The Time Gene, page 17
“All the evidence said he done it. There was CCTV footage o’ him in a dark street, doin’ a deal wi’ the terrorist guys. They laughed at him in court, cos it was clearly him in the film, but…hey Leonie…have you seen Jurassic Park?”
Leonie’s eyes gleamed. “Nanna hired it out for us as a treat when she won second prize at the church fête for her Victoria sponge.”
“Thing is…there weren’t really any dinosaurs, were there?”
Leonie considered. “Not unless Gollum’s right and they do have one at Camperdown Park…”
“No, you daftie. It’s all fake. They cut bits out an’ stick bits in. That’s what they done wi’ my dad. Made it look real. But nobody knows, ‘cept my gran an’ me.” Then she gulped hard. “Well – there is one other person who knows,” she added, her voice smouldering. “An’ if I have tae burn for a thousand years in hell, I swear I’ll kill him.”
Every night she perfected the killing method. Stakes. Boiling oil. Wolves. Stew McLiar had initially told the paparazzi Fergie had “considerably assisted” him in his valiant rescue bid. But then his election had come up. And when the old witches in his surgery cackled that “Malone was a convicted criminal”, he had changed his allegiance overnight. He swore on oath in court he had always known Fergie Malone was a shifty, dishonest and despicable character and that the Jury could be as certain of his guilt as that Wednesday followed Tuesday.
The cold chafed Roxy’s hands and she wished she’d brought her gloves. She climbed far higher than Leonie dared to. It was beautiful up here. The sun’s dying rays glowed as red as the chilli peppers her dad had always hidden in their veg on the rare occasions he cooked. Buttery yellow lights flitted from rows upon rows of houses, high-rise flats, fields, factory chimneys... The coniferous shoots swathed the girls like a cloak.
“Be careful, Roxanne,” squealed Leonie, as Roxy swung on a flimsy branch.
“Don’t worry, Leonie,” she grimaced. “I, unlike my brother, have the wits to know when a branch won’t take my weight. He fell out a tree 40 feet high. An’ died.”
“But your brother’s not dead,” Leonie murmured.
Roxy groaned. “Aye. I should’ve let him snuff it.”
“Did you give him the kiss of life?” Leonie had removed her sock and appeared to be collecting Dreamia’s pines.
“Ugh, barf, yuck, NO!” She took a deep breath. She had but moments to consider the biggest decision of her life. “Gonna promise no’ to ever tell anyone I told you this?”
“Oh. I do!”
“Cross yer heart an’ hope tae die?”
“I hope I’m molested and disembowelled!”
“Ok. I can go back in time.”
“Oh, right,” Leonie said as she made a necklace with Dreamia’s fallen pines.
God. Roxy might as well have told her she could tap-dance or count to ten in French. “Nobody else’s ever believed me,” she murmured. “You really do?”
“’Course. You’re my friend.;”
Roxanne frowned. “You would believe me if I said I was the tooth fairy.”
Leonie’s face fell. “No, Roxy, I believe you because you’re my friend! Look…”
She extracted from her coat pocket two fluorescent multicoloured woven bracelets. “I got these from Santa but didn’t have anyone to give them to.” Her eyes lit up. “They’re friendship bracelets, Roxy,” she said in a breathless whisper. “The idea is, you give one to your best friend in the whole world, and then you’re bonded for life.” She passed one to Roxy, beseeching as a poodle.
Roxy’s face contorted. Fionnula and her gang had spent countless hours weaving these lurid and rather sickly bands, and lavished them on every girl, vowed undying devotion, only to drop them like a hot brick the next day. “You won’t catch me wearin’ that. Friendship bands are bollocks, Leonie.”
With quivering fingers, Leonie put the bracelets back in her pocket. Her eyes moistened, and she turned away, singing softly to herself.
That had been mean.
“Leonie, wait. I’ll tell you another secret…”
Maybe it was sheer guilt, or more cathartis, but she ended up telling her the entire history of her time-travelling adventures, from the attack on Fionnula to her bid to save her father. Every syllable enraptured and mesmerised Leonie.
“Oh, Roxy, I so wish I could turn back time. Must be amazing. You can make bad things better,” she cried. “Like Superman!”
Roxanne arched her back. “Dinnae go thinkin’ I’m some kind o’ superhero, cos I’m so not.”
“You are, though!” she badgered. “You saved your brother, an’ your school, an’ your dad...” She broke off. “Roxanne...do you think you could… bring back my dad?” Leonie stared up at her, her eyes as adoring and obsequious as Chantelle’s when gazing at her latest shag.
“Didn’t I tell you it hurt? Didn’t I tell you goin’ back one week felt like bein’ disembowelled alive! Didn’t I?”
Leonie chased after her, spluttering tears. “Please, Roxanne...I didn’t mean...”
“Promise me you’ll never, ever ask me to do that again, or I swear I’ll kill you, Leonie. An’ I won’t bring you back, either.” Leonie, tears burning her face, blurted a meek apology and swore to guard her secret dearer than her very soul.
As they skulked home in near total darkness, an awkward silence reigned between them, as if an invisible wall divided them. Roxy buried her head. She had been a pig. Moments later, when they were nearing their shared close, Roxy froze. The Watchman. Although she could not see him, his presence crushed her like a huge black bear. His eyes glinted, his cameras whirred in the darkness. How she envied Leonie as she trotted home to boiled mutton with her batty grandmother and listless mother. Leonie who, untainted by shadow, could lay down the past and take a leap into each new day, her fairy friends dancing at her heels.
Chapter Seventeen
The Bhoys
Braemuir Estate, Dundee, 14th November 1995
Leonie snivelled through her sums as Brooke prattled to Roxanne in the sand pit about Baywatch hunks and Brad from Neighbours. Leonie glanced with chagrin at Jacinta Whyte, who would finish first today. Would finish first every day from now on, unto eternity. For she, Leonie, must fall on her sword. With a deep breath she changed half her sums to incorrect answers.
“Hey, Mrs. B!” yelled Fozzy. “You cannae divide 68 by 9.”
“Och, Jeez, I forgot tae tell yous how tae do remainders!” Mrs. Bogieson fretted. Her hands dripped with a mixture of flour, paper slurry and sand. The door sprang open without the trace of a knock, and banged so hard against the wall it sent plaster flying. Two tall, brassy girls barged in.
“We’re doin’ a survey…”
“On the sports liked by 9s to 11s today…”
Leonie paled. Kayleigh Darroch and Adrienne MacFarlane. Leonie always knew which mudcakes came from them as they really stung. Folk called them “the Bhoys” because they supported Celtic. They specialised in black eyes and squashed noses. All the teachers knew they’d flooded the girls’ bogs, that they’d graffitied the gym hall, that they keyed staff cars. But they never said anything. According to Barrel, it was because they didn’t want their heads smashed in. The Darroch family was rotten to the core. Kayleigh’s brother had already been expelled for punching a teacher.
Kayleigh’s hunched shoulders and squat nose gave her the air of a mountain gorilla and her coarse brown hair hung as lank as Nanna’s old tights. Adrienne chewed gum so much she must have suffered chronic jaw-ache. Mr Cook never made her bin it. Last teacher who’d tried got a fistful of gum stuffed up her high-heels. With her tall, lanky body and waist-length bubble-permed blonde hair, denim jacket, and dangly earrings, she resembled an oversized lollipop.
“Now wait a minute,” groaned Bogey. “I’m in the middle of…”
Kayleigh shrugged. “Mr. Cook says we need it today. Question one: what is your favourite sport? Hands up for FITBA’!”
Several hands went up, although those tyrannosauruses who were buried in the sand had difficulties.
“Ten.”
“No!!!” chipped in the gum-chewing Adrienne. “Eleven.”
They had failed to count Gollum McGoughtrie who had crawled out from under the table. He was sporting a black eye after attempting to nip Barrel.
“Hey, Ade – there’s other folk over there!”
The spinosauruses, blissfully oblivious, were engrossed in brain gym.
“God’s sake, why didn’t you get them tae take the heidsets off?” Adrienne jeered at Bogey. She marched up to the them, and began hauling off the headsets. Ginga rolled backwards out of his chair and banged his head.
“DO YOU LIKE FITBA’?” she bawled over him as he came to.
“Adrienne MacFarlane, how dare you disrupt my class like this!” screamed Bogey. “An’ get that gum out your gob.”
Adrienne rolled her eyes. “Mr. Cook lets us chew. Next sport, Kayles?”
“Now, girl!”
Adrienne bristled, kicked someone’s schoolbag and spat out the gum at the nearest bin. It hit Gollum McGoughtrie’s nose instead, accidentally (she claimed.) As Kayleigh read out the remaining sport choices, Adrienne sulked for ten minutes, tying and untying her hair. She laid out a long row of fluorescent scrunchies on the class project table.
“Folks, can we wrap this up?” Bogey whined.
Kayleigh glared at her. “No’ very patient, are you? I’ve got tae ask what teams folk support yet. Hands up for Dundee United?”
Half the class raised their hands.
Bogey finally got a word in, and suggested it would be quicker to go round the class one by one.
“We’ll start wi’ the brachiosauruses,” Kayleigh blared. “Craig?”
“Dundee United.”
“Dexy?”
“Dundee,” he said, making a rude hand gesture at Craig.
“Leonie?”
“Nobody.”
Kayleigh looked as flabbergasted as if she’d encountered a student without a head. “You cannae no’ support naebody!”
“But I don’t like football.”
Adrienne strutted across and glowered over her desk. Her acrid deodorant overpowered Leonie so much she almost fell out her chair.
“But we need the whole class for the graph!” Kayleigh griped.
“You spoil everything,” sniped Adrienne. “Specially school photos.” The class sniggered.
Tears gushed from Leonie’s eyes. That class photograph had been taken two years earlier, when her scars had been far worse. But the memory still pained her.
“For Christ’s sake, pick a random team!” raged Bogey. Adrienne paid no more heed to Bogey’s hysteria than she would to a distressed jenny long legs. “Leonie,” she pressed. “See if if you got executed for no’ supportin’ a team...who would it be?”
The Bhoys closed in. The class jeered and chanted in unison. Leonie wanted to sink through the floor.
“Pssst…Leones,” Kayleigh hissed. “I’ll give you some sherbet if you say Celtic.”
“Look, guys – I ken how tae sort this,” Brooke simpered. “Just find out who Roxy supports. She’d support Adolf Hitler if Roxy told her to.”
“Celtic,” Roxanne said, a mote of wistfulness in her eyes. “I used tae go to matches with…” She stopped short.
“Woo-hoo!” Kayleigh bawled. “Roxy ROCKS!”
“You’re our pal for life!” Adrienne said, her teeth gleaming. “If anyone pisses you off, just tell us. We’ll beat them tae a pulp for you.”
Bogey put her foot down. Leonie would be put down for Celtic, and that was that. Leonie’s lips curled into a sly smile. She could use this. Her ‘football craze’ would cement her claim, whilst weakening Brooke’s. Brooke was an avid Dundee fan. She, Brooke, did not love Roxy enough to change her allegiance. But she, Leonie, would give up anything for Roxy - even Peggy and Grip, her favourite clothes pegs. She wondered if Nanna would let her paint their room green.
Leonie and Roxy were separated for lunch, as Leonie took a packed lunch, and Roxy a hot meal. Nanna said that school meals contained “too much fat and too few good, honest vitamins”. Yet she always made Leonie enough to feed an army, and baked the bread by hand.
Roxanne’s table had just one free chair. Brooke shot Leonie a catty smirk as Barrel took it.
“Sit wi’ us, Leonie!” yelled a voice. Leonie gave a start. Kayleigh Darroch.
Despair flooded Leonie’s head, and the canteen began to spin around. She hovered between the tables like a sparrow battling in a storm. Only two other tables had vacant seats, that of the rough primary sevens and a gaggle of sulky primary four girls who made it clear Leonie was as welcome a plague of locusts. She sank into the seat by Kayleigh, as gingerly as if the latter had been a malarial mosquito. Kayleigh put a podgy arm round her. Leonie winced. “She’s one o’ us now,” she announced to her friends. “She’s a Celtic fan. So if I catch any of you takin’ the piss out o’ Leonie, I’ll smash your skull. Got that?”
They all denied ever bullying Leonie, in most cases untruthfully.
Adrienne stuck her bony elbow in front of Leonie. “Are you havin’ a nice day?”
It felt weird to be exchanging social niceties with the school’s two most notorious bullies.
“Er...yes thanks. How did the survey go?”
“Pure dead brilliant,” Kayleigh said. “Cheers for askin’.”
“We’re doin’ another survey now,” said Adrienne, looming over her. She towered above almost everyone, including the primary seven boys.
“Um...nice.”.
“We were wonderin’ if you could help us.”
Leonie found this about as tempting as swallowing a cheese grater.
“About people’s balls,” chirped Adrienne. Stifled giggles wafted round the chairs.
“For our graph,” Kayleigh added.
“You do mean the ones you throw and catch, right?”
Adrienne pleaded ignorance as to the existence of any other sort.
“You ken, there’s balls an’ balls,” said Kayleigh. “For example, my boyfrien’ in P7 has got two rugby balls.”
“I’ve got twa basketballs!” bragged Fousty, a beefy primary six, and the only boy in the year taller than Adrienne.
“My sister’s ex’s were ping pong balls,” Adrienne said scathingly. “Ginga’s only got one. (Like Hitler.) Gollum’s got none. How many’ve you got?”
Leonie scratched her head. “T...t...two, I think.”
“Could you check?” Kayleigh asked.
“My neighbour’s dog chewed one; and the other’s a big foam ball,” she stuttered.
The entire table erupted into hysterical laughter. The Bhoys themselves could hold back no longer. Hot tears stung Leonie’s eyes as she stumbled to her feet, grabbed her lunch and stormed off to join the primary fours, who held their noses as she slumped into the chair.
As Leonie shuffled through her front door, she heard a flurried whisper, and the clink of shaking china. Mrs Ferreira, their upstairs neighbour, who was usually in hysterics, was visiting.
“Of course I’ll sign your petition, Ana,” Nanna said. That family is as steeped in trouble as lard in a lardy cake.”
“Especially that girl,” nodded Mrs Ferreira. “I see Satan’s darkness in her eyes. Witchcraft.”
“Yes. They are agents of the devil.”
“But you haven’t heard the latest,” Mrs Ferreira squawked. “Th...they’re on the loose, Perrie!”
“Who?” Nanna blasted.
Mrs Ferreira’s voice shuddered. “Fergie Malone’s hitmen. Ned Quigley and Ciaron MacMahon.”
Chapter Eighteen
Fool’s Gold
HMP Blake Prison, Scotland, 13th November 1995
Charlie took another drag on Havana cigar. Havana’s aroma lifted him from these grimy corridors and transported him to a sunkissed paradise. He glanced at his watch and heaved a sigh. Over three hours to go. Ten years ago, Irn Bru would have seen him through a long shift. Now he needed something stiffer. But he tapped his foot imperiously as he stared at the overflowing bins. He’d show the varmints Charlie McLuckie wasn’t a screw to be screwed over.
In fifteen years he might, God willing, have saved enough to retire to Hawaii. He’d lie on the beach all day under shady palms, and watch babes in hula skirts bring him banana mango smoothies as the golden sands tickled his toes…mmmm. But a glance at the piss-soaked floor reminded him he couldn’t actually see his toes. His belly stuck out like a speed bump. Sod it…time enough to shape up. He’d have another bag of crisps. But he saw them in his mind’s eye, tanned and snake-hipped girls gyrating in their hula skirts. His keys slithered from his pocket as the skirts wafted in the wind, exposing their thighs. As he stooped to retrieve his keys, a white gold light shone above him. He looked up, paralysed, at a white gold angel. The lovechild of Apollo. The sun incarnate.
Her light was so dazzling he had to shield his eyes. His eyes throbbed from her blazing luminescence. He lay on a white sand beach, flanked by tall, verdant palms, as the sun goddess bathed the sea in a lake of gold. He wore a lei garland and his jangly keys were not keys after all but a Blue Hawaii cocktail. Two bikini-clad girls simpered over to ask him to dance, their faces burning with passion and obsession with him. One, with a knowing wink, relieved him of his cocktail glass. “Hasta la vista,” he murmured as their interlocking eyes agreed a nocturnal rendez-vous.
Ned Quigley warmed himself in a motheaten blanket. He stared through the filthy window. Drizzly rain meandered down the pane, mirroring the tears that snaked down his cheeks. The droplets mingled with layers of dirt and grime as a sea mist drifted in. Misery swallowed him like flame. The courtyard flooded his eyes- the barbed wire, the grey blocks - the same as yesterday, and the day before. The same view that would greet him for the next twenty-five years. Nine months ago, he had been roaming the hills, breathing in the scent of pinewood and berries. But now he’d never leave this forsaken pit other than in a wooden box. Twilight bleakened the milky clouds; dense fog churned across the yard; soon only his reflection would face him through the dirty glass. The cold seeped through the window and chafed his bones. He cast his eyes around his cell. Grease, food remnants, spilt beverages and dirt obscured the slopping wet floor. The cell reeked of cigarette ash, mouldy food and stale sweat. Fag ends, biscuit wrappers and crisp bags littered the floor. He lay back upon his tombstone of a mattress, and counted the tears that dripped into his ears.
