Junk - Melvin Burgess [5]
I walked down to the sea and wept and wept and raged and wept. My life, such as it was, was in tatters. As for that old bag Mrs Auntie Joan – she’d loved every minute of it. There was a myth amongst the local traders that all the trouble in Minely was caused by the local kids. If someone bent a car aerial or turned over a wastebin on the seafront, they’d all gather together like gulls and mutter darkly about Youths and no discipline and how the young people were ruining Minely. Of course they were quite happy to welcome any number of out-of-town thugs. They could run around the town vomiting, screeching and kicking wastebins over as long as they liked, and it was just youthful high spirits.
Basically anyone who had a fiver in their pocket was Mother Theresa of Calcutta as far as the local traders were concerned.
Minely was all geared up for tourists. If the local traders had their way, the place would have been closed down in the winter and the native population sent to Scarborough or Siberia or somewhere like that. But that’s another story.
Furious as I was at Mrs Auntie Joan, it was like a mild spring day compared with the soul-deep rage burning for my loving parents.
I didn’t go back that day. In fact, I stayed away all weekend as a protest.
Response: banned from going out of the house at weekends.
My next plot was to stay out until ten each night during the week. They couldn’t keep me off school in the name of discipline, surely? They got round that by my dad picking me up from school. My God! Everyone knew what was going on. He actually came into the class to get me! I thought I was going to die of humiliation.
This was getting really out of hand. I could see my mother was having second thoughts, but by this time Dad was going on all burners. I heard them arguing one night and I like to think she was trying to get him to slow down, but by that time his authority was at stake and you might as well have tried to stop the Pope blessing babies. Of course Mum didn’t have a leg to stand on because she’d started the whole thing off.
My mum is the philosopher in the family.
‘The love is there, Gemma,’ she explained to me. ‘The generosity is there. The compromise. I don’t like treating you like a child. All you have to do is show us you can follow a few simple rules and we can resume a proper family life. You can get a new job and stay out at weekends again. We just need to see some responsibility. That’s all we ask.’
My parents needed to be taught a lesson.
Don’t tell me. You’ve had this horrendous argument with your parents. Life is abominable. Why should you put up with this? you think. Why indeed? Why not leave home instead? It’s easy, it’s cheap. And it gets your point across beautifully.
Only it’s not easy, is it? That is to say, it might be easy and it might be hard, but how do you know? You’re only a kid, you’ve got things to learn. It isn’t as though you can walk into a shop and ask for a handbook.
Well, here it is – what you’ve all been waiting for:
GEMMA BROGAN’S
PRACTICAL HANDBOOK TO RUNNING AWAY
FROM HOME
A step-by-step guide for radical malcontents
1 You will need: Clothes – woolly vest, long underwear, plenty of keep-warm stuff. Plenty of underwear and other personal items. A waterproof coat. A sleeping-bag. A pencil and paper. Money. Your father’s bank card and pin number.
2 Your wits. You’ll need ‘em.
3 Think about it. What are your mum and dad going to do? Try to get you back, of course. It’ll be police. It’ll be, Oh, my God, my little girl has been abducted. It’ll be, Maybe some dreadful pervert is at her right now. Maybe she’s lying murdered in a binliner in the town rubbish tip THIS VERY SECOND! It never occurs to them that little Lucinda got so fed up with Mumsy and Dadsy that she actually left of her own accord. So… if you don’t want every copper in the land on your tail and pictures of little you shining out