Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul

Jase thinks she wants me to respect her. Read it in Cosmo when he was stacking the magazines at work. I do respect her, I tell him. I buy her bus ticket, drop in a ten pack of Benson when I can get served, spend Saturday afternoons down the mall, take her nan to the park. If that isn’t respect, I don’t know what is. Jase looks at me like a retard.

‘Mate, that’s not even the start of it. If you want to get into her pants, you’re going to have to do better than that.’

Like he knows anything. Jase shags one of the part-timers, a Micradriving housewife, in the stockroom once every three weeks if he’s lucky, but he’s never had a proper girlfriend in his life. A casual grope with Lizzie Jennings every once in a while. Nothing that lasts more than a week or two. Something to do with his sister and the car crash; girls think he has too much baggage… that he’s a proper nutter because of it. They’re not at the age where a lanky stoner is considered a great catch. In another five years, though, when they’re pining for surfer chic… I ditch his advice, need it like I need a hole in the head.

Snogging is snogging, I don’t confuse it with anything else. Kel is still mad at me, each of us taking pains to avoid mentioning the Brit-word in case something blows up again, but I know things are forgotten when she comes back from the toilet with a bag of those baby jelly beans that cost about five pounds a pack. Standing above me, and placing them in my hands wordlessly. She lets the beans and the kiss on my cheek that follows do the talking. Payback for taking her shit on the tube, I guess, and also in part for the strawberry milkshake I’d produced earlier without any prompting, because I knew it was her favourite. We kiss, and hold hands, and giggle, and kiss again.

Much later, close to one a.m., once we’re back within Surrey’s safe borders, and Kel’s mum has been informed, and Kel’s dad is driving past the station, I spot something standing at the taxi rank.

There’s two of them, a man and a boy, the shorty slightly behind the man, both in shadow, and both in trackies I’m now noticing. They’re the last in the taxi queue, a line of around twenty people, and are laughing about some bollocks. The kid is cracking up so the older one must be a hoot. He’s holding a rolled up Britney poster, identical to the two I picked up outside Wembley after the show; supersized so that the tits are bigger than the average human head — one for me and Jason. The older man is in and out of shadow, but the build, the laugh, the Nike airs with the exaggerated red soles like Coco the clown, are all photo-fit material; match my disgraced ex-Harrier trainer 100 %. Someone call Crimewatch .

Pearson is a volleyball-playing shit-for-brains lump who thinks he’s popular just for punching a stupid ball around an indoor court like a faggot. Sure, the volleyball squad are the glamour elite of the school, twelve guys and girls riding the crest of a wave, the closest thing we have to jocks, but even this status doesn’t protect him from ridicule.

He doesn’t realise that everyone laughs at him behind his back. Thinks of him as an oaf, which, at this place, is saying something. The other members of the squad are protective of him and all, on the court they’re like brothers, but away from the sports hall they’re not as defensive as they should be. Must be something in his manner: loud, overbearing, know-it-all smartarse. Has a habit of hogging the ball and busting a few solo moves on the court, whether it benefits the game or not. Coming out with all kinds of shit just to get some attention. Dumping the flid kids’ clothes in the shower whilst they’re in PE, bullying the pikeys in the changing rooms, challenging them to prove that their underwear wasn’t 2p from Oxfam. General stupidness we should all have grown out of at twelve.

The team seem to agree. Me and Jase would have got a cleaning from them otherwise.

Moon used to realise this, I think, but seems to have forgotten now that her eyes have gone heart-shaped. Now they walk around the corridors hand in hand, barely out of each other’s sight.

Normally I have respect for the jocks. Fellow sportsmen, and all that. It should be a mutual thing. We all give each other a heads-up around school, some more enthusiastic and exuberant than others. Since I do most of my training out of school, do all of my competitions out of school, steer clear from competing in lacklustre class athletics, I keep it low-key. I’m not a show-off like some of these volleyball and footie idiots. But nothing will make me like this guy. Rich boy trying to be like one of us? Fuck off! What’s the appeal of that? Putting my feelings for Moon aside, he just ain’t right for her.

‘They’re sweet together,’ Kel said once, when we saw them feeding each other chips in the canteen. Thought it was all right now that we were a couple ourselves, thought she could relax her neuroses a little, but she saw my look, realised I wasn’t laughing.

‘If you want us to stay together, you’re going to have to stop saying things like that,’ I go, voice so low it’s virtually in the gutter; where tone ends and a snake-like hiss begins. ‘Don’t keep talking about them. Don’t even mention them. Doesn’t do anyone any good.’

It came out tougher than I meant it to. I was going for jokey, but something in Kel’s observation set something off. Made me panic that she was possibly right. Panicked me more when I thought about how everyone else at school might be thinking the same thing; that Moon was better off with a proper boyfriend, and without me.

Glance over in Moon’s direction whilst Kel goes to the loo for a discreet cry, waving over Lizzie Jennings on the way. They’ve finished the chips and she’s now biting into his Snickers. They take alternate mouthfuls. She takes it slow, conscious of crumbs falling on her shirt. He grabs the fucker like the greedy pig he is. It’s all about ownership with that piece of shit. Then they share the same can of drink. I can almost feel Pearson’s gob on my lips. Can’t stop watching. Feel sick. Her face is so different. Furrows smoothed, mouth looser, eyes wide, none of her usual defensive squinting. Touches her hair every other minute but all the time certain of herself. None of it’s a ruse. She’s never looked so settled… or sated.

Jason has no time for Casey. Calls him various vegetable names, depending on which aisle he’s stacking.

‘He’s a turnip, man,’ he goes, on more than one occasion, when I find myself justifying exactly why I’m with him. ‘He’s a fucking kiddie fiddler. I’ve got no time for him, however great you say he is.’

I get twitchy at the mention of kiddie-fiddler and Casey in the same sentence. I wish I hadn’t been looking out the car window, seeing things I shouldn’t have.

Jase believes everything he reads in the papers. Swears by The Sun , like it’s the Torah or something.

It doesn’t escape my notice that the fiddled kid is the same age as his sister would be now. It touches a nerve; his sole defence for starting a little backyard blaze last summer that ended up in Casey’s house being burnt to the ground.

I’m not supposed to know, but I do. He told some slag the night he did it, as a way to get into her pants. She told Chinese Peter’s sister, who told me. I’d been running as usual, so wasn’t around. And I wonder why people don’t invite me to anything. But I wish I’d got evidence of it. Something like an MPEG would’ve been awesome. Like capturing history in the making . Totally wild.

It’s one of those secrets that Jase keeps from me, the way I keep stuff from him; like when I had to start giving Mum tuff love when she started overdoing the pity party a couple of years after Dad left, and got really close to embarrassing herself. (Jews, delayed reaction.) You gotta do what you gotta do.