wanker?’ Marco asked Kyle softly. Mike noticed me for the first time. ‘All right, Paki. Want some too do you?’ He turned to his mates and laughed. ‘Seen the state of these cunts?’
Lee shoved his face in Denis’s. ‘Give us a fiver and you can go.’ Denis looked like he was going to shit himself.
When Kyle finally spoke, it was with the gravely sympathetic air of a doctor imparting very bad news. ‘Mike,’ he began sadly, as the other passengers craned forward to listen. ‘Your mum’s a lesbian, your sister’s on the game and your dad sucks cock. Now let me off the fucking bus. Please.’
There was a moment of silence, then an eruption of shocked laughter from a crowd of black kids at the front and suddenly the rest of the bus were shaking their heads and smiling in disbelief too. Mike looked like someone had thrown a brick in his face. ‘Hah?’ he said.
One of the black kids shouted, ‘Let them off the fucking bus, batty-boy.’
A fat girl with braids got up and made shooing motions with her hand. ‘Get out of the man’s way, you pasty little shit.’ Her boyfriend, big and menacing, kissed his teeth at Mike. ‘Let them through, man, or shall I kick ya bony ass?’ His friends started laughing, waving their right hands till their fingers clicked, shouting ‘Shaaaaaaaaame!’ and ‘Buuuuuuuuuurn!’ while the girl, creasing up, said, ‘Bwoy! Mama’s a lesbian!’ She wiped pretend tears from her eyes and shook her head slowly. ‘Oh my gosh, that’s harsh, man.’
Mike’s only option was to feign indifference. Shrugging, he moved aside to let us pass. Me and Denis followed Kyle downstairs. The bus kept level with us for a while as we walked in silence. As it finally veered off to the right, a window slid open and Mike’s face appeared in the little square gap. He gobbed at each of us, three wet balls of spit landing expertly on our heads.
We make telephones at the factory where I work. I’ve been there for four years. Every day for four years I have been responsible for sticking the manufacturer’s logo onto the bottom of the handset. Millions and millions of sticky labels I have attached, each one identical to the last. I am a good worker, Doctor Barton. I am quiet, steady and fast and I always beat my targets. At first the other workers resented me for it, but once they realised I was oblivious to their remarks and dirty looks they gave up and now I am to them like part of the bench I sit on every day.
And the days and weeks dissolve into each other, they dissolve. I measure out each one carefully, inch by inch, fraction by fraction, until it is night and I can go home and wait for Malcolm.
Malcolm is nineteen, six months younger than me, and he lives with his mum in my block. He washes up in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant called Speedy Gonzales. I knew there was something different about him right away. I mean, I knew there was something different about how I felt about him. I wasn’t afraid of him. I didn’t want to duck my head and run into my bedsit whenever I passed him. I usually avoid people’s eyes and so does he, but after I had been here for a year we just gently, bit by bit, started letting ourselves not look away, whenever we passed on the stairs or in the corridor. We didn’t smile or anything, didn’t speak, but we started to let our eyes rest awhile on each other’s. Which is a lot, an awful lot, for people like me and Malcolm.
Denis, Kyle and I had got off the bus in the middle of Greenwich, the market place and cafes spewing tourists come to buy cheap antiques or second-hand jeans. We started walking towards the river and the high masts of the Cutty Sark. When we reached the boat I stopped. Denis looked at me questioningly. ‘You coming then?’
I glanced at Kyle, who was squinting up at the sun and fiddling with a cigarette butt he’d pulled from his pocket. He shrugged and nodded. The three of us walked on.
The day had the kind of hyper-real, orange-hued brightness that engraves itself in memories, the sky so blue I felt I could reach up and tear chunks from it. At the river we stopped to watch some tourists get on the pleasure boat. A woman handed out ice creams to her kids as her husband took pictures from the jetty. Kyle stared across the river at the scrappy brown wastelands of the Isle of Dogs then looked pointedly at the brick and glass-domed entrance to the Thames’ foot tunnel. Denis shook his head. ‘I’m not going down there,’ he said. It was clearly a familiar request. He shuddered and turned to me. ‘Don’t like being underground.’ Kyle shrugged and we turned towards the cool shaded walkway that follows the Thames’ bank in the direction of Woolwich.
We fell into single file, Kyle leading the way. We didn’t speak, each of us dragging a hand along the black iron railings, our faces turned towards the river, scenting out like dogs the water’s warm, yeasty whiff as it lapped gently below. To our right was the cold white stone of the Royal Naval College, looming and magnificent in the midday heat.
On we walked, past laughing, beery pubs, down cobbled lanes then out again to the deserted narrow streets of east Greenwich. We were alone suddenly, no tourists or weekend shoppers there. Just little rows of black-bricked houses in the shadow of an enormous power station in a perpetual sullen stand-off. Tiny pubs on corners, an air of recent violent brawls, in the dark cracks we glimpsed lone old men with fag-butts for fingers staring at their pints.
We joined the river again and made our way to the grassy wastelands that scorched and browned between some warehouses. On a steel girder in an empty boat-yard we smoked the cigarettes I’d stolen from my sisters’ stash. The air was thick with river smells and hazy with heat. Distant clankings from the scrapyards mixed with shouts of laughter from a nearby beer garden while the Thames lapped below us like the sea-shore. A whiff of molasses from the animal feed factory drifted and mingled with the sounds and light like liquid, the sun scorching the tops of our heads and the backs of our hands. I watched the river turn and tug and thought that somewhere it must join up with the sea, somewhere very far away I’d never been.
‘Did you know,’ said Kyle eventually, ‘that if two people were to hold hands for like, years and years and years, never letting go I mean – like eating and going to school and that, just holding hands all the time – that their skin would eventually grow over each other’s and they’d be joined up?’
Denis gazed at him with silent respect for a while before eventually asking, ‘What if they weren’t in the same class, though?’
Seven years have passed since that summer. Here in my little room in Bristol I look out over the quiet Clifton streets and the distant fields and hills, but what I see are the banks of the river Thames. That day was the start of it all, see – the start of me, Denis and Kyle. And despite everything, despite what was to come, I smile when I think of the three of us then. The truth is, those first few weeks we spent together were the best of my life. You look a little shocked, Doctor Barton. But just listen. Listen to me.
That first day Kyle and I didn’t talk much. The few times I did speak to him it was like dropping a stone down a very deep well. He’d look at me with vacant eyes until whatever I’d said finally hit the bottom of him and you could almost hear the ‘plop’, then he’d blink and either answer, or not. Mostly I kept quiet as we smoked and listened to one of Denis’s rambling stories and threw sticks into the river, but my eyes kept returning to Kyle’s face; that guarded, always-thinking face like one of those rodenty, bug-eyed cats. But his eyes were as grey as stones, as grey as the river. A face that could utterly shock you with its rare half-smiles like a sudden crack of light in a dark room.
I got the feeling that he wasn’t mad keen on me being there, and while he was used to Denis’s constant chatter and questions, I was merely being put up with for that one brief day.
‘Are we going to look for caves?’ Denis asked Kyle when we’d been sitting there a while. The look Kyle shot back said it all. I was not to be trusted.
We watched boats pass; flash yuppies’ speed boats, the slow glide of the rowers’ club and once a police boat ripping through the grey stillness, scattering swans and driftwood and the gently bobbing plastic bottles. To our right the mangled