The Faithless - Martina Cole [114]
He had learned to play the game, though. Eventually it had occurred to him that he had to change to get out of that place and that is what he had done. He had acted the way they wanted him to act, and the psychiatrists had patted themselves on the back – look how well we’ve done with him, he can join the real world again, mix in society and blend in!
Fucking morons. He had gone from a group home to his own bedsit at sixteen. He was still classified as mentally ill, but not violent any more. It was in the bedsit he had first encountered heroin. He had not been able to believe it was illegal – it was the best thing he had ever experienced in his life! And he had been on more drugs than fucking Kurt Cobain! Anti-psychotics – you name them, he’d had them. He had spent most of his life higher than a jumbo jet. Now he knew what it was to be mellow, and he liked it. He still had violent fantasies, but the heroin helped to subdue them much better than those fucking pills they had shoved down his throat ever had.
So, finally, he was going to visit the family. He was going to see just how the land lay and, more important than anything else, where that skank of a mother of his lived.
As he walked towards his nana and granddad’s house, he saw Roy Brown, and nearly said hello. The cat incident had long been buried away in his mind, but now he remembered it and was sure his nana would remember it too; it wasn’t exactly something you forgot, he supposed.
It all came back to him – the look on his nana’s face when she had seen her bread knife, the precious antique bread knife she thought was so fucking marvellous. The memory made him laugh; she had looked so funny with that surprised look on her face.
Then he remembered the hammering his granddad had given him and suddenly he wasn’t smiling any more. He was scowling, brooding. He’d like to see the old bastard try that now; he’d wipe the floor with him, and laugh while he did it.
James took a few deep breaths; he had to calm himself down, he had to look like he was a nice lad now. It was like pretending to the shrinks and the social workers – as long as you told them what they wanted to hear, and acted like they wanted you to act, you were all right.
Life, he had sussed out, was nothing more than an elaborate game; you played the role required, and you watched and waited for your opportunity. It was simple really.
As he approached his nana’s house he felt the first stirrings of excitement mixed with apprehension. But it had been ten years since he had seen any of them, and that, he surmised, was to be expected.
Chapter One Hundred and Eleven
‘Come on, Mummy, I want to go to Mackie D’s!’
Cherie was already bored with being at her great-nana Mary’s. All her great-granddad wanted to do was watch the horse racing; she had picked out his winners for him and, as one had come in, she was now the queen of the horse world. At least that was what her great-grandad was calling her anyway. But it was stifling here, and she wanted to go out, go somewhere else. It smelt of cigarettes, chip fat and furniture polish, and she hated it. So did her nanny Cynthia; she had said the house was like a tomb, and then explained it was a place for dead people. Cherie didn’t really understand that, but she imagined that the smell of her nana Mary’s was that of a dead person’s house and she didn’t like the thought of that. Dead people were scary.
She liked it at her mummy’s flat because it was bright and cheerful. But Nanny Cynthia said that her mummy wasn’t a proper mummy, and the police wouldn’t let her stay there all the time because her mummy sold drugs and her daddy was in prison. She didn’t believe her daddy was in prison, and she tried to explain that he was training to be a fighter pilot and go to the war. But her nanny Cynthia said it was lies and she should remember that. It was confusing really; she had to remember so much and