Kevin Brooks - Born Scared

DOC: It’s a representation of reality though, isn’t it?

ME: It’s still not real.

DOC: And that’s the same with all your books and the things you see on the internet, is it? It’s not real, so it’s not frightening?

ME: I can’t explain it. I don’t even bother trying to understand it myself any more. I just . . . I don’t know. I just do my best to live with it.

DOC: Do you ever get used to being scared all the time?

ME: No, but I’ve kind of got used to not getting used to it.

‘Are you sure you can trust her?’ Dake asked Jenner.

They’d left the moors behind now and were driving along a single-track lane that would eventually bring them out at the top of the village. The snow had eased off a little, and although the icy wind was still blowing hard, the Land Rover was shielded from the worst of it by the high banks and dry-stone walls either side of the lane.

‘I don’t trust anyone,’ Jenner said matter-of-factly.

‘So how do you know she’s not lying?’

‘Because she knows what I’ll do to her if she is.’

Dake didn’t doubt there was a veiled threat to him in Jenner’s answer – and you’d better not mess me around either – and he also knew that Jenner didn’t make idle threats. He made promises, and he kept them.

‘It just seems a bit odd, that’s all,’ Dake said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The timing, you know . . . Christmas and everything. I still don’t get it. I mean, you would have thought they’d empty the place over Christmas, not keep it all there.’

Jenner sighed. ‘How many more times do I have to tell you? The whole point of this, the reason it won’t be expected – and why we’re going to get away with it – is precisely because of the timing. They usually would keep all the branches empty over Christmas, but when their internal computer system crashed last week it messed up the program they use to schedule and track the collections . . .’ Jenner paused, glancing sideways at Dake. ‘Do I really have to go over all this again? Don’t you remember anything , for God’s sake?’

‘Yeah, of course I remember,’ Dake said defensively. ‘It’s just . . . well, you know . . . I can’t be expected to remember everything, can I?’

Jenner shook his head in disbelief. He’d always known that Dake wasn’t particularly intelligent – he could barely read or write, for a start – but Jenner was beginning to wonder now if there was something seriously wrong with him. How could he not remember what he’d already been told at least three or four times?

Jenner slowed the Land Rover and pulled into a passing space to let a tractor go by. Once it had passed, he lit a cigarette and turned to Dake.

‘The money’s there, okay?’ he said, as patiently as possible. ‘It’s in the vault. That’s all you need to know.’

‘How much?’

‘I’ve already told you that.’

‘I know.’ Dake grinned. ‘I just want to hear it again.’

‘At least a million, according to the girl. Probably more.’

‘At least a million . . .’ Dake echoed dreamily.

‘Yeah, and the best thing about it is they won’t even know it’s gone until the day after Boxing Day.’

‘He’ll know though, won’t he?’

‘Who?’

‘The manager guy, you know . . . the one who’s going to open the safe for us. He’ll know the money’s gone.’

‘He won’t tell anyone.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’ll know what I’ll do to his mother if he does.’

ME: Do you think I’m mad?

DOC: Do you?

ME: I don’t know . . . sometimes, maybe. I’m definitely not normal, am I?

DOC: None of us are normal. We all have things wrong with us. It’s just that some of those things have a much bigger effect on our lives than others.

ME: Do you think something could have gone wrong in my head when I was a baby?

DOC: Do you mean when your heart stopped?

ME: Yeah. Maybe my brain stopped too, or it got damaged or something.

DOC: Well, that can happen, yes. If you’re starved of oxygen at birth it can lead to irreversible brain damage. But in all the instances I’ve ever come across, the oxygen supply has been stopped for at least two or three minutes, usually quite a bit longer. But that wasn’t the case with you, Elliot. Your heart stopped beating for less than a minute.

ME: Yeah, but what if –?

DOC: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your mind, Elliot. Trust me. If you’d suffered any brain damage I’d know.

ME: So are you saying it’s perfectly all right for me to be terrified of everything?

DOC: No, of course not.

ME: So there is something wrong with my brain then.

Sometimes I have no sense of the present. All I can feel is a sense of the past and a sense of the future – the ‘then’ and the ‘when’. I can look back and remember things – things that happened, things that I did – and I can look forward to things that haven’t happened yet. I can imagine things happening in the future – the next half hour, the next day, next Monday afternoon, next year. I can do all that. But the present . . . the present seems to pass me by. I can’t get hold of it. It’s like a shapeless and senseless void that moves, like a cursor, between the past and the future. A dead black line, forever moving, forever being . . . but never actually there.

ME: I know you think I’m weird.

DOC: What makes you say that?

ME: I heard you talking to Mum once. You told her it was really weird how sometimes I sound really grown up, almost like an adult, but other times I seem almost babyish.

DOC: I didn’t say it was ‘really weird’, I just said I’d noticed it, that’s all. And I didn’t say ‘babyish’ either. All I said was that sometimes the way you talk makes you sound older than you are, and sometimes you come across as being younger than you are. I didn’t say it was ‘weird’. And I wouldn’t use that word anyway.

ME: What word would you use?

DOC: I don’t know . . . ‘different’, perhaps.

‘Unusual’. There’s nothing wrong with being unusual.

I’ve never met my father. According to Mum, she met him at a party, they spent the night together, and that was that. They never saw each other again.

‘It was all perfectly amiable,’ she told me once. ‘He was a lovely man, and we had a very nice time together. But neither of us wanted to take it any further, and we were both quite happy to go our separate ways.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked her.

‘Martyn.’

‘Martyn what?’

‘I honestly don’t know. He introduced himself as Martyn, and I told him I was Grace, and that’s all we needed to know.’

Even if she had known his surname, she still wouldn’t have made any effort to contact him when she found out she was pregnant.

‘It would only have complicated things,’ she explained. ‘And besides, apart from his name, the only other thing I knew about Martyn was that he lived in Los Angeles and he was a writer, but he didn’t write under his real name. So I couldn’t have tracked him down even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t.’

I don’t miss having a father – you can’t miss what you’ve never had, can you? – and on the rare occasions when I do wonder what it would be like to have a dad, the mere thought of it makes me shudder. A man living in my house? A monkem? A man I’d have to share Mum with . . .?

No.

I wouldn’t like that one bit.

DOC: We might not know the precise cause of your problem, Elliot, but we know how it affects you, and it might be possible to lessen those effects to some degree.