‘Don’t you shout at me!’
‘Why not, you’re shouting at me?’
‘I want this room cleared up before tea time, do you hear me?
‘It doesn’t need it, I like it like this.’
‘How can your grandmother stay in all this mess?’
‘It not a mess, it’s how I want it and I didn’t ask Grandma to come, why does she have to anyway, she has her own place and likes it there.’ I could hear the frustration in my sister’s voice.
‘By tea time!’ I heard my mother say as she rattled down our stairs.
I looked at her red angry face and tried hard to remember how it was, how it used to be before Dad had been killed. Our lives had turned upside down that day and since then Mum wasn’t the same. She and my sister had these shouting matches and I just kept quiet and out of the way. Next week was Christmas day and once again we were having Gran to stay. I loved her and if I wasn’t in that tiny little box room she could have had my bed with all my love, but that room was so small even I had to duck under the sloping ceiling of the dorma roof and I was only nine. After the accident we had moved to this much smaller house, it was all we could afford and Mum had changed. Her way of smiling changed and the rows with my sister just got worse and worse.
‘I ‘m off out Mum,’ I called as I slipped out through the back doorway.
‘Where are you off to?’ she asked, ’Don’t forget I am doing a double shift and I want you back here by seven before I go.’
‘Just out’ I shouted as the door slammed behind me.
I tried not to look back at the sad door, paint cracked and worn, not how Dad would have had it, but he wasn’t here now and it was all Mum could do to feed us and pay the mortgage, whatever that was. She used to hunch her back over what she called her account book several evenings a week, trying to find the odd pound or two to make ends meet, as she said. I thought again about the job I had been promised, it would give us loads of money.
I had first met Stevie over the ’Banks.’ The ‘Banks’ was what the locals called the fields that ran alongside the old disused railways. Brambles and scrubby bushes filled it now and the very place us boys made our ‘dens.’ Stevie was older than the usual crowd that met up there and he used to pass around stub ends of fags. I never tried one, I knew if caught my Mum would kill me, so I always made an excuse that I had asthma and got out of it that way. Stevie made me feel grown up the way he talked about knowing people who could get you jobs that paid hundreds of pounds. Today he was going to give me all the ‘gen’ and he promised that I would be able to give my family the best Christmas ever with the money it would earn me.
We sat in a dip in the hillside shadowed now in the late afternoon. ‘It’s like this Morgan,’ he puffed, his cigarette hanging from his lip, ‘ I give you this parcel and you gotta take it to a house, and then I give you the money next time I see you’
‘Is that all?’ I asked, ‘there’s a catch somewhere isn’t there, I ‘ve got to get it to the other side of the city or even another town?.’
‘Nup, just a few streets away.’ he answered, ‘Nelson street.’
‘That’s near to where my Gran lives, I exclaimed, thinking when the job was done I could pop in and see her. ‘Right give me the parcel and I’ll be off.’
‘Oi, hang on a tick, you need to make sure it is well inside your pocket, you lose that and that’s the last job I get you mate.’ he smiled and the ash from his cigarette dropped onto his top. I hated the smell and hoped it would be gone off me before I got to Gran’s
The shadows had lengthened and I pulled up my hoody around my face to keep off the bitter wind. Gran lived in the close just off Nelson Street and this parcel had to go to 34 quite a way passed the turning into the close. I couldn’t wait to pop in to see her and get a hot drink.
I got to the turning in the road and suddenly heard someone.
‘Hey is that young Morgan?’ a voice called and I looked up at the beaming face of Greg He had been my Dad’s friend and at one time used to call round to see Mum but then suddenly he had stopped. I missed him, he was the link with my past before the accident and happier times.
‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ he asked.
Suddenly I knew I shouldn’t mention the parcel or where I was going.
‘Just to see Gran’ I lied.
‘I am going that way myself so come on, too cold to hang around.’ he said.
We stopped outside Gran’s and I stood by the gate and then dodged back into the front garden and watched as he walked off down the street. I waited till he had gone, feeling relieved that he had, but I felt as though I had betrayed my Dad lying to Greg,
I turned and was just about to rush off when my Gran’s door opened and she called out to me, ‘Come on in, I thought it was you, although with that hood pulled up, you could have been one of those horrors that live down Nelson Street. I am still cleaning the eggs off my top windows after the little buggars threw them at Halloween.’
‘Hi Gran,’ I called from the gate way, ‘ I ‘ve just got to see someone and then I ‘ll be there, have you got enough milk for hot chocolate, I am freezing.’
‘Don’t be too long, its dark and too many odd people around these days.’ she said.
I started to run, worried now by the threat of who knows, the weird and odd people that Gran was always talking about and I was cold.
Number 34 was dark, unlike the other houses that had Christmas lights or decorated trees in their windows and I hesitated at the end of the path and looked across at the corner shop, its lit windows radiating onto the pavement. It was then I saw Greg standing watching across the street, ‘Oh no,’ I thought.
He had his partner with him, a young WPC and they looked serious as they shuffled their feet trying to keep warm, but always keeping their eyes looking around.
I don’t know how I knew but I did, the parcel delivery was some sort of illegal thing, I was going to be caught passing drugs or something. I ducked into the shadows of the hedging that surrounded number 36 and looked back at 34. I was near to tears and I fingered the packet in my pocket. It would have been so easy to just sneak through the hedging to the house and not be seen by Greg. I knelt down and the rotten smell from under the hedge hit my nostrils, like a thousand cats had peed there and I wanted to pee as well now. I felt the tears start to roll and my knee snagged down on the soft earth. It was cold and I thought of my Dad lying in cold earth, shot by some lousy thief that night. My brave, happy Dad, downed by one bullet that day and I gulped as the tears flowed.
Suddenly Christmas lights from 36 lit up the garden and Greg was standing there in front of me, I collapsed down onto the sodden earth and all I wanted was to die like my Dad. I had let him down.
Later as I drank hot chocolate in my Gran’s front room bathed and wrapped in her old dressing gown, Greg explained that they were on the beat just doing their job. He had taken the packet from me and it wasn’t drugs but a love note from Stevie with a ring for Tracy. It seemed her Dad didn’t like Stevie but Stevie wouldn’t be deterred, he loved Tracy and so that’s why he had hatched up this plot. My payment would have been a couple of pounds, as Stevie didn’t have the hundreds of pounds he had promised me. Stevie had told all when Greg had texted him on my phone to say I had been taken ill, not that I had been delayed because I had peed my pants!
‘I want to give the ring to Tracy’, I said,’ I don’t want any money from Stevie, ‘I just want to do it.’ and I struggled into some old jeans left at Gran’s for emergencies and this was just that.
Greg watched me as I ran down Nelson Street at top speed and delivered the parcel. Tracy opened it right away and her face lit up brighter than any Christmas lights I had seen that night, ‘Dad, Dad’ she shouted excitedly … ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
Gran and I pulled our crackers as Mum sat down, her face smiling and the roast chicken steaming in the middle of the table waiting for my sister to carve. At 17 she felt it was time Mum gave her more responsibility and carving the chicken was her first grown up job, Mum had said, and we all laughed and I laughed the loudest. My sister had her room tidy ready for Gran and we were happy.
Tracy had persuaded her Dad that Stevie was ok, and he was over the moon, so much so that Stevie had called round to see me a couple of days before Christmas and wanted to do something to pay me, but I said no. My Dad would have been proud of me, the way I had approached Greg that night and confessed to being a drug runner, well I thought I was! But Stevie did come up trumps as he worked for a builder and the next day he and a mate had called round with scrapers and paint and Mum had the shiniest yellow front door in our street. The best Christmas present I could have had she had told him, after the scent and soap I had given her, and the hair do my sister had paid for and of course tidying her room really tidy for Gran!
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