Num8ers Read online

  NUM8ERS

  RACHEL WARD

  FOR

  OZZY, ALI, AND PETER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Special Sneak Preview

  PRAISE FOR NUM8ERS

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  There are places where kids like me go. Sad kids, bad kids, bored kids, and lonely kids, kids that are different. Any day of the week, if you know where to look, you’ll find us: behind the shops, in back lanes, under bridges by canals and rivers, ’round garages, in sheds, on vacant lots. There are thousands of us. If you choose to find us, that is — most people don’t. If they do see us, they look away, pretend we’re not there. It’s easier that way. Don’t believe all that crap about giving everyone a chance — when they see us, they’re glad we’re not in school with their kids, disrupting their lessons, making their lives a misery. The teachers, too. Do you think they’re disappointed when we don’t turn up for registration? Give me a break. They’re laughing — they don’t want kids like us in their classrooms, and we don’t want to be there.

  Most hang about in small groups, twos or threes, whiling away the hours. Me, I like to be on my own. I like to find the places where nobody is — where I don’t have to look at anyone, where I don’t have to see their numbers.

  That’s why I was pissed off when I got to my favorite haunt down by the canal and found someone had got there before me. If it had just been a stranger, some old dosser or junkie, I’d have gone somewhere else, easy, but, just my luck, it was one of the other kids from Mr. McNulty’s “special” class: the restless, gangly, mouthy one they call Spider.

  He laughed when he saw me, came right up to me and wagged a finger in my face. “Naughty, naughty! What you doing here, girl?”

  I shrugged, looked down at the ground.

  He carried on for me. “Couldn’t face another day of the Nutter? Don’t blame you, Jem — he’s a psycho. Shouldn’t be allowed out, that one, should he?”

  He’s big, Spider, tall. One of those people who stand too close to you, doesn’t know when to back off. Suppose that’s why he gets into fights at school. He’s in your face all the time, you can smell him. Even if you twist and turn away, he’s still there — doesn’t read the signs at all, never takes the hint. My view of him was blocked by the edge of my hood, but as he loomed up to me and I moved my head instinctively away from him, our eyes met for a moment and it was there. His number. 12152010. That was the other reason why he made me feel uncomfortable. Poor sod — he doesn’t stand a chance, does he, with a number like that?

  Everyone’s got one, but I think I’m the only one that sees them. Well, I don’t exactly “see” them, like something hanging in the air; they kind of appear in my head. I feel them, somewhere behind my eyes. But they’re real. I don’t care if you don’t believe me — suit yourself, I know they’re real. And I know what they mean. The light went on the day my mum went.

  I’d always seen the numbers, for as long as I could remember. I thought everyone did. Walking down the street, if my eyes met someone else’s, there it would be, their number. I used to tell my mum people’s numbers as she pushed me along in my buggy. I thought she’d be pleased. She’d think I was clever. Yeah, right.

  We were making our way rapidly along the High Street, on the way to the Department of Social Security to pick up her weekly money. Thursday was normally a good day. Soon, very soon, she would be able to buy that stuff from the boarded-up house down our street, and she would be happy for a few hours. Every taut muscle in her body would relax, she’d talk to me, even read to me sometimes. I called out people’s numbers cheerily as we hurtled along. “Nothing, two, one, four, two, nothing, one, nine!” “Nothing, seven, nothing, two, two, nothing, four, six!”

  Suddenly, Mum jerked the stroller to a halt and swung it ’round to face her. She crouched down and held both sides of the frame with her hands, making a cage with her body, clutching so tightly I could see the cords in her arms standing out, the bruises and pinpricks more vivid than ever. She looked me straight in the eye, the fury clear on her face. “Listen, Jem.” The words came spitting out of her face. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I want you to stop. It’s doing my head in. I don’t need it today. OK? I don’t need it, so just…bloody…shut…up.” Syllables stinging like angry wasps, her venom fizzing all around me. And all the time, as we sat there eye-to-eye, her number was there, stamped on the inside of my skull: 10102001.

  Four years later, I watched a man in a scruffy suit write it down on a piece of paper: Date of Death: 10.10.2001. I’d found her in the morning. I’d got up, like normal, put my school things on, helped myself to some cereal. No milk, because it stank when I got it out of the fridge. I left the carton on the side, put the kettle on, and ate my Coco Pops while it boiled. Then I made Mum a black coffee and carried it carefully into her room. She was still in bed, kind of leaning over. Her eyes were open, and there was stuff, sick, down her front and on the covers. I put the coffee down on the floor, next to the needle.

  “Mum?” I said, even though I knew she wouldn’t reply. There was no one there. She was gone. And her number was gone, too. I could remember it, but I couldn’t see it anymore when I looked into her dull, empty eyes.

  I stood there for a few minutes, a few hours — I don’t know — then I went downstairs and told the lady in the flat below us. She came up to look. Made me wait outside the flat, like I hadn’t already seen it, silly cow. She was only gone about thirty seconds, and then she rushed out past me and was sick in the hallway. When she’d finished, she wiped her mouth on her hankie, took me back to her flat, and rang for an ambulance. Then all these people came: people in uniform — police, ambulance men; people in suits — like that man with the clipboard and paper; and a lady, who spoke to me like I was stupid and took me away from there, just like that, the only place I’d ever known.

  In her car, on the way to God knows where, I kept going over and over it in my mind. Not numbers this time, words. Three words. Date of Death. Date of Death. If only I’d known that was what it was, I could have told her, stopped her, I don’t know. Would it have made a difference? If she’d known that we only had six years together? Would it? Hell — she would still have been a junkie. There was nothing on this earth that could have stopped her. She was hooked.

  I didn’t like being there under the bridge with Spider. I know it was outside, bu
t I felt closed in, trapped there with him. He filled the space with his gangly arms and legs, constantly moving — twitching, almost — and that smell. I ducked past him and out onto the towpath.

  “Where you going?” he shouted behind me, his voice booming off the concrete walls.

  “Just walking,” I mumbled.

  “Right,” he said, catching up with me. “Walk and talk,” he said, “walk and talk.” Drawing level, too close to my shoulder, brushing against me. I carried on, head down, hood up, a blinkered patch of gravel and trash moving under my sneakers. He loped along beside me. We must have looked so stupid, me being small for fifteen and him like a black giraffe on speed. He tried to chat a bit, and I just ignored him. Hoped he’d give up and go away. No chance. Guess you’d have to tell him to piss off to get rid of him, and even then he probably wouldn’t.

  “So you’re new around here, yeah?” I shrugged. “Got kicked out your old school? Been a bad girl, have ya?”

  Kicked out of school, kicked out of my last “home,” and the one before that and the one before that. People just don’t seem to get me. Don’t understand that I need my space. Always telling me what to do. They think rules and routine and clean hands and minding your p’s and q’s will make everything all right. They haven’t got a clue.

  He reached into his pocket. “D’you wanna smoke? I’ve got some, look.”

  I stopped, and watched as he extracted a crumpled packet. “Go on, then.”

  He handed me a cigarette and flicked his lighter for me. I leaned forward and inhaled until it caught, drawing in some of his stink at the same time. I moved back quickly, and breathed out again. “Ta,” I mumbled.

  He drew on his cig like it was the best thing on earth, then blew the smoke out theatrically and smiled. And I thought, Less than three months to go, that’s all. All this poor bugger’s got is skiving off school and having a smoke by the canal. Not what you’d call a life, is it?

  I sat down on a heap of old railway sleepers. The nicotine made me feel less edgy, but nothing calmed Spider down. He was up and down, climbing on the sleepers, leaping off, balancing on the edge of the canal on the balls of his feet, jumping back again. I thought to myself, That’s how he’ll go, the silly sod, jumping off something, breaking his bloody neck.

  “Don’t you ever keep still?” I said.

  “Nah, I’m not a statue. Not a waxwork like at Madame Tussauds. I’ve got all this energy, man.” He did a little dance there on the towpath. Made me smile, couldn’t help it. Felt like the first time in years. He grinned back at me.

  “You got a nice smile,” he said.

  That did it. I don’t like personal comments. “Fuck off, Spider,” I said, “just fuck off.”

  “Relax, man. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Yeah, well…I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like looking at people, neither, do you?”

  I shrugged.

  “People think you’re up yourself, the way you keep looking down, don’t look no one in the eye.”

  “Well, that’s personal, too. I’ve got my reasons.”

  He turned and kicked a stone into the canal. “Whatever. Listen, I’ll never say nothing nice to you again, OK?”

  “OK,” I said. There were alarm bells going off inside my head. Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world — to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, to not get sucked in. You get used to someone — start to like them, even — and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves. I looked at him jiggling restlessly from foot to foot, now scooping up some stones and chucking them into the water. Don’t go there, Jem, I thought. In a few months, he’ll be gone.

  While his back was turned, I got up quietly from my perch on the sleepers and started running. No explanations, no good-byes.

  From behind me I could hear him calling, “Hey, where you going?” I was willing him to stay there, not to follow. His voice faded away as I put some distance between us.

  “OK, be like that. See you tomorrow, man.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Nutter was cracking the whip. Someone must have rattled his cage — whatever, he was definitely on our case. No messing about, no backchat, heads down, English comprehension test, thirty minutes. Trouble is, when someone tells me to do something, I have this problem. I just wanna tell them to piss off, I’ll do it in my own time. Even if it’s something I actually want to do. Which this wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I can read, sort of, but I’m not very fast. My brain kind of needs time to sort out the words. If I try and read quickly, everything gets muddled up, the words don’t mean nothing.

  Anyway, I was trying my best, this time. I really was. Karen, my foster mum, had read me the riot act over bunking off school. You know how it goes, don’t you? “Time to knuckle down…important to get some qualifications…life’s not a rehearsal…” She’d been talking to the school, to my social worker — all the usual suspects — and I figured I didn’t need the hassle anymore. I’d go along with it all, keep my head down for a bit, get me some breathing space.

  Everyone else was quiet, too, for a change. They’d picked up on the Nutter’s evil mood and decided not to push it. There was a bit of shuffling about and sighing, but basically everyone was sitting still and working — or pretending to — when, without any warning, something exploded into the room. The door swung back on its hinges and crashed into the wall behind, and Spider burst in like he’d been fired out of a cannon, stumbling on his feet, almost falling over. Instantly the mood was broken. Kids started cheering and jeering, shouting out to him.

  The Nutter wasn’t impressed. “What do you mean by bursting in here like that? Go outside into the corridor and come back in like a civilized human being.”

  Spider slumped forward with an exaggerated sigh and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Ah, come on, sir. I’m in now, aren’t I? I’m here.”

  McNulty spoke quietly, but with force, if you know what I mean, like he was just managing to keep a lid on things. “Just do what I say, and we’ll start again.”

  “What you doing this for, sir? I don’t need to be here, but I’m here. I’m ready to learn, sir.” An ironic look to the rest of us, met with an answering jeer. “Why d’ya have to give me all this grief?”

  The Nutter took a deep breath. “I don’t know why you’ve decided to join us today, but something has brought you here. Now if you want to join in, and I hope that you do, you need to go out, come in quietly like I’ve asked you, and we’ll get on with the lesson.”

  There was a long pause, while they eyeballed each other. The rest of us went quiet, waiting to see how it would play out. For once, Spider was almost keeping still, standing there, staring at the Nutter, with just one leg jiggling. Then he turned and went out, just like that. Every eye in that classroom watched him go and kept watching the empty doorway. Had he gone for good? There was a low murmur as he reappeared, drawn up to his full height, cool as anything. He paused on the threshold. “Morning, sir,” he said and nodded in the Nutter’s direction.

  “Good morning, Dawson.” There was a wary look in McNulty’s eye, not sure how to take Spider’s apparent backdown. Worried that victory had been too easy. He placed the comprehension sheet, some paper, and a pen on Spider’s desk. “Sit down, lad, and do your best with this.” Spider sauntered over to his desk, while McNulty returned to the front and stood there, watching us. “OK, everyone, settle down. Twenty-five minutes to go. Let’s see what you can do.”

  But Spider’s unexpected return had broken the mood. We were agitated now, a bit of a buzz going ’round. Everyone was fidgeting; there was backchat, chair legs scraping on the floor. McNulty kept picking away at people, trying to get back on top of things: “Eyes on the page, please.” “Keep your hands to yourself.” He was fighting a losing battle.

  As for me, the words in front of me swam and danced. They were meaningless, a pattern, nothing more,
like Chinese or Arabic. Because I couldn’t stop myself wondering if I was the reason Spider was back. Down by the canal I thought I’d felt the start of a connection, and it had scared me. I’d avoided him since then, but I’d no reason to think that Spider had given me a second thought, until now. Because I could have sworn that as he’d sauntered over to his desk, he’d winked at me. Bloody nerve. Who did he think he was?

  After lunch, the Nutter had had enough. Against a background of noise, laughter, general chat, he suddenly stopped. “Right, books away, pens away, paper away. All of you. Now!” What was he up to? “Come on, get on with it. All your stuff away. We need to talk.” Rolled eyes, yawns — yeah, we got it, here comes the pep talk. We put our things in our bags or stuffed them into pockets, and waited for the standard bollocking: “Unacceptable behavior…Letting yourselves down…Lack of respect…” But it didn’t happen.

  Instead he walked up and down between the desks, stopping and saying something to each of us before going on to the next one. “Unemployed.” “Checkout girl.” “Garbageman.” When he got to me, he didn’t even pause. “Cleaning lady,” he said and carried on walking. He worked his way back to the front, turned and faced us. “OK, how did that make you feel?”

  We stared at our desks or out the window. It had made us feel exactly how he wanted us to feel. Like shit. We all knew what sort of futures were waiting for us after school, didn’t need a puffed-up little tit like him to remind us.

  Then Spider blurted out, “I feel fine, sir. It’s just your opinion, isn’t it? It don’t mean shit. I can do anything I want, can’t I?”

  “No, Dawson, that’s the whole point, and I want you all to listen. At the moment, with the attitude you’ve all got now, that’s where you’re heading. However, if you apply yourselves a bit more, concentrate, make the best of your last year here, it could be different. If you get some certifications, get a good report from school, credits toward a degree, you can achieve so much more.”