Snared E-Book

C.J. Dunford

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 248

Beschreibung

Lennox 'Nox' Ritchie wakes up the day before his fifteenth birthday to find six ten pound notes and a farewell letter in an envelope taped to his bedroom door. Underage, under financed, and alone on the notorious Dubhbrae estate, Nox's chances don't look good. But, unlike his mother, Nox has a plan: Pass his exams this summer. Get into college. Get into university. Never look back. But his mother has absconded on her debts and it's not long before Nox finds himself trying to avoid the estate's loansharks and drug dealers. His neighbour, and best friend, Kenzie, introduces him as a computer genius to Cal, her gang-leader boyfriend. Against his will, Nox finds himself attempting to please Cal who, in turn, keeps the loansharks away, and supplies endless pizza. Dragged further and further into Cal's increasingly dark schemes, both on the Darknet and in the real world, Nox reaches out for help. But everybody he encounters has their own agendas. If he wants to survive the crazed, drug-fuelled and increasing violent world of Cal and the other youths on the Dubhbrae estate, he's going to need less of a plan and more of a miracle. And just when he thinks he has a way out, the shadow of his mother turns up once again, in the most unexpected and unhelpful of ways. Nox has to face the realisation that not everyone gets out of Dubhbrae Estate alive, and that might include him.

Leseprobe

Snared

C J Dunford

Contents

Chapter One

Nox’s not birthday

Chapter Two

It’s not you, it’s me

Chapter Three

Keeping Mum around

Chapter Four

One week later

Chapter Five

Nox encounters a new state of being, and Terry

Chapter Six

Kenzie interferes

Chapter Seven

Terry, the loan shark, returns

Chapter Eight

The King of the Thanes

Chapter Nine

The morning after

Chapter Ten

The meaning of life

Chapter Eleven

Family meal

Chapter Twelve

A bed for the night

Chapter Thirteen

Cal is not unhappy

Chapter Fourteen

School but not worse

Chapter Fifteen

Having a friend

Chapter Sixteen

The beginnings of a plan

Chapter Seventeen

Getting down to the work

Chapter Eighteen

Falling into the groove

Chapter Nineteen

Fighting back

Chapter Twenty

Deeper in

Chapter Twenty-one

Miss Dickinson

Chapter Twenty-two

A new plan

Chapter Twenty-three

Help?

Chapter Twenty-four

A meeting in the dark

Chapter Twenty-five

Moving ahead

Chapter Twenty-six

Fighting rage

Chapter Twenty-seven

The news that changes everything

Chapter Twenty-eight

No time for grief

Chapter Twenty-nine

Stomping ground

Chapter Thirty

The plan comes together

Chapter Thirty-one

Endings

Acknowledgements

Landmarks

Cover

To all young people who have ever felt lost, alone and hopeless. May you find the help you need, and when you do, may you pass that help along in the future.

Chapter One

Nox’s not birthday

Lennox ‘Nox’ Ritchie pokes the top of his head cautiously outside the duvet. Things are not feeling right. Air, heavy and cold as stone, clamps down on the top of his head. Instinctively, he pulls himself back deep under the covers. Yet again, his mother has let the heating run out. He wonders if she has noticed. If she is even home.

His bed is warm with body heat, dark and silent, a cocoon that shields him from the rest of the world. It makes so much more sense to him to stay here, to discover if there is the slightest possibility that overnight he evolved into the kind of human that can hibernate like a bear. But he’s heard tales of the education welfare officer Mr Bryant, who handles cases on the Dubhbrae estate, and knows that he never wants to meet him. Nox’s mum tries to be a good mum, but on her best days she’s a walking advert for taking kids into care.

He takes a deep breath and pushes the duvet down to his waist. It’s like plunging into an icy bath. He leaps out of bed, snatches up his deodorant and liberally sprays himself and his clothes with it. Then he struggles into his school uniform before his fingers become too cold to do up the buttons on his shirt. His curtains are shut, and he doesn’t dare open them – see, I was paying attention in physics last week, Mr Boo-hoo McBride, he thinks to himself.

Nox suspects he would find ice on the inside of his window. He finds himself recalling the choice words his mother uses for whoever designed the block of flats and the cheapskates that built it. As his English teacher wrote on his last report, Nox has a wide and colourful vocabulary for his age. Although he does have a tendency to lean towards the vernacular. It was only after the third plate had been thrown at him that Nox had been able to reassure his mother that vernacular didn’t mean he had a sexual disease. As if, at fourteen.

He gives his armpits a bit of a sniff and feels his nose hairs shrivel. Fortunately, the acrid smell of the ‘for real men only’ deodorant his Auntie Morag (who isn’t really his auntie at all) gave him at Christmas seems to win out as the dominant odour.

The blue alarm clock that sits on the floor beside his bed shows him he has missed registration and the first period. He’ll be lucky to get there in time for the third. No time for breakfast. He hopes his mother hasn’t tidied his shoes away. She does this if she trips over them when she comes home pissed from the pub. Last time she put them away in the oven and it took him an hour to find them.

He wonders if he has time for a piss. Now he’s up and around, he really needs to go. It’s only then that he notices the envelope taped to the back of the door. It has his real name written across it in his mother’s long, looping handwriting although she’s written so big the end of his name is all squashed up and the last letter is missing. ‘Lenno’ it reads. He’s named after Lennox Castle, a place that fascinated his mother as a girl – he’s still unsure why. Thankfully, everyone calls him Nox.

He snatches up the envelope and pushes it into his pocket. It doesn’t crumple easily. The letter is oddly hard and thick. But Nox has other things on his mind. The bathroom is even colder than anywhere else in the flat, if that’s possible. He’s as quick as he can be, only rinsing his hands rather than using soap. He wipes them on his mother’s towel. A petty form of revenge.

He doesn’t hear her call out when he sits in the hall putting his trainers on as loudly as he can. He slams the door on the way out. The glass panels rattle and the girl leaning over the balcony outside turns round to look at him. It’s less of a balcony and more of a pathway, running in front of all the flats and leading to the open air stairwell down. They’re on the fourth floor. High enough above the the rubbish bins that the stench only snakes up on the hottest summer days.

‘Your mum out all night again?’ she asks.

Nox pulls his coat around him (the zip is long broken) and goes to stand beside her. She isn’t wearing a coat and she’s tied her blouse up in a knot so it shows off her midriff and the navel ring she has, sparkling with crystals. Nox can’t help but notice the taut skin of her stomach is peppered with goose pimples. She’s plaited her hair on her head every which way, in a style so complex there is no way the school will ask her to take it out. She grins up at him from under blue eyelashes. ‘You’re going to be late,’ she adds.

‘Are you even going in?’ returns Nox. ‘I realise those scraps of clothing you’re wearing were once a school uniform but…’

Kenzie turns away from him. ‘Nah,’ she says, ‘I don’t feel like it today.’

‘Still missing your dad?’ asks Nox.

Kenzie shrugs. ‘He’s okay when he’s sober.’

‘Do you think he’s definitely gone for good this time?’

Kenzie shrugs again. ‘He doesn’t like babies. That’s what Mum says. He might come back when Lulu is older.’

‘She does cry a lot,’ said Nox.

‘Yeah, well, we’re not exactly a happy house,’ said Kenzie, her voice acidly bitter.

Nox shuffles and looks down at his feet. ‘Yeah,’ he says. Silence. He takes a deep breath. ‘You might be better off. I do hear it, you know. When your dad gets into one of his…’ he finishes off lamely, ‘bad days.’

‘You mean when he’s beating the shit out of whoever doesn’t get out the way fast enough?’

‘Yeah,’ says Nox. ‘That.’

Kenzie turns and gives him a quick shadow of a smile. ‘At least you talk about it. Everyone else knows, but it’s all whispers behind my back. You’re the only one who says it to my face. So where’s your mum? Off buying you a nice big pressie?’

‘That’s tomorrow. And I doubt it. The only birthday cake I’ve ever had has been a Greggs sausage roll with a candle in it. Unlit. Her lighter had run out.’

Kenzie laughs.

‘What’s so funny about that?’

‘Your face. Doleful as fuck!’

‘Doleful is it? Mr Drummond would be impressed.’

Kenzie spits over the balcony, narrowly missing a woman in a woolly hat walking on the level below. ‘That perv. He keeps looking down my top at my tits,’ she says.

‘Dinkie Drummond?’ says Nox. ‘I didn’t know he had it in him.’

Kenzie gives him an angry look.

‘Hey, your blouse like that barely covers them, and I bet you’re not wearing a bra.’

‘Want to see?’ says Kenzie, turning round to him again and leaning forward.

For a tiny moment, that lasts about a hour in his mind, Nox thinks about it. Kenzie is pretty, really pretty, and he can imagine all too well how her breasts are growing. They’d be round, and soft, and ripe like some kind of exotic fruit. He shakes his head as if that will make the thoughts go away. She’s his friend. Even if she can be a bit of a prick tease at times. ‘Nah, thanks,’ said Nox, glad his coat reaches down to his thighs. ‘I saw you naked when we were three. That was enough.’

‘You’re weird,’ says Kenzie, but she sounds more puzzled than angry. ‘So what you waiting for?’

Nox sighs. Deep breathing or rather, sighing, is a bad habit of his. He thinks if it’s as good for you as people say, he should be as healthy as a horse. ‘Mum left me an envelope on the back of my door. It feels odd.’

‘Birthday card,’ squeals Kenzie. ‘I haven’t forgotten. I’ve got you something!’

Nox’s mood lifts. He laughs. ‘Is it a bogie?’

‘Will you ever let that go?’ says Kenzie. ‘I was two. I thought that was how you made friends.’

Nox’s smile fades and he turns the card over in his hands. ‘There’s something wrong,’ says Nox. ‘I can feel it.’

Kenzie tilts her head on one side, considering him. ‘Always with the weird, but come on, show us!’

Nox heaves another sigh, this time feeling guilty for taking up so much of the planet’s oxygen. He takes the envelope out of his pocket and opens it. Inside is a birthday card. Something flutters to the ground and Kenzie dives for it. Nox stares at the card.

Kenzie comes to stand next to him and peers over at it. On the front is a large, shiny green frog jumping off a lily pad. Next to the frog’s head are the numbers one and six. ‘Sixteen? You been lying to me all these years, bro?’

Nox shakes his head. ‘Not unless she’s been lying to me. I’m fifteen tomorrow.’ He blinks a few times. ‘I think this is the closest she’s ever got to giving me a card on the right date,’ he says.

‘And look at these!’ Kenzie wiggles a handful of twenty pound notes under his nose. Nox looks at her blankly. ‘They fell out of the card, idiot. They’re for your birthday. Take us up town for pizza?’

‘No,’ said Nox slowly. ‘No. No. No. She doesn’t do stuff like that.’

‘If you don’t want them…’ says Kenzie, but Nox is paying her no attention. He has opened the card and is reading. He’s holding the card up near his face and she has to stand on tip toe to read it. She places a hand on his forearm to steady herself, and then leaves it there when she sees what it says. ‘Oh Nox,’ she says.

Chapter Two

It’s not you, it’s me

Dear Son,

Happy Birthday!

Now you are sixteen, you are a man. I know I haven’t been a good mother. I did try, but I don’t think I was made for it. But I’ve kept you alive and now you’re grown up. We should both get some credit for that.

I keep thinking about you when you were really small, so vulnerable and me so terrified that somehow I’d break you. Such a scrap of a thing when you was born. I had no money. Your father was god knows where and my parents changed the locks. I never thought we’d make it but we did. Reckon the credit goes more to you than to me. I do love you, but that’s another thing I’m not very good at. Nothing is your fault. It’s all on me.

Anyway, I’ve decided that now you’re old enough, the best thing to do is let you move on in your life without me. Don’t worry! I’m not about to end myself! I just think it’s time we went our own ways. You’re clever. You’ve got plans and I’d only hold you back. Get off Dubhbrae. Make a decent life for yourself.

I’ve left you a bit of cash, and the flat of course. The council should pass that on to you no bother. You’ll probably have to get a job, but loads of kids better off than us work their way through college. I reckon you’ll do fine.

Ellie

Your mum

Kenzie gives a little shriek and clutches at his arm. ‘What are you going to do?’

Nox shuts the card and folds it in half. He shoves it back in his pocket. ‘What do you think the frog means?’ he says. ‘I don’t like the frog.’

‘That’s all you’ve got to say. She’s left you.’

‘If she hadn’t left a card I’m not sure I would have noticed,’ says Nox. He pinches the top of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. He is trying not to cry, but he doesn’t want Kenzie to see how upset he is.

‘I always thought she was nice,’ said Kenzie. ‘She gave me some of her old make-up once. Brought me out in a rash, but it was a kind thought.’

‘Yeah, she used to like going through bins when she was drunk,’ said Nox. ‘Found all sorts of things there.’

‘Oh yuck,’ said Kenzie. ‘I thought…’

Nox reached over and took the notes from her hand. ‘I’m going to need these,’ he said. ‘But if she’s left any make-up behind…’

Kenzie puts up her hand. ‘Don’t bother. But the council will never give you the flat. You’ll be taken into care.’

Nox shakes his head. ‘I’ll manage it,’ he says. ‘Fuck knows how,’ he mutters under his breath.

‘If I can help…’ says Kenzie.

‘You can’t,’ says Nox. Then he breathes deeply again and says more gently. ‘You’ve got enough of your own troubles. Just please, Kenzie, don’t tell anyone about this. Anyone. Promise.’

‘Bogie promise,’ says Kenzie. ‘I’m so sorry, Nox.’

Nox shrugs. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Kenzie gives him a sudden and quick hug. Having embarrassed both of them, she turns away and goes into her flat without another word. Nox sets off for school.

It’s weird. He is feeling weird. There is a fizzing, bubbling inside him like someone is running electricity through his veins. He feels free. The dull grey walls around him are suddenly a patchwork of blues and blacks and light that he never noticed before. Every step he takes is longer than usual, falls harder, jolting him up the spine, making him walk taller. The cold air on his face is enlivening, exciting, the world is full of sudden and unexpected possibilities.

Then he comes to the stairs. Only visitors use the lifts and even they only do it once. Kenzie reckons the stench of piss in them even gets into her hair. By mid morning the stairwell is a blend of shadows with the corners at each turn inky black. He’s not afraid. There’s not much to be had from anyone on the estate and they’re even less likely to be carrying something of worth at this time of day. So he can’t explain why, when he reaches the entrance to the stairway, he has to clutch at the filthy bannister to stop himself falling. Nor why tears jab with pinpoint spikes behind his eyes.

All too soon the sadness dissolves into fear. His mouth fills with bile. How will I do this alone? he thinks. Where has she gone? Is she safe?

She’s a total fuck-up of a mother, but she’s the only mother he’s got. Their bond, good or bad, for fourteen years is all he has ever known. Freedom, liberation, brings with it the fear of everything, from paying for the heating to keeping out of the hands of Bryant and being sent into care. Life in care. More like life in prison from what he has heard. He’s no cute, tousle-haired tot to be adopted. No, when people look at him they see a gangly-legged adolescent, a manling-still-becoming. Then, when they hear he’s from the Dubhbrae estate, they see a vandal, a thief, a drug-taking teen who is the root of all the ills of society, and Nox knows, deep down, that every time he is seen like this he will become closer to what they imagine. That despite his best intentions, he will gradually become what he fears the most: a permanent resident of the Dubhbrae estate.

‘Are you sure you shouldn’t be thinking of studying English Literature at university?’ says Miss Dickinson when he tells her something of his fears after another awful day at school. They are sitting in the community library, where Miss Dickinson is head and sole librarian. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the library is neutral territory on the estate, and since he found it, in the early years of primary school, Nox has been coming here after school. It’s warm and safe, and because he started coming here as a tousle-haired tot, or at least a cute seven-year-old, he has wormed his way onto the very, very short list of people that Miss Dickinson will allow to join her for tea and biscuits when the library is quiet.

The library was built before Nox’s mum was born. It’s as old as the estate, concrete and lined with heavy wooden shelving. The old card catalogue remains and now stores Miss Dickinson’s bits and pieces, such as her biscuits. There are computers and consoles, which she has allowed in with great reluctance and loathing, although they are at the root of her continuing friendship with Nox.

Her tone is wistful, and while Nox knows she is only semi-serious, he notes the regret in her eyes. ‘Purple prose. That’s what my English teacher calls it,’ he says. ‘Last time I wrote something like that she told the whole class I was a budding romance writer. I got called Camilla for weeks.’

‘Like the Royal?’ asks Emily Dickinson, frowning. She is in her early forties, but doesn’t dye her hair and wears half moon glasses on the bridge of her nose. She is known for always being dressed in hardwearing skirt suits in green or navy, and for having a tongue that can embarrass even the most hardened sixth former. She and Nox have a pact.

Nox shakes his head, perplexed. He has no interest in the lives of celebrities. His mother doesn’t – didn’t – buy newspapers, and they don’t have a working TV.

‘So why do you think you had this panic attack?’ asks Emily.

Nox shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says carefully. ‘Mum had another one of her wild weekends and was out for the count when I left for school. The heating was off again.’

Miss Dickinson tsks.

‘She does her best,’ says Nox. ‘I know she does.’ He gives Emily a grin. ‘It’s just not your usual definition of “best”.’ He does quote marks in the air.

‘Definitely an English degree,’ says Miss Dickinson. ‘Now, less about your familial woes and more about why this console has a red ring around that big button. It made Sandy Maclean, that seven-year-old who always wears the jumpers with holes in them, cry.’

‘Ah,’ says Nox. ‘It’s not good.’ He gives her the bad news and diverts her away from his own troubles. He likes Miss Dickinson, even trusts her to an extent, and loves her a tiny bit for the biscuits she has always given him. His mother had a particularly bad patch when he was in primary school and other than his school lunch, those biscuits and tea were all he got.

He is her unofficial computer consultant now. Finally able to return some of the favours she did him, and to keep his place late into the evening when the library is officially closed, and Miss Dickinson is tidying up for the day. But all the same, she is a person with authority. He’s seen her sign the back of photographs for bus passes and other things. People bring them in all the time. Sometimes she signs, sometimes she doesn’t. She’s sharp and not easily fooled.

As such, she is not someone he can tell about his mum leaving. As an authority, she would have to call the other authorities. He’s a minor. He’s not allowed to live alone. Nox half hopes his mum wrote his letter during some maudlin hangover, and that when he gets home she will be there, wrapped in all the duvets in the house and drinking vodka from the fridge. There aren’t always chips in the fridge, but there is always vodka. That’s another thing he doesn’t tell Miss Dickinson, who at present is ranting about the age of equipment that has been donated to the library, and is she ever going to convince a group of lads she has had her eye on to actually read a book.

Nox doesn’t answer this question. He knows she makes a lot of the youths on the estate her personal projects. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But even the ones who join the Thanes never give her any hassle. It’s like she’s created herself in the image of everyone’s favourite granny. Yes, Miss Dickinson is very sharp. He mustn’t tell her.

When he gets home, having fixed all the things he can fix in the library, and deleted several caches full of porn URLs, he comes home to a flat as cold and as empty as he left it.

Chapter Three

Keeping Mum around

It’s 4 a.m. in the morning, and Nox has stolen the duvet out of his mum’s room. He’s sitting with both duvets wrapped around him, thinking. He tells himself that he’s only using her duvet for warmth, but a small part of him acknowledges that having her familiar scent around is comforting. Oddly comforting, considering she always wore the same cheap perfume. It is foul. He’s no idea why his mother thought it would make her more attractive. But then, more than once when she was drunk, he’d caught her dabbing disinfectant on herself by mistake. Maybe she’s never had a good sense of smell.

It’s dark. Very dark. Nox isn’t afraid of the dark. There’s always been worse things to worry about and also, you can hide in the dark. Only once did his mother ever bring one of her boyfriends home, and if it hadn’t been as dark as fuck then, Nox thinks he might have come to real harm. The man had been too drunk to have sex and furious at this, he’d beaten his mother black and blue, screaming it was her fault.

Nox had only been six or seven at the time. When the drunk had come searching for him – somehow it had all become his fault cos having a kid hanging around had made the man unable to get it up – he’d had the sense to hide in a cupboard. He’d heard his mother begging the man not to hurt him, scrabbling to hold him back and then when she couldn’t, insulting him, telling him he was as limp-brained as his dick and other such things. At the time he hadn’t understood, but now he knew she wanted the man to stop looking for him, even if it meant she got another beating. In her own way, she’d tried to be a good mum. She could be as brave as a lion for him, but she couldn’t remember to buy food.

Another time, when she was very drunk she’d told him no matter what he did or where he went, she’d never change the locks on him. She’d never shut him out like her parents had done to her. And to be fair, she hadn’t. She’d left him the keys and walked away. He worries she’s with another drunk. He worries she will get hurt. In a weird way he feels protective of her. Always has. It’s as if from the beginning he’d known she had no more idea of how to be an adult than he has now.

Only now, he thinks, she did do more than I thought. She paid the rent or got the housing office to pay it. Mostly she kept the heat and light on. He has no idea how she got the money for that – the money for that and for her fags, booze, long nights in the pub and the occasional packet of frozen food in the fridge. As he grew up, he found he wanted to look less and less at what his mother was, think less about what she did when he was at school, but now he is thinking about it. He’s thinking that it says really good things about her that she didn’t end up on drugs – unless you count alcohol. But he’s also wondering if some of those boyfriends of hers were more professional contacts than lovers.

He might as well admit it to himself now she’s no longer here. Did his mother do things to pay the bills? He wishes she had told him. At fourteen he could have got a job. He could have helped out. He wouldn’t have thought the less of her for it. In a weird kind of way, if that guy she brought home was anything to go by, she was being courageous. His mother hadn’t made it through school. She used to joke her only skills were drinking, smoking and lying in bed eating crisps.

They used to do that when he was little. Eat crisps together in her bed on a Sunday morning. She never dropped any crumbs. It was a joke between them. Why was it, sitting here in the dark, smelling her perfume, that he was only beginning to understand what she had done to keep them both alive?

And what the hell was he going to do for money? She piled all the bills and other stuff in the bread bin. (Why not? It wasn’t as if they used it for bread.) He needed to look through all of that. Sit down and plan a campaign. A campaign not only to keep himself alive, but also to convince the rest of the world his mum was still around.

He wants to get up and start now, but he has no idea how much was left on the electric, and he likes his morning tea. But before that, he is going to have to go back to school and behave as if everything was normal. Sighing, he reaches for the writing pad under his bed and begins to write a note for PE. He’s been doing these since he could copy her handwriting – at primary school. He doesn’t mind playing football, but the rest of PE bores him, and… Nox looks down at the letter and an idea starts to form in his head. It’s not as if his mother ever made many of the official meetings she was supposed to attend. For ages, he’s been the one to write letters, even letters to the dole office. He’s always given the official ones to her to sign, but the wording has always been his. All he has to do is a little practice.

It’s still early when he finds Kenzie out on the balcony. ‘Hey,’ he says, and offers her a coffee. It’s nasty cheap coffee, but Kenzie is already smoking, so he reckons she won’t be able to tell the difference. It’s hot and as usual, she’s wearing far too little.

Kenzie takes the cup from him and smiles.

‘Is it really worth getting hypothermia for fashion?’ says Nox. ‘Parts of you are blue!’

Kenzie snorts a laugh. ‘You don’t know the half of it, bro. This isn’t me getting up, this is me coming home.’

‘But you’re in school uniform?’ says Nox.

Kenzie shrugs. ‘The dude I’m dating likes that.’

Nox feels his mouth curl in disgust. ‘Tell me he’s younger than your grandfather.’

‘Pops is only forty-two,’ said Kenzie. ‘It’s the lack of teeth that makes him look older.’ She watches Nox from under her eyelashes as she takes another sip of coffee. ‘This is rank,’ she says, but she doesn’t hand it back.

‘How old?’ pursues Nox.

‘Nineteen,’ says Kenzie. ‘A teenager like us. Maybe twenty. Twenty-two at most.’

‘You’re fourteen,’ says Nox.

‘Fourteen on the outside, a hundred and fourteen on the inside,’ says Kenzie.

‘Kenz, you’re really bright…’

Kenzie holds up her hand. ‘If you’re going to try and adult at me, I’m going in.’

Nox cuts to the chase. ‘Fine. I might need a favour.’

Kenzie turns her back to the balcony and arches towards him, ‘I’m listening…’

Nox feels his mouth go dry. Partly because of the way Kenzie is standing, emphasising her breasts, and partly because he’s scared about what’s coming next.