Junk - Melvin Burgess [59]
Me and Rob and Sal went out and made a slide down Richmond Road. It was already so slippery we had trouble walking up it. Once we got to the top, you could sit on a piece of cardboard and slide for miles down into the square at the bottom. We were at it all morning. We got Gemma out, and Col. Even Lily came out in the end. We forgot everything. Then this old black guy went past and started on at us for making the pathway dangerous and Lily lost her temper as usual.
‘Son of the morgue! Sod off and die!’ she yelled at the poor old bloke. Lily really knows how to turn a good insult.
Lily doesn’t go out so much any more. ‘Too many straights,’ she says. She used to do the shops with us in the summer but we don’t have to do that so much now. Me and Rob do quite a bit of dealing these days. Not to make money, we never have much money, but just enough so we can buy some smokes and some hash and a little junk from time to time. You can shoplift most things but it isn’t clever to try and pinch drugs. Apart from anything else, they usually belong to your friends.
Dealing’s okay, it’s a business. You go round and visit your friends, buy a little, sell a little, take a little. We usually have enough money left over to get food and stuff, so we don’t have to do so much shoplifting. That’s nice, because although it’s fun, it wears you down if you have to do it every day. Rob’s sixteen, he can sign on. Lily’ll be sixteen in a few months but meanwhile we only get what we make ourselves.
I really got into the shoplifting for a while. I got Gemma to sew these big pockets into my coat so I could really stuff myself with things.
I used to walk into the supermarket thin and walk out again fat. I even used to try and keep up with Rob, which was dangerous, really, because he’s in another class.
Rob’s been at it since he was a kid. He used to train for it. He grew up in tepees and trailers and lorries. He’d get up in the night and go into someone’s tepee, and then he’d crawl round inside, hiding behind the chairs and the table and dashing out across the open spaces while they weren’t looking. Can you imagine?
‘Practising,’ he says. For shoplifting, see? And he never got caught either.
Yeah, the summer was beautiful. Now it’s winter, it’s cold. I suppose you wouldn’t expect it to be so good.
I remember those nights out in the garden by the fire. They really were the summer for me. Big bonfires – we kept them going all night. Whenever it got low someone’d toddle out and find some wood in a skip. There was the swing. Did you hear about that swing? Rob and I built it up in the big sycamore tree at the end of the garden. Huge great tree, its roots were breaking up the wall on the other side, tearing out stones and rubble…
Anyway, we climbed up and cut off the branches to fit this swing in. We had to fight Lily about it, she went mad, she said we were mutilating her tree. She went on and on about it, but when we’d finished it, she loved it. It was one great long piece of rope, must have been five yards long, with a cross-piece of wood at the bottom. You had to go right back to the other end of the garden pulling the rope after you, right up on top of the little shed… then you let go…
It was amazing! Not just how long it was, but because you went right out beyond the garden and over the road. People’d be walking along or driving or on their bikes and they’d hear this whoosh of air overhead like some giant eagle or something was coming down. And there’d be someone flying out above their heads! We used to do it with no clothes on. Stark naked. People used to almost crash their cars. It was such a gas. You can imagine – you’re driving along and then suddenly this naked girl appears howling and flying through the air.
We were all in love with one another. We were in love with ourselves. We still are. And me and Gemma