Driving Jarvis Ham. Jim Bob

Чтение книги онлайн.

      I would have loved to have had a mother who made costumes for me and a father who baked cakes and wasn’t drunk in an armchair all day long, burning holes into the upholstery while he fell asleep watching the horse racing with a fag on.

      And then there was the bullying.

      I’ve compiled a typical week’s worth of Kenneth bullying episodes into one fun-packed omnibus edition to illustrate.

      It was a Tuesday. I came home from school, mum was at work and Kenneth was in the front room, drunk, sitting in his armchair – that used to be my armchair – and shouting abuse at Basil Brush. I went into the kitchen and made an elaborate sandwich from the ingredients I’d bought on the way home from school (there was never any food in the cupboards at Ugly Park). I took my sandwich into the front room and as I made my way past Kenneth towards the sofa he leant over and took the sandwich off my plate and stuffed it into his mouth. When I complained Kenneth raised his hand, showing me the back of it in a way that was supposed to tell me he’d hit me with it if I didn’t shut up. He’d never catch me I thought. It would probably take him half an hour to get himself out of the armchair. But I couldn’t be sure. And even if the backhanded slap didn’t hurt, the nicotine stains on Kenneth’s fingers would probably give me cancer.

      I sat down on the sofa and opened my bag of crisps and can of Coke. Kenneth leant over again and snatched the crisps from me and crushed them into a bag of Cheese and Onion crumbs before handing them back. He then launched himself out of the armchair with the aid of a massive fart and walked off to the toilet to piss all over the toilet seat and floor, putting his cigarette out in my can of Coke along the way.

      Kenneth would never bully me in front of my mother and when I tried telling her about it she thought I was making it all up because I was missing my real father. I wasn’t. He was no Atticus Finch or Doctor Huxtable either.

      You know how when you’re young there are people you call your aunt or your uncle even though they aren’t related to you? Jarvis’s parents were like a mum and dad version of that. Which would have made Jarvis my brother I suppose. Okay, bad analogy. But while Kenneth was living with us at Ugly Park I spent more time with the Hams than I did at home. I liked the pots of tea, the biscuits and the cakes. I liked the family board games, the Charades and the I Spy. There was an open fire in the living room and food in the kitchen cupboards. Jarvis’s house always smelled of freshly baked bread and flowers. Ugly Park smelled of ugly.

      Sometimes I’d go to the Ham and Hams with Jarvis after school and I’d feel so at home that I’d forget to go home.

      One day I went back to Ugly Park after sleeping the night in the spare room at Jarvis’s house and there was a fire engine outside my house. Kenneth had set fire to the kitchen. The fire brigade had found him asleep in the armchair, fifteen feet of ash hanging from a cigarette on his bottom lip and children’s TV on.

      He had to go.

      So Jarvis and me bunked off school one afternoon and went to Ugly Park to talk to Kenneth. I was too scared to confront him on my own and taking Jarvis with me seemed like a good idea (the only idea) at the time.

      I knew my mother would be out at work and Kenneth would be drunk and half asleep on the sofa when Jarvis and I walked into the front room. When Kenneth woke up and saw us both standing above him, all menacing and purposeful, he’d be terrified. I imagined this is what Kenneth would see:

      In reality, it was more like this:

      Kenneth woke and he stood up – faster than I’d ever seen him move before – and perhaps it caught Jarvis unawares, because I doubt he really meant to slash Kenneth across the arm with the cake slice that he pulled out from inside his jacket. There was a bit of blackcurrant jam on the cake slice; it was made of stainless steel, a bit like this:

      I don’t know why Jarvis had come tooled up. Or cutlery-d up, and I don’t know what he was expecting to do with the cake slice. It didn’t even have a pointed end. What was he going to do? Ice Kenneth?

      Which shows what I know about cutlery.

      The cake slice cut into Kenneth’s arm like it was a blancmange and Kenneth’s blood sprayed onto both Jarvis and me.

      We were blood brothers now.

      We ran away from Ugly Park, all the way back to the Ham and Hams – throwing the bloody cake slice into the river on the way, like we were in a gangster movie. We washed the blood off in the bathroom at Jarvis’s house and Jarvis’s dad cooked us dinner. We didn’t talk about what had happened with Kenneth, although we were both expecting the police to knock on the door at any moment. They never came.

      After dinner we played Monopoly with Jarvis’s mum and dad and I let Jarvis buy Mayfair and Park Lane because they were his favourites. I stayed the night in the spare room but didn’t sleep.

      When I went home the next day my mother was alone. Kenneth had left Ugly Park – via Accident and Emergency – saying to my mother that her son and his friends were all mental.

      Ugly Park didn’t seem quite so ugly any more.

СКАЧАТЬ