Inside My Head Page 3

  ‘Here you go,’ she says. ‘Sit down. Eat this and you might feel a bit better.’

  I sit down and stare at it. It makes me feel sick. She might as well have served up a dog shit on a plate. I’m not eating anything.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ she says.

  I shake my head. I stare at the food on my plate and my stomach churns.

  ‘Gary,’ she says. ‘Are you all right, my man?’

  I look up at her. ‘I’m not hungry, Mum,’ I say, and I push the plate away.

  Mum tuts. She walks over to the sink and washes up her mug. ‘I’ve got to go back to work now, Gary. I shan’t be back till six, but your father’ll be back about five.’

  I snort. Like fuck he’ll be back. Lazy bugger’ll be in the Swan.

  Mum gives me a look, like she knows what I’m thinking. ‘Just you have a think about what happened today, cos when your father gets home, he’s gornta want a very stern word with you, young man.’ She kisses me on the top of my head, picks up her keys and handbag, and then heads for the front door. Patch follows her. ‘And don’t you even think about going out of this house – you’re grounded.’

  Mum heaves the door open and then she’s gone. Patch starts whining for a minute, then comes back through to the kitchen.

  I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the cheese puffs on my plate. All the while I can feel it again – the pressure building in my head like someone’s blowing up a fucking balloon in there. It gets worse and worse, so bad that I can’t fucking stand it. If I don’t do something, I’m gonna fucking well explode. I stand up, send my chair flying behind me. And before I can even think about what I’m doing, I pick up the plate and throw it at the wall.

  It smashes. The sandwich sticks to the wall, then slides down and lands on the broken plate. The cheese puffs just scatter all over the place. Patch stands up and starts barking, crouching down. Then he goes over and sniffs the plate, gobbles down the bread. All I can do is stand there and stare at the mess and wish I hadn’t done it. I turn, walk out of the kitchen and pull the front door open.

  .

  Zoë

  The playing field’s deserted. As I walk in along the gravel drive, there’s a grim-looking building up ahead. ‘The Wallingham Social Club’. It’s empty. Closed. Depressing as hell.

  I turn towards the playing field. Over on the far side, a man’s walking a little yappy dog. And over to the right there’s a play area with a great big tree trunk, like a telegraph pole, laid down for balancing on. Just beyond that there’s a set of swings, with a boy sitting on one. The boy on the swing isn’t swinging. He’s just sitting there, looking down at the ground.

  I walk over to the swings. I walk past the boy and sit on the swing next to his. He doesn’t look up. He’s about my age, maybe a year older. Quite big. Not fat, just big. He isn’t much to look at. He’s got a really round head and short fuzzy ginger hair. His face is covered in freckles. I look at him, try to catch his eye, but he just stares at the ground. He’s wearing black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. It must be school uniform. It’s Thursday. He should be at school now. God knows why he isn’t. Must be skiving, I guess.

  No matter how hard I stare at him, the boy doesn’t look up. So I give up and start to swing instead, concentrate on swinging as high as I can. We used to do that at the park near where I live. Where I used to live. Till they changed the swings to the baby kind that only let you swing up to a certain height. Everyone said they changed them cos of this kid called Leon, cos he swung so high that the swing ended up going right up over the frame. Someone had to call an ambulance, so they say. But I reckon it’s just a load of crap. They changed the swings cos they changed the swings, that’s all.

  Every now and then I glance at the boy as I’m swinging. He doesn’t look at me. I don’t think he’s moved a muscle since I got here. After a while, I get bored and put my feet out to stop myself. And I look at the boy. It’s like a challenge – I have to get him to look at me.

  And he does. Slowly he lifts his head and looks straight at me. ‘What’s your problem?’ he says. ‘What you looking at?’

  Wow! He talks. And he has an attitude all right. But I like that. He looks down at the ground again. I rack my brains for something to say, something that won’t sound stupid, something that won’t sound like I have a problem. But I can’t think of anything. So I say, ‘Sorry, I was staring, wasn’t I?’

  He looks confused.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I say.

  He looks up again, suspiciously. He doesn’t say anything for ages – just stares at me like he’s trying to figure me out. ‘Gary,’ he says really quietly. ‘Gary Wood.’ He has an accent. Must be a Norfolk accent.

  I smile at him. But he’s looking at the ground again. ‘My name’s Zoë.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he says, without looking up.

  And now I don’t know what to say, so I just sway gently on the swing and watch the man and the yappy dog cross the field. The man keeps throwing a stick for the dog to fetch. The dog fetches it each time, but then runs round the man, teasing him with the stick, not giving it back straight away.

  I look back at Gary. He isn’t staring at the ground any more. He’s gazing out into the distance, across the field.

  ‘Do you go to school?’

  He looks down at the ground. He makes a sound. A grunt.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then,’ I say.

  He just looks at the ground.

  ‘Which school?’

  ‘Wendham,’ he says without looking up.

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘I’m supposed to be starting there next week. What’s it like?’

  He shrugs. ‘Pile of shit.’ A smile creeps across the corner of his mouth. Then it goes again.

  I laugh. ‘All schools are shit, Gary!’ I say. ‘You’ll have to be more specific than that. Is it like a big steaming pile of dung or just a little squirty dribble?’

  Gary smiles. He looks up at me. He kind of snorts, laughing. ‘It’s a massive stinking bloody cowpat!’

  I laugh too.

  Gary looks away again.

  ‘So why aren’t you there, then? Are you skiving or something?’

  He doesn’t look up. His jaw sort of clenches.

  I stop my swing from swaying and look at Gary. What is wrong with him? He looks so angry, like there’s something awful going on in his head. ‘Have you been chucked out or something?’

  His jaw clenches even more. He concentrates on looking at the ground so much that it looks like his eyes are gonna pop out of their sockets.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘You can tell me. I’m no angel, either. I’ve been thrown out of schools before.’ Which is a lie.

  He looks up at me slowly. ‘Have you?’

  I nod. The secret to a good lie is to give a couple of details, make it seem real. ‘Yeah. Once,’ I say. ‘Just for the day, though.’

  Gary keeps looking at me. I think he doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. ‘Honestly?’

  I nod again. ‘Yeah. I got caught smoking by a teacher. What about you?’

  He looks out across the field, at where the man with the yappy dog was before. ‘I hit someone.’

  I don’t really know what to say. So I just nod my head. ‘I’ve never done that,’ I say. Which is the truth.

  Gary doesn’t reply. He stares out across the field. The wind gusts across it. I shiver.

  ‘Who’d you hit?’

  His face tenses up again. He turns and looks at me. ‘What’s with all these questions?’ He says it quietly, but through gritted teeth. He stares at me for a couple of seconds.

  ‘I’m just asking,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to answer. I thought you might want to talk about it, that’s all. I would if it was me.’

  He tak
es a deep breath, closes his eyes for a second. ‘This kid called Paul Knaggs.’

  I smile at him. ‘Did he deserve it?’

  Gary shrugs his shoulders. ‘Don’t know,’ he says. Then he looks angry again. ‘Yeah, he did.’

  ‘So they chucked you out?’

  He nods. ‘Yeah, till next week.’

  ‘That’s when I’m starting,’ I say.

  He sort of half nods his head. But I wouldn’t say he looks interested.

  ‘So how come you’re sitting in the park? If I got sent home from school I’d get grounded for, like, my whole life.’

  He shrugs again. ‘No one knows I’m here. Mum had to go back to work, so I just come down here.’

  ‘What about your dad?’

  He doesn’t answer. He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘So you just gonna sit here and look at the ground all afternoon?’

  ‘Probably.’

  We’re silent. So’s the field, except for a crow cawing somewhere.

  ‘Is this where everyone hangs out, then?’ I say after a while.

  He shrugs. And then he shivers. He has goosebumps on his arms. He gets up from the swing. He starts to walk off, across the field.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I call after him.

  He doesn’t turn round. ‘Home,’ he says. ‘I’m hungry.’

  .

  Gary

  I’d leave school now, if they’d let me. I can’t see no point in it. How’s learning French or science or whatever gonna help me? I should be doing a job, earning some money. I couldn’t care less what job it was, as long as it was as far away from Wendham High School as possible.

  When I was little, I only had one thing in my head. I wanted to be a farmer. I remember when I was about three or four and Dad took me to work with him. We used to drive round the fields in a tractor, me sitting on Dad’s lap. He used to let me steer it. That was the best feeling in the world. I felt like a grown-up. I was the one driving the tractor. In my head, it was my farm, I was the farmer.

  I had a whole farm at home as well. A toy farm, I mean. Fields, fences, animals, sheds, barns – the whole lot. But it was always the tractors that I used to play with most. I’ve still got them all somewhere. In the loft, I think.

  Dad used to work for Henry Walpole on a farm in Wallingham. He was Henry’s dairyman. Basically he just looked after the cattle for Henry. He’d be up really early, get the cows ready for milking. When I was old enough, he took me to work with him most days in the holidays. I used to love it. I’d have quit school then if I’d been allowed to, and just worked on the farm.

  And when I got home, I’d play with my toy farm – run it like a proper farm, just like Henry’s farm. Henry’s farm was a proper farm back then, before it went downhill, before it became an overgrown scrapyard. I’d even pretend to go to market and buy new animals, sell the milk, slaughter the male calves. Everything. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But that’s all I knew. I thought I was gonna end up working on a farm when I grew up. Didn’t even think of anything else. But then everything changed, didn’t it?

  I don’t know what I’ll do when I leave school now. Work in a factory like Mum, I s’pose. Probably end up slaughtering chickens or something, like all the other losers round here.

  .

  Friday

  Zoë

  My stuff is now unpacked, just like Mum and Dad wanted. The boxes have officially been emptied, moved out of my room and stacked on the landing. True, most of my clothes are now in a big heap in the middle of my floor. And my walls are still blank and blue and yuck and covered in blobs of Blu-tack. But at least I’ve done what I was asked. It’ll stop them nagging me. For a bit.

  I go downstairs and Mum and Dad are unpacking in the kitchen. No surprise there. Dad’s so engrossed in unwrapping cutlery that he doesn’t even look at me. But Mum stops what she’s doing, brushes her hair away from her face with the back of her hand and smiles.

  ‘I’m going out for a little while,’ I say.

  ‘OK. Is your stuff unpacked, Zoë?’

  I nod.

  ‘Oh well, OK then, I s’pose. Just for a bit, though, love. Make sure you’re back by half twelve for lunch. We need to go and get your uniform and do some shopping this afternoon.’

  I sigh and fold my arms.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Zo,’ Mum says.

  I roll my eyes.

  Mum smiles at me. A sort of sad smile.

  ‘Can I borrow some money, Mum?’

  ‘What for?’ she says.

  ‘To go to the shop. There’s nothing else to do in Wallingham.’

  Mum sighs. But she goes over to the worktop and grabs her purse anyway. She hands me £1.

  ‘Is that all?’

  Mum gives me a look. She shakes her head, like she can’t believe I said that.

  ‘OK. Ta,’ I say, and I turn and head for the front door.

  ‘Where are you going to be?’ Mum calls after me.

  ‘I dunno. Playing field, probably,’ I say as I open the door.

  ‘Have you got your mobile phone?’ she asks.

  I step outside and shut the door behind me.

  .

  He’s there again, in the playing field. The boy on the swing. Gary. He’s on the swing, gazing at nothing. I thought he would be. He doesn’t look up when I walk towards him. He just sits there, like he has all the worries of the world bouncing around his head.

  Gary isn’t wearing his school uniform today. He’s wearing camouflage combats and an army jacket instead. Back in Morden, there was a kid at my primary school who used to wear army gear all the time. Michael Brooks was his name. He was weird; he used to sit in lessons and make stupid squeaking and screeching and crashing noises. And he liked guns way more than is healthy. Some people said he had a replica gun that he used to shoot cats up the arse with. He wanted to be a soldier when he grew up. If that isn’t weird then I don’t know what is.

  ‘All right, Gary. You off to a war or something?’ I say as I sit on the free swing.

  He looks up. ‘What?’

  I point at his clothes. ‘Camouflage. You look like you’re in the army or something,’ I say with a smile.

  He looks down at his clothes. ‘Very funny.’ He blushes.

  ‘Sorry, crap joke,’ I say. ‘Anyway, camo is very “in” in Norfolk this season, so I hear!’

  He doesn’t laugh. He just does that staring thing again. It’s a bit annoying.

  ‘So how come you’re here again today, Gary? Did your mum just let you out?’

  He shakes his head. ‘She don’t know I’m here,’ he says. ‘She’s at work.’

  I start swinging gently and look out across the playing field. It’s pretty much empty again, except for a woman with a dog. It looks like the yappy dog I saw yesterday. Maybe it is. The woman doesn’t throw a stick for the dog, though. She has it on a lead. The yappy dog looks like it’s sulking. It probably likes fetching sticks better than being on a lead. I would if I were a dog.

  I stop swinging and look at Gary. He’s doing exactly what he seems to do best: sitting staring into space. ‘You said you go to Wendham High School, didn’t you?’ I say.

  He looks a little uncomfortable. He makes a grunting noise that I think means ‘yes’.

  ‘What year are you in, Gary?’

  He looks at me. ‘Year Ten. Why?’

  I smile. I knew it. ‘Honestly? You’re in year ten?’

  He nods his head and makes this face at the same time, like, ‘Yeah, what’s it to you?’

  ‘That’s so cool! I’m in year ten too. We might be in the same tutor group.’

  He looks away and doesn’t say anything.

  ‘What are the teachers like?’ I ask him.

  He sigh
s.

  ‘Hey, are there any fit boys in year ten?’

  Gary turns and looks at me. ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got eyes, haven’t you?’ I say.

  ‘I’m not fucking queer,’ he says. And he looks away. Again.

  For God’s sake, what’s his problem? ‘Don’t be so homophobic! You don’t have to be gay to see whether someone’s fit or not!’

  He doesn’t look round.

  ‘Like, for instance, I could tell you which girls are fit. That doesn’t make me a lesbian, does it?’

  He slowly looks round. He’s smirking. I can’t help but smile back.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I say.

  He stops smirking. ‘Nothing,’ he says. And then in a quieter voice he says, ‘You might be a lezza, for all I know.’ His cheeks go red.

  I laugh and smile at him. We sit in silence for a while. I think it’s clear that I’m not going to get any inside info from Gary on who’s fit and who’s not. Oh well. I’ll find out soon enough.

  It doesn’t take long for the silence to do my head in, though. ‘So are the teachers strict, then?’

  Gary sits and stares.

  ‘Back at my old school, we had this English teacher called Mr McCartney. He used to make us stand up when we were answering a question. Can you believe that?’

  No reaction.

  ‘He was so creepy. He’d call all the boys “young man” and all the girls “young lady”. So patronising.’

  Gary sighs and folds his arms.

  I make a point of looking at him and then carrying on. If he has a problem, he can tell me. ‘Mr McCartney was so old-fashioned, right, when you did something wrong, he’d make you stay in at break-time and he’d give you this long lecture about how “young people have no respect for anyone, least of all themselves” and blah-blah-blah. And then he’d make you copy out the dictionary. And if he thought it wasn’t your neatest handwriting he’d . . .’