Junk - Melvin Burgess [31]
She didn’t like me one little bit. You could see it in her face what she thought of me: spoilt brat. She didn’t like the way I spoke or the way I acted or the way I looked. She thought I ought to be at school, at home and out of her life. She figured I ought to be tucked up back in bed.
I figured that was her problem.
Basically, she was running a campaign to get me out and back home. She didn’t know me or she’d have realised – the best way of making me do something is tell me not to do it. But she was on at Richard as well and I could see he agreed with her. He was a lot more sympathetic but basically it was the same. If you were fourteen you belonged to someone – in this case, my mum and dad.
She was on at Tar about it ALL THE TIME. You could see him roasting. She poured the hot fat on and let him crackle, telling him how selfish he was being for dragging a young innocent like me away from the loving bosom of my family.
‘How must your parents feel?’ he wailed.
‘About as good as Von is making you feel,’ I told him. He had just the same expression he did when his real mother was wrapping him around her little finger, back in Minely.
Actually, Richard and Vonny made a perfectly reasonable set of parents. If I’d had them instead of the inadequate pair of bozos God gifted me with, I’d never have run away. It was perfect. I could spend the night with my boyfriend. They passed joints to me. I could decorate my room whatever colour I liked, stay out how long I liked. As parents they were perfect.
The only trouble was, I hadn’t run away from home in order to find a new set.
I didn’t say anything to Tar, but I was thinking, well, this was okay for now. I was going to keep my eyes open for proper friends. People more our own age or a bit older, maybe, who weren’t going to worry about how legal we were, because they’d probably be fairly illegal themselves.
We were already meeting people. Richard and Jerry and Vonny had friends round. There was the night we were allowed, WOW, to have the LIGHTS ON IN THE HOUSE! And walk around in the brilliance of Real Electric Lighting.
Well, actually it was quite exciting after creeping round in candlelight for a week. They had a few people round then for the first time. Just people sitting round talking and drinking and getting stoned, no dancing or anything. Richard brought his sound system down. Me and Tar sat in the corner and watched like a pair of tame parrots. Occasionally people came up and were nice to us. They were all ancient.
One interesting thing that did come out was that we were going to have a housewarming party the next weekend to open the squat officially. A proper party, with dancing and loud sounds. Richard said he’d invite some people more our age there. Richard knows everyone, he’s opened up so many squats. He mentioned some people living a few streets away who sounded interesting, said he knew some more not so far off who might come… and I began to think maybe it would be worthwhile after all.
It was about right. Two weeks of living in candlelight and house painting were about my limit.
I still had that hundred quid I thieved from Dad’s cash card. I hadn’t had to spend a thing. They’d paid for all the food. Vonny and Jerry had even been keeping me in ciggies. I thought to myself… right. So the next day I told Tar we were going out.
Would you believe it took me ages to drag him away? He was still mad keen on painting the wretched house. You practically had to make an appointment with him before you could do anything except paint, and one or two other things. I almost pulled him out of the house in the end.
We headed off into town to do a bit of spending.
The whole day unravelled in my mind as we walked down the road. By the time we got