LITMIR.BIZ

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off me!” he gurgled.

      A shrieking laugh rang out behind his head and his left arm was pushed further up his back, sending a fresh thunderclap of pain through his shoulder.

      “Break it, Danny,” someone shouted. “Snap it off!”

      “I just might,” replied Danny Mitchell, between gales of laughter. Then his voice was low and right next to Jamie’s ear. “I could, you know,” he whispered. “Easy.”

      “Get off me, you fat —”

      A huge hand, its fingers like sausages, gripped his hair and pushed his face back into the dirt. Jamie squeezed his eyes shut and flailed around with his right hand, trying to push himself up from the sucking mud.

      “Someone grab his arm,” Danny shouted. “Hold it down.” A second later Jamie’s right arm was gripped at the wrist and pressed to the ground.

      Jamie’s head started to ache as his body begged for oxygen. He couldn’t breathe, his nostrils full of sticky, foul-smelling mud, and he couldn’t move, his arms pinned and fifteen stone of Danny Mitchell sitting astride his back.

      “That’s enough!”

      Jamie recognised the voice of Mr Jacobs, the English teacher.

       My knight in shining armour. A fifty-year-old man with sweat patches and bad breath. Perfect.

      “Mitchell, get off him. Don’t make me tell you again!” the teacher shouted, and suddenly the pressure on Jamie’s arm and the weight on his back were gone. He lifted his face from the mud and took a huge breath, his chest convulsing.

      “We were just playing a game, sir,” he heard Danny Mitchell say.

       Great game. Really fun.

      Jamie rolled over on to his back and looked round at the faces of the crowd who had gathered to watch his humiliation. They looked down at him with a mixture of excitement and disgust.

       They don’t even like Danny Mitchell. They just hate me more than they hate him.

      Mr Jacobs hunkered down next to him.

      “Are you all right, Carpenter?”

      “I’m fine, sir.”

      “Mitchell tells me this was some kind of game. Is that true?

      ” Over the teacher’s shoulder Jamie saw Danny looking at him, the warning clear in his face.

      “Yes, sir. I think I lost, sir.”

      Mr Jacobs looked down at Jamie’s mud-splattered clothes. “It certainly looks like it.” The teacher held his hand out and Jamie took it and pulled himself up out of the mud with a loud sucking noise. A couple of people in the crowd giggled, and Mr Jacobs whirled round, his face red with anger.

      “Get out of here, you vultures!” he shouted. “Get to your next lesson right now or I’ll see you all for detention at the end of the day!”

      The crowd dispersed, leaving Jamie and Mr Jacobs standing alone on the field.

      “Jamie,” the teacher began, “if you ever want to talk about anything, you know where my office is.”

      “Talk about what, sir?” Jamie asked.

      “Well, you know, your father, and… well, what happened.”

      “What did happen, sir?”

      Mr Jacobs looked at him for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to get cleaned up before next lesson. You can use the staff bathroom.”

      When the bell rang for the end of the day, Jamie made his way slowly up the school drive towards the gate. His instincts were normally sharp, especially where danger was concerned, but somehow Danny Mitchell had crept up behind him during afternoon break. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

      He slowed his pace, drifting in and out of groups of children ambling towards buses and waiting cars, his pale blue eyes darting left and right, looking for an ambush.

      His chest tightened when he saw Danny Mitchell off to his left, laughing his ridiculous laugh and waving his arms violently around as he made a point to his adoring gaggle of sycophants.

      Jamie slipped between two buses and across the road, waiting for the shouts and running feet that would mean he had been seen, but they didn’t come. Then he was into the neat, identical rows of houses that made up the estate he and his mother lived in, and out of sight of the school.

      The Carpenters had moved three times in the two years since Jamie’s dad had died. Immediately after it happened the police had come to see them and told them that his father had been involved in a plot to sell intelligence to a British terrorist cell, classified intelligence from his job at the Ministry of Defence. The policemen had been kind, and sympathetic, assuring them there was no evidence that either he or his mother had known anything, but it didn’t matter. The letters had started to arrive almost immediately, from patriotic neighbours who didn’t want the family of a traitor living in their quiet Daily Mail-reading neighbourhood.

      They had sold the house in Kent a few months later. Jamie didn’t care. His memory of that awful night was hazy, but the tree in the garden scared him and he couldn’t walk across the gravel drive where his father had died, choosing instead to walk around the edge of the lawn, keeping as much distance between him and the oak as possible, and jumping across the gravel on to the doorstep.

      The face at the window, and the high, terrifying laugh that had drifted through the smashed window of the living room, he didn’t remember at all.

      After that they had moved in with his aunt and uncle in a village outside Coventry. A new school for Jamie, a job as a receptionist in a GP’s surgery for his mother. But the rumours and stories followed them, and a brick was thrown through the kitchen window of his aunt’s terraced house the same day Jamie broke the nose of a classmate who made a joke about his dad.

      They moved on the following morning.

      From there they caught a train to Leeds and found a house in a suburb that looked like it was made of Lego. When Jamie was expelled from his second school in three months, for persistent truancy, his mother didn’t even shout at him. She just handed in their notice to their landlord, and started packing their things.

      Finally, they had ended up in this quiet estate on the outskirts of Nottingham. It was grey, cold and miserable. Jamie, an outdoor creature, a country boy at heart, was forced to roam the concrete underpasses and supermarket car parks, his hood up and pulled tight around his face, his iPod thumping in his ears, keeping to himself and avoiding the gangs that congregated on the shadowy corners of this suburban wasteland. Jamie always avoided the shadows. He didn’t know why.

      He walked quickly through the estate, along quiet roads full of nondescript houses and second-hand cars. He passed a small group of girls, who stared at him with open hostility. One of them said something he couldn’t quite hear, and her friends laughed. He walked on.

      He was sixteen years old, and miserably, crushingly lonely.

      Jamie closed the front door of the small semi-detached house he and his mother lived in as quietly as possible, intending to head straight to his room and change out of his muddy clothes. He got halfway up the stairs before his mother called his name.

      “What, Mum?” he shouted.

      “Can you come in here, please, Jamie?”

      Jamie swore under his breath and stomped back down the stairs, across the hall and into the living room. His mother was sitting in the chair under the window, looking at him with such sadness that his throat clenched.

      ‘What’s going on, Mum?” he asked.

      “I got a call from one of your teachers today,” she replied. “Mr Jacobs.”

      God, why can’t he mind

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