The Norway Room

Birmingham 2007

ASHLEY

1

Fuck it was cold. Everything frozen. Ashley didn’t usually light up until he reached Harold North’s grave. He didn’t know why he always did it there, but he did. Today he couldn’t wait. He was shivering. Had to hold one hand with the other to steady the lighter. He inhaled deeply. The hot smoke hit his chest and he held it there for as long as he could before exhaling. It blew back into his face, curled round it into his hood. He looked at his watch. Nearly eleven, the middle of break.

He made for the area of trees and benches beyond the long stretch of graves. There were some trees with wreaths hanging from every low branch; all motionless today in the windless cold. The benches were covered in them too. Christmas cards and messages everywhere, pinned to the trunks and branches of trees, the benches. These were for the dead without graves. Sometimes when he came here a scattering was happening and he had to hold back, but today all was clear, and it was too cold for anyone to be sitting with their memories or their grief on one of the benches – not that there was any room. He had the place to himself.

He headed up the incline to the laurel bush near the top. Here he squatted and let a finger touch the frozen ground. The ashes of his nan who had looked after him had been scattered here. He inhaled again. Perhaps the cigarettes would kill him. He hoped so. That’s what it promised on the box.

Shivering he stood and pulled his blazer tighter round himself. He wished he wasn’t so skinny. He wished he was clever, and good-looking. He wished he was good at football so he could become a professional and be rich. He was good at snooker, but not good enough for it to come to anything. The same with darts.

He hated school. Hated it.

Sometimes when he came up here he talked to his nan. But not today. It was too cold – and it was pointless anyway. He stamped his feet as he took a last hefty pull on his cigarette, dragging the fire right down to the nub. He flicked it away, held the smoke in his chest until it hurt – someone had told him it was the same burn you felt when you got cancer – then exhaled. He could do a ring: now he was trying to do a question mark. He had tried to work out how you would have to position your lips, what you should do with your tongue, how much suction was needed in the cheeks. He had got somewhere near a few times but not close enough for it to be recognised as a question mark, more like a fat comma. He lit another cigarette. If he could get it right perhaps he could work out how to do lots of other shapes, writing even, go on telly and be famous. He laughed to himself as he imagined taking an enormous pull on a cigarette and Fuck off coming out in joined-up writing. That would be a money-spinner.

A procession of black cars was making its way through South Gate. Ashley wondered what that would be like as a job. Last summer he had talked to some of the undertaker blokes as they stood smoking behind the chapel waiting for a funeral to end so they could drive the people home. They were okay. They had joked with him about wagging school, about smoking at thirteen, said what he needed was a bloody good hiding – like they’d had as kids when they’d done those things. But they were all right. He liked the way they were fooling around, swearing and joking one minute, then becoming all serious and kind the instant the chapel doors opened and the mourners filed through. Like his dad changed when the cops turned up and changed in another way when the lads came round.

His phone toned. A message from Karl.

U bin copped. Mad bin lookin 4U. Whit just taken a reg. Got your coat in my bag.

More trouble. So what? Ashley didn’t care. They couldn’t do anything, not really. Last night Maddocks had kept him behind. Pointless. Just standing there in his office while the headmaster got on with reading and signing a whole stack of forms. For an hour he had just stood there, being deafed-out, like he was invisible. Stupid.

On the way home after his detention Ashley had stopped at a greengrocer’s and nicked a banana. He spent ages in the bathroom trying to stuff it into his arse using soap as a lubricant. He remembered a joke about gays using soap; they could use butter as well, but he didn’t have any. His plan had been to ram it all the way in, make his arse bleed, then go to the cops. Tell them the headmaster had shagged him. He had formulated the plan while standing, jam-packed with anger, in his office watching him sign forms. It was the perfect plan. If he could get Maddocks sent down for a long stretch Ashley knew the Criminal Injuries Board paid out huge amounts in abuse cases. He’d probably be able to sue the Education too. And if he made out he was so messed up by it he couldn’t work he could probably claim invalidity benefit for a few years. A master plan.

But the banana hurt too much. Like fire. Less than a fingertip’s length in and he thought he was going to pass out. He gritted his teeth and pushed. The pain consumed his entire torso. He tried again, and then again, but it was useless. Then his dad was banging on the door. ‘What you doin’ in there, Ash, ’avin’ a fuckin’ wank? I need a shit.’

The house was empty when Ashley got back. He went across to the Highbury. His dad was in the bar with Kieran. To Kieran and the rest of Crawford’s men his dad was the Weasel. From as far back as Ashley could remember his dad had been known as that. Even the coppers called him it when they came round. ‘It’s like my professional name,’ he had explained to Ashley when he was little, when he used to tell him stories, ‘a nippy little creature that can get in and out of places quick.’

‘What you doin’ ’ere?’ the Weasel asked. ‘You should be in school.’

‘Waggin’ it.’

‘Christ! Already. You’ve only been back two days.’

‘Two days too many.’ Ashley sat down on the padded bench beside the men. Baz was behind the bar. He squinted across at Ashley, but Baz was all right.

‘Can I have some crisps?’

His dad fished in his pocket, produced a pound coin and banged it down on the table in front of his son. Ashley lifted it and made for the fruit machine where he turned the single coin into three. He went to the bar and bought two bags of crisps.

‘I’ve got enough for two scratch cards now,’ he smirked as he rejoined the men. ‘What you over here for anyway?’

‘Shurrup and eat your dinna,’ his dad told him.

Baz carried a metal stepladder from behind the bar and started to remove Christmas decorations.

‘You never fed the dog,’ Ashley accused his dad. ‘She’s starvin’.’

‘Greyhounds are supposed to be thin.’

‘The fucking thing can hardly stand.’

‘Same again, Weeze?’ Kieran lifted the empty pint glasses. His dad nodded. ‘Ta.’

‘D’you want a drink, Ash?’

‘I’ll have a Coke.’

While Kieran was at the bar the Weasel turned to his son. ‘I’m pleadin’ guilty, Ash.’

The boy stopped eating. ‘Oh fuck.’

‘It’s for the best. There’s no point going to trial. They’ve got too much on us. We’re goin’ for guilty.’ Ashley was fighting back the tears. ‘’Ere,’ his dad said, ‘’Ave a fag.’ He pushed his pack across the table.

‘How long will you get?’

‘Between three and five. Most likely three though.’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘’Ere. Now don’t go gettin’ upset.’ His dad tapped a cigarette from the pack. ‘’Ere.’ Ashley put it in his mouth. His dad struck a match and Ashley inhaled.

‘That’s better. It’ll be all right, son.’

‘All right? Of course it won’t be fuckin’ all right. What’s goin’ to happen to me? They’ll stick me in care.’

‘No. No, they won’t. I promise. I’m workin’ somethin’ out.’

Ashley was shaking when Kieran returned with the drinks. ‘What’s wrong with the kid?’ he asked the Weasel. ‘Cold?’

‘I’ve just told him. About the guilty plea.’

Kieran sat down and leaned towards Ashley. ‘It’s for the best, Ash, honest. It’ll save him two years.’

Ashley couldn’t speak. He had stopped the tears, but he couldn’t control the ague that had taken his body, or the snot running from his nose.

Kieran pushed a plastic sachet to the Weasel.

‘Go and blow your nose, son.’ He dropped the sachet in Ashley’s lap beneath the table. ‘’Ere, but only a line mind. Just to make you feel better.’

‘You should do something about his spots, Weeze,’ Kieran said as the two men watched the boy make his way towards the Gents. ‘Take him to the doctor before you go down.’

The Weasel lifted his beer and took a gulp. ‘Fat chance. ’E won’t even let me squeeze ’em for ’im.’

After school Karl brought Ashley’s coat round for him. ‘Come in the kitchen,’ Ashley told him, ‘it’s warm in here. I’m making my tea. Want some toast?’

Karl shook his head. ‘Whittaker had me,’ he told Ashley. ‘Asked if I knew where you’d gone. Said he’s going to ring your dad.’

Ashley snorted. ‘Landline’s off and they ain’t got his mobile number. He don’t care anyway.’ St George snuffled round Karl’s feet. The boy stroked her head.

Ashley lined fish fingers up on a slice of toast, poured tomato ketchup over them and put another slice on top. He bit into the sandwich. A fish finger slipped out on to the floor. The dog pounced on it. Karl laughed.

‘Me dad’s pleadin’ guilty.’

Karl felt awkward, so he said nothing, just patted the dog’s head.

‘He’ll get three years.’

Karl still didn’t know what to say.

‘So I’m in the shit. Don’t know what to do.’ There was no point beating about the bush. ‘D’you think your mom’d let me stay at yours. Till I’m sixteen. A sort of foster. She’d get benefit. Some sort of allowance. At least fifty quid a week. Probably more: I’m Special Needs.’

‘Dunno. I’ll ask her.’

‘I could have Wesley’s room. While he’s in Iraq.’

‘He’ll be back in April. The twenty-ninth.’

‘I could find somewhere else. For while he’s on leave.’

‘Dunno. I’ll ask her.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Are we going to nick some stereos tonight?’

‘Yeah, all right. When I’ve finished my tea. D’you want to see Neighbours first?’

‘Might as well.’

When the programme was finished and the boys were leaving the house Ashley grasped Karl’s arm. ‘If your mom won’t have me, d’you think she’d let you look after the dog?’

‘Dunno. I’ll ask her.’

Then there was the pigeons. What to do about the pigeons? Taking the tin of feed from under the sink he walked down the narrow strip of garden to the shed. He drew the bolt. The hungry birds swooped around him. Ashley made the squawking sound, chorkee, chorkee, chorkee, as he cast the feed in arcs around the shed.

This was stupid; he might just as well let them go. Just leave the door open. Let them join up with the street pigeons. Give them their freedom. There was one week to go till the trial. There would be no one to look after them then. Not that his dad did much of a job of looking after them. He used to, years ago when Ashley’s mom was here. He had good pigeons then, looked after them properly, raced them seriously. Ashley remembered when he was a little kid watching his dad taking them one by one and thrusting them away, sending them tumbling upwards, as if thrown by a juggler into the sky. Ashley used to love watching that.

When he returned to the shed none of them had left. They couldn’t be bothered. All instinct was gone now. Standing in their midst, he gently lifted the nearest grey bird, a collar of white around its neck, from a perch, stroked with his fingers the length of the head a couple of times, then quickly grasped, tugged, felt the quick jerk of the body, a fluttering of the wings, then stillness. He dropped the bird to the floor. Reached for another. Repeated the action. Reached for another. Until a dozen birds lay dead on the shit-encrusted floor of the shed. Soon he would have to do something about the dog.

Ashley did churches on Sunday mornings, sometimes with Karl. It was easy. If the alarms went off people were slow to return to their cars. You can’t just rush out of a church service. He could do half a dozen in a morning, no problem.

Ashley took the CD players round to Easy Ted Nichol’s for a fiver a time. Sometimes, now, they got a satnav. Ted paid fifteen quid for those. He flogged them at car boot sales. Ted’s maisonette was up on the Mendelssohn Estate, the Mendy, just off the Tallis Road. There was a small stickered Cross of St George, about twice the size of a postcard, neatly placed in the corner of each of the front windows. The Weasel said it made the place look like a first aid centre, but nobody was fooled; everybody knew what it meant. It had cost Ted a few windows now and then, but as soon as they were replaced the flags were back. No windows had been smashed for a while now.

‘You’re a little bastard,’ Ted told him.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah. What you did to your dad’s birds.’ Ted cuffed the side of Ashley’s head.

‘Piss off.’

‘Then you let the fuckin’ dog eat ’em.’

‘She was hungry.’

‘Fuckin’ loon you are. Broadmoor’s waitin’ for you, mate. Got a bed with your name on it.’ He put a mug of tea in front of Ashley. ‘Want some toast with that?’

‘Go on then.’

When Ashley had eaten his toast and collected from Ted he confided his fears. ‘Social worker keeps coming round.’

‘Trial’s Thursday?’ Ted checked.

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

‘I’m in the shit. She keeps goin’ on about fosters.’

‘They’re not gonna let you stay in that house on your own, Ash.’ Ted could see the tears in Ashley’s eyes. ‘Fag?’

Ashley took the offered cigarette from Ted and lit up.

Ted watched him. He felt sorry for the boy. ‘It’s for the best, kid. You get the right family, they’ll look after you.’

‘No way.’ It was almost a wail.

‘Ash, you can’t stay in Cecil Road. The house’ll be repossessed in a couple of months.’

‘No. Crawford’s going to look after that.’

‘Bollocks. For four years? There’s—’

‘Three. He’ll get three.’

‘Ash, you don’t know. Anything could happen.’

The boy said nothing. Ted could tell he was thinking; he let him be. Ashley finished his cigarette, drained the remains of his tea. He was calmer now. ‘Ted, any chance of me stayin’ ’ere for a bit. Just kippin’ like. I’ll get the radios for my rent. And satnavs. Other stuff too. I can do the clothes shops easy. Good stuff.’

‘Sorry, mate. Marilyn’ll be out in a coupla months. We should get the kids back. It’d be too much.’

‘Till then. Till she comes home.’

‘Sorry, Ash. No can do.’

‘The dog then?’

‘Same. Sorry. What about that black mate of yours?’

‘Karl? His mom won’t let him.’ Then quietly, as if to himself. ‘No can do.’

Fuck it! Fifty quid’s worth of lottery tickets and all he had made was twenty quid. It wasn’t fair. This had been his last chance. He knew his dad had agreed with the social worker that he should go into care. That’s why she was coming round tomorrow before his dad left for court. No. No. No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be here when she came. He’d be out of the house before his dad got up. He didn’t want to have to say goodbye. He didn’t want to have to see him in a borrowed suit, his hair all gelled and combed. He wasn’t going to be there to hear him say everything would be all right.

He wasn’t going to say goodbye and he wasn’t going into care. No way. Some poxy family telling him what to do. Making him sit down for meals. Being all nice. Just think of Jamie as your brother. You can call me Mom if you’d like. Well he didn’t fucking like. He’d been there before. He hated it. No. No. No. He’d lamp Jamie or Josh or whatever the next one was called and he’d be back in the home waiting for the next on the list to come and collect him. No.

Ashley wondered why there was never any smoke coming out of the big crematorium chimney. Perhaps they burnt them at night. No, the undertaker blokes had told him they do it straight after the funeral, that’s the law, they said, it must be done straight away.

Sometimes when he came to the cemetery Ashley practised his reading on the gravestones, or the long marble scrolls that held the names of the war dead. Today he went straight to the laurel bush. The cold wind brought tears to his eyes so he couldn’t read the face of his watch, but the case would be over by now. With guilty pleas it was just sentencing.

‘I won’t be back for a bit,’ he explained. ‘I’m not going in no home, Nan. Nor a foster neither. I’d rather do time. It’ll be better that way. Don’t worry; I’ll be all right. And I won’t hurt anyone. I’m going into school tonight. Just Maddocks’s office. Torch it. I won’t do it till late, when everyone’s gone. No one’ll get hurt.’ He took a cigarette and lit it. ‘All I got to do now is keep out the way till it’s dark. I’ve done the dog. There was no choice. She’s in the shed, but I’ll take her into the school if I can. Leave her in the office.’

He crouched down and let his fingers dance on the cold earth. The shrivelled grass. The hot smoke in his chest was a comfort. As he ditched the nub he rose. ‘Oh well. I’m going now. I’ll be all right. I’ll be back one day. Promise.’

There were other words – he wanted to say them, but what was the point. And it was too cold anyway. But he’d be warm tonight.

2

Ashley stood in the darkness of the headmaster’s office. He had put the dog on the desk. A canister of petrol at his feet. He knew this room so well. A patch of darker dark beyond the desk, a filing cabinet. If he moved a pace or two to his left his leg would touch one of the two upright chairs placed before the headmaster’s desk. Outside the window another sort of darkness, bluer, not so black.

A surge of tiredness overtook the boy. He wanted to lie down, beneath the desk perhaps, and sleep. It was ten o’clock. He thought about his dad. His first night, so it’d be Winson Green. It’s always a local prison to start with. He guessed he would be in bed by now; they went to bed early in prison. He tried to see him in a cell. Two men, or even three, in a cell smaller than this room. He wondered who he’d be in with. What they had done. And in the silence he recalled the sounds he had heard about: slamming and clanking, footsteps – on metal stairs – hundreds of them; keys – jangling and turning – hundreds of them; after dark – shouting and calling, tapping and banging. His dad had told him stories. It was the smell that was the worst. Piss. Sweat and piss. Kieran had told him it was snoring; that’s the worst, other blokes in the cell, snoring like trains, like pigs, and no escape.

He guessed he’d probably know for real in a few days. Well it’d be better than care. He wished he were bigger and stronger. He knew that the kids in YD were tough, hard, brutal. His dad always said, weedy blokes like us, littleuns, have to learn to use our gobs, talk our way out.

He’d got a paper, his reading wasn’t that good, and he had looked carefully at each headline, searching for key words, burglary, sentenced, but he couldn’t see anything about his dad. He wondered if they would write about him after the fire. He lifted the petrol canister. He needed to think this out. If he didn’t he’d probably go up with everything. Perhaps that – he stopped the thought and concentrated on the matter in hand. If he slopped about half the can over the dog and the desk, then dribbled a thin trail to the door he could light the newspaper in the corridor, throw it into the office and quickly pull the door shut; that should be okay.

Then burning. In his eyes. Or like there was pepper in them. He opened his mouth to gulp air and a sob shook his body, echoed like another presence in the dark room. Something was going. Something from inside him. Slipping away. What was he going to do? If he set fire to the school, who knew how long he would be looking at, a couple of years at least. American kids shot the school up and then blew their own heads off. There were sites for them on the net.

If he didn’t do anything? Just laid low. Tried to get by. They might not notice. Or care even. If he set fire to the school they’d have to chase him, even if he didn’t give himself up. In the darkness he stroked the brittle pelt of the dog. Wiry. Sort of hard. No point in leaving her here. He heaved her back into the sack. He’d picked the lock so neatly it slammed to and clicked behind him as if he had never been there.

He let himself into the house. Even darker than in the school. Real black, and the tinny throb of music from the students next door. It