Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul

‘Should I give her one?’ he repeats.

‘Why?’

‘Why not? She’s hot. V, you’ve been busy lately with your running and that nerd stuff. You’re not paying attention to what’s going on. You should see how she looks at me.’

He’s the only person I let call me V.

‘And how does she look at you?’

‘Like she wants to eat my dick.’

We laugh like a pair of duffuses.

‘Well,’ I go, in my posh voice, ‘speaking as someone who’s already sampled the goods, I’d say she’s well worth boning.’

‘Are you saying you’ve done her? And not told me?’

‘It was the Christmas holidays. She was bored. I was bored …’

I’m more stoned than I realise. Moon is going to kill me.

‘What do you make of this?’ I’m saying quickly, pulling a letter from my bag, realising that I don’t really want to get into what I got up to with Moon. Also, trying to play it cool, because the last thing I want is him getting any further than her tits.

Jason does a double take and starts chanting, pulling out a similar letter from his jacket.

‘Who’s bad? Who’s bad? Who’s bad? Who’s bad? Shit, I knew there was something I wanted to tell you.’

The letters are from the school to our parents, telling them that their children are shit.

‘We’re in for it, aren’t we?’ he goes, after scanning my letter.

They are the same word for word, even down to the spelling mistakes — an extra c in fracas, and one n too many in unprovoked. The Year Head is requesting a meeting at our parents’ earliest convenience. We don’t see either of them being free for that meeting. Ever.

Jase hands over his letter and I stuff both of them in the tree. Push them as far down as I can manage, grazing my fingers as I pull them out. We could have started a nice little bonfire instead, but Jase hasn’t got much lighter fuel left and is being stingy. The tree is hollow at a certain point of entry, round halfway up. The only way you’d find it is by climbing the thing. And there’s little chance of that round here. Most of the guys at our school are happy to stand outside the offie and get pissed. No one is interested in climbing a fucking tree. Not unless you’re using it as practice to get up drainpipes.

‘Teachers are always busy,’ I go, once I’m back on my feet and dusting down.

‘You think?’

‘Chances are, they’ll be too stressed with the key stage tests to worry about us. Anyway, who’s going to remember a small scuffle when Lucy Gilbert has just been knocked up?’

‘You’re funny, d’you know that, V?’

Jason is so far gone now, he’s grinning like one of those kids who’s been shot-up with too much Ritalin. I might as well be talking to myself.

This is how we have our fun: Friday night, cold and clear. Riding our bikes from Broadhurst to Auriol. A two-mile circuit that takes in the best of our area: video shops, kebab shops, offies, pubs, posh coffee bars, and more old people’s hairdressers than there are old people. None of these interest us. We’ve already had a drink, and we don’t want to have our hair done. Our rule is that we’ll lap and lap until we find someone to have fun with. This will normally be in Auriol, where it’s more densely wooded than Broadhurst, and is less hardcore with the street lighting.

Like fruit pickers, we’re seasonal. Summer is no good for our fun. We work better in the darkness of winter. One kid’s terrifying gloom is another kid’s safety net.

We trawl until we come across a suitable player. If it’s someone from school, great. Someone from the upper years, even better; usually a Year 12 muppet who still hasn’t passed their driving test, and is too much of a dork to go out drinking.

Tonight is a night like any other. It’s seven-thirty. We’ve been on the road for twenty minutes and haven’t passed anyone of value. A man with a briefcase who’s on his way home from the station; an old woman who looks like she’s heading for the bus stop at the top of Auriol. Neither of them are right.

We can lap four or five times until we find what we are looking for. We’re pros. We’re fussy about our playmate. We could go onto the high street, where there is guaranteed to be all-night action, but we prefer it here, on these streets. Catching people only yards from their houses only adds to the fun. Another bonus point if we can get them under a Neighbourhood Watch sign. There is minimal over-eighteen activity round here after dusk. Adults with any sense know that they need to drive everywhere, even if it’s just down to the Tesco Metro at the bottom of the street for a pint of milk. The muppet kids don’t have that luxury, and this is when we strike.

There’s no one in our houses to give a shit where we are. Mum is on another block of late shifts, this week it’s been seven out of seven, and Jase’s mum has gone to her group meeting where she talks to other depressives who’ve lost children and eat too much cake to get over it. Jase says it’s a kind of AA for grievers. Apparently they know everything about each other except their real names. I tell Jase that people have to give a name for everything these days, that they won’t be happy until every aspect of human nature has been labelled or explained; that soon there’ll be a support group for people who still can’t come to terms with the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy or something, but he’s cycled so far ahead I don’t know whether he heard me. Racing off and ploughing up the hill that leads into Auriol at the first mention of his mum and her group.

This kind of picking on people comes naturally to us. If I didn’t run, and Jase didn’t smoke all the time, I guess this could be our second careers.

Jase is on his way back down. He’s almost flying down the hill, hand off brakes, feet elevated from pedals, but even at those speeds the prospect of take-off isn’t pleasing him. I suddenly think that if a car pulled out of one of these side roads any moment now, Jase would go the way of his sister. I feel like the biggest loser to be thinking it, but can’t help it. That thought, that death, is always there.

He’s already back in my face before I stopped thinking my horrible thoughts, luxuriously picking the scab. Looks pissed off.

‘This is stupid. There’s no one about.’

‘Give it some time, eh? There’ll probably be some action after eight.’

We always make sure we have our fun before ten-thirty. Any playfulness that coincides with closing time can lead to situations with older kids that are out of our depth. I speak from experience.

‘Fuck that. It’s too cold tonight. Let’s go back to that commuter, and then we can go indoors.’

Jase is the only person I know who calls home ‘indoors’. His family aren’t even cockneys. We’re all pretending to be something round here.

I agree that this commuter’s our boy, and we black up: caps on, hoodies up, scarves wrapped tight around our faces, so that all you can see are the eyes. I make sure mine is pulled so tight that it feels like its been stitched into my head. It wouldn’t take the police five minutes to knock on our door if the scarf fell and the commuter got a full-frontal mugshot of a local Paki wearing Nike. There’s only about five of us in this town. Finding the right teenage darkie is no needle-in-a-haystack exercise.

Jase is on fist duty tonight, we take it in turns, leaving me to be the cameraman. He leads, a head-start set at a standard thirty seconds. Means potential playmates let down their guard as they see the lone cyclist riding past, until, that is, he does the sharpest of U-ies, arriving at a point too close to their personal space for comfort. (Early on we made a decision not to go after the girls, unless we chanced across one of the school bitches who needed to be taught a lesson. Bad karma otherwise.)