And so she’s glad when her phone buzzes with a new message and she can stop thinking about it. When she checks, she finds that in fact she’s got messages from lots of people in the last hour – from Janine, from Denise, from KellyAnn, Shannan, Richard Dunstable (Seabrook), Graham Canning (St Mary’s) and Leo Coates (Gonzaga); she reads them one by one, replies, replies to the replies, time slipping by, phone buzzing, messages wrapping around her like a cocoon, protecting her from the thought of the toad-boy, of what is in her stomach, of everything else.
Obviously the text from Shannan she deletes without even reading. Lori and Janine have been ignoring Shannan ever since Lori found out Shannan told Kimberley Cross that Janine hates Lloyd Dalton even though she knows Kimberley’s boyfriend and Lloyd Dalton are best friends. It’s as she’s sending the message to the trash that she gets her idea. When something annoying or stupid or evil or all three like Shannan is in your life, the best thing to do is treat it like it doesn’t exist. So, that’s what she should do with the invaders in her stomach too! While they are living inside it, she will cut her stomach out of her life, just like she and Janine and Denise have cut out Shannan. She will act like it’s not there until she’s sure the problem has been solved.
She knows her body will not like this. Her body wants to eat food, it wants to grow and make itself stronger. Even now her stomach is mewling with hunger, not knowing that it’s in control of the enemy. But she has the answer to this too, in fact the answer has been here all along – tucked away inside her favourite bear, a baggie of at least one hundred pills, enough to last her for a couple of weeks at least. She reaches for Lala, finds the secret tear underneath his left arm. She’ll start now with one pill or maybe two. Soon she’ll have everything back under control.
Something is following Carl.
In the beginning he just feels it, in the classroom, in Texaco, outside Lori’s house. It’s watching him but it doesn’t let him see it, he turns round and it’s gone. He asks Barry if he’s noticed anything.
‘Like what?’ Barry says.
‘Just like someone following us around.’
‘Shit, you mean like the pigs?’
But Carl doesn’t mean the pigs. He doesn’t know what he means. But just because he doesn’t know what it is doesn’t stop it from watching him, even in places where it’s impossible to watch him, in Deano’s flat or in his own room, or in his dreams where he starts to feel it too, the same pair of eyes that track him invisibly when he’s awake, there silently in the dream-space. For a long time though he doesn’t see it, it’s just a feeling, so he smokes more and more of the superskunk and tries to bury it under the feeling of nothing.
And then one night he is with Janine. They are in the greenhouse talking about what to do about the Plan, which is over because Carl ruined it. He doesn’t remember why he did it. It was a very good plan, the way that Janine explained it. We trick Lori’s mom and dad so they think she is going out with Skippy, but really she is going to meet you. They won’t know about you. Skippy won’t know about you. The only people that know about you will be the three of us. Lori will have to be with Skippy a little bit sometimes for the Plan to work. But it won’t mean anything. And the two of you can be together, Janine said, my love, and she ran her tongue over Carl’s neck. And Carl understood. Lori would be with Skippy sometimes, but it wouldn’t mean anything, the same way it didn’t mean anything when he was with Janine. It was just a trick to fool her parents, so she could say, I’m going to meet Skippy, and then she would go to meet Carl. He understood, he could see it was an excellent plan. But then at the last minute, when it was actually happening, he realized he didn’t understand. Most of him did but he couldn’t explain it to the part that didn’t. And he worried about whether the boy Skippy understood. That’s why he sent the film from the roof of Ed’s, so that everyone would know what was going on, everyone would know that Lori was his. But you see that was not part of the Plan. So what happened then was, instead of bringing him and Lori together, he has actually split them apart, and now he is in Janine’s granny’s greenhouse and everything is different. She is telling him Lori will not see him, will not talk to him. She is crying. He is breaking her granny’s flowerpots. She is begging him to stop. She is telling him that it will blow over, that Lori will come around, that she will talk to her. She is saying you can’t blame yourself for this, Carl! She keeps scrambling up his leg to try and kiss him, and he keeps pushing her back but then she gets close enough that he sees something. I love you, she says, but he doesn’t hear her, he is staring deep into her eyes.
The dead boy is staring back out at him.
Carl always thought it was him. Now he knows for certain.
After that Dead Boy becomes braver, he will appear not just in eyes and dreams but like a hologram beside Carl, or behind him, or in front of him, there and gone, a split-second at a time. No one else can see him, only Carl. ‘See what?’ they say. ‘A person.’ ‘Yeah right, haven’t you ever heard the saying, don’t get high on your own supply?’ and then they laugh. And right in the middle of them Dead Boy will be standing, staring at Carl with his big empty eyes.
Carl tries to get used to him and ignore him. Then he tries to fight him, to hit him kick him stab him, one day in school when he sees him standing in the window he throws a chair at him he screams at him in his bedroom, Stay away from me, but nothing works, just Mom appears at the door with messy hair asking if he wants a sleeping pill.
It gets hard to concentrate on things. Mark gives him jobs to do and he can’t find the money afterwards. Did he forget to take it? Did he leave it somewhere? You better get it from somewhere, dude, Barry says, otherwise he’s going to freak. So Carl ends up replacing it himself. After a while he starts running out of replacement money. But Mom’s written her ATM pin at the back of her address book.
Get it together, Barry says. You snooze you lose in this game, bro.
Barry is jealous because Carl has been suspended for a week because of throwing the chair. But being suspended is not that great. Most of the time he just goes to Deano’s gaff. Deano lives in the flats behind the shopping mall with his mom, only he calls her Ma, she looks like his granny and most of the time she stays in the kitchen drinking cups of tea and pretending not to know what they’re doing. Outside, everything smells like piss. The blokes are all scobes in tracksuits and the birds are mingers with ponytails and earrings as big as their heads, they laugh at Carl and call him a Seabrook bum boy and a poshie. But no one ever tries to mess with him because they know Deano has a sawn-off in a sports bag under his bed. He sits there with the others watching Ren and Stimpy and smoking and Dead Boy flicks in and out and Carl’s heart screams Lori Lori Lori Lori until the grass blots it out.
So where does all this shit come from? Barry says one night.
What? Mark says.
All this stuff we smoke and we sell, where does it come from?
A stork brings it, Deano says.
We buy it off the fuckin Mafia, Ste says.
Really? Barry goes.
No, you thick cunt, Ste says. Barry goes red.
What do you fuckin care where it comes from, Knoxer says. Are you on fuckin work experience or something?
Work experience! Deano says, laughing so hard snot comes out of his nose.
Knoxer is a cunt with greasy hair. Gee, Ren, says Stimpy, he is holding out a plate of sick.
It comes from different places, Mark says. They make the pills mostly in Holland. Coke, that’s all from South America. And heroin, that comes from poppies that these ragheads grow in Afghanistan.