Bad Company Page 4

  She is so right. We’re so alike. It’s all J.B.’s fault, and Ralph Aird’s. I hate them both.

  J.B. tried to talk to me that same night. Mum suddenly had to go for a walk with Jonny and Margo, so we could be alone.

  He switched the TV off and pocketed the remote control, obviously not taking any chances that I’d volume him out.

  ‘I’m sorry about today,’ he said at once, pacing nervously up and down the living room. ‘I should have told you I was starting work there.’

  ‘You call that working,’ I jeered at him.

  ‘Yes. I call it working,’ he said. ‘I’m being paid and I work really hard for my money.’

  ‘Do you get extra for looking stupid?’

  He tried to make a joke of it. ‘I do look stupid, don’t I?’

  There was no answer to that. It would be useless even talking to him. I stood up to leave the room. ‘It’s not permanent, Lissa. I’ll get something else, but for the moment, I’ll work at anything. I almost had to beg them to give me a try there,’ he tried at a laugh again.

  He almost had to beg them? Was that supposed to make me feel better? It only made me feel more ashamed of him.

  ‘I just want to earn money. To keep out of trouble.’

  ‘It’s always what you want, isn’t it?’ was all I said to him. ‘You don’t care how much you embarrass me.’

  I pushed past him. He still tried to talk on, but I wouldn’t listen.

  ‘It won’t be for long. I’m waiting for word about something else. A good job. Something better.’

  His last words followed me as I bounded upstairs.

  I slammed the door of my room so hard the house seemed to shudder. I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t. Not because of him. Instead I threw myself on the bed and started to think.

  And do you know, what he said began to make sense. Working should be all that matters. If he had a job, any job, there would be less chance of Magnus Pierce drawing him back into his clutches.

  A chance of another job? A better job? Was that the truth, or was he telling lies just like I always did? If it was the truth, maybe I’d been too hard. Maybe, I thought, I should go back downstairs and just sit with him. Nothing dramatic, like throwing my arms around him and begging his forgiveness. But maybe, just to sit with him would let him see I was ready to take one small step.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I heard his urgent, whispered voice on the phone. ‘Don’t phone here any more. I can’t take the risk. I’ll get in touch with you.’

  He replaced the receiver hurriedly and walked guiltily into the kitchen, closing the door softly behind him.

  All my loathing for him returned. He was still in touch with them. Secret calls, like the ones I could remember from so long ago. Whispered calls.

  ‘I’ll get in touch with you.’

  It wasn’t finished. Magnus Pierce here in the house, and now this. He’d never change. Like Ralph Aird had said, the leopard never changes his spots.

  The hardest thing I’d ever had to do was go to school next day. Even harder than the day so long ago when the whole story of J.B. broke in all the papers. At least then the teachers understood, especially Murdo. He had done his best to protect me from all the unwanted attention, asking me to stay in his class to help with a class project, giving me a lift home.

  Today, there would be no one to protect me.

  But I was wrong.

  I still had Diane.

  Ralph had spread the word to everyone and as I walked into the playground half the pupils who were hanging around the school gates immediately started mooing like cows.

  Ralph sauntered up to me like a cowboy. ‘How d’ye like your steak, honey?’ Then he threw out his answer with a cowboy yell. ‘Just yank off the horns and put it on a plate!’

  Everyone burst out laughing at that. I’m sure I would have cried, wouldn’t have been able to stop myself when suddenly, there was Diane pushing past Ralph with such force he stumbled and almost fell. He just glared at her.

  ‘Hey Connell, watch it!’

  She ignored him. She put her arm in mine and pulled me on. ‘Come on, Lissa, let’s get away from this low life scum.’

  It was a wonderful moment. She gave me all the strength I needed to stare right back at Ralph Aird and his nerdy friends. I was better than them. Even if J.B. had shamed me I would always be better than Ralph Aird.

  ‘You think you are something, Lissa Blythe,’ he rasped at me.

  I grinned back at him. ‘You are something too, Ralph Aird, but I’m too much of a lady to tell you what it is.’

  Then, with a cowboy yell of our own, Diane and I raced off.

  ‘Thanks, Diane, that was brilliant,’ I told her as we went into class. ‘That’ll show Ralph Aird.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Someone like him has to be taught a lesson. We’ve got to bring him down a peg or two.’

  Always with Diane it was ‘we’. Whatever hurt me, hurt her. She was definitely, I thought then, the best friend anyone could ever have.

  ‘Yes, but what could we possibly do to Ralph Aird?’

  She sucked in her cheeks, a sure sign she was thinking hard. Her brain was working. ‘We’ll think of something,’ she said at last.

  Murdo was in a great mood that morning. He beamed a big smile around the class, and it was all thanks to Ralph Aird. His banner was almost finished. And even I had to admit it looked impressive.

  ‘By next week,’ Murdo bellowed, ‘it will be down off the wall, and in for the competition, and I think it has an excellent chance of winning. It’s imaginative. It’s clever, and it takes us on a journey through the world of books.’ He aimed his smile at Ralph. ‘You’ve done a wonderful job, Ralph. Come up here with me and bask in your class’s admiration.’

  Ralph shuffled out of his seat, his neck crimson with embarrassment, and possibly with pride too.

  I thought he looked smug.

  Murdo put a hand on his shoulder and pointed to the collage.

  ‘Ralph read all these books you know. So he could really get to know the characters he was drawing.’ This was Ralph Aird who had probably never read a book before in his life. Ralph looked even more embarrassed. ‘And what wonderful characters he chose.’ Murdo’s voice rose with enthusiasm.

  I looked at the collage too, at Oliver Twist asking for more and Captain Ahab and the great Moby Dick (Murdo had, by that time, told us all about him), at Long John Silver complete with parrot. And Harry Potter pointing off into the distance to a future where books will always be. The cut-out figures were alive and colourful and seemed as if they were ready to leap from the wall. Ralph had talent. Murdo had found it. So why did it make me so angry?

  ‘If Ralph doesn’t take the prize home for this school, I’ll lay an egg.’ Murdo laughed heartily. Only Diane and I didn’t join in. ‘So, now, I would like you to join me in congratulating Ralph for all his hard work and wishing him all the best in the competition.’

  He began to clap. One by one the class joined him enthusiastically. Once Ralph had been really unpopular. Lots of people still thought he was obnoxious, but they also admired how hard he had worked. Ralph tried not to beam with delight. Everyone applauding Ralph Aird? My stomach tightened with something more than anger.

  Reluctantly, Diane and I began to clap too, but our hearts weren’t in it.

  Yet Diane was smiling. I was puzzled by that smile, until we were filing out of the class and she pulled me close to her and whispered, ‘Now, I know exactly how we can hurt Ralph Aird.’

  Chapter Eight

  March 9th

  ‘There’s no time like the present,’ that’s what Diane said. She says her dad always says you never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

  But I suddenly wanted to put it off forever when I heard what she had in mind. Destroy Ralph’s collage! Rip it to shreds, tear it to pieces. It would all be blamed on the vandals who had been terrorising the school and the neighbourhood. That’s what
Diane said.

  We sneaked back into the empty English classroom after the school had emptied and all we could hear were the cleaners rattling their mops and buckets in the corridors below.

  I was breathing so fast I thought my heart was going to burst. I didn’t want to be there. I’d tried to tell Diane but she wouldn’t listen. But as I looked at the collage and realised the amount of work that had gone into it I wanted to be there even less.

  Diane pushed a massive pair of scissors into my hands. ‘I took them from the art class,’ she answered to my surprised look. ‘Now hurry, you haven’t got much time.’

  That was when I realised that Diane wasn’t going to help me. I was meant to do this on my own.

  ‘It’s your revenge, silly,’ she said. ‘It’ll get all that anger, that frustration, out of your system. My dad does it all the time. He’s got his boss’s photo on a punchball in the basement gym. And when that boss of his really gets his back up, he punches lumps out of his picture.’ She laughed, covering her mouth so she wouldn’t make a sound. ‘Well, it’s better than punching lumps out of him, isn’t it?’

  And wasn’t this much better than punching lumps out of Ralph Aird?

  ‘You wouldn’t want to do Ralph any real harm, would you?’ She seemed shocked at the thought of it and I hurried to correct her.

  ‘Of course, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Well, material things don’t matter and this collage is only a material thing, isn’t it?’

  She was right, material things aren’t important. I opened the scissors, but I still couldn’t bring myself to make that first cut.

  Diane was getting mad at me by this time. ‘Goodness, Lissa. If you don’t hurry up the cleaners will be on this floor.’ She tutted in annoyance. She would never be this indecisive. Not Diane. I was letting her down.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Just don’t come running to me moaning about Ralph Aird and how he made a fool of you, and how he humiliated you. It seems to me you’d let Ralph Aird walk all over you and you wouldn’t do anything about it. Maybe you’re more like your father than you like to think.’

  But I wasn’t like J.B. I wanted to shout that out to her. ‘If Ralph Aird was in your shoes, I bet he wouldn’t be holding back.’

  And he wouldn’t. Not Ralph Aird. He’d be destroying everything with whoops of delight. That, I suppose, decided me.

  I snapped the scissors shut and cut Harry Potter in two.

  As Diane hurried to the class door to keep watch, I heard her sigh with satisfaction. ‘Thatta girl, Lissa.’

  That first cut was the hardest. After that I snapped and slashed in a growing frenzy of anger. So much for Ralph Aird, and the way he’d made a fool of J.B. … Oliver Twist’s head shot to the floor. So much for Murdo, and how he’d lost all faith in me … Moby Dick dangled from the banner like a broken concertina. So much for J.B. and all his lies … Fagin was sliced into ribbons. So much for everybody! Scheherazade and Huckleberry Finn were snipped and shredded like so much confetti.

  So much for them all.

  I was breathing hard by the time I’d finished and the classroom floor was littered with the tattered remnants of Ralph’s literary collage.

  I could feel beads of sweat running down my back and I was shaking.

  ‘Good work!’ Diane said, patting me on the back and pulling me from the class. ‘Now let’s get out of here before someone sees us.’

  I’m still shaking now. I can’t stop.

  What will I do if they ever find out it was me?

  How could I ever have done such a terrible thing! Yet, I remember at the time thinking it was the best thing I could do. I can remember the rush of excitement I felt when I’d finished. Am I really such a nasty person?

  I remember the fear too, the fear that someone would find out what I’d done. I didn’t want to go to school next day. If it hadn’t been for knowing that Diane would be there to support me, I don’t think I would have gone.

  She was waiting for me when I walked through the school gates next morning. She winked and whispered, ‘It’s all over the school. The cleaners found it this morning, and, know what? The vandals are getting the blame. Didn’t I tell you?’

  English was our first subject and as we filed in there were gasps of horror from the rest of the class. Like coloured snow the shreds of the collage lay pathetically around the floor. They still hadn’t been cleaned up. I couldn’t see Ralph Aird at first. I didn’t even look, so sure that guilt was written all over my face.

  In the bright light of the morning what we had done seemed so much worse. The faces of the characters, lying askew all over the floor, jumped up at me accusingly. It seemed pathetic and sad. Murdo came striding into the room, slamming the door behind him. I have never seen him so angry. His wild hair stood on end as if he’d been pulling at it with his short stocky fingers.

  His voice echoed round the class like the desperate wail of a banshee. ‘How could anyone do such a cruel, senseless thing?’

  He knew it had been me. At that moment I was sure of it. I couldn’t meet his eyes and kept mine fastened on the desk in front of me. Trying hard not to listen to his words, finding that impossible.

  ‘What kind of people do things like this? To destroy something beautiful is bad enough. But we know all the hard work, the care, the time that has gone into this beautiful work of art. We know how hard Ralph worked, all the enthusiasm he put into it.’ Suddenly his voice became once more a terrifying bellow and he lifted his desk lid and slammed it down hard. ‘And some pathetic idiot who has nothing in his life comes along and in the space of sixty seconds destroys something wonderful!’

  Sixty seconds. That must have been how long it took. I had been frenzied, like someone crazy. And I hadn’t once thought of it like that. All his care, all his enthusiasm. I had destroyed that too.

  I felt my eyes pool with tears, but then half the class were crying. Diane turned to me. Was she crying too? She was sniffing and she said softly, ‘I know, Lissa. How could anybody be so rotten?’ And if I hadn’t known the truth, I would have believed she meant that.

  Murdo kept Ralph behind after class. It was my first chance to actually see Ralph’s face. He had been slouched down in his seat, silent the whole lesson. Now, I saw for the first time that his face was chalk white. He stood in front of Murdo and Murdo’s voice was soft and comforting. I hung back at the door and watched.

  ‘There are no words for how I feel, Ralph. For what I could do to these people who did this.’ He paused. Spittle was bubbling through his clenched teeth like lava ready to erupt from a volcano. ‘This was a hellish act. But we can start again, Ralph. There’s always next year’s competition.’

  I could only see the side of Ralph’s face. ‘It doesn’t matter, sir,’ he said in a flat, lifeless voice. ‘My dad’s right. He says there’s no point even trying. Nothing ever works out for people like us.’

  And though I could only see the side of Ralph’s face, it was enough to make out a trickle of a tear.

  That was when Murdo noticed me. His wild eyes fixed on mine. I felt my whole head go red, not just my face. He knows, I thought frantically. He must know. I ran out of the classroom, bursting through the doors that led out on to the playground.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so upset.’ Diane sounded annoyed as we left school that day. ‘It’s done now. And he can always make another for next year.’

  I thought about Ralph and what he had said. ‘There’s no point even trying.’

  ‘Maybe he won’t,’ I said.

  Diane shrugged. ‘Well, if he doesn’t that’s his problem.’

  ‘Maybe we should just confess and face up to it.’ The thought terrified me.

  ‘You must be joking!’ For a moment a different Diane flashed in her eyes. One that kind of frightened me. Then she smiled. ‘I mean, I would get into as much trouble as you and that wouldn’t really be fair. I never really did anything. I was just the lookout.’

  ‘I won’t mention you. I
promise.’

  She was already shaking her head. ‘That’s not fair, Lissa. You don’t do that to a friend. You do still want to be friends, don’t you?’

  And of course I did. Diane was the only friend I had. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  She was right anyway. It was done. Me confessing wouldn’t help Ralph Aird. Diane said if he was made of good stuff he would bounce back. Make another for next year’s competition. That’s what Diane would do, she said. That’s what people like us would do.

  That’s what I kept telling myself too.

  If only I could forget his lifeless voice, with no hope left in it and that single tear running down Ralph Aird’s face.

  But all thought of Ralph Aird was blotted out when I came home. Magnus Pierce was there. Magnus Pierce with his big frame blocking the doorway into the living room. Margo was in her playpen, hugging a brand new teddybear. No prizes for guessing who had brought that. J.B. was standing over her, like a lion protecting his cub.

  ‘We really have to talk,’ Magnus Pierce was saying as I walked in. ‘If I can’t come here, you should come to my office. We have things to discuss.’

  J.B. saw me then, and his eyes flickered in my direction. As they did Magnus Pierce turned slowly round.

  ‘Ah, it’s the lovely Lissa.’ He beamed a big white smile at me. I almost expected to see his teeth flash like in a cartoon. ‘And I’m just leaving. What a pity.’ As he stepped past me he touched my shoulder and turned back to J.B. ‘Just think about what I said, Jonathan. You’ll see I’m right.’ Then he paused and added very slowly, ‘You have a family to look after you know.’

  At that very moment Mum burst into the house with Jonny in tow. She’d known she was going to find Magnus Pierce here, must have seen his car. I certainly hadn’t but then I had been too busy thinking about Ralph Aird.

  ‘I’m just going, Mrs Blythe,’ he said pleasantly, as if Mum had already asked him to do just that.

  And in two long strides he was out of the house and moving down the path. Mum ran to J.B. and he held her close. Jonny looked baffled, didn’t know what was going on. And Margo with her nose running was biting obliviously into her new bear.