The Madness of Mr Meretrine: Chapter 2, Part 1

Ta-daa! Chapter two, part one. I've not been able to get to the computer for a couple of days, but I'm back and bearing a new installment.  

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2

I stopped caring that seventh birthday. Stopped hoping for things – for affection, for treats, for attention. I stopped giving a damn about my parents, because, after seven years, I’d finally accepted that they didn’t give a damn about me.

            Sad, isn’t it? At age seven most kids pout and whine at their parents if they aren’t allowed some sweets – they don’t cut themselves off from them completely because they’ve been ignored for years on end, save for irritable comments and shouting.

            I hate whiney kids, but I wish I could’ve been one. It’s one of life’s stages – you hate looking back on it but it has to be there, at least if you’re normal.

            But, like I said, I’d stopped caring. I’d learnt that whining didn’t do anything.

            By the time I was eleven I was spending more time out of the house than in it, and by that I mean I was staying out late and making trouble because there was nothing else to do. When I was ten we moved to another even rougher part of Barnsley, and it was there I met the people, or rather person, who ‘led me astray’, as some put it. I honestly think I’d have acquired the same attitude had this person entered my life or not, but there’s no way of telling, really.

            Still, there was no way that I’d have grown up to be a saint, with or without their influence. You only had to look at my mother and father to know that I was headed for trouble.

            My parents had always had a rocky relationship – they’d been smacking and screaming at one another for as long as I could remember – but I did notice as I got older that the abuse, on both parts, was intensifying. When I was ten, during one particularly vicious row, my father nearly broke my mother’s cheekbone, and in response she started shrieking at him and throwing everything within reach in his direction. I was on my bed upstairs at the time, only vaguely listening, throwing a cricket ball up in the air and catching it single-handedly. These fights had happened so frequently for so long that I was numb to them.

Eventually they became like a mildly amusing game to me; I’d listen to the tone of my mother’s voice, or my father’s comments on tea (usually a takeaway or ready meal – something that we didn’t have to cook) and make an estimate as to when the next argument would be, what would be the cause of it and how violent it would get. I was usually right on at least one of the aspects.

I really didn’t care about them; they were like strangers. None of it felt real. It was as though I was walking through the world surrounded by an invisible veil – able to see, hear and feel everything but not quite a part of it. None of it affected me, not anymore. I’d stopped living properly.

So I got bored.

And I don’t cope with boredom very well.

My new school wasn’t an institution that I was particularly keen on entering. As anyone would expect, I didn’t want to go, but that wasn’t only because I was a kid and disliked the places on principle. It was because I knew that, for me (a ten-year-old child with no friends and no authority), entering a bottom-of-the-league-table school with a reputation for its roughness would be like a big, plump lamb running into a slaughterhouse, covering itself in barbeque sauce and yelling ‘come and get me, bitches’. 

In short, I was a dead man walking. I’d seen some kids of my age around the town, my potential future classmates, and they were about a foot taller than me and twice as wide, looking pretty damn capable of throwing a good punch. I wondered how the hell I was going to manage – if my classmates looked like that then the older kids (the school taught eleven to eighteen-year-olds) would be killing machines. I imagined them all too often; the best of them would be teens like those I’d encountered in the park all those years ago, and the worst would be violent monsters confined within human skin. I genuinely wondered whether I should throw myself off a bridge and save them the trouble of killing me, or otherwise driving me to suicide.

But then, just a few days before my first day at the school, I encountered someone whilst roaming the town.

I say ‘roaming the town’. I was actually in a shop.

Shoplifting.

Oh, I know what you’re doing. You’re judging me. Well, judge away, my friend – it’s what everyone does.

25^th August 1999

The summer weather had been and left, lasting about two weeks, and, in all honesty, I was glad it was over. I was tired of either staying in our shitty house or having to wear long, hot clothes outside because my parents didn’t think it necessary to buy sun cream. One day, with my stupidly childish logic, I went out in shorts regardless and spent the entire day in the sun, thinking, like my parents, that sun cream was a needless waste of time. It was only when I came back home and saw that I looked as though I’d been dunked in a deep fryer that I realised that I was mistaken. After that, I either had to go out in the boiling heat dressed in my winter clothing (I didn’t have many outfits, just to clarify) or stay indoors with my parents.

I went out in my winter clothing.  

I won’t lie, after a few minutes in the heat the fabric began to feel like the undersides of irons against my skin, and at one point I seriously considered leaping into someone’s garden and commandeering their two-year-old’s paddling pool, or otherwise taking my long clothing off and deciding I didn’t give a toss about potential skin cancer.

However, even in my heat-swollen brain I knew neither were good ideas, so I set off in pursuit of shade, eventually coming to rest outside a supermarket. I leant against the hot bricks of the wall, relishing each time the automatic doors swung open and fanned me with cool air.

But it did nothing for my throat, which felt as dry as sandpaper. I found myself staring longingly through the glass doors at the huge, cool, open tanks containing masses of bottles of water, which were located near the front of the supermarket. The sheer number of them blurred together in my heat-ridden vision, and I found my brain swimming with thoughts of cool water and quenched thirst.

Surely it wouldn’t be hard to sidle over and pick out a bottle, slip it under my shirt and leave. What’s one bottle amongst that lot?

I’d shoplifted before for various reasons. The most common cause was hunger, during the periods of my life in which my parents, caught up in their own moronic problems, seemed to forget that offspring needed feeding every now and again, so I’d have to nick sweets or something to feed myself (not exactly a balanced diet, but it’s better than no diet at all). Sometimes it was boredom, when I was out and about and looking for something to do, and stealing seemed the best distraction. And, once or twice, the cause was my drunken father, who’d occasionally stab a finger in my direction and tell me to get him some alcohol (this happened when I was nine) and, as I was always penniless, I’d have to scramble down to the supermarket and sneak Tesco-value vodka off the shelf.  

So, basically, I was a pretty accomplished shoplifter. The only slight worry I had was that, on all the past occasions I’d stolen, I had ensured I was wearing what I called my shoplifting coat – a big, blue raincoat that swamped my body frame and was perfect for hiding pinched goods. Now, I merely had a long-sleeved black top. Granted, it was better for concealment than summer wear, but it wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

Still, I decided that I was far too thirsty to care. Maybe the heat was going to my brain.

I sauntered over to the tanks, glancing round in case of onlookers. Deeming it safe, I slipped my hand in and pulled out a smallish bottle, which I thrust up my shirt. I clamped my hands over it in order to try and shield the imprint it strained against the fabric, almost screaming at how cold it felt against my burning skin.

Then I swivelled round, ready to leave.

A stone plunged in my stomach. There was a boy standing a few feet from me, eyes locked in my direction, quite unmistakably a witness to my theft.

He looked about seventeen, with longish, browny-red hair and malicious eyes, ebony in hue, that gave him a somewhat roguish look. At the sight of him I was reminded of badmouthed youths and smoking teens, swearing and fighting and the petrol-like smell of alcohol. Somehow I knew that, if this guy called security on me or something, he’d be classed as what is commonly known as a hypocrite. I know a thief when I see one.

Society says not to judge people before you know them, but I personally saw judgement as a shortcut. If I judged someone then I could rapidly know their personality, know how to deal with them, but if  I spent time ‘getting to know them first’ then I’d just lumber through an extensive period of time learning all the aspects that I could’ve easily read in their appearance. I might've found out that they own a rabbit called Chuck or something, but, at the end of the day, if you see a bloke with a bloody knife, then they are a bloke with a bloody knife. You don’t need to waste time learning their life story to get that, not unless you’re a total nut job.

Basically, I didn’t see what the point was of not judging people. Especially as I was always right.

And I was right back then as well.

The teenage boy gave me a look, narrowing his eyes and softly twitching his lips into what, with a little more enhancement, could be classed as a smirk. I looked at him intently, watching as he, with more fluidity than the liquid in my stolen bottle, swiped a pint of water for himself.

His hand seemed to scoop through the air as though it had a mind of its own. I half expected him to whip round, slap his rogue arm on the wrist and scold it for stealing, like how people tell off puppets that they themselves are controlling.

Nevertheless, he, with a look of underlying smugness, tilted his head ever-so-slightly in my direction and looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, eyebrows raised.

And that’s when it became a game.  

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I'll post part two in a couple of days. In the meantime, keep dancing reviews are appreciated. ;)