Part Two of the Angie Boyd Trilogy. Which won’t make much sense unless you’ve already read Part One, Angie Boyd’s Mum.
***
DEAN SITS ON his bike across the road from the school, partially hidden behind an unmanned ice-cream van, waiting for the lunch bell to sound; every few seconds raising his fingernails to his nostrils, snorting the exciting new scent under them like a drug.
Five seconds after the bell rings out, a horizontal line of white Reeboks drags across the road towards him, skirts above the knee.
Angie has tied a knot in her school polo shirt. Leanne has thin crayon lines for eyebrows. The fumes from Kim’s hairspray stick to the back of Dean’s throat.
“Angie!” Dean hisses.
The girls look at him. He lifts his hand to his nose, catches himself, drops it.
“Angie, come here a sec.”
Angie frowns. She’s known Dean longer than they’ve had teeth in their gums. As little kids they used to play Uno, sprawled out on the rug in her bedroom, while Uncle Bill and Angie’s mum listened to records in the living room behind closed door. But they’ve grown apart since then, barely a word exchanged in years.
Angie says, “What do you want, Dean?”
“Come here a sec and I’ll tell you.”
The girls are pulling hard on cigarettes. Kim’s and Leanne’s pinched faces displaying the same scowl worn by the pram-pushing single mothers of the estate. But not Angie, whose thick black hair bounces on her shoulders like a lion’s mane. Her full lips, sultry brown eyes, long lashes, distinguishing her from the town’s zombies.
“Who do you think you are—” Leanne shouts, “Peter Andre?”
She cackles, it turns into a horsey cough, she hawks, spits on the ground.
“Probably, with that hair!”
Ignoring Leanne, looking at Angie, Dean says, “I got something to tell you.”
“Oi!” Leanne isn’t finished. “What do you do to get that look, pop in the chip shop on the way to school and dip your head in last night’s oil?”
Dean looks at Leanne’s hair, bleached yellow, dry as straw during a heatwave, pulled back so tight it makes her face angry.
“At least I ain’t so rough my eyebrows committed suicide,” he says.
“Whatever!” Leanne says, cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. “Chip Shop!”
Walking towards him, Angie says, “You better not be wasting my time, Dean.”
“Not here,” Dean says. “Not in front of them.”
He leans his bike against the wall and leads Angie to the clearing in the bushes, by the tall, rotten fence that separates the flats from a small green covered in dog shit. The air feels damp, like the school changing rooms when the showers are on. Branches rustle in the wind.
Dean squeezes into the opening as though entering a haunted lighthouse. Angie follows. She looks at the mud below her shoes, then at Dean with unimpressed eyes.
Dean holds out the ten-pound note out. He was going to say he’d seen it fall from Angie’s mum’s purse outside the shop, but he stops himself. Angie will just say, “Well, why didn’t you give it to her then?” So he says nothing.
Angie stares at the money without taking it.
Slowly, she looks up and says, “What the fuck, Dean?”
Angie isn’t blinking. She knows. Knows he put his hand inside her mum. Shot off without paying. That he is scum. But how could she know? Can she smell it? No, it’s worse than that. It shows in her watery eyes. Angie thinks…
The earth below them rumbles like a warzone. The roar of an unmuffled engine. Getting louder. Nearer. Rave music. Birds scatter to the tops of telegraph poles.
The old banger mounts the kerb and stops by Dean’s bike.
Dean mumbles, “Your mum…”
But Angie cuts him off: “Put it away!”
“Alright, slappers! Where’s the pretty one?” Pete Chapman’s deep voice booms.
Leanne and Kim point to the bush. Angie has stepped out and is facing the car. Pete takes a swig from a can of Stella, pushes the passenger door open, shouts above the music:
“Oi, oi! What you doin in the bushes, you wrong’un?”
His pupils shift to Dean.
“Ohhhhh,” he says. “I see! Bit of doctors and nurses at playtime!” His pupils shift back to Angie, “Can I play, too?” Then back to Dean, “How about I start by opening you up?”
Dean’s veins run with boiling hot adrenalin, psyching him up to scale the fence and escape across the green. But his bike is still against the wall and he knows if he leaves it there it will be the last time he ever sees it, and that his dad will beat him black and blue.
“Leave him alone, Pete,” Angie says. “His uncle’s just died. He was just telling me the date of the funeral so I can let my mum know. They were friends.”
Pete takes a long swig, eyeballing Dean over the rim. Dean’s cheeks burn. Pete lets out a long yeasty belch, a sound you can smell.
“Well…” he says, “you’ve told her now. So come over here and get your bike. Then fuck off. Leave the grown-ups alone.”
Dean stands as stiff as a statue, looking at the bike, not saying anything.
Pete shouts, “What are you waiting for… fucking sign language?”
Still not moving, Dean mutters, “She’s eleven.”
“Dean!” Angie says sharply. “Don’t!”
But Dean finishes: “And I’m twelve.”
Pete gets out of the car, rests his elbows on the roof and stares at Dean with eyes expanding like water to ice.
“You fucking what?”
“Pete, just let him take his bike and go, he hasn’t done anything to you!” Angie says.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Pete says. “Isn’t it, Dean?”
Dean’s heart shoots up his throat. He swallows it back down like a lump of coal.
That’s right,” Pete says. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are and what you said to my brother. I’ve been keeping an eye out for you.”
“Pete!” Angie begs.
“Angie, just shut the fuck up a minute, yea, and let Deano tell me in his own words what he said.”
Dean looks at his bike, how close it is to Pete’s car, looks at the road, looks at the school, looks at the bike again, looks at the ground.
Angie whispers, “Don’t say it, Dean.”
Dean meets Pete’s gaze, holds it for a moment, feels his legs shaking like flagpoles in a hurricane. He loses his nerve, blinks, looks down again.
“Lookatcha, yer gobby little cunt, you’re pathetic,” Pete says, sneering. “Talk shit and now you’ve shit your pants, I can smell it from here!”
Dean looks up again, his face hardened with defiance.
“I said the reason your dad hung himself in his cell was because his release date was coming up and it was better to die than come home to you lot.”
Pete’s eyes have gone somewhere else. He squeezes the can in his hand, still a quarter full, and launches it in the direction of Dean’s head. It misses, smashing against the fence over Dean’s shoulder, splashing his hair with warm beer.
“You’re fucking dead,” Pete snarls, his eyes wet with an emotion Dean can’t pinpoint.
He leans into the car, reaching under the seat.
Dean starts to sprint towards the bike, but stops when he sees Pete brandishing an iron bar. Before Pete has fully unbent himself, Dean has scaled the fence and is out of sight.
**
“ALRIGHT, DEAN!”
Matty Marx’s monotone voice takes Dean by surprise as he nears Angie’s gate.
Matty is leaning out of the upstairs window next door, smoking a bong fashioned out of an empty plastic bottle. His left eye looks like meat on a butcher’s apron. A cris-crossed scar runs from the corner of the eye up his forehead, like Frankenstein. The eyelid is lowered, but not fully closed, his usually crystal blue iris now blood red and in hiding.
Last week, Matty was walking along the promenade, arm round a girl’s shoulder, when some lads from the other side of the pier ambushed him with a brick to the face.
“Alright, Matty,” Dean says, looking up. “Eye’s looking a lot better! You’ll be back in the ring by next week! Mad how quickly that’s healing up!”
“Yea…” Matty sighs. “We’ll see. Doc says I’ll have to wear a mask. I told him I’m already wearing one.” He pauses, then says with a wry smile, “The Elephant Man!”
Dean says, “It’s not that bad, mate. You hardly notice it. Unless you look closely.”
Matty raises the eyebrow above his good eye, flashes his teeth in an exaggerated smile, chuckles like Frank Bruno.
“Angie’s not in, if that’s why you’re here. Hasn’t come back from school,” he says. “Cher’s…” (he makes air quotes with his fingers) “«busy». Ugly geezers knocking about all day. Got one in there now. Giro day, innit. Look at all the empty cans!”
They are interrupted by the sound of the security chain being unlatched behind Angie’s front door. A scruffy old man, his trousers too long and covered in yellow stains, oozes out like toxic waste. Dean catches Angie Boyd’s Mum’s sedated eyes squinting out from the darkness. Her gaze fixes Dean’s, her eyes widen, she slams the door, reattaches the chain.
“Come back when there’s hair on your bollocks,” the old man croaks.
“Oi, Reg!” Matty shouts, causing the old man to spin round. “Up here, you plum!”
Reg looks up. “Whadaya want?”
“I just wanted to tell you,” Matty says calmly, “that your shoes are on back to front.”
The old man looks down and inspects his feet intently, swaying like the old drunk he is, before declaring, “No they’re not!”
Matty bursts out laughing. Dean does too. Reg slides under the gate like a slug and slithers down the hill towards the cemetery, where his wife Sybil the dinner lady was laid to rest last winter after slipping on ice as she came down the steps outside her front door, cracking her head open on the concrete.
“Shall I tell Angie you are looking for her?” Matty asks.
“Nah,” Dean says, “it wasn’t important. See ya later, Matty.”
“See ya later, Dean.”
Dean sets off walking, kicking an empty can along the pavement like a football.
I work slow. Don’t hold your breath for Part Three. But it will come. Thanks for reading. Love you.
More!
I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what this reminds me of. It's been driving me crazy. But I think I've realised that it's not a film or a TV series or a book, but an amalgamation of my early teenage anxieties. Like I've said many times, your writing always feels so familiar to me, and this is no exception.
I'd like to know more about Angie, I think that as a character she's got the potential to be a really interesting side character. I like how there's a lot of backstory alluded to, and it makes me want to know more.
I'd also like to know how she knows what the tenner is for. Because although there's kind of an unspoken understanding, what about this particular act is familiar to her? Do other people pay her? This is heartbreaking and adds another layer of pathos to an already pretty dire situation.
I look forward to the next chapter, and maybe more spin off stories?
Take care mate.