Junk - Melvin Burgess [21]
I pretty soon found out it was all true after all. Joanne Roberts told me. She lives round the corner from his mum and dad and she found out everything from her mum and dad. Jo said it was the best thing that had happened on their street for years.
She had a big fat lip. Joanne actually saw the lip when she was out shopping with it. She wore dark glasses but she couldn’t hide the lip.
Of course, she could have done it falling down the stairs or walking into a wall. She’d done that before. But it sounded like a fair bet it was Mr Muscles wot done it. It seemed like he didn’t waste much time, either. He walked straight in and thumped her one as soon as she showed him Tar’s note and she ran straight off down the road to a friend of hers who told Joanne’s mum all about it. She slept on the sofa and their cleaning lady said there was a pile of sick behind it in the morning.
I wasn’t telling Tar that, though. Not yet, anyway. He only needed the slightest excuse to dash back and get beaten up for Mumsy.
I went round there once and she was all over him. I was surprised she didn’t put her tongue in his ear and wiggle it about. Honestly. She was grabbing hold of him and pulling him on top of her and holding on to him like Young Love, except that she’s about forty and all baggy and scrawny with her hair all over the place, like the Hag Woman of Minely. It quite put me off him for a bit. I’d smell her on him sometimes. She used to use gallons of perfume to try and drown out the booze, and she came out smelling like she drank the stuff. Maybe she did.
Poor Tar was ever so embarrassed but his dad was livid. He was clanging around in the background pouring drinks for him and her, not forgetting to abuse her for drinking it, of course. I never heard language like it. His dad, actually, must have known she was only doing it to wind him up but he couldn’t help getting angry about it. Not that he wanted to have her wet tongue in his ear… but he didn’t want her to even pretend to put it in anyone else’s, especially not Tar’s. And of course that’s exactly why she did it.
It was all deeply crazy stuff and both Tar and his dad knew exactly what she was up to but they didn’t seem able to help themselves. She had the old man knocking Tar about, when all he really wanted to do was land one on her.
It sounded as though he hadn’t wasted much time waiting for his dreams to come true. And of course she wanted Tar to come back and carry on inserting his face in between his dad’s fist and her own ugly mug.
I had no intention of letting him.
I tried to get round to have a look at his mum myself. I thought I’d go and knock on the door and pretend to be all sympathetic. Fat chance. My mum and dad would have fed me to the sharks first.
Since Tar ran off, things had been tighter than ever. Dad wasn’t just picking me up from school. He’d started taking me there as well. He must have got time off work to do it, because I didn’t get ready until about ten to nine. There were top-level meetings at school. I used to catch glimpses of the teachers keeping an eye on me when I went to the loo, that sort of thing. Of course it was All For My Own Good. They wanted every second of my life accounted for. I suppose they thought that the moment I had a spare minute, I’d be peeling my knickers off and diving into the boys’ toilets…
I tried telling them. ‘I’M STILL A VIRGIN!’ I screamed from the top of the stairs one day. There was no reply.
I’d had the police round questioning me about Tar. Mum and Dad hated that. I think they hated me for it, bringing their home into disrepute or something. They’d even taken to locking the doors in the evening to stop me sneaking out. The stupidity of it, when you think… I mean, I could have gone out of the windows or anything. And, of course, my weekends out hadn’t been banned, not yet anyway, although I assumed that it was only a matter of time. Let’s face it, if I was going to run off there wasn’t much they could do about it, beyond tying me to the