Someone Shouting

The boy scuffed his trainers on the mat, three times each shoe, then opened the white and flimsy looking apartment door that had been left ajar for him.

"Alright," he said, closing the door behind him.

"Hi," said his father, who was hovering in the hallway. "Come in."

His father turned and walked back into the living room. The boy took off his coat and hung it on the metal coatrack screwed into the hallway wall then followed him in. The flat smelled of food, sausages maybe, and oven chips. In the living room that was also a dining room and a kitchen they sat at a square wooden table, stained very dark, on matching dark wooden chairs.

"You hungry?" asked his father.

"No," said the boy, "I just ate lunch."

His father had thin gauzy curtains that he always kept drawn. Diffuse, milky light filled the room, nothing like the crunchy sun outside.

"Have you had a haircut?" asked his father.

"No," said the boy.

"Yes you have — I can see where they shaved it."

"That was ages ago."

The boy's skin was very pale. It was even paler along the raw borders where the barber had clipped his hair, and in the flecks of scalp that showed through his tapered hair, which until a week ago had been long enough to sit in lank sandy clumps on his school collar.

The boy began to fiddle with a square glass ashtray on the table. His father smoked, but the ashtray was clean. Its sides were streaked with water.

"Want a drink?" asked his father, "A beer?"

"No thanks. It's too early for getting drunk."

His father looked at him and half smiled and looked away.

"You can switch the telly on if you want."

"Telly's crap in the daytime."

"You're right there. Crap all the time if you ask me. That reminds me — I've got something for you."

His father stood and crossed the room and rifled through a backpack on the floor by the kitchen units. He brought back a white paper bag with a dark blue logo on it and a flat oblong shape inside.

"Thanks," said the boy, sliding a book out of the bag.

The book was a hardback. It had worn green covers with gold lettering and white cotton binding with a green and gold trim. The boy opened it and flicked through the thick, uneven pages. They were clean and still felt crisp to the touch, but in the folds between them was that used bookshop smell that meant so many things to the boy, and that right then meant a voyage to an ancient, ferocious place, where infidelity razed a city and murder moved like a chess piece from daughter to husband to mother to son.

"Thanks a lot."

He was tempted to start reading it straight away. He knew his father wouldn't stop him.

"So what have you been up to?" asked the boy.

"Nothing much," said his father, "The usual. I met Sally the other day — did she say?"

The boy nodded.

"She was with some friends. I didn't recognise most of them. Hardly bloody recognised her to be honest. She had all that makeup on and she's dyed her hair. What do you call it — the goth look?"

"You could call it that."

"Don't think she was too pleased to see her old dad when she was out with her friends. You know, hiding behind her hair and all that."

"She was doing you a favour."

"She's alright though isn't she? She hasn't fallen in with a bad crowd."

"That lot? They couldn't be bad if they tried."

"But she's alright isn't she?"

"Sally's alright," said the boy, "She's always alright."

They looked at each other, looked away. They both had very dark rings around their eyes. It was almost funny to see them together, like a pair of racoons, one young and skinny and quick, the other heavier and older, the two of them caught foraging or raiding bins, frozen in some bright, unexpected light, wearing their guilt in their hunched cowed faces and in the black robber's masks around their eyes.

"Mum's been seeing that guy from the bank again," said the boy.

"I know. She said."

"He's a wanker."

His father put his hand to the back of his head.

"Long as she's happy. That's the main thing."

"Yeah," said the boy.

In the bright nervy silence the boy glanced around the room. Three posters were fixed to the wall with brass thumbtacks and pins with coloured plastic heads. Two were for films the boy had never seen. One showed a face like a saint from an old church painting, with Cyrillic writing below it. The face was gentle and serene, but the intersecting planes of smoke and light that had been layered on top of it made it seem like it was trapped it hell. The second poster was French; it showed a full length picture of a dark eyed, beautiful girl. So beautiful the boy could not look at her. He jabbed his finger at the third poster.

"Why do you always have that picture up?" asked the boy.

His father shrugged.

"I like it."

"It's crap. Look at the boy playing with his stupid toy soldiers. And the girl's like a fat little doll or something."

"It's from a long time ago."

"The guy looks like he's made out of wood."

His father smiled.

"Maybe he was."

"What's it supposed to mean anyway, Daddy, what did you do in the great war? You weren't even born till after the war. Only war you've been in was over who got to keep the stereo."

"It's from the First World War," muttered his father.

A television was on in the flat next door. They could just make out screeching brakes, someone shouting.

"So what about you?" asked his father, "What have you been up to?"

His voice sounded tense, coiled.

"Not much," said the boy.

"Did you sort out your problem with that lad at school? What was his name… Scott?"

The boy looked like he'd been caught by a fast left jab.

"Yeah," he said.

"Glad to hear that. He sounds like a nasty piece of work."

"Yeah."

"You can't let people like that push you around you know."

"Yeah. I know."

They were quiet for some time. The boy stared at the patches of shine on the dark wooden table. Without looking up he said, "I told my friend I'd meet him at two. Guess I'd better go."

"Right," said his father. He said it again, and the second time he didn't sound so sure. "Right."

"Thanks for the book."

"No problem. Hope you like it."

The boy stood and picked up the book and slid it into the paper bag. His father watched with one arm on the open living room door as the boy took his jacket off the coathook and put it on and squeezed the book into one of the pockets. The pocket was wide enough but not quite deep enough. The end of the book stuck out with the bottom of the bag drawn tight across it.

"Bye," said the boy.

"Goodbye."

The stairwell always smelled of damp plaster. The paint that was grey to a meter up the wall then white above that was scuffed and scratched, as if something too wide to fit had been dragged up the stairs. The boy descended slowly. A dog had a fit of barking as he passed a door.

A few coloured leaves were scattered round the flagstones in the entranceway, blown in from the courtyard out back. The boy crunched them under his shoe as he walked to the two front doors. They were big, heavy doors, made of unpainted metal, wide enough to drive a car through when both were open. Their upper panels were filled with thickly frosted glass. The boy stopped in front of them, listening to the ragged noises of the street, feeling the bright autumn chill seep in. Shapes moved like clouds across the glass.

He has lied when he said he had a friend to meet. He had nothing to do, except watch the vague shapes of the street drift past.

After a while he noticed that the two windows were frosted in different ways. The one on the right was clouded by a random foam of bubbles; the one on the left was tiled by a regular pattern of short curved ridges, with a wire grid embedded inside it, black against the light. The boy glanced between the panes, saw light smashed into spray, disassembled into sparkling chunks. He thought of a pair of horribly magnified fingertips, stroking the world with their different grooves, sensing everything.

His trance was broken by the slap of a football off the pavement. The ball bounced again and he heard some boys talking. They were coming his way. As they drew closer, stopping and starting, laughing and chatting, he recognised a few of their voices. And once the voices were in his head he saw faces too, some black and others white. He could even see the sports gear they were wearing. One of them kicked the ball along the pavement and its scudding track ended with a crisp tap. The boy knew where they were going. There was an astroturf pitch around the corner from his dad's. It had a high mesh fence around it and seven-a-side goals with no nets and worn white lines trundled into the surface. As he listened to the ball roll back and forth, the trainers jostle around it, his body began to dream. The clean sharp contact of the ball with the instep of his boot, the arc of it rising and curving, then dipping with perfect weight for the head or volley that would drive it into goal. The quick one-twos that would slice the midfield into triangular pieces. The through ball, snaking around defenders to coil at the feet of the onrushing winger. And the celebrations afterwards, the rise of shared delight, the warm joy of having served and won.

He should not have lied to his father.

Outside the lads began to move. They were playing keepy-uppy. The ball knocked between them without touching the ground and their feet scuffed fast on the pavement. The boy was suddenly, absurdly conscious of what he was wearing. The old white trainers and the no-logo black hooded top with the hood coming out over the blue-grey jacket. And the book, the ridiculous paper bagged book jutting from his pocket. The sounds of the boys came into naked focus; their breathing, the swishing of their clothes. The boy held himself very still. A moment later, dark, lunging shapes clouded the glass.

He could step out now. Feign surprise. It wouldn't matter that he didn't know them very well. Maybe the ball would come his way and he could show his skills, control it with his chest and bounce it from knee to knee and dink it back just a little too high, so the ball hung for a moment in the air and the music stopped for half a beat before someone headed it on and the syncopated rhythm resumed.

A voice cursing, out of breath. Fast broken steps and a kick, and a harder, higher kick.

"Almost," said one of the boys, "Almost."

He could step out now and join the game. They would go to the astroturf and the afternoon would wheel over them, the sun dropping lower and the shadows deepening, the sun flashing behind their bodies as he jockeyed for the ball. And in the evening the day would still be with him. It would flicker behind his eyes, tingle on his face. As he fell asleep his legs would sway like a sailor's on the first night of leave.

The ball dropped and rolled. It glanced off the big metal doors and the recoil was no more than the blown kiss of another door closing somewhere in the building.

Someone said "Fuck."

The boy recognised the voice. The voice, and the silence that surrounded it.

"Fuck," repeated Scott, as he walked to the ball. He passed the door and banged his fist on it so the whole thing shook and the glass rattled. Shit. It was never him who fucked up and dropped the ball. Stuff like that happened to other people, not him. He picked up to a jog to catch the ball before it rolled under a car.