Bad Company Read online

  Mum was crying. I could hear it in her voice though I couldn’t see her face crushed against J.B.’s chest.

  ‘I’m so afraid of that man, Jonny,’ she said.

  And do you know what J.B. said? ‘So am I.’

  Chapter Nine

  April 3rd

  I’ve been to Diane’s house for dinner tonight. We went straight after school, running through streets and alleys and on to the broad tree-lined avenue where Diane lives. Our house had been in a street just like hers. Our house had been so much like hers. No wonder I love going there.

  Dinner was served at a long, mahogany table and the dinner set was white china with dainty lines of gold around the edges. Tall crystal glasses were on the table for mineral water and stemmed glasses for the wine. In the middle was a bowl of glorious chrysanthemums. It took me back to the dinner parties Mum and Dad used to have for J.B.’s business partners. Magnus Pierce was always there. He seemed to dominate the table with his loud voice and his larger than life frame. Even then, he fascinated me.

  And for the first time I have actually met Diane’s dad. He has grey hair, but a young face and he looks so much like Diane, it’s uncanny.

  ‘Terrible thing about what happened to that boy’s artwork,’ he said while we were having dessert. (Banoffee pie, my favourite.) I almost choked on it. I glanced at Diane but she didn’t even look up at me.

  ‘They’ve locked the school up now, Daddy,’ she said, sounding sorry for herself. ‘It’s like a prison in there. Isn’t it, Lissa?’

  My mouth was too dry to answer. Just as well I didn’t have to. Diane’s mum crashed into the conversation angrily. ‘Locking up schools! Vandalism!’ Her thin voice was shaking. ‘I hate using clichés but I don’t know what this world is coming to.’

  Mr Connell was calmer. ‘Yes, dear. But it won’t be for long. We should hear from Adler Academy soon.’

  Adler Academy, the private school in the countryside nearby. The one I had once hoped to attend.

  Now Diane is going to Adler Academy. Leaving me alone again? I can’t bear the thought of it. It was only just before I was leaving for home that I had the chance to ask her about it.

  ‘Well, you didn’t think I’d be staying in that dump, did you?’ And of course, I shouldn’t have. Diane was never meant to be in a school like mine. But the thought of losing her just makes me feel sick.

  ‘Couldn’t J.B. send you to Adler Academy with me?’

  Sure, I almost said. He’ll be able to afford it with his tips from Burgers A GoGo. He has a night job now too, stacking shelves. It gets worse and worse.

  But he has an interview coming up, for a ‘good position’. I heard him discussing it with Mum. And if he gets that job, then why shouldn’t I ask him to let me go to Adler Academy with Diane?

  How sure I was when I wrote that. Sure I was safe. Sure Diane was my friend. Sure everything was going to be all right. Diane was the only thing that made school bearable. Security had been tightened up because of what had happened, and there was an air of mistrust about the place.

  I was convinced Murdo knew I was responsible. He never smiled at me any more but I found he was watching me, very thoughtfully. When he talked to me he was always brusque.

  I didn’t care any more. I had Diane. And she had been right. No one had blamed us. Everybody assumed it had been the vandals and soon everything settled down once again.

  Except for Ralph Aird. Diane said he had reverted to type.

  He was always missing school and when he was there he was sullen and bad-tempered. Even Murdo couldn’t motivate him.

  At moments like that I felt sick with guilt. Had I done that to him? How would he have acted if he’d won the competition? Proud? Confident? A totally different Ralph?

  And he would have won. Murdo stormed into the class one day and showed us the entry that did win. A very unimaginative paper tower covered with ‘My Favourite Words from Books’.

  Murdo was incensed that such a winner had been chosen. It was banging down the desk time again. ‘Words are nothing!’ he shouted, his Highland burr always more noticeable when he was angry. ‘It’s how they are used that matters. The ideas they convey.’ He spat the words out at us. ‘It’s the characters they create. Ah Ralph! Your entry spoke of characters and ideas and literature.’ He shook his head violently and addressed Ralph’s empty chair as if he was in it. ‘Ah Ralph, surely you would have been the winner instead!’

  Later that same afternoon as we passed two of the other teachers in the corridor we heard them discussing Ralph. Diane pulled me back to listen.

  ‘He’s not at school again. And I heard he’s been running wild at night time all through the town centre. Always said he was a bad lot.’

  The other teacher agreed. ‘Well, look at the family he comes from. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d destroyed that collage himself. People like Ralph Aird and his kind can’t handle that kind of responsibility. But don’t tell old Murdo I said that, you know how precious he thinks his pupils are.’

  They moved off still talking and I wanted to scream after them, ‘He didn’t destroy it. He didn’t. We did.’

  But Diane thought it was amusing. ‘Told you they’d never suspect us,’ she said.

  ‘But that’s so unfair, Diane. If they start to think he did it himself.’

  But she just shrugged that off. ‘Do you think Ralph Aird cares? He’s probably forgotten his old collage already.’

  I didn’t think that was true somehow, and as I trudged home it was all I could think about.

  I could hear Margo snoring as I let myself in. She was lying on her back in her playpen, sounding like a great navvy. ‘She’s got adenoids,’ Mum keeps insisting. I stood looking at her for a moment. Apart from the awful noise, and her runny nose, she looked so sweet with her chubby cheeks and her rosebud mouth. I warmed all over just watching her.

  But where was J.B.? Not far anyway. He’d never leave Margo alone. Yet the house seemed so quiet. Ominously quiet.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen. The lunch dishes were stacked on the dresser and the lemon curtains were blowing gently in the breeze from the open window.

  Was he having another of his secret phone calls? There was an extension in the bedroom and I tiptoed upstairs, sure I was going to find him out at last. This time, I promised myself, I would tell Mum.

  His bedroom door was ajar, the telephone still in its cradle, lying beside the bed. No J.B.

  Puzzled, I pushed open the door of my bedroom and there he was, sitting on the bed. His shoulders were slumped and his face was drawn and grey. He looked older than I’d ever seen him. As if he’d had a shock.

  Something had happened to Mum! That was my first thought. Until I saw what he was holding in his hands.

  My diary.

  He had been reading my diary.

  He looked up at me slowly, not surprised or shocked to be caught, but very deliberately. He’d been waiting for me. He looked at me as if he was disgusted by what he saw.

  ‘What kind of girl have you turned into, Lissa?’ He held up the diary. ‘How could you have done such a terrible thing? How could you have been so cruel?’

  I shrieked at him, refusing to feel guilty. ‘You had no right to read my diary. That’s private!’ I tried to snatch it from him but he held it high away from me.

  ‘Maybe so, but I’ll tell you this, Lissa. You are going to school tomorrow and you’re going to confess everything.’

  Chapter Ten

  All that night I screamed and screamed at him, but he wouldn’t change his mind. ‘You’re going to own up to what you have done, and that’s all there is to say.’

  It was no use appealing to Mum. She’d never go against J.B. ‘I don’t know why I find it so hard to believe you could do such a thing,’ she said, clutching a snivelling Margo against her. ‘You did the same thing to little Jonny’s poster. How could you have been so cruel?’

  ‘You don’t know how cruel Ralph Aird can be. He deserved it.’
I refused to feel sorry for Ralph now, or guilty. He had brought it all on himself.

  When I said that J.B. jumped to his feet. ‘Deserved it!’ he yelled at me. ‘Deserved to have his hard work ruined, something he’d put so much of his time into ripped to shreds.’ I could have answered him then, told him about what I’d put up with from Ralph, all the time he was in prison. Told him how he’d made a fool of him for working in Burgers A GoGo. But he didn’t wait for an answer. Didn’t want one. He took a step toward me. ‘What could he have possibly done to deserve the wrath of you and your snobbish little friend?’

  ‘Don’t you say that about Diane.’

  He didn’t listen. ‘Maybe you both suddenly realised he was better than you. And he was going to prove it by winning that competition.’

  ‘He’s not better than me,’ I shouted. ‘Ralph Aird’s the scum of the earth.’

  I sounded like Diane when I said that. Scum of the earth.

  ‘And what does that make you?’ he shouted back.

  There was no arguing with him. No getting round him.

  ‘I won’t tell, and you can’t make me.’

  ‘Yes, I can.’ He held up the diary. ‘If you refuse to confess of your own accord, I’ll hand this over.’

  That was the worst threat of all. All my feelings, my hopes, everything was locked in the pages of that diary. I had no doubt he’d do what he threatened.

  ‘You’re the one that’s despicable. Reading someone else’s private diary. No wonder I hate you.’

  That got to him. He sank on to the arm of the chair. ‘Hate me then. I shouldn’t have read it, I know that. But when I saw it lying there I thought maybe inside I’d find the key that might get me through to you. I just wanted us at least to begin to respect each other again, Lissa. I didn’t know you hated me that much. I didn’t expect to find anything like this.’

  ‘I’ll never respect you again. I hate you.’ I was crying now. Didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. I didn’t see any way out of the nightmare he was creating for me.

  ‘Don’t say that, Lissa.’ Mum put her arm gently on my shoulder but I shrugged it off.

  ‘I’ll go with you to school tomorrow,’ J.B. said quietly.

  ‘To make sure I go?’ I snapped.

  ‘No. I want to support you.’

  That almost made me laugh. ‘You! An ex-con. Oh yes, I really need your support.’

  ‘I’ll go anyway,’ he said.

  ‘But Jonny … your interview,’ Mum reminded him.

  He looked up at her and managed a smile. He could always manage a smile at Mum. ‘I’ll go after. It’ll be all right.’

  But it wasn’t all right. It was the most humiliating day of my life. To stand in the headmaster’s office and have to admit to him, my voice shaking, exactly what I’d done. Murdo was there too, and that made it a hundred times worse. His eyes were hard and cold as he stared at me. I tried not to look at him, but as a vampire in a ghost story his eyes pulled me towards them.

  ‘But why would you do such a terrible thing?’ he asked when I’d finished.

  ‘He was always horrible to me.’ It sounded stupid even as I said it. I wanted to get back at Ralph Aird, but that would have meant telling them about J.B.’s stupid job and Ralph’s dad in the same prison as he was and I just couldn’t say it. I wanted to cry, but I held the tears back and only said again, ‘He’s horrible.’

  Murdo sighed. For once he didn’t fly into a rage or throw things or pull at his hair. He only said in a soft Highland lilt, ‘You weren’t in this alone.’

  I glanced at J.B. I had already expected this question. So had he. And I had told him again and again that I wouldn’t bring Diane into it. That was the least I could do for her.

  ‘But why not?’ he had yelled at me. ‘She’s every bit as bad as you. She egged you on, I could tell that in the diary.’

  But I wouldn’t tell on her. It was the one thing I could do that was right.

  I swallowed and lied. ‘There was no one else involved.’

  Murdo shook his head violently. ‘No. No. She was in it with you. Tell me, Lissa.’

  But I wouldn’t budge. You don’t grass on your friends.

  I was suspended from school for a week. That was bad enough, but worse was to come. As I was walking through the empty playground on my own (I refused to leave with J.B. and he had hurried on for his interview), Diane came rushing up to me. Her lips were white with anger.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. But she knew. The news had travelled through the school like an inferno. ‘If you’ve been telling on me, I’ll say you lied. I’ll never forgive you.’

  I tried to tell her I hadn’t but she wasn’t in a listening mood.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t do anything. You did it all yourself.’

  ‘Diane I know, I wouldn’t …’ But she only pushed me away.

  ‘If that’s all you think of our friendship you can just forget it. I don’t want to be friends with you any more.’

  And though I called her back, she ran off, wouldn’t listen.

  That was the worst thing of all. Diane was no longer my friend. That was finally what made me cry in the quiet solitude of my room, away from everything. I cried because I had lost the only friend I had. I had lost Diane.

  If I’d had the nerve to run away from home then, I would have.

  I was suspended for a week.

  No one phoned to ask where I was.

  No one phoned to find out when I was coming back.

  No one cared.

  My only consolation was that J.B. didn’t get the job. He pretended not to be disappointed when the letter arrived. But he was.

  So was Mum, but she looked at me as if it was my fault. ‘Your mind wasn’t on the interview, Jonny.’ I heard her comfort him. ‘You had so many other things to think about.’

  The main other thing being me.

  Well, J.B., we all have problems, I felt like telling him. I had been expected to go to school, sit exams, do well, when the front pages were full of your trial and your guilt and your villainy.

  You’ve just got to get on with it.

  Anyway, I had lots to think about myself.

  Like going back to school.

  Chapter Eleven

  My mum offered to come with me the morning I went back to school, but I said no. The last thing I needed was to walk in through the school gates protected by my mother.

  So I went alone. Knowing I would be alone the whole day. I wouldn’t even have Diane.

  It was even worse than I could have imagined.

  As I neared the gates I could see them all waiting for me. All the pupils in my year. They were standing on the pavement forming two lines across from each other. To get into the school I would have to pass between them. They were silent as I approached, so quiet it was terrifying and if I’d had the courage I would have run away then. But all I could do was to walk towards them, my whole body shaking.

  Murdo had once told us about ‘running the gauntlet’. I never thought then that one day I would have to do it myself.

  I stepped between the rows and held my breath. They didn’t shout. They didn’t scream at me. What were they going to do? Harry Ball was the first. He produced a whole bagful of rotten tomatoes and threw them at me. They splashed straight on to my face, into my hair. I let out a yelp as they exploded against my lips. I gagged and tried to spit them out but they were on my tongue, in my mouth, down my throat.

  That’s when I started to run. Then they all took their turn, pelting me with every rotting thing they had, rancid pears and squashy bananas and more tomatoes. I tried to duck and dive and avoid them, but it was impossible. I tasted mould and tried hard to keep my mouth shut, but with every direct hit I let out a yelp and my mouth was filled with rotten fruit. I immediately imagined maggots crawling down my face, wriggling round my tongue. I was crying out and I began to run faster through that angry crowd, dying to be past them. The smell was all over me, in my hair, in my clothes.
I’d turn from one side and only get hit from the other. And all the time not a word, not a murmur escaped their lips.

  At the end of the line, there was Nancy and Asra, their faces grim. They pelted me harder than the rest. Nancy spoke the only words. ‘I never thought you could be this bad.’ And she let go with another handful of tomatoes straight into my face.

  I ran, crying, heading for the toilets. Ralph Aird hadn’t been in that crowd, and I was soon to understand why. He was standing at the revolving doors that led into the main school. I hesitated when I saw him, sure he was waiting to throw something even more disgusting at me. I would have to pass him, and I’ve never been so afraid in my life. He had a look of such venomous hatred. He spat in front of me. ‘I’ll show you, Blythe. You’re goin’ to be sorry.’ It was all he said, but it made me even more afraid.

  And then, suddenly from behind me, all of my year came sprinting forward. I was so sure they were after me again and I almost tripped through the doors and into the main school. They wouldn’t dare touch me there.

  But they weren’t interested in me any more. They drew Ralph into their circle, Nancy and Asra and the rest and pulled him away, laughing.

  And that’s when I understood.

  Ralph had not been one of the ones who had pelted me. They had made sure of that. If I told on them, and I suppose they expected that I would, no blame would be attached to Ralph Aird. Now, it was being made very clear to me that Ralph Aird was one of them. I wasn’t.

  I cleaned myself up as best I could in the toilets, all the time knowing I could get rid of the smell, but I would never rid myself of the humiliation. No matter how hard I scrubbed.

  The door of the toilets squeaked open and I held my breath. Was this someone else to torment me? I dried my eyes quickly with a paper towel and swung round to face whoever it was.

  It was Diane.

  She stood at the door, one foot casually crossed over the other, her arms folded, just staring at me.