nick. I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Hang on, though... I’m forgetting. Wait here

  He went back into the room and came out a moment later with a bag full of goodies - chocolates, sweets, a packet of ciggies. Nick looked at him and smiled. Now he knew where Oliver got his stuff from.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nick. It had been great. He took a breath and walked back out of the world and into the Home.

  8

  Davey O'Brian

  Nick was terrified that the Morrises were going to go for him again, especially since Creal had had them flogged until the blood ran.

  ‘He don’t look the sort to do that,’ said Nick to Oliver a few days later.

  ‘He doesn’t do it,’ said Oliver. ‘He hands them over to Harvey to do it.’

  Mr Harvey turned out to be another of the House tutors. Oliver pointed him out a while later - a tall, gangly man, with a dully bald head and eyes as black as beetles, dressed in a skinny Teddy boy-type suit.

  ‘He don't look like much,’ said Nick. It was true -Harvey was long but thin. He didn’t look as if he could do as much damage as Toms, for instance, who was tubby, but strong.

  ‘Look at his arms,’ said Oliver. Nick saw what he meant at once. Harvey’s arms were really long. When he used the cane, he curled them back round behind his head like a piece of rubber hose and spun on his heels as he brought it down. The wounds were like whiplash.

  ‘Blood on the first stroke. No one wants it from the Chimp,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Nick.

  Despite such a thrashing, the Morrises didn’t take it out on him anymore; they seemed to feel they’d done what they had to. God knows it was enough. He ached from head to foot for days after. A couple of them threatened him, just to make sure he didn’t try it on with Steven again, but that was it.

  Perhaps it was the influence of Mr Creal, perhaps it was just that Nick had fought his way to a standstill, but the fights began to slacken off as well. He knew which lads to avoid, and the other lads knew whether or not to avoid him. He’d made his mark and found his place. Life got easier. And then something else good happened. During the shower after football one day, for the first time since he arrived, Nick spotted a face he knew.

  It was Davey O’Brian.

  The O’Brians were a huge clan. Davey’s mum and her two sisters and all their twenty-odd kids lived in three houses all within a stone’s throw of each other in Poplar Road, not far from where Nick used to live. There were ten kids in Davey’s house alone, living there in a pack with their mum and dad. His parents were both more or less permanently drunk and as a result, the kids were in and out of care all the time. They rarely went to school, but spent most days wandering round Manchester, begging and stealing. Every evening, they went back home and handed over their takings to their mum and dad, who would pocket the lot, take it down the pub and drink it all away, while the kids went back out of the door looking for their tea. They’d steal anything and were banned from every shop within a mile, but the odd thing was, it never occurred to them to steal off their mum and dad. It was partly fear, but they were a loyal crew, the O’Brians, even though everyone in the family hit everyone else, from their dad hitting their mum down to the smallest tot kicking sleeping cats off the wall, if she could get close enough.

  Nick and Davey had been friends, on and off. Davey was a little older, but shorter than Nick, who was on the short side himself, and just as ready to stand up for himself if need be. Together, they made quite a team.

  Davey was always coming and going - now, Nick knew where. They’d always got on well. Davey knew every scam going and Nick was always up for trouble. Since he hadn’t been banned from all the local shops and no one knew him for a thief, Nick had been very useful to Davey. He’d keep a shopkeeper busy while Davey crept in on his hands and knees and filled his shirt with biscuits, cakes and other eatables. It had been fun - until he got caught, and his mum found out what he’d been doing. He'd been grounded for a week, and when he got out, he wasn’t so keen on the stealing. For Davey it was a matter of getting himself fed, but for Nick it just wasn’t really worth it. But they hung around together from time to time anyway, just because they were mates.

  In the showers, they caught one another’s eye but Davey was talking to someone else, and Nick didn’t break in. It felt a bit odd, being naked, introducing yourself and anyway, he’d been in long enough at Meadow Hill to know that just that could lead to a fight, unless you were one of the in-crowd, which he certainly wasn’t.

  He didn’t have much of a chance to talk to him that day. Everyone seemed to know Davey and he was always su
rrounded. In the end, he got fed up waiting for a chance to get him on his own, so he went up when he was talking to a couple of other lads during break at school the next day.

  ‘So this is where you keep disappearin’ to,’ Nick said.

  Davey smiled sheepishly and shrugged. He was aware that some of the other lads were watching him, and they weren’t too impressed.

  ‘Nah, I got sent here from Boulders.’ Boulders was another Home. ‘I kept runnin’ off. I’m high security, me.’ He laughed at his own feats. Nick smiled.

  One of the other boys butted in. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Leave him, Case,’ said Davey. ‘I know ’im, he’s OK.’ Davey nodded at the other two lads, who nodded back. Nick nodded familiarly at them too. They didn’t look as though they liked it, but they left it alone anyway.

  ‘So what are you doing in ’ere?’ Davey wanted to know. ‘You with yer posh mum and all?’

  ‘She’s not posh,’ began Nick, but she obviously was to Davey. So he just told him.

  ‘She died. Heroin overdose.’

  ‘No! ’Eroin? ’Er?’

  ‘I never knew aught about it. Came home one day and the place was full of the Social. I don’t ’ave any family - so that was that.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Who’d have thought that? Nick Dane in care. Bloody hell. And I’m in ’ere because me sister died, I reckon.’

  Nick remembered Davey’s sister, Kath. The O’Brians were a close lot, but Davey and Kath were inseparable. She was a few years younger than him and Nick, but she was up for anything they did. It drove Davey mad, because he was the one who’d get into trouble if she got caught. She never did, though. She could dodge so fast, no one could touch her. Sometimes, she’d do her robbing by dashing into a shop, run along the aisles grabbing what she wanted, and then back out, with people falling over themselves and each other trying to catch her, and no one ever able to lay a finger on her.

  She had a terrific imagination as well, always thinking things up.

  ‘Look at that man over there,’ she’d say, picking someone out in the park or walking down the street. ‘’E’s a murderer, I know it!’

  ‘You can’t know that, Kath,’ Davey would say.

  ‘I can feel it comin’ out of him. Look at his eyes. How cool he is. You’d never know, would you, just to meet him on’t street?’

  By the time she’d finished, Nick would feel in his bones that he was looking at a man who’d killed his own wife, or his daughters or something terrible.

  ‘He’s looking! Run for it!’ she’d yell, and they’d all go haring off down the street squealing with laughter and fear. She had a real gift for stories, did Kath.

  She died like this: there was a block of flats, Glorianna Buildings, on the way into town. Davey and Kath had discovered that if you wedged your foot in the lift doors in between floors, the safety system would kick in and the lift would stop. Then you could force the door open and climb up on top of the lift. It was easy, and not dangerous because the lift was between you and that breathless, terrible drop to the bottom of the lift shaft all the way down to the basement. The great thing was, on top of the lift there was a separate control panel. Once you switched it to override, you could use the control panel to make the lift do whatever you wanted.

  ‘You’da loved it,’ said Davey. ‘We used to wait till someone got in and we’d trap ’em in it. You could make that lift do anythin’ - take ’em to the wrong floor, stop ’em in between floors, all sorts. They went barmy! We got one old dear in there for over an hour. She had to pee on the floor. Then when we let her out, someone else came in and she wrinkled up her nose and blamed it on the kids. Old bag, serve her right.’

  But one day, disaster had struck. Davey was in the lift and Kath was up on top, so he never saw what happened. Something hit her - the counterweights maybe, he never knew. By the time he looked up, saw blood coming down from the roof of the lift, lovely little Kath was already dead.

  Just to make it worse, his parents blamed him. ‘When me dad came home he leathered the life out of me. I was in a Home within a week. And I bin in ever since.’

  ‘Maybe they just thought your mum wasn’t lookin’ after you properly again.’

  Nick regretted it as soon as he said it, because he didn’t want anyone to criticise his mum - why should Davey? But Davey just shrugged.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘If that was the case, we’da all gone. This time, it was just me.’

  Nick was appalled. Another disaster! But at least it made him feel that he wasn’t alone.

  ‘How long ’ave you been in?’

  ‘Months. They keep moving me around. See, Davey O’Brian’s too much for ’em!’ Davey grinned and stabbed his thumb into his chest. ‘I keep doing a runner, dun I?’

  ‘Back home,’ said Nick.

  ‘Yeah, back ’ome. Me brothers and sisters sneak me into their rooms and I’ve got this friend who puts me up - in return for a few jobs.’ Davey winked and smiled. He always had a scam going.

  ‘So how come you’re back in?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Same as always,’ said Davey, his face falling. ‘As soon as me dad finds out I’m back the bastard shops me to the cops! Me own dad!’ He looked at Nick with wide eyes, as if he couldn’t believe his bad luck. ‘And ’e’s the one as always says how we O’Brians have to stick together. Yeah, us O’Brians, so long as it’s not me.’ Davey looked so stricken, Nick laughed at him, and Davey grinned again. ‘He’s a bastard,’ he said fondly.

  ‘You gonna do a runner here, too?’ asked Nick.

  ‘You bet. But it’s a bummer here. Really hard to bunk off here.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Prefects, innit? And fences. It’s a bloody prison camp, ’ere.’

  It was true. Since he had nowhere to run to, Nick hadn’t thought about it, but he had noticed the perimeter fence, which was a good eight feet high, curving in at the top. You could get over it if you had the time, but the prefects were everywhere. Whenever any kid was out of the building, at games, on the way to and fro to school, the prefects were there watching you. During the day they patrolled the fence, at night you were locked in. At Meadow Hill, you never got to spend any time on your own.

  ‘And the staff are all the most evil bastards on earth,’ pointed out Davey.

  ‘What about Creal?’ said Nick. ‘He seems OK.’

  ‘Creal? It’s him that keeps you in here. Him and his little bum boys. Creal’s a bastard. They’re all bastards.’

  Nick laughed. That was Davey all over. If you were in authority, you were a bastard. It didn’t matter if you were a cop, a social worker, the mayor, the prime minister, or the local vicar. You were on the wrong side - bastard, by default.

  ‘Creal’s been all right to me,’ he said.

  ‘ ’As he?’ said Davey. He looked at Nick and shrugged. ‘That’s your business. A few treats, innit? Don’t forget, though, he might wear a suit and a tie, but he’s still a copper and remember ... ?’

  Nick remembered - the O’Brian chant. They repeated it together.

  ‘All coppers are bast-ards!’

  The two boys laughed, and around them, other lads looked round and laughed too. Nick was delighted. Him and Davey - and Davey knew everyone. Things couldn’t help but get better now, surely?

  He was right - things were getting better at last. The first week had been hell, but now, Nick was becoming part of a little group. It was the first stroke of luck he’d had for ages, and he had another one straight on its heels. Davey got put in with Toms too, and they ended up in the same dorm.

  Getting a new friend never meant to Nick that he had to get rid of the old ones. Davey wasn’t all that keen on Oliver at first, and only really accepted him because Nick was immovable on the subject. Oliver was too much of a goody-goody, always being given treats and favours. Mr Creal in particular seemed to like him - he was on the Flat List almost all the time, and he was always being given time off school or sports or
whatever.

  Davey moaned at Nick and teased Oliver about being Creal’s little bum boy same as everyone else, but he had to accept it.

  ‘I’d do the same for you,’ said Nick, and they knew it was true. That was Nick - once you were one of his you stayed one of his, even if you were teacher’s little pet. Davey got used to it. He was always keeping an eye out for his young brothers and sisters back home, and he accepted Oliver like that - as someone to be taken care of. But he never liked him much.

  9

  The Flat List

  So life at Meadow Hill went on - early mornings, schooling that didn’t even try to teach you anything, sports every evening, getting beaten, trying to avoid getting beaten. Every now and then Nick saw Mr Creal round and about the grounds, but didn’t have a chance to talk to him. A couple of weeks went by, and he was beginning to think he’d been forgotten about when Davey came running up to him in the corridor at school.

  ‘Nick, you’re on the List! How ’bout that?’

  Nick ran to see. There he was, on the Flat List, just as Mr Creal had promised, for that same evening - him, Oliver and another lad called Mick Flynn.

  ‘You bum boy!’ exclaimed Davey.

  Nick couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Wonder why he picked me?’

  Davey laughed. ‘I can’t think. Hey, see if you can nick some tabs for me, will you?’ Davey loved smoking. He’d do almost anything for a tab.

  Nick went around the rest of the day on a high, he was looking forward to it so much. He couldn’t help laughing at himself, though. He was getting a night of TV and gingemuts, and he thought he was going to Heaven. How things had changed ...

  That evening, Nick together with Oliver and Mick changed into their regulation pyjamas early and put on the tatty dressing gowns hanging up among the lockers for expeditions of this kind. Nick thought they might at least have let them wear their own clothes. He moaned about it to Oliver as they gathered outside before making their way to the big house, but Oliver just shrugged.