Kodiak

I was in the shed out the back of our house and I was picking up heavy logs that were going to go on the fire in the house. Earlier it had been tearing it up in our little hearth but now it was dying out so it needed more fuel. The logs we’d collected were a little damp to the touch and they had layers of moss and grainy dirt and grime all over them, not to mention insects. My dad stood with his arms folded and the wind blowing the wisps of what little hair he had left up into the air so that they were pretty much standing on end.

“You need to pick all the crap off them first.”

I opened my mouth to speak but Stewart butted in just like he always does. He’s six years older than me and he thinks he’s got twice the brains I have. He’s too stupid to realise he’s wrong.

“Hey dad that’s a one man job,” he pointed down to the pile of logs that he’d just helped me lug out of the shed, “and I’ve got homework to do. Can’t he do it?”
Dad rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully.
“You’re probably right, you get on inside. Nicky you can finish up here.”

I hate my brother sometimes. I knew he had no intention of working; that he just wanted to stare out of his window at our neighbour Becky Prendergast all night. He’d recently bought himself a pair of expensive binoculars and he’d sold a load of stuff on Ebay just so he could pay for them. I’d met her a few times and she seemed like a nice person and everything and she had a nice pretty smile and “really awesome tits” as Stewart liked to say but she wasn’t worth selling your TV for.

My dad pointed a finger, a warning point that he didn’t seem very sure about.

“Nicky they’d better be completely clean; I don’t want any mess on my carpets when you bring them.” He paused, squinting, before carrying on, “you need to make sure the moss comes off and they’re not wet. Otherwise they won’t burn.” He came over and crouched next to me and showed me how to quickly pick off all of the moss in one big lump. Even down on his haunches he’s taller than me and I couldn’t help but feel insignificant. He ran his hands along the surface of the wood and tugged off any stray pieces and extra bits of rough and felt the wood with the backs of his hands, checking for dampness I assumed. Dad’s good at doing those kind of outdoor mans jobs where you need to have a plain mind, he thinks in straight lines and that’s useful.

I looked at his arms and the tattooes that live on them in sporadic areas. He says he likes his tattooes and that they all mean something to him. He’s got my birthday on one arm and Stewart’s on the other. He’s got quite a few on his back and he even has one on his leg. He has union jack flags, lightning bolts, curvy ladies and cords of rope and twine. I don’t know what even half of them are. Over his heart he even has two that are crossed out. They were names but now they’re not there anymore, they’re just two scribbled blue blocks. He says this is because they don’t mean anything to him now and that he doesn’t want them there any longer.

I sat down as he went indoors. It was a dry day so the stone floor of the yard was ok to sit on. Still after a few minutes my backside started to get cold so I sat cross legged like a Red Indian, only rather than sitting on my rear I pushed my trainers back underneath me to make a kind of seat. I sat like this standing the different logs on end between my legs, picking the moss from them as patiently as I could. I can’t exactly say I felt happy about it but I felt like a caveman, this seemed like the kind of thing that they would have to do. I felt like Stig of the Dump, I’d just read that book and it was playing on my mind a lot.

I read a lot you know, usually at night when dad’s asleep and when Stewart’s locked in his room on the phone or lifting weights or whatever it is he does in there. I’ve got a lot of books in my room, all kinds, I don’t know where they came from; I imagine they were my mother’s but I’m not too sure because my dad won’t tell me.

The light switched on in my brothers room whilst I sat working on the logs and listening to the sound of Becky’s dad Mr Prendergast mowing his lawn with that sound that’s like a hornets buzz. Mr Prendergast always uses it in the evening and gets complaints from the other neighbours including my dad.

Mr Prendergast works in “some insurance place” as my dad says and he moved here when his wife “took off”. When the Prendergast’s moved in Mr Prendergast came over to say hi to my dad. The two of them stood in the kitchen drinking beer that Mr Prendergast brought over, talking about their lives and hovering side by side as they looked out of the window onto our garden out the back; neither of them sure how they felt about each other yet. I was eating my dinner, it was macaroni and cheese that I had actually made myself and I was feeling pretty good about it so I only heard a half of what they were saying but it seemed like they got on OK. Dad told Mr Prendergast that the local school was good and he told him that he liked his car. Mr Prendergast joked about how the weather up here wasn’t quite as good as it was down South but I could tell that Dad didn’t really agree with him.

We met Becky a week later when she started school and it was pretty obvious that Stewart liked her straight away. One Saturday when I was lying on my bed looking out of my window I saw Becky walking home from the bus smiling to herself about something. As she smiled, the fronds of sunlight beat down right upon her mouth and shone off of her braces so that it looked like she had some kind of weird alien freak mouth. I laughed hard about it but when I mentioned to Stewart that she had a mouth like Jaws from James Bond he told me that he was going to “smash me in my face if I didn’t shut up”.

That’s when I realised he was serious.

So there I was as Stewarts light beamed out into the evening. The curtains slowly unfurled and I saw his muscled forearms perching on the windowsill up above with the two eyes of the binoculars stretching out from his face. He was chewing something as usual and he was holding his binoculars in one hand whilst his other rested and bunched up into a fist that made little circular movements on the sill as he watched across the way over the tops of the trees. When I stood up and moved so my back was to the wall of the house I could see upward at what he was looking at through the corner of the window pane, it was Becky in her room. I couldn’t make out exactly what she was doing thanks to the angle of the window but I could make out a bit of skin and I could just about see a dash of her blonde hair, the tips of it dangling soft in the light as the evening slowly turned dark.

The next day I woke up, had breakfast (Corn Flakes) and then sat upstairs in my room reading. My bedroom is where the book boxes are. They’re big wooden crates that look like they’ve been specially made just to hold old hardback volumes and paperbacks with folded yellowing pages and dust that creeps down in the leaves of the paper. I often pick out a book at random and inspect its folds and its creases and smell its pages because I love the smell, the mustiness and I love thinking about all the people who’ve looked at the pages I’m looking at right there at that moment. I like to think about those people and imagine who they might be and what they might have done.

I sat lying on my bed and kicking my feet up in the air as I lay on my stomach in that way I like. From the big boxes pushed against the wall I picked up an adventure book about two brothers called the Hunt boys who go looking for rare animals for their dads zoo. It was written by a man named Willard Price. I thought his name was strange and that the picture on the front was cool.

The book was turning out to be really pretty good, the two boys in the story were a little older than me and Stewart but the difference in their ages was the same, Hal was the older (19) and Roger the younger (13). In the story the two of them head to the wilderness and end up having to fight a huge bear called the Kodiak bear which apparently is a lot bigger than the Grizzly.

I was interrupted by Stewart. He kicked open the door and then walked over and kicked my bed.

“Hey needle dick. Why don’t you pull your head out of that book whilst I talk to you? What you doing?”
“Reading.”
“Don’t get clever.” He snorted back a piece of phlegm to the back of his throat.
I put the book down because I knew he was going to try and make me do something.
“Listen-”
“I’m not doing it.”
“You don’t even know what it is yet!”
“I know I’m not going to like it.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,”
“How?”
“I’ll do the washing up on your nights,”
“No.”
“Hey that’s a good offer!”
“No. You’ll only find some way of getting out of it and Dad will make me do it.”
“I won’t!”
“You will.”
“Jesus,”
“Pay me.”
“What?”
“I want money.”
“I don’t have any money.”

I knew this was a lie, I’d been in his bedroom only three evenings ago and I’d opened his underwear drawer and rooted around to find the ski socks that he used to keep his cash in. I don’t know how he made his money, he didn’t have a job. I suspected he stole some of it from dad and that the rest of it he made selling cigarettes to kids at school because he was tall and had some hair on his top lip so he could get served in the corner shop. He had at least thirty in that sock in notes and a bit extra in coins.

“Ten, I know you have it.”
“No way that’s all I’ve got. I’ll give you five,”
“No you have more. Ten.”
“Eight?”
“You want me to do something? It costs ten.”
“God alright. When did you turn out to be such a little leech?”
I made a face at him. He leaned over and thumped me and gave me a dead arm.
“That’s for going in my drawer.” He flexed his muscles and puckered his lips like he was kissing the air and gave me the finger as he walked out backwards.

Later we sat on the bench round the bend by the road outside of the corner shop whilst Stewart smoked one of his cigarettes. He offered it to me but I decided not to smoke any because they’re bad for you. He wanted to go and find Becky. His plan was that I would get into some kind of trouble and then Stewart would save me or stop me from doing whatever it was that I was going to be doing. This would happen right in front of her and she’d be impressed and this would supposedly make her like him. Personally I didn’t think too much of the idea but I don’t have that many friends in our area so I had nothing better to do.

“I think what you should do is maybe get hit by a car or stand in the road so you’re going to get hit and then I can come and save you.”
“I’m not getting hit by a car.”
“I’d do it for you.”
“You would not!”
“I swear I would, if it was for something this important.”
“But I might get killed,”
“No you wouldn’t I’d save you,”
“I don’t think so,”
“Alright then Einstein you think of something.”
“Maybe I should call her a name or something. I could call her a bitch?”
“No don’t call her a bitch.”
“Why not?”
“She might hit you before I do.”
“Oh.” I thought on this for a second. “How about if I just come with you and act cute? Girls like that don’t they?”
“Yeah they do they love kids. They all do.”
“It’d be like I was your kid or something.”
“You are,”
“No I’m not.”

It took us a while to find her but eventually we got her down at the park. I can’t lie I was pretty excited about this, I’d enjoyed our search across the estate and near the shops nearly as much as I’d enjoyed spying on the local areas where the teenagers hung out. I felt like we were Hal and Roger Hunt, Becky was our Kodiak and now the green park with its football pitches with the brown dirt area that lay patchy beneath the goalposts and the swings that had been swung round and over the bars they hung from till they were tight and unreachable, was our hunting ground.

We walked over.

She was stood with her hands in her pockets, wearing denim shorts and a pink t shirt with sleeves that were hardly there. She wasn’t exactly like a bear or a wild animal when you got up close to her but I didn’t mind. She was stood by the climbing frame which her friend Sophie was hanging upside down from, suspended by the crook in her knees. Sophie’s t-shirt was hanging loosely towards her neck because of the gravity and she was showing her stomach which was quite fat and could be seen pale in the distance. Stewart was walking like he was a tough guy and I followed a few steps behind.

“Hey Becky,” he said when we arrived.
“Hi Stew,”
“I want you to meet my brother Nicky.”
“Hello Nick,” she said grinning at me with her metal mouth, “this is my friend Sophie.”

I looked across at Sophie and I felt hot all over. She looked down at me for a second then put her hands on her hips and said out loud;
“He’s sooo cute.”
“I know!” said Becky “Where did you get him from Stew?”
“I found him in a basket by the canal and took him in. My dad didn’t like it at first but I talked him round.”
They both laughed. I blushed.
“How old are you Nick?”

I actually couldn’t speak; all I could do was look at the ground and turn a horrible red. The girls both cooed to each other like pigeons and then started laughing at how cute I was. As they did Stewart winked at me but it didn’t make me feel good because I wasn’t acting at all.

After a short while Stewart was talking to the girls on the roundabout whilst I sat on the grass away from them. They were laughing and I felt bored and stupid and the melted chocolate bar he had given me that he said would “seal the deal” if he gave it to me in front of the girls was sitting in my lap because I didn’t want it. I wondered if this was how the Hunt brothers did things. Did Roger ever feel stupid and little?

I was going to go over and tell Stew I wanted to go home when I spotted some bikes across the park travelling over our way and ridden by two other guys who might have been seventeen or maybe eighteen or nineteen, I couldn’t be sure.

One was wearing long denim shorts, a baggy red t shirt and a baseball cap. The other was wearing tracksuit bottoms, white trainers and had a cigarette behind his ear. They pulled up at the roundabout next to Stewart and the girls and I could see them talking. At first I stood where I was, watching things but I wanted to hear what was going on so I ran over as fast as I could. I stopped behind them.

“What you girls doing with this loser then?” was the first thing I heard. It came from the one in the tracksuit. The other friend was on his bike and looking the other way not caring much at all by the look of him. His bike was a little BMX and he had bright blue pegs on the back, I’d wanted one like that for years.

“Not much,” said Sophie. Becky didn’t say anything.
“Stewart Hughes. I remember Little Stewey from primary school. You forgot your kit and had to do PE in your boxers. Remember his boxers Matt?”
“Yeah! It was well funny!”
“Looked like you’d shit yourself!”

I looked at Stewart who looked at the floor. The two older boys laughed.

The one in the tracksuit looked over at me. I didn’t look away but I did squint my eyes because the sun was glaring and it made it hard to make out his face properly. I felt small in my shorts and my t shirt but I wasn’t afraid.

“And who’s this then? What’s your name?”
“Nick.”
“I see you know my little mate Stewey then?” I could make out the silhouette of his head and saw the shadow shape of his cheeks widening with his smile. A hooped earring hung from his ear.
“He’s my brother.”
“You never said you had a brother Stewey,”
My brother didn’t say anything.
“What do you think of your big brother then Nicky? I suppose you think he’s the big man don’t you? Walking about like he’s ten men all the time it’s hard not to eh?”
I shrugged, saying no without actually having to say the words.
He laughed and looked at my brother mockingly.
“What have you got no other mates Stew?”
“Course he doesn’t!” laughed Matt.

Stewart couldn’t look up and meet their eyes like I could. He’d wimped out. “Dear oh dear Stewey. Looks like Nick here isn’t very impressed with his big bad brother is he!” They both laughed at him but still he didn’t say anything. “What a puff!”
The one on the BMX called Matt nodded at Sophie.
“Fancy a ride?” he said, “We’re going down the precinct.”
“Alright,” she grinned and climbed onto the pegs. She linked her hands around his waist and pushed her chest up close against his back. “Bye Nicky,” she said as she looked down at me. I held up a hand by way of a goodbye as they cycled off and failed to prevent the spread of blushing red from creeping up my neck and burning my cheeks.

The remaining boy stood between Stewart and Becky pointedly.
“What about you?” he said to her.
“I don’t know,” she said and she glanced at Stewart.
“Come on. You’re not staying here with these kids are you?” I noticed at the edge of his zip up tracksuit top, the point of a tattoo at his wrist. I wondered if it was like any of my dad’s. “You might as well come with me, we’ll have some fun.”
She paused and I could see her thinking but it didn’t take long for her to make up her mind.
“You know what; I don’t think I will.” she folded her arms and she looked away. “Fine,” he smirked and he turned his bike around, climbed onto it. He cycled off, spitting his cigarette out of his mouth to his left as he went. I watched it spiral through the air with its little puffs of smoke still trailing up out of it.

It landed on the floor and I watched it there with my back to my brother and Becky and the ember burning in the grass until it died and spent itself out, a black tip that was finished; lying forgotten by everyone except me.

As he began to cycle away I didn’t think twice, I pulled the chocolate bar that Stewart had given me earlier out of my pocket and ran forward a few paces like a javelin thrower. I drew back my arm as far as I could and threw it after the older boy. It stopped a little short but he turned around and he saw it and he looked back and he looked right at me.I stayed where I was, looking back at him, trying to stare him down like a big man. It wasn’t much but I was satisfied with the distance I got on my throw and I’d very nearly hit him.

He waited for a moment before turning round and cycling back towards me, pulling up fast in a sharp and intimidating skid. I had it in my mind to tell him where to go but I soon found that I was incapable and actually pretty frightened.

“What was that? You throwing stuff dickhead?”

I didn’t know where to look or what I could say, my stomach dipped as if I was riding in a car and I’d gone over a hill too quickly.
“No!”
“Yeah you was. Trying to act the big man eh?”

He got off his bike and let it drop to the floor and approached me. I stood my ground several yards away from Stewart and Becky, not knowing what to do. He wasn’t far off six feet tall and he moved fast. He pushed me in my right shoulder with an extended index finger.
“Well do you know what happens to big men who mess with bigger boys?”
I said nothing.
“They get shown what’s what,” he said and he leant in and grabbed my balls.

He squeezed them for a second and gripped them in his palm, “They get shown what’s what.” He repeated.

In that long moment then the midges buzzed around my head carelessly and I stood, unable to move, my head swimming. His eyes glared down at me and his mouth leered open and slack as he cupped me. It occurred to me that I might have made a rash decision trying to get at him.
He released me and smirked and I could smell chewing gum on his breath as he spoke.
“Remember that.”

He poked me in the chest again as if to drive the point home one final time and then turned away and picked up his bike. I didn’t wait to watch him ride away; I just turned my back and walked. I returned back to my brother and Becky.
“What did he say to you?” said Stewart.
“That was really brave Nick!” said Becky.
“I want to go home Stew,” I said.
“I think we might stay here, it’s still sunny.”
“Fine!” I shouted, and I turned and I ran, ignoring him as he shouted after me.

I ran back across the green of the park, away from the yellow roundabout and I ran through the gate and onto the tarmac pavement with its loose scuffed stones bouncing under my trainers. I ran back to my house as fast as I could, running for some of the way with my eyes shut tight, the beads of sweat quietly soaking my hair at the back of my neck and running in salty rivulets down my forehead onto my cheeks and nose.

The gate clanked shut when I got back and I ran inside and up to my room and locked my door. Inside on my bed was the Willard Price book about the Hunt brothers. I looked at the cover and I thought about them and the Kodiak bear that they fought and I suddenly felt, for the first time in my life, that a book could be bullshit. I angrily swept it onto the floor and I kicked it across the room as hard as I could where it bounced off the wooden crates up against the wall in my room. It lay there splayed open; face down as if someone had put it there to temporarily save their place.

Later on I made my way downstairs for dinner feeling wrung out and empty. My dad was smoking at the table, drinking a beer and doing the crossword. He asked me what was wrong and why I’d come back on my own. I told him simply that I was OK and that I was feeling tired so I came back.

He took a drink from his can and stuck the pencil behind his ear and said breezily that it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the evening on my own past nine o clock and Stewart probably shouldn’t have let me come back on my own, that I was too young to be out on the park.

“I know,” I said.