Kiss My Name Page 8

  ZARA – May 2011

  Flo and I were sat in Goodies coffee shop. I was having a diet coke, whilst Flo was having a hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and a chocolate chipped cookie to wash it down with! If Flo is stressed she eats, that’s her coping mechanism. Mr.Brazier had given Flo an hour off to escort me off the premises and calm me down. I wasn’t the one who needed calming though, Flo was.

  “Flo, chill out! Everything is in hand.”

  “Zara, are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure! I’m not stupid, Flo. For the first time in our lives, we are rich!”

  “Well, you are.”

  “Absolutely not. This isn’t money just for me to enjoy, this is ours.”

  Flo half-smiled a grateful smile towards me. Flo rarely smiled.

  “Where is it then?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The winning ticket. The one hundred thousand pound answer to all your prayers.”

  “Our prayers, Flo.”

  “Get it out then, Zara! Let me have a good look at it.”

  “I still can’t believe it!” I said as I delved into my handbag.

  “You haven’t gone and bloody lost it, have you?” Flo asked tetchily.

  “No, no, it’s here somewhere. Give me a chance!”

  Flo was beginning to panic and I guess I was too. If I couldn’t find it, I knew Flo would be constantly reminding me how stupid I was. I know Flo thought a lot of me, but she had an irritable side and from time to time had a tendency to ridicule my lack of intelligence. I didn’t do it deliberately. I am to the female race what Winnie is to Pooh bears. The more I panicked though, the more my search for the scratchcard appeared fruitless. Nervously, I kept looking over and over in the same places.

  “Oh my God! You have lost it, Zara, haven’t you?”

  “Misplaced, I’ve misplaced it. It can’t have gone far.”

  “It would be just like you to lose it, Zara!”

  “Flo, calm down, will you? I haven’t lost it.”

  Thankfully, I’d put it in the zipped up side pocket of my handbag. As I was so anxious to find it, I’d been searching through the main pocket. All the rubbish from my work locker that I had just had to empty had been piled in on top of the mass of rubbish that was already in there. Lip stained tissues, emergency tampons, copper coins, old car parking vouchers and old batteries piled up in there. It was like a mini grotto for hoarders. I now remembered that was why I had opted for the side pocket! I pulled the scratch card out delicately, holding a corner between two fingers.

  “Here is our one hundred thousand pound note!” I announced triumphantly.

  “Can I have a look at it?” Flo asked, showing me the palm of her hand.

  “Here,” I passed her the card, “see for yourself, Flo, we’re rich, honey!”

  I’m not sure Flo was the type of person to buy a scratch card. Optimists buy scratch cards. That Lotto slogan, ‘It could be you’, that works for me, because I’m an optimist. It says, ‘It could be you’ and I think, ‘exactly, why not?’

  Flo, on the other hand, is a pessimist. She would read the ‘it could be you’ slogan and think, ‘No, it bloody couldn’t! It’d never be me. Why would I waste a pound on a scratch card, when you can get three Cadbury’s Caramels in a packet from Spar for that? Scratch cards don’t taste half as nice!’

  Flo inspected my card as if she understood what all the games on it were about, but after ten or fifteen seconds, the truth came out.

  “Show me where you’ve won then, Zara, I can’t see it.”

  “There,” I explained, pointing at the correct game, “in that section there, it says if your two numbers add up to ten, you win the prize.”

  I puffed a little to indicate that it was obvious.

  “I’m sorry, Zara, I might be being stupid here, but where exactly have you won?”

  “There, in the top right hand corner.”

  I put my little finger on the exact place.

  “This one?” Flo asked.

  “Yes, the one hundred thousand pound one, like I said.”

  “But Zara, four add seven doesn’t equal ten.”

  I forced a laugh.

  “Of course they don’t, Flo, but eleven is MORE THAN TEN! Even better!”

  Flo gave me the look that she sometimes gives me when I am putting make-up on in the bathroom and she comes in to hurry me up and then realises I’ve been to the toilet in there.

  “Zara, it says to win the prize that the numbers have to equal ten, not be more than ten.”

  I shook my head, she was starting to annoy me now, I remember thinking ‘and she thinks I’m stupid!’

  “Look Flo, which one of us plays on the scratch cards? I’m pretty positive that my two numbers have been more than ten before and they’ve paid out.”

  Flo still had her quizzical look on.

  “Well, if that’s the case, you’ve won £170 000, because five add eight pays £50 000 and seven add nine pays £20 000.”

  Bearing in mind that I had just quit my job on the back of my six figure sum, a sense of doubt suddenly started to flow into my brain. I was keen not to let Flo know. I remained insistent.

  “I must have won one hundred and seventy grand then, even better!”

  “Zara, you can’t possibly have won that much. The top prize is one hundred grand. You’ve just quit your job for nothing, Zara. You need to get your tongue out quick sharp and go arse licking.”

  Instinctively, I still tried to keep the dream alive.

  “Flo, will you just calm down! We’ve won this, I tell you, we’ve won! Come with me to the shop and we’ll ask. They’ll tell you I’m right and when they do, I expect an apology.”

  “Zara, with all my heart, I hope I’m wrong, I really do. If I’m not though, honey, you haven’t just lost on the card, hun, you’ve lost everything.”

  ZARA – May 2011

  Flo and I were stood out the newsagents in Chorley town centre who had just delivered the news that I was not going to be a ‘hundredthousandaire’.

  “Shit, what do we do now? I was sure if it added up to more than ten they would pay out.”

  With her suspicions confirmed, Flo was back to her old, unsympathetic self.

  “Zara, read the rules, it was never going to pay out!”

  “Well I don’t think that’s fair!”

  Flo didn’t feel I had any right to feel aggrieved.

  “Of course it’s bloody fair! Otherwise they’d be paying out thousands every time anyone bought a one pound scratchcard!”

  “They should make it clearer on the card.”

  “I don’t believe you sometimes, Zara! Exactly how clear do you want them to be? Let’s read it again, ‘if your two numbers, added together, equal ten, you win the amount shown’. Yours didn’t. You haven’t won. You haven’t been cheated. You haven’t got a job. It is all very fair, so can you stop feeling sorry for yourself and start thinking where we go from here.”

  Flo was right. I was normally such a positive person. It didn’t make sense to feel a sense of injustice. My mind flipped back to the altercation I had had with Mr.Brazier at Penny Pinchers.

  “I’m not apologising.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” Flo said, “you just made a mistake. I don’t hold it against you.”

  “I don’t mean to you, Flo, I mean to Mr.Brazier, I’m not apologising to him. I meant every word.”

  “Well, you can tell the ladies and gentleman at the Benefits Office that you are very honest.”

  “He’s a pervert, Flo. I told you how he felt me up at the Christmas party when he was pissed.”

  “I know, but since then, you’ve put up with him because you’ve had to. The only reason you told him what you thought of him today, was because you thought you were rich. Now you know you aren’t rich. So, you either swallow your pride and apologise or you become even more skint than you are now.”

  “Do you believe in fate, Flo?”

 
Flo looked at me like I had written ‘I am a loonball’ in lipstick on my forehead.

  “No.”

  “I do. Everything happens for a reason, I reckon. OK, so maybe I wasn’t meant to win one hundred thousand pounds on a scratchcard, but maybe I was meant to leave my job at Penny Pinchers today. I’m not going back there, Flo. Fate has decided something better is out there for me.”

  Flo continued with the same look, half way between puzzled and annoyed.

  “Zara, it hasn’t. This isn’t fate! You were just too stupid to read the instructions on the scratchcard.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well you were! Come back to Penny Pinchers with me, Zara. You are the only good thing about that job. I have to go back now, I’ve already had an extra hour, please come back with me. Let’s get your job back.”

  Despite Flo’s pleas, my mind was made up. I felt really positive, as if I was somehow being guided into making the right decision. I grabbed Flo by the hand.

  “Flo, I’m not coming back. I love you, Flo and I’ll miss working with you, but we’ll still be mates. We’ll always be mates. If I find a great new job, maybe they’ll take you on too, Flo.”

  “No, they won’t, Zara! You won’t get a great new job and even if you do, hun, they won’t take me on.”

  “Don’t be so silly, think positive, Flo! Something good will happen to both of us. Anyway, you best get back to Penny Pinchers. Tell that creep I’m delighted to be away from him! I’m off to buy a couple of local papers. I’m going to get applying for new jobs straight away. This is all going to work out brilliantly, Flo, just you watch!”

  Part Four

  Searching For Justice

  SIMON – September 1986

  Grief is impossible to accurately put down in words. I don’t believe there is a natural pattern for grief. I don’t believe grief passes in stages, it just comes and goes like a dark cloud, sometimes gathering in clusters and sometimes just passing over for an instant to ruin a sunny day.

  From the moment we were notified of Colin’s death, to the end of his funeral, two weeks later, I felt I had coped with his death reasonably well and then all of a sudden I wasn’t coping at all. I started to struggle to sleep at night, getting my brain to settle down was an impossibility as it kept reminding me of its own mortality and that it had lost it’s closest comparable. Colin’s death hindered the deception that I would live forever.

  Colin’s funeral was a long, long time ago now but when I think of the funeral, I always think of my Uncle Bob. I could count on one hand how many times I have ever met my Uncle Bob. He is my Mum’s brother, but they were and are, two very different characters. Mum is candid and expressive. Uncle Bob is serious, reclusive and complex. Before he retired, Uncle Bob was a neurosurgeon which added to what Mum and Dad always called his ‘God complex’. Naturally, as Mum’s only brother, he attended Colin’s funeral.

  I wasn’t one of the sobbing masses at the funeral. My expressions of sorrow tended to be private affairs, but I remember the general atmosphere improved at the reception afterwards and polite laughter and chatter started to gather. I did not fancy being paraded amongst distant relatives as the surviving brother, so I was minding my own business, keeping a comfortable distance from Mum and Dad. When Uncle Bob sauntered over, I was by the buffet tables, trying to spot which of the white bread sandwiches had egg and cress in. I had met Uncle Bob a couple of times before, he had called in one Friday evening the previous summer when he was on his way to go rambling in the Lake District, so I was well aware of who he was. He was a tall, Italian looking man with a well groomed black moustache, thick rimmed spectacles, a full head of waxed, dark hair and an expensive suit. I guessed it was expensive anyway, Mum and Dad always said that given he was a neurosurgeon with no children, he must be loaded. I also remember in a sea of thin ties, Uncle Bob’s was the thinnest.

  “How are you bearing up, Simon?” he asked sympathetically.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  I was a shy kid with adults. I was twenty one before I could hold a proper conversation with any adult other than Mum and Dad. I had given him the standard answer that I had given to every adult friend and relative concerned about my well being. At that stage, I was relatively fine.

  “Now, can I offer you some advice?”

  “Sure.”

  Advice from a neurosurgeon, I expected, would be about working hard at school or studying sciences or some other crap I wasn’t really interested in, but if Uncle Bob was prepared to give me some advice, I was, at the very least, going to pretend to listen.

  “Your Mum and Dad tell me that you and Colin were very close, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  This was already not going along predicted lines.

  “Well, what I am about to say, will probably sound completely crazy, but I’m going to say it anyway.”

  Uncle Bob laughed a little to himself before continuing.

  “It doesn’t benefit to dwell on such matters,” he said.

  I must have looked at him blankly as he then asked,

  “Do you know what I mean, Simon?”

  I shook my head, before quietly murmuring,

  “Not really.”

  “No matter how much you loved him, no matter how close you were, Colin has gone and will never come back. We wish he could, but he can’t. He isn’t sitting on a white cloud looking down on us from heaven. He isn’t being punished for eternity in hell. He has just gone. Now, if you spend a lot of your time thinking about Colin and about his death, it will just eat away at you. Don’t do it, Simon. It will just make you a very unhappy young man.”

  I think one of the reasons I remember this conversation so vividly, was because it was so unusual for an adult to be so blunt with me. Most of them were telling me that the sun, a star more than one hundred times larger than earth, was shining because of Colin. I was thirteen but even I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that. Uncle Bob was direct and I appreciated this. I have always thought what he said was wise and profound and I have put it down to him being a highly intelligent medical professional who was no doubt hugely experienced in dealing in death. I told my Dad about this conversation when I was in my twenties and he said it was ‘just another example of ‘Bob being a bit of a dick’. It’s funny how two people can interpret the same thing in completely different ways.

  I suppose I should have heeded Uncle Bob’s warnings about dwelling on Colin’s death, but despite Mum and Dad’s efforts to distract me, I found it impossible not to dwell on it. We had become a family of three, every meal sat around our kitchen table, was a reminder of Colin’s death, as it was square table, for four people. One side was no longer filled and the chair that had previously contained a vibrant, talkative child was now empty. Meal times were not the only reminder. Cricket reminded me of Colin. Playing out reminded me of Colin. An empty bed in my bedroom reminded me of Colin. Deaths on the news reminded me of Colin. Deaths in action films reminded me of Colin. Nicky reminded me. Mum and Dad reminded me. Swimming reminded me. Everything reminded me. For a long time, these reminders weren’t happy, poignant reminders either, they were distressing reminders.

  When the summer holidays were over and I returned to school at Parklands, I obviously moved up into Third Year and a whole load of new kids started as First Year’s. Colin was not meant to start that year, he would have been due to start the following year, but their presence made me cry because it was a further reminder that Colin would never be coming to my school.

  I hated all the constant reminders but Mum approached Colin’s death in a totally different way. Mum wanted to be reminded of Colin. She went looking for reminders. Mum kept photos of Colin up around the house. The photos were bad enough, but even worse were the home video recordings of Colin and me that Mum would watch over and over again. I hated seeing them. They freaked me out. The videos somehow seemed to make the non-existent exist. Seeing Colin speak, move, smile and laugh again just destroyed me. Mum took great comf
ort in watching those videos but I couldn’t watch more than a couple of minutes as they totally freaked me out.

  With Colin no longer around, my childhood bore a wound that took several years to heal and always left a scar. I had never been the most comfortable child in my own skin anyway, but after Colin’s death I had a sense that everyone was always looking at me. I thought everyone at school who barely knew me, treated me as ‘that kid whose brother died’. Life felt hard and as far as I was concerned, the blame lay at the feet of one person, Luke ‘Boffin’ Booth.

  By appealing to the public, the police had tried to piece together the last day of Colin’s life as best they could, but there were pieces of the jigsaw that just didn’t fit. One thing that they knew conclusively was that during the late afternoon and early evening, Colin was sat on the side of the canal with another boy, an older boy. Several people on narrow boats, as well as dog walkers and fishermen, reported to the police that Colin was there, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the rain, with an older boy in a baseball cap. A few people also reported that they had driven past two boys on Euxton Lane, mid-afternoon. One of them matched Colin’s description. The other one was wearing a baseball cap.

  I never had a doubt, from the beginning, that the mystery older child would be Luke ‘Boffin’ Booth. Colin had been hanging around with him and I had already confronted Colin about his tobacco smelling clothing previously after a day with Boffin. One thing that frustrated me though, was that the child spotted with Colin wore a baseball cap, because if there had been reports of Colin being with an older child with ginger hair then the finger of blame could have been pointed at Boffin far more easily.

  Phil Moss inadvertently gave the game away. Phil was another of the kids Colin had hung around with. In the initial months after Colin’s death, Mum and Dad went through a spell of spoiling me. They started taking me to Fredericks, an ice cream parlour on the outskirts of Chorley, two or three times a week. I think Mum and Dad were conscious that Colin and I had just been left to run loose for the most part, so now, after the tragedy, they wanted to spend more family time together. I felt Colin’s death probably hurt them even more than it hurt me, so I was happy to go along with whatever they suggested. Not that I would ever have minded going for ice cream anyway.