Steven Camden - Nobody Real

Close my eyes.

Alan. Everyone needs help. It’s good to talk.

Ball my paws into fists. Yeah. It’s good to talk.

But it’s so much better to smash.

The street is narrow.

Terraced houses with small, square front yards and shallow bay windows. One of those normal streets in among the madness. This won’t take more than a few days.

I don’t see anyone, but I can hear Billie Holiday through an open window and there’s the warm, soapy smell of fresh laundry. Printout says number seven. Odd numbers are this side.

It’s a bit like your street. Coral’s street. Different name, but familiar. Where are you now?

Have you already left for school? Outside the gym with everyone else? People swapping last-minute quotes and pretending they haven’t revised? You standing silent, telling yourself it’s time?

There’s a little inky black cat on the low wall outside number nineteen. It looks at me with a tilted head, trying to work out if I’m a threat. A boy with bear arms, carrying a backpack.

I step forward, reaching out to stroke it, but it jumps down and scampers away behind two grey bins.

“Screw you then, kitty.”

The cat pokes its head out and stares. I stare back.

“Didn’t really want to stroke you anyway, fleabag. Might eat you later.”

Carry on walking. Can’t wait to start smashing now. Seventeen. Fifteen. Thirteen. Check my bag. The chipped sky-blue of my trusty helmet. If I properly go for it this morning, might even take the afternoon off. Go to the river or something. Eleven. Nine. Yeah. That’s a plan. Stop.

Look at the house.

And feel a wrecking ball hit my chest.

The clock ticks.

Ten minutes in

and my page is still empty.

All around me, a gym full of people, sitting in rows, heads bobbing like a gridded flock of feeding birds, speed-scrawling answers to questions we’ve spent months preparing for.

Every few breaths, a head will pop up, like it heard something. The distant call of that great idea. That one quote that could turn forty UCAS points into forty-eight.

This is it.

Final exam. Sixth form’s last supper.

Scan the room. Mouth everyone’s name.

Most of us have been at this school since we were eleven. Some of us even went to the same primary school. How many memories do we share?

Izzy Maynard. Tolu Clarke. How different are mine to yours? Eli Hanson. Hardeep Khan. How does it work? So many versions of everything that happens. Everything that happened.

I remember play fights; you remember getting punched. You remember lunchtimes packed with hide-and-seek; I remember hiding in the craft cupboard and people forgetting about me.

We all remember laughing when Simon Harris tripped and threw pink custard over dicky Mr Page.

When you think about it, it’s thirteen years. More than two-thirds of our lives so far sharing the same space and, after today, most of us probably won’t see each other again.

We’ll say we will, but we won’t.

Maybe accidentally in town, one random summer Saturday.

Or five years from now, on a train platform at New Street, heading in different directions.

Or maybe in middle age, at some badly soundtracked class reunion when we’re all swollen or wrinkled or both and crying into our gin and tonics about how we chose the wrong path. Isn’t that just a little bit weird? Has anyone else in here even thought about it?

Sean is four across and two in front. I watch him scribble, then pause, scribble then pause. Scratching his head. Questioning himself, whether he’s following the right thought.

Cara is two across and three in front. Even from behind, the calm in her slender shoulders is clear.

Prepared. Sure. Tattooing her future on to paper. Ready for the rest of her life. When she’s finished, she’ll look back, checking in with me. That things are going to plan.

I look down at my page.

Still empty. Still waiting.

I know what I’m supposed to do. And I know what I want to do.

Last chance.

My pen tip scratches the blank paper. Like a claw.

And then I feel you.

For the first time in years. Watching me. Knowing my thoughts.

I look up.

Across the room.

And there you are.

Outside.

The tinted glass facade of reception.

Me, reflected, sitting on the low brick wall, backlit by a fuzzy white afternoon sun.

A life-size, full-page panel. Top left, one thought box.

I did it.

My pen is still in my hand. I actually did it. Can’t be undone now.

No more school.

No more lessons.

No more sawdust-dry assemblies.

No more cafeteria parade.

Nearly seven years spent shuffling around this place, nodding at teachers, passing notes, hanging back in cross-country, swapping homework. Come September, somebody else will sit where I sat. Use my locker. Answer the questions I would’ve answered … And a new crop of wide-eyed Year Sevens will step on to the secondary conveyer belt, just as we step off. Into our futures.

My skin is tingling, my whole body buzzing like a light bulb.

And there you are. Behind me. Your reflected silhouette. Bigger than I remember. Broader. Just me and you in the frame. “I did it, Thor.”

Your name is honey in my mouth.

The sliding glass doors of reception part and you’re gone.

Cara skips out, arm in arm with Leia and Naomi, like a half-Chinese Dorothy and her friends, off to Oz. A stream of other sixth-formers follows them, squinting as the sunlight hits them. I stand up, and wait for her to see me.

“What the hell, Mars!” she shouts, breaking off from the others and walking over. “How do you do it?”

We’re the same height, but my dandelion Afro gives me a few extra centimetres. Cara lifts her arms in celebration and a strip of smooth, pale midriff shows itself above the edge of her skirt.

“How’d you finish so quick?”

I pull my blouse away from my stomach and shrug back. “Said what I wanted to say, I guess.”

She smiles. She has more teeth than she needs, little white overlapping roots that on anyone else would look weird, but on her look like evidence of intelligent design.

“Marcie Baker, super-brain,” she says, and we hug. I close my eyes and breathe her in.

Honesty, confidence and ambition. That’s Cara. Since forever.

“We did it, Mars,” she says over my shoulder and squeezes me with her thin arms. I can feel her little pointy boobs pressed against my fuller chest.

“Yeah.”

People are scattered down the wide school driveway, hugging and hi-fiving each other. Sean, Mo and Jordan are tearing pages of revision notes into confetti over the bonnets of teachers’ cars. Jordan already has his tie around his head. Cara lets go of me and wipes her eyes.

“I feel like I can breathe again, you know?” Her sharp bob shines like black ribbon. “I can’t wait for uni! We’re gonna have so much fun! Did you do the ‘role of women’ question?”

I look down at our feet. Her crisp white Vans. My battered Chuck Taylors.

“Yep.”

Then she screams. Like a proper animal-type scream, head thrown back, arms stretched out. Someone else behind us takes their cue and screams, then someone else, and someone else, like car alarms triggered by each other, until I’m watching a school driveway full of A-level English students howling at the sky like wolves.