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No one was ever sure what Sanjay might have said or done to provoke him. It had started out reasonably well – Sanjay defending, Caleb trying to work under the block of his left arm, the other boys hovering around the edges of this main event, which had somehow assumed far more importance than any other aspect of the game. It was all very solemn, very nearly silent except for the hiss of breath through clenched teeth…and something (none of the boys ever stated clearly what, if anything) which saw Caleb launch himself forward with a grunt, bulling into Sanjay’s chest and beating his head ferociously against the asphalt.
Every time Sanjay’s head hit the court, there was a muffled thud, the scrape of his skin dragging along, a yelp. Eventually, the yelps became groans. The groans became whimpers. The whimpers stopped.
Caleb never made the slightest noise, never blinked. His face hardly twitched. He crouched over Sanjay with a cold fury in his face, rhythmically beating another boy into unconsciousness. He raised one hand – his left hand – to brush the hair from his eyes, and a slender steel bracelet glinted around his wrist. He stood up without saying a word and fetched Sanjay’s white cricket jumper from the sidelines. With the greatest care, he lifted Sanjay’s head and delicately folded the jumper into a neat pillow underneath.
He stood up again. He folded his arms. He barely even glanced at the two teachers who gripped him by the shoulders and marched him off to the principal’s office. He didn’t seem to notice the bustle around Sanjay, being carried off on a makeshift stretcher and apparently still unconscious. He might perhaps have smiled slightly at the sight of Ming gingerly reaching for the white jumper, left neatly folded where Sanjay’s head had been, and doing his best to avoid the bloodstain (still damp, still dark red rather than brown, still spreading over and through the fabric) that looked as though it belonged somewhere on a map.
Maybe he smiled. Maybe he didn’t. Caleb seldom looked clearly at anyone, and nobody seemed to do very much looking at him. Then again, nobody was looking at anyone – all eyes were fixed on the spot where Sanjay had been, and no one made a sound.
She kept her desk clear. She put a new ink sketch (usually done by her daughter, who was a reasonable if not exactly wonderful artist) in the frame behind her desk at the start of each new term. She occasionally found flowers for the windowsill, if there were any pretty ones in season or it was a reasonably cheap purchase. Lilies, usually. She liked lilies. Failing that, she liked roses (yellow Elinas with a beautiful light scent) cut from the enormously tangled bush by the window of the staffroom. She made sure that the student chair on the other side of her desk was repaired or replaced from time to time. It didn’t do much good, that last effort. As soon as the chair was fixed, students began kicking at it.
Like this one, for instance. Caleb Ellis. Again. She adjusted her glasses slightly and studied him in silence. As usual, she started at his feet.
Scuffed shoes. Not regulation school shoes, she noticed – a pair of scuffed black ankle boots, the laces broken and tied together again at least three times to judge by the extra lumps and bumps and awkwardly-shaped bulges along their length. The left toe might even have been patched. Grey socks rumpled around his ankles, the elastic totally gone. Trousers just a fraction too small for him, stopping just short of his ankles and starting to wear thin at the knees. They were fading a bit, she could see, and if he turned around she knew there would be a similar slight change of colour somewhere around his backside. Shirt – woefully untucked, top button missing, cuffs looking scruffy rolled past his elbows, and a grey t-shirt clearly visible underneath. She had never seen him with a jumper or a coat that fitted him properly; the only coat she’d ever known him to wear was an elderly army service jacket that was best described as faded green, slightly frayed and far too big for him. Indeed, the seams that should have marked the shoulders were hanging down almost to his elbows. It was the genuine article, she knew, with a threadbare patch on the right shoulder where the flag and force insignia had been torn away. His father’s, she assumed. He never wore a school jumper; she had a sneaking suspicion that he didn’t actually own one, and that the grey t-shirt was a way to keep him warm. The army jacket only ever appeared in the coldest of weather – any other day of the school year, he wore his school shirt and his t-shirt and a steel bracelet glinting sharply around one thin brown wrist.
“Caleb,” she began. How exactly did one talk to a boy like this? She tried her best, but she’d never been certain what to say to him, even as a little boy, and she was beginning to think that he knew it.
“Ms Lee,” he countered coolly, his face totally impassive. He had the unnerving habit – whether he’d always had it she didn’t know, but he certainly had it now – of looking through people, rather than at them. He would focus on a spot directly between their eyes, almost as though he was aiming at a target, and he would look straight through anyone he didn’t want to talk to. He was doing it now. She tried to lock eyes with him, tried not to blink. As long as he couldn’t look away…
She tried not to think about the fact that she was engaging in mind games with a thirteen-year-old boy whose voice was still breaking. As long as she didn’t blink…
He had magnificent hair. She couldn’t help but notice it, if she was going to stare at him. Dark, coppery brown, cropped close to his head and perfectly straight. It bristled at the front, and had just one thin tuft left long enough to dip between his eyes. His nose was just a little crooked, falling slightly out of joint at the end. Mouth…no trace of a smile. No sign of a frown. No teeth in sight. A perfectly straight line, as emotionless as a pencil stroke on paper. His whole face was just a fraction too thin – much like the rest of him, it gave the impression of not quite being fully formed, of not quite having the bulk to call himself finished. He was a skinny boy, no doubt about it. Almost too skinny, to be honest; he looked hungry all the time…and those eyes didn’t help in the slightest.
They were green. Pale, muted green. There was nothing too unusual about that; having met his mother once or twice in passing, Annette Lee knew perfectly well where they must have come from. It wasn’t the colour. It wasn’t the shape. It was…the expression, for lack of a better word. She’d always seen something unbelievably distant, something unbelievably cold in them, and as hard as she tried, that first moment wouldn’t go away. They were very like his mother’s eyes…but Annette had never seen Julia Ellis look quite like that.
Thirteen-year-old boys should not have frightened her. Thirteen-year-old boys did not frighten her. She was just being very careful about this one. That was all.
“Caleb.” She started again, trying not to break eye contact. She could feel her eyes beginning to water, but she did not blink. Caleb did, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Even if he blinked a hundred times, she wouldn’t have beaten him yet. This was a new, different sort of game. “What did you do?”
Caleb shrugged. “Ask Mr Neves. He told you already.”
This was true, strictly speaking. Dominic Neves had pinned Caleb down outside the door, one hand clamped tightly around his bony right shoulder. He’d stormed in and, through tightly clenched teeth that seemed to be shaking with fury, coldly informed her that Sanjay Krishnan had been unconscious for ten minutes and it was all Caleb’s fault.
“I know. But I’m asking you. What happened?” Dominic had very nearly insisted that Caleb Ellis be expelled. This was not the sort of decision that could be made lightly. “I can’t ask Sanjay, so I want to hear it from you. The truth, Caleb.”
That infuriating shrug, and the barest flicker of a muscle in his cheek. She would have slapped him if he hadn’t been a student, just for that. The mere fact that he existed made him almost too insolent to stand. “I don’t have to tell you anything if I don’t want to.”
“Yes, you do. If you don’t speak, I’ll have no choice but to accept Mr Neves’ version of events. I’ll call your mother and you’ll have to be expelled.”
“You can’t.” She’d barely finished the sentence before he shot back a reply.
“I beg your pardon?” She adjusted her glasses again, hoping that he wasn’t actually serious. Worse yet, that he meant to prove it somehow!
“You. Can’t.” Caleb repeated very slowly and clearly, as though he were speaking to a particularly stupid small child.
She closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to look at the thin steel band that slid up and down his left arm. That bracelet made life very difficult for her – without it, she wouldn’t need to worry about antagonising this boy any further. If she couldn’t see it, Annette Lee was quite within her rights to shout at him as loudly as her voice could manage. She still wouldn’t be allowed to throw him across the room (as she really wanted to do), but she could at least rage at him until her throat hurt. When she opened her eyes again, the bracelet was still there and Caleb appeared to have won the game. “Why is that, exactly?” she enquired, keeping her voice as calm as she could manage.
“Because,” he told her evenly. “They’ve just cut off our phone line.”
“Don’t play games with me Caleb. I mean it. You’ll be expelled, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it if you don’t tell the truth.” She didn’t have the patience to deal with this. Not today, and certainly not now.
“I am telling the truth,” he snapped. Frustration. It was probably best to take a step backwards. He’d never shown many signs of being a particularly aggressive boy until today…but every teacher in the school knew what he could do. Everybody knew about his history, his background. Nobody had any particularly burning wish to experience it first hand. “They cut off the phone line last week.”
Fine. He wanted to be difficult. She had him trapped anyway. “Where does your mother work?” She had to work somewhere – Caleb’s father was like Caleb, and there was no other way to pay the costs of…well, everything. Children were expensive these days, and the Ellis’ had three of them. “What’s the phone number? I’ll call her there.”
“She works at night, but you can try.” Damn him. He might actually have been enjoying this. It was usually difficult to tell if he was smiling – was he smiling? Was he? Damn this boy! Damn him to the deepest pits of hell. He’d fit right in there.
Annette decided she wasn’t going to look at him any more. She wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. Instead she turned aside, picked up the earpiece to her telephone and calmly began punching in numbers.
“Hello. Is this DJ’s? It is. Good. Do you have contact details for Julia Ellis?”
The voice at the other end was a man’s – DJ, she assumed. Contrary to her expectations, he didn’t sound particularly rough. Crackly, yes – it must have been a patchy connection – but not too bad, all things considered. Just a little confused about why anyone would possibly want to call the number of a pub at one in the afternoon on a work day. It wasn’t exactly the busiest time for a man in his line of work. “Yeah, I do. She’s actually here – we were having a quick meeting when you rang. I’ll grab her for you.”
“There’s no need. If you could pass on a message that her son’s school would like to see her as soon as can be arranged, that should be adequate. There’s an urgent matter we need to discuss, preferably face to face.”
“Erm…yeah. Okay. She’s on her way.” The squirming he must have been doing…it was almost palpable.
“Right. Yes. Thank you.” Annette laid the phone down and turned back to Caleb. He didn’t seem to have moved. “Stay here. Your mother’s coming to talk to me – you’re quite certain there’s nothing you want to tell me before she arrives?”
“Yep.” He played absently with the steel bracelet, sliding it along the length of his arm and twining the links of it around his fingers. “I’m sure.”
Julia Ellis was not the easiest woman to describe. Not short, but not frighteningly tall – about five foot seven, maybe five foot eight if she was lucky and stood perfectly straight to be measured. Her eyes were green, like Caleb’s were, but other than that, there was absolutely no way of knowing anything about her ancestry save that everything had been more or less the same species. It was entirely possible that she herself did not know anything concrete about it. There was nothing she resembled so much as a series of features thrown together into a human being accidentally, each with no excuse for its presence except that it had obviously come from somewhere. She had the look of someone who was not quite finished – Caleb had it too, in a slightly different way – but where his face was nearly impossible to read because of it, Julia Ellis seemed merely to shift and change every time she opened her mouth to speak. She seemed physically incapable of retaining the same expression (or indeed, the same general look) for more than two minutes. She was…poorly defined, for lack of a better expression. Maybe she would have been pretty if she could have stopped the shifting rawness that was so much a part of her. She might even have been beautiful in her way, if she could just close the lines and sit still. She never did.
“Robert is fine.” Annette had never had much to do with the younger boy. He was nowhere near as volatile as his brother, and had no outstanding talents to catch her eye other than reasonable intelligence and generally good behaviour. He was very good with mathematics, if she remembered rightly; far from brilliance, but almost certainly an ease and an affinity that helped him through. He very rarely had any reason to speak to her, or she to him. Ten years old, apparently consisting entirely of elbows and knees, slightly shabby and thoroughly unremarkable in every way but one…that was Robert Ellis – or ‘Robbie’, as he was called. Ordinary as he was, Annette had nevertheless learnt to recognise Robbie – she had learnt the faces and mannerisms of the entire family – by sight. These days, she could identify any Ellis (except for the smallest child, who she had never seen) at a hundred metres and from any angle you cared to name.
She had a school to manage, and one could never be too careful.
She cleared her throat primly. “I assure you, Robert is fine. He’s in a science class, I believe. However, there is the small matter of Caleb…”
Julia’s eyes flicked over to Caleb, drumming his heels against the legs of his chair. He refused to meet her eyes. She made a small, indeterminate noise. He grunted. Plainly she wouldn’t be getting a confession from him just yet. “What happened?”
“Caleb…” Annette sighed softly to herself, wondering how best to express this. “He attacked another boy. Sanjay Krishnan is his name. The other boys refuse to discuss what might have occurred, but our maths teacher saw the incident and brought Caleb to me. Mr Neves suggests that your son be expelled.”
“Sanjay was seriously hurt then?” Julia was biting her bottom lip. Thinking about her options. Annette could just about see the cogs turning behind her eyes. It was like clockwork, in a face so open she could see every click of every gear. They studied each other quietly. “Expulsion…that’s a big step.”
“I know, Mrs Ellis, and I am reluctant to take it without a great deal of thought. The exact state of Sanjay’s injuries are not known.” Dominic had not told her in any great detail, though she was certain there had been blood beneath his fingernails. Not many substances left a creeping brown stain like that, and still fewer could be found in a school. “I know that he was unconscious when Mr Neves saw him, but beyond that point…”
“Oh.” She really was extraordinarily easy to read, this woman. The fences had gone up. By this stage, she understood perfectly. “Right.”
“It would have to go on his file, you understand. An incident like this…in the circumstances, I’m sure you agree that we can’t allow any chance of a repeat performance. The risk to the other students would be too great.”
“It sounds as though your mind’s made up.” Her mouth had settled into a thin line. Not like Caleb – not blank, or at least not intentionally so – but nevertheless as close to inscrutable as someone like her could get. There were no clues in her voice either. Steady as a rock; no anger (Annette had been fearing anger), no resentment, no argument that she could tell. Acceptance, and maybe resignation…but that was all. “You have to look after the students, and this is how you do it.”
“I’m sorry.” She meant that. She really, truly meant that. Expulsions were rare and growing rarer, but Annette had never liked being the one to decide on them. It was the one aspect of her job that she actively hated. Besides, she couldn’t help thinking that Caleb Ellis might possibly have been a decent sort of boy – never a dream boy, never a model student and never in a million years would he have been a sterling ambassador for the school, but decent enough in his way – if only he wasn’t himself.
That was, of course, precisely Caleb’s problem.
From the inside, the tenements consisted of a dimly lit hallway, with fluorescent lights buzzing and sparking erratically overhead. A faded green pattern tiled on the walls at about shoulder height, and scratched linoleum beneath the grimy stained glass panel set into the door. It was supposed to add a touch of class, that panel – invariably a sickly pink rose pattern – but all it really did was cast a mildly unhealthy looking reddish light on the creaking, rickety stairwell that led up to the flats themselves. Everything – and that does mean everything – carried a lingering trace of dust, old gas heaters and (inexplicably) vinegar.
A sigh whistled through her teeth. “You couldn’t help it, could you? Just for once, you couldn’t let things lie.”
Caleb kicked at the steps on his way up, trying to raise a few more splinters from the already battered wood. “I didn’t mean to get you mad,” he muttered. The step he was standing on groaned.
“Cause and effect, Caleb.” Julia stood aside to let him pass her, scabby green tiles pressing into her back. He nodded, but didn’t turn his head. “Cause and effect. If you’re going to beat someone up, you expect to be punished. If you’re expelled…I’m going to be mad. You know that.”
“Hmmm.” He had an entire language of noncommittal noises.
She tossed him the house keys. “If you’re going to be here, you can make yourself useful. Your sister’s with Cesca now, but I’m not paying someone to baby-sit if you’re home to do it. Until we sort something out, you’ll do as you’re told.”
“But Mum…”
“Don’t argue with me Caleb. Just don’t.” She raised her eyebrows, reached up to tilt his face until he had to meet her eyes. “I need your help. It’s either that or I think of a real punishment – the choice is yours.”
He knew about the real punishments. This was likely to be easier. “Okay.” Even knowing that he’d picked the easy way out didn’t mean Caleb had to be graceful about it. He didn’t know how to be graceful. “If I have to…”
“Believe me, you do.” She ran her hand lightly through his short-cropped hair, feeling the pointed bristles against her fingers. “I’ll be back soon. You do anything stupid and I’ll skin you alive.”
“Where’re you going?”
There was an answer for all situations. This particular answer could cover most of them all by itself. “I’ve got to see a man about a dog.”
She’d always loved the little things in life, the things you had to hunt for. Michael – particularly his face – seemed to be made of little things. Of course, he was nearly a foot taller than her and therefore not really little at all, but the little things were what made him. He certainly wasn’t too striking without them. As he lengthened his steps to catch her up, she tried to see him as another person might, just to see if she could still do it.
He really was immensely tall, she decided privately. It was almost as though someone had caught hold of his shoulders and given them a heave upwards without troubling to fix the proportions again. He had plenty of length – in fact, his legs were ridiculously long, and he could do some extraordinary things with his bare toes – but no width to speak of. Even under full training, even at his bulkiest he had been in proportion rather than heavily muscled, and the years between then and now had stripped him right down until he was almost too thin. Faded jeans, black shirt with the top button missing and the loose thread dangling absently down his front, thin steel bracelet glinting as always on his left wrist. Then again, there was one thing he seemed to have gained a little more of lately. He still liked it short from ingrained habit and convenience, but his hair – reddish-brown-black or whatever colour it was, the same dark coppery shade that Caleb and Robbie had and Cass loudly wished she did – was longer now than it had been, almost fluffy as it dipped towards his eyebrows. She did it herself over the kitchen sink, with the aid of his shaving mirror propped against the window to check she wasn’t stabbing him in the head with every wisp that dropped down the plughole.
Major consideration, that was. Very important.
“I thought I’d seen you,” he told her quietly, “but I wasn’t sure. You’re usually asleep at this time of day. Is it a night off or something tonight?”
“Unfortunately, no.” If it weren’t for the fact that the rent was well and truly overdue, she would have welcomed a night off. She would have loved one. Even with the bills to pay, it was still a tempting proposition. “Something came up.”
“Ah.” He turned his head to look at her. “Private conversation time?”
It hadn’t taken them long to come up with this. The walls of the flat were thin. Any given wall and a small glass were enough to know the full doings (in meticulous detail) of the entire tenement, and they could usually tell which of their neighbours had been fighting by the general direction of the smashing sounds. The walls between individual rooms were even more questionable. Add to that a small child (originally Caleb, then Robbie and now Cass) who apparently wasn’t yet sure what a closed door might mean…and most of their private moments somehow ended up being in very public spaces. It was far from ideal, but if they blocked off a space – usually made up of Michael’s back to the street and hers to the nearest wall – and kept their voices low, they could at least pretend that they weren’t being overheard. It even seemed to work occasionally.
“Everything okay?” He smiled slightly; a little crooked curve upwards at one corner of his mouth, almost too small to count as anything. A little boy’s smile that didn’t quite fit. His face was still readable, but it had never been very mobile – years of training, years of ‘eyes forward’ and ‘are you eyeballing me, soldier?’ had sunk in deep, and it was only rarely that he really showed anything on his face. You had to learn to read him properly, and some of the signs were a little understated. This one…oh dear. His eyes weren’t smiling.
“With me, yes.” His left arm was up against the wall by her head, and the flash of his scratched bracelet was very distracting. It had a tendency to hang loose around his wrist, though she knew perfectly well that it was just slightly too small to go anywhere near his fingers. It certainly couldn’t be rolled off too easily. That was the whole point of the exercise. “Could you put your arm down?”
“Sorry.” He moved the arm away. “Is that better?”
“Much better.” He’d spread his fingers lightly over the curve of her hip. His fingers twitched, finding that one ticklish spot over the bone. He knew her far, far too well. Little tiny circles right there…and he hadn’t even looked down. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. She tried to find a better way of explaining this, then gave up. “Caleb was expelled.”
“What?” She was suddenly very much aware that the hand at her waist had stopped moving. Michael didn’t seem to have noticed, though he hadn’t taken the hand away. “He what? What happened?”
“He got into a fight. Knocked another boy clean out. They couldn’t get hold of you, so the school rang me at DJ’s…half an hour later and he’s not a student there any more.” She brushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “They said he was dangerous, and how are we supposed to argue any different after a performance like that?”
“We can’t.” Michael slammed a fist into the wall by her head, apparently unaware of the grazes on his right knuckles and the thin film of plaster dust that drifted off the wall. Either he didn’t see it or he just needed to hit something. He did that sometimes, and there were dents in the walls to prove it. One or two of the more spectacular ones had even been patched over. He snorted. “Fuck.”
“Come on Mick.” It wasn’t often that she called him Mick. Usually, that was reserved for moments when she played with the hair on the back of his neck. Much like she was doing now, in fact. “If you’re going to get angry, you might as well have a proper vent. Swear. Kick things. Go nuts.”
“I’d be shouting for ten minutes if I did that,” he reminded her, bending his neck down so she could scratch it harder. He liked that. “Continuously. It’d all be obscene. I don’t think they’d like that much.”
“There’s a ‘they’ now?” She raised her eyebrows quizzically. “Exactly how many enemies did you make today?”
“A few.” He wasn’t smiling. “I spent the afternoon at the police station.”
That was not what she wanted to hear. It explained his mood perfectly, but she still didn’t want to hear it. The police station was bad news. There was no way of knowing what might come from this incident. “Shit. Why? What did they want?”
“Same as usual.” He just looked at her. He had such pretty eyes – hazel they were; green flecks, blue flecks on brown. They weren’t striking enough to redeem the rest of his ordinariness, but they were nice in a mixed up sort of way. “I’m on notice again. If things heat up…”
“They’re expecting something?” They had to be expecting something. Michael was always on notice theoretically, and he tended to behave as though he was, but it was rare for someone at the station to actually make it official.
“Riots. Something, but probably riots.” He tried to smile. It didn’t work very well. Instead, he just looked like he was going to be sick. “They’ve had a tip off. If that tip off is right, I answer for it.”
“Soldier without a gun, policeman without a badge…they don’t pay you nearly enough for this job.”
He started to laugh. It wasn’t very funny, but he laughed. “Guess what, Julia?” He kissed the top of her head with a flourish (which was most unlike him), then grinned the sort of wide, slightly off-putting smile that has no mirth in it at all. “The word is ‘peacekeeper’…and they don’t pay me anything.”
