Inside My Head Read online

  I stop because Gary’s turning his head slowly towards me. He looks at me with bulging, angry eyes. He looks like the Incredible Hulk as he’s about to turn green. ‘Will you shut the fuck up?’ he says. ‘I don’t want to talk about school. I don’t want to hear about your bloody old teachers. I hate school. Just leave me alone!’

  He turns away and stares at that same patch of ground again. He’s gonna burn a hole in the ground if he keeps staring at it like that. He looks like he might cry. But he doesn’t. I feel guilty. I was trying to provoke him. I shouldn’t have done that.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I was just trying to be friendly. If you want me to go away, just say.’

  He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there. He looks so unbelievably angry. It’s difficult to look at him. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

  I sigh. ‘Oh, me and my big mouth again.’ Maybe I should just say nothing, get up and leave him to feel sorry for himself. It’s obvious I’m not making him feel any better.

  But I don’t leave. I want to know what the matter is. I want to help him. I sit, look away from Gary and try to think of something that’ll take his mind off whatever’s bothering him so much. All I can come up with is, ‘So, are you gonna take me on a tour of Wallingham today or what?’

  He doesn’t look at me. He just shakes his head.

  ‘Please?’ I say. ‘Why not?’

  Gary doesn’t move. Doesn’t even shake his head. But his stomach rumbles. He blushes.

  I remember the chocolate bars in my pocket. I bought them in the shop earlier. I have an idea. ‘Hey, I’ll tell you what. You show me the sights of Wallingham and I’ll give you some chocolate!’

  He looks at me, suspicious. But I can tell he’s interested.

  I pull one of the Snickers bars from my pocket and dangle it in front of his face. ‘Deal?’ I say. ‘Or no deal?’

  He looks at the chocolate and then at me, like he’s not sure whether to trust me. Eventually he sort of smiles. ‘All right.’ He grabs the chocolate bar. ‘Deal!’

  We slip off the swings and begin walking across the empty playing field. The grass is wet and my trainers soak up the water like sponges. There isn’t much there apart from a couple of rusty-looking football goalposts and a little taped-off cricket square. It doesn’t take long for Gary to eat his Snickers – maybe three bites. Then he looks at mine, which I haven’t opened yet.

  ‘Here, go on, have it,’ I say. ‘You look hungry.’

  He looks at me for a second and then grabs the bar off me. He tears the wrapper and takes a massive bite.

  ‘Doesn’t your mum feed you?’ I say.

  Gary doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me. He stops chewing and looks embarrassed.

  I smile at him. ‘It was a joke,’ I say. ‘Eat!’

  Then he goes back to eating the bar, just much more slowly than before.

  We walk on in silence. I’ve sort of run out of things to say again. It isn’t easy talking to someone who doesn’t really talk back.

  We’ve nearly come to the end of the playing field. There’s a hedge in front of us, and behind that I can just see the tops of some houses. They look like our new house: square and boring. Lego homes.

  Gary leads the way over to the right, where there’s a narrow mud path that leads off the field into a little wood. The path isn’t very wide, so I follow behind him.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Other side of the village,’ he says.

  ‘What, you mean this place has more than one side?’

  It was meant to be a joke, but Gary doesn’t laugh. He turns round and looks at me, like he doesn’t quite understand. He nods. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what’s on the other side of the village, then?’

  He shrugs. ‘Just some fields and stuff. Not much. The church.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say under my breath. ‘Exciting.’

  And then we walk in silence for a while. There are loads of muddy puddles on the path that I have to jump over or walk round. Gary just walks straight through them. He has big black boots on – army boots or something. He looks like Action Man in all that camo gear. I wonder if he’s got a cord coming out of his back to make him talk, too. If he has, maybe I should give it a tug.

  After a while the woods thin out and there are the back gates of a few houses on either side of the path. The path’s wider now, made out of stones instead of mud. I quicken my pace to keep up with Gary.

  ‘You walk fast, don’t you?’

  Gary nods his head.

  And there’s silence again. Gary gets to the end of the path first and stops by the edge of the road. He looks to the right and stares. He looks nervous, sort of.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He doesn’t answer. He just points down the road at the vehicle that’s heading towards us. A mobility scooter, driving right down the middle of the road. Gary stands there and waits for it to get closer. He looks uncomfortable. Slowly, the scooter draws nearer. And then it stops, right in front of us. An old man sits on the scooter, wearing a trilby hat and a pair of the most enormous shades. They cover most of his face. He smiles at Gary.

  ‘All right, Gary, boy,’ he says in a Norfolk accent.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You not at school today, my man?’

  Gary blushes. ‘No.’

  ‘Why on earth not, boy?’

  Gary looks down at his black boots. ‘Been excluded for fighting,’ he mumbles.

  The old man chuckles. And then the chuckle becomes a cough that lasts for ages. The man has to pat his chest a couple of times, to stop himself from coughing. He spits something into a hankie. ‘Oh dear, ’scuse me. Take a tip, children: never smoke! Well, Gary, boy, I hope you gave the other feller a good hiding anyhow!’

  Gary keeps looking at his shoes and nods.

  The man on the scooter chuckles again. ‘That’s the spirit. Just like your father. He was always scrapping an’ all.’

  Gary looks up at him for a second.

  ‘So how come you’re roaming the streets, then, my man? I should have thought you’re in enough trouble already if you’ve been sent home from school. Aren’t your mother and father cross with you?’

  Gary shifts uncomfortably.

  ‘Is your mother at home today, boy?’

  Gary shakes his head.

  ‘Father?’

  Gary shakes his head again.

  The old man shakes his too. ‘Well, I don’t know if you should be out here, boy. I hope your father don’t catch you. Otherwise it’ll be you who’s getting a good hiding!’

  The man on the scooter laughs again. Then he looks away from Gary, straight at me, like he’s noticing me for the first time. He lifts his enormous sunglasses up and then looks at me, starting at the top of my head and slowly going down my whole body. Then his eyes travel back up again. He licks his lips. It makes me feel sick. I shiver.

  ‘Who’s this lovely young lady, Gary?’ he says. ‘I never seen her before.’

  Gary’s blushing. He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Come on, boy. Cat got your tongue?’

  Gary shakes his head. He looks at me. ‘I can’t remember your name,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

  I feel a jolt in my chest somewhere. I give Gary a look. And then I turn away from him and look at the dirty old man. ‘Zoë,’ I say. ‘I’m Zoë.’

  The dirty old man smiles a rotten-toothed grin. ‘Well, Zoë,’ he says, ‘I must go and post a letter. Make sure young Gary here stays out of trouble, won’t you?’

  And then he turns his head, and his mobility scooter buzzes off down the road.

  Me and Gary walk on in silence, out into the countryside. A few fields, some hedges and a couple of tiny roads for as far as the eye can
see. And the sky. The big grey sky. All the while, I want to say something like ‘I can’t believe you couldn’t even remember my name.’ But I don’t. I just trot along behind him and try to keep up.

  ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Gary says. ‘Farm maybe.’

  In my head I yawn at the prospect. But I follow Gary anyway, along the narrow road, past the fields. We walk right down the middle of the road. It feels as if we’re being rebellious. Doing this in Morden would be suicidal. But in Wallingham the roads always seem to be empty. No cars. Ever.

  We don’t say anything. Gary just marches us along. He walks as though he’s in the army. Big strides. But his head and shoulders are always stooped, like he’s got something bad going on in his head. I guess maybe he has.

  ‘Are you all right, Gary?’

  He kind of half looks round, but not at me. And then he mumbles something. I think it’s ‘yeah’.

  Another silence. We keep marching down the middle of the road. I look at the fields. The one on the right is filled with something yellow, something that stinks. The one on the left is covered in long grass and old tractors and machines that I don’t know the names of. They’re all rusting and falling apart, like a tractor graveyard.

  ‘Why’s that field full of rusty tractors?’ I ask.

  Gary slows a little, looks over the hedge into the field. He looks like he knows what he’s looking at. ‘That’s Henry’s field,’ he says.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He was a lazy bugger,’ Gary says. ‘Never fixed his bloody machinery. He’s dead now, though, anyhow.’

  We walk a little further up the road, to a chained gate on the left-hand side. Gary looks both ways and then climbs the gate.

  I look at him. ‘Are we allowed to do this?’

  He shrugs. He has a very faint smile on his face. ‘My dad used to work here,’ he says. ‘No one uses it any more. No one’s gonna see us.’

  I look along the road. There’s no one coming in either direction. I step forward and climb the gate.

  Gary smiles at me.

  ‘So your dad’s a farmer?’

  The smile fades from Gary’s face. He starts walking across the field.

  I follow him.

  ‘He was a dairyman,’ Gary says. ‘Worked for Henry.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘So what does he do now?’

  He shrugs. ‘Handyman,’ he says. ‘Odd jobs.’

  The grass is really long and wet in the field. Doesn’t really make a difference to my trainers cos they’re already soaked, but now the bottoms of my jeans are getting wet as well. Right across the field I can see a bunch of buildings and a little concrete farmyard. I’m no expert, but I’d guess that one’s the farmhouse and the other’s a barn. Don’t know about the others, though. Even from this distance, I can tell they’ve all seen better days. They look like they’re crumbling away, like eroded cliffs or something.

  We march straight across the field, towards the buildings. We stop in the big barn. It’s full of farm machinery, some old and rusty like the stuff in the field, but some newer stuff that just looks dirty. Weeds are growing everywhere, and old sacks and boxes and stuff lie all around. It stinks in here. It’s difficult to know where the smell’s coming from. I think it might be the straw. Or maybe it’s rats. Whatever it is, it doesn’t smell good.

  Gary climbs up on to a tractor and sits in the cab or cockpit or whatever you call it, dangling his legs over the side. I look around for a box that doesn’t look too dirty and then I sit.

  ‘Does anyone live here?’

  Gary shakes his head. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘There’s a row going on in Henry’s family about who should have it. Stupid dickhead didn’t leave no will. Don’t belong to no one yet. I don’t s’pose they’d want to move in, though, after what happened . . .’

  I nod as though I have a clue what he’s talking about. But I don’t, so I change the subject. ‘Who was that man on the scooter?’

  ‘Herbert,’ Gary says.

  ‘He gave me the creeps.’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘Did you see the way he looked me up and down?’

  Gary doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Is he a pervert or something?’

  Gary shakes his head. ‘Herbert’s just an old man,’ he says. ‘He’s all right.’

  And then we sit in silence for what seems like eternity. I pick up stones from the floor and start to throw them at a bucket. They keep missing the bucket, bouncing off the ground and hitting the tractor with a ping.

  ‘Not much of a shot, are you?’

  I look up at Gary. ‘Can you do any better?’

  He jumps down from the tractor, crouches down next to me and grabs a handful of stones. And then he throws them, one after the other. CLUNK. CLUNK. CLUNK. CLUNK. CLUNK. CLUNK.

  They all go in.

  ‘Very impressive.’

  Gary smiles modestly for a second. ‘Not bad.’

  I try throwing another. CLUNK. It hits the rim of the bucket and then bounces off.

  And then it’s quiet again. We seem to have a lot of these silences. They’re sort of awkward. And Gary never seems to fill them. So I leave this one and just stare around the barn, trying to work out how long it must have been since Henry died. Everything’s started to rust, so it must be quite a while. And there are lots of weeds growing up through everything. I’d say no one’s sorted this place out in at least two years. At least.

  Eventually I get an urge to say something – anything.

  ‘You don’t say much, do you?’ I say. I regret it as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

  Gary goes red. He doesn’t look at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘What I mean is, don’t you want to know who I am? Don’t you want to know where I come from?’

  ‘S’pose,’ he says. But then he sits there silently, staring into space and doesn’t ask me a thing.

  I sigh. And I wait for a while, for Gary to ask me about myself. But he doesn’t, so I get up, dust down my jeans and walk over to the entrance of the barn. I look at the farmhouse. ‘Have you ever been in there?’ I ask.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The farmhouse. Have you ever been in there?’

  Gary jumps down from the tractor and walks over towards me. ‘Of course. Loads of times. Dad used to work for Henry.’

  I look at the house. Apart from the fact that a breeze might topple it over, it looks quite nice. It’s big and built from bricks. I bet it was cosy, once upon a time. I can imagine a farmer’s wife in there, baking bread and doing all that farmer’s wife stuff. It’s the kind of house I imagined when Mum and Dad said we were gonna move to the country.

  ‘Can we go in there?’ I ask.

  Gary looks at the house and shakes his head.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I say. ‘Why not?’

  ’It’s not right,’ he says. ‘It ain’t ours.’

  ‘Neither’s this barn, but we’re in here, aren’t we?’

  Gary screws up his face as though he’s thinking hard about something and then he shakes his head. ‘It’s Henry’s house,’ he says. ‘It’s personal. We shouldn’t. That’s for Henry’s family, not us.’ He goes back and sits on the tractor.

  For whatever reason, I suddenly think of Mum and Dad. I’m supposed to be home by half twelve. ‘Have you got a watch, Gary?’ I ask.

  Gary nods and then looks at his watch. ‘Quarter to one,’ he says.

  ‘Oh no!’ I say. ‘See you later.’

  .

  David

  It’s windy. And we’re lined up by the pavilion on the field for PE. Our school field must be the windiest place on the face of the planet. Honestly. So I’m jogging up and down on the spot, pulling the sleeves of my football shirt over my fing
ers, trying to stay warm. Mr Lawson, our PE teacher, stands in front of us. Sometimes we call him ‘Bumble’ on account of the fact that he has this old tracksuit – it’s from the seventies or eighties – that’s black with big orange stripes, like a bumblebee. He’s rubbing his hands together and looking along the line at us.

  ‘OK, boys,’ he says. ‘Game of football today. Alfie, you can be a captain. Over here, please. And, Dougie, you too. Over here on the other side of me.’

  Dougie and Alfie go and stand by Mr Lawson, one on each side. It’s always them who’re captains, cos they’re both on the school team. Dougie’s way better than Alfie, though. He plays up front and scores shed-loads of goals. I’m on the team as well, but I usually end up being a sub, so Mr Lawson never picks me as captain in PE.

  Dougie and Alfie take it in turns to choose players for their teams, picking the best footballers and the hardest kids first, leaving all the pebbleheads and the fat kids till last. I end up on Alfie’s side. Knaggs is on Dougie’s side.

  ‘Right, lads, go and get warmed up on the pitch,’ Bumble says.

  ‘But, Mr Lawson,’ says Dougie, ‘they’ve got eleven players and we’ve only got ten, sir.’

  Bumble looks at both teams, from one player to the next. You can see him mouthing numbers as he counts up the players. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘It looks fair enough to me.’ And he walks away towards the pavilion like he’s solved the problem.

  Alfie grabs a ball and leads our team to the pitch, right over to the half that’s furthest away. It’s the best half to have, cos it means you get to kick downhill. Dougie’s team’ll be even more pissed off when they get to the pitch, cos not only have they got fewer players, but they’ve also got the worst half. But they’re not moving at the moment. They’re still standing outside the pavilion, waiting for Bumble to come back out.

  ‘Come on, lads, let’s warm up,’ Alfie says. And he kicks the ball to me.

  I take it straight out to the wing and put in a cross. I hit it sweetly and the ball floats into the box and Alfie goes up for the header.

  BOOF!

  The ball ends up in the back of the net.