The Ant Colony Read online

  He was leaning on a stick, leaning heavily, like if you took it away from him he might just collapse in a heap, right there. He didn’t smile, he frowned, and his mouth was open, but he didn’t say anything.

  He wasn’t quite what I expected.

  “Are you Max?” I said, and he nodded.

  “Max the Ant Expert?”

  He shifted his stick and thought about it, and then he nodded again.

  “Thank God for that,” I said. “I’m Bohemia. I’m a friend of Sam’s. I’ve brought you your book back.”

  Eighteen (Sam)

  It was impossible to even try to sleep the first night Bohemia was away. We sat round Isabel’s table like waxworks, not talking, hardly moving, just suspended in time. Cherry ran out of cigarettes and started drumming softly on the tabletop with the tips of her fingers. Mick watched her constantly, like he expected her to fall apart any minute. Steve couldn’t take his eyes off the clock. Isabel heated up some soup and we all ate without really tasting it. I was supposed to be at work, but there’s no way I was going. Isabel said I had to go and tell them. She said I’d lose my job if I didn’t.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Course you do. Think about it.”

  I thought about not working and not having any money to pay the rent and having to leave and go home. I thought about not being here when Bohemia came back.

  “I’ll go and tell them,” I said.

  Cherry said she was coming with me. She said, “I need some fags and I could do with the air.”

  Mick asked if she wanted him to go with her. She said he didn’t need to. She said, “I could do with being on my own.”

  As if me being there didn’t count.

  It was cold outside and Cherry rubbed the tops of her arms through her T-shirt. “I should’ve got my jacket,” she said.

  I gave her my sweatshirt to put on. I took it off and handed it to her, the same one I’d given to Bohemia in the park.

  “Oh, it’s warm,” she said, pulling it over her head, slipping both arms in at once.

  It’s exactly what Bohemia had said.

  Cherry didn’t come in the shop. She gave me the money for her cigarettes and stood outside in the cold, her hands in her pockets, looking up at the sky. I told Besnik’s uncle that something had come up. I said there was an emergency and I couldn’t work tonight. He shrugged and looked at the far corner of his shop while he was talking.

  He said, “There are hundreds of boys just like you wanting jobs.”

  I said, “I want my job. I just need tonight off. Maybe tomorrow. Hopefully not.”

  “Two shifts,” he said. “After two shifts it’s somebody else’s.”

  Outside, Cherry unwrapped the packet and dropped the rubbish on the floor. I had to hold my hands around the flame of her lighter because the wind kept blowing it out. We walked slower on the way back. I think maybe we were giving Bohemia more time to get there first.

  When we got to the park at the end of the road she wanted to sit there for a bit. She asked me if I’d sit with her. She said, “I don’t want to go back in there and carry on waiting.”

  The park was empty except for a couple lying on a blanket by the bins. They looked like they were sunbathing in the dark. We sat on the third bench in from the entrance. Cherry lit a new cigarette with the end of the last one.

  “I haven’t had a drink today,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. I just listened because I had the feeling that’s what she wanted me to do.

  “I can’t tell you the last time I didn’t have a drink.”

  She looked at her cigarette then and she threw it on the floor away from her, half smoked. She twisted her hair around with her right hand and tucked it in at her collar. She looked almost as lost in my sweatshirt as Bohemia had.

  She said, “I’m praying to God she’s all right. I’m praying and I don’t even believe in God.”

  She said, “I don’t know where she could’ve gone. There isn’t anyone for her to go to.”

  She said, “She’s only got me.”

  And then she folded forwards with her elbows on her knees and said very quietly to the floor, “I’m a terrible mother. I’m a bad, bad person.”

  “No you’re not,” I said, because I had to, but we both knew that neither of us believed it.

  She said, “I was so young when I had her. I was your age.”

  She said, “Maybe we should be calling the police right now.”

  She said, “If she comes home in one piece, I’ll never drink or smoke or do drugs or leave her behind again.”

  It was quiet then while we both listened to the echoes in our heads of what she’d just said.

  “Do you think you could do that?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and started chewing at her nails. “I’d like to,” she said. Then she sat up straight again and looked at me. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she said.

  I said she didn’t want to know.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I bet it’s nothing. What is it? Stealing sweets from the newsagents? Looking at porn mags in your dad’s shed?”

  “It’s not nothing,” I said.

  “Well, I bet it is compared to me. I threw my own child away, Sam. What did you do? Come on, take my mind off it, I could do with a laugh.”

  And so I told her, partly to prove her wrong, and partly because it’s easy telling someone how low you’ve sunk when they’re further down than you.

  Nineteen (Bohemia)

  Being with Max was very confusing. When I gave him the book, he looked at it for a long time and then he said, “OK,” instead of “Thanks,” and he started shutting the door with me still on the outside of it.

  “Can I come in?” I said, and the door stopped closing.

  He frowned at me.

  I said, “I’ve come quite a long way.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just opened the door enough for me to walk through and then he followed me down the corridor into the kitchen. His stick thwacked on the hard floor and his foot dragged.

  The kitchen was about the size of our whole flat, by the way. And there was a big wooden table in there that you could fit everyone in our whole house around.

  Max went to the sink and poured me a glass of water. He pushed a bowl of fruit in my direction and I took a banana and a handful of grapes out of it.

  “Why have you got my book?” he said.

  It was on the table between us. The Ant Colony by Dr Bernard O Hopkins.

  “I stole it from Sam,” I said. “I stole all his money as well, but not on purpose, and then I borrowed some to come and give this to you.”

  I opened the front cover and turned it towards him. “See?” I said. “Your name and address. That’s how come I knew where to find you.”

  “OK,” he said.

  “I tried to read some on the coach,” I said, “but it was way too hard for me.”

  Max’s eyes were very dark blue. He had long eyelashes like a girl.

  I said, “Sam told me you were clever.” He blinked. I said, “Don’t you want to know where he is?”

  He laughed then, sort of, and shook his head, and looked at me like I was a funny thing that just fell out of his sock. “Sam?” he said again.

  “He should’ve left a note,” I said. “I told him that. You’ve got every right to be cross with him.”

  I said, “I’m sure he would’ve sent a note with me, except he didn’t know I was coming.”

  I said, “It’s kind of a surprise.”

  I wanted Max to say something. I wanted him to be pleased that Sam was somewhere and not disappeared off the face of the earth. It wasn’t turning out like I imagined at all.

  “Sam told me all about you, Max,” I said.

  He frowned, picked up the book and opened it just anywhere and started reading. It was rude, I thought, just to start reading like that while I was talking to him. “Is it really a good book?” I said.

  “I
t’s a brilliant book,” he said. “Sam didn’t read it.”

  “Well, he took it all the way to London with him,” I said. “And he didn’t take much. You should see his flat. It’s empty. Why would he take it if he wasn’t going to read it?”

  “So he’s in London,” Max said.

  Then this woman’s voice just outside the door said, “Who’s in London?” and when she came in the room and saw me she said, “Who’s this?”

  “Sam’s in London,” Max said. “This girl brought my book back.”

  The woman stopped dead still in the middle of the kitchen and she stared at me. “Oh, God,” she said.

  Max picked up the book, like he was sort of hiding behind it.

  She said it again. “Oh, God.”

  I looked at her and I looked at the book in front of Max’s face, and I said, “It’s OK. He’s really fine.”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I’m Bo,” I said. “I’m Sam’s friend.”

  “Well, I am not,” she told me, and I could see she meant it really hard cos her hands were in fists and her knuckles were like bone white from squeezing.

  “Not what?” I said.

  “Sam’s friend,” she said. “And nor is my son.”

  I didn’t get it at all.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Is that true?”

  Max said, “Yes, but it’s good to see my book.”

  Twenty (Sam)

  The worst thing I did when I was eleven was tell some of the kids at my new school that Max was a weirdo and he liked pickling ants. It got me a laugh, but it didn’t do him any favours at all. It kind of cemented his reputation.

  The worst thing I did when I was eleven and still Max’s best friend was realise that he was never going to make me popular. That everyone saw Max for the ways he was different, and that the ways he was different were rubbing off on me.

  The worst thing I did when I was eleven was switch sides and laugh at him along with everybody else, and leave him in the playground on his own, a wounded frown on his face, one eye looking at the tree tops, one eye looking straight at me.

  The worst thing I did when I was eleven was pretend to be his friend for long enough to copy his homework or borrow his calculator or get him to lend me money.

  The worst thing I did while I was at school was want people not to like Max, because I wanted the person they hated not to be me.

  He was an easy target. If you laughed at him he just blinked at you slowly, because he never quite understood why things were funny. If you flicked him on the back of the head when you walked past him in the corridor, he always said “Ouch” to the floor. If you saw him in the woods while you were all at the river, dressed in his ant-hunting gear, with a flask of water and a compass and a specimen jar and a clipboard, and you chased him and threw his things into the water, he waded in, fully clothed, and got them out and didn’t look you in the eye, not once.

  The first night I climbed up the side of his house to his window, I took pictures of him asleep with his eye patch on, and we stuck them up around the school for people to see. That was the worst thing I did when I was fourteen. The headteacher prowled up and down the assembly hall waiting for the culprit to own up. I never did.

  His mum and dad came to see mine. They said, “This victimisation has to stop.”

  I denied everything. I said it was nothing to do with me. I said I’d tried to have a word on Max’s behalf, but when a whole school was against somebody it was difficult for one person to make them stop.

  Max’s mum looked at me like she hated me that night, like I was the most despicable person she’d ever met.

  I don’t blame her.

  Max didn’t act like he hated me. That’s the other thing that made picking on him so easy. Whatever I did, or helped others to do, the next day he’d nod and say, “Hello, Sam,” like we were still friends, like nothing bad had ever happened to him because of me. It was as if, in spite of everything, Max liked me, for old times’ sake. It made me think I had nothing to feel bad about. It made it easier for me to kid myself, put it that way.

  The worst thing I did when I was seventeen was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Worse even than disappearing without leaving a note, worse even than making Bohemia do the same.

  It was October and my dad was giving me driving lessons up on the common – boring, meticulous, mirror-signal-manoeuvre lessons, when all I wanted to do was let rip and do handbrake turns and look at myself in the rearview mirror with my good shades on. I was desperate to learn to drive. Living in the middle of nowhere can do that to a person. I was sick of getting lifts all the time and cycling up hills until I felt like my lungs were going to bleed. I hassled the life out of my dad to start teaching me. I talked about nothing but driving until he gave in.

  I remember sitting in the car with him every Thursday at five, watching the reined-in, concrete profile of his face, the way he set his jaw when I did something wrong and the car squealed.

  Once I remember saying, “Can I have a car for my birthday then or what?”

  He laughed. He said the best I could hope for was to pick one up at the dump and get my genius friend Max to fix it up.

  “Max?” I said. “What are you on about?”

  He said, “His dad was telling me all about it last night in the pub. Max read a few books about mechanics, got a car from the scrap yard and he’s putting the thing back together. He’s got it in a shed up at the house. It bloody works too.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  “I know,” Dad looked at me. “Is there nothing that boy can’t do?”

  I started being nicer to Max then. Not in public or anything, not so anyone would notice. I think Max noticed though. It was around then that Mum dropped him at his house after chess club, or that I walked the dog near his house so I could have an excuse to bump into him. I wanted to see the car.

  I wish I’d never set eyes on it now.

  I was walking Ringo on the common. It was starting to get dark. He started barking at something I couldn’t see in the half-light. He ran off with his hackles up, storming across the bracken towards whatever was there. I followed him. I could hear the shush and thump of him running. I could see less and less with every few paces, like the light was just falling out of a hole in the sky.

  It was Max and his car. He was just sitting in it with the engine and the lights off. He was waiting for me to leave.

  “Shit, Max,” I said, circling it, keeping my hand on it all the way round. I was acting like I owned it already. I can see that when I watch myself from here.

  Max nodded. He wound down his window. “Hello, Sam.”

  “Nice car,” I said.

  He was sitting very still and looking straight ahead, like I hadn’t seen him yet, like he was still pretending he wasn’t there.

  I put my elbows on his open window and leaned in. “Give us a go,” I said.

  He smiled. He shook his head.

  “I can drive,” I said. “My dad’s been teaching me.”

  “No, Sam,” he said.

  I stood up again, looked around me, breathed out. There was no way I could be this close to it and not drive it. “Let me drive to the cattle grid,” I said. “Ringo can follow us. And then I’ll get out and walk him home down the road.”

  “Why should I?” he said, very quietly. I got the feeling that if I hadn’t heard it the first time, he wouldn’t have said it again.

  “Oh, mate,” I said. “You’re the first person in our year to have a car. You’re the coolest. You’re going to have no worries now.”

  Max looked at me then. He said, “Do you promise?”

  I smiled and opened the door for him to get out. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that,” I said, and I was in the driver’s seat before he’d walked round the car and opened the door at the other side.

  I started off pretty slowly. I acted like my dad was in the car with me. I put my seatbelt on. I checked my mirrors. I put the lig
hts on full beam and they sliced out across the common, bleaching the night out of the bracken, marking out the last dancing of the flies. Ringo was barking and wagging his tail behind us. I could just see him in the lights. We bumped sedately along towards the cattle grid.

  “I’ll get out just up here,” I said.

  But I didn’t.

  Just before the grid I swung the car to the right and put my foot down hard.

  “Stop!” Max shouted at me. “What are you doing?”

  “Just one more lap.”

  Ringo’s bark was further away now and the bracken crumpled fast in the lights. I remember seeing the moon quite low in the sky ahead of us. I remember having time to notice there were stars. I remember Max was shouting, but I didn’t listen.

  Three times we went round, three great loops of the common in the dark. The last time was fast. I looked at Max. He was quiet now and he was crying.

  I laughed at him. I said, “What’s the matter?”

  He didn’t answer me. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  I said, “What’s the point of owning your own car if you’re not going to really drive it?”

  Remembering that moment is hard. Seeing myself behind the wheel, grinning and yelling, it’s like looking at someone I hate. It’s like looking at someone I made disappear.

  Because just after that Max shouted something. And at the same time we hit it. Two things. We hit something that sent us hurtling into a rock. There was a deep sudden thud and the force of it turned forty miles an hour into nothing in a second. I felt the speed we’d been going rush past us from behind, slamming my face towards the steering wheel, knocking the air out of my lungs, throwing me against my own seatbelt so hard that I had bruises across my chest for weeks.