Jake looked at them both, standing over him. He felt nauseous and, even though he tried to ignore it, the shrill whine of the child repellent would not let him concentrate. If there was a choice to make it was not one he could make with his intelligence or reasoned argument, being only thirteen at the time and under attack. Surely there was a choice, but made already for him by all the preceding years, by intuition, fate, or by the erratic balance of hormones that were at war inside him. If there was a choice it was like the choice whether or not to lift your leg when the doctor hits your knee with a tiny mallet.
“I’m staying,” he said.
I imagine that Tamsin’s eyes filled with admiration.
“Suit your-fucking-self,” she said with a confused, hopeful smile, and walked away with Will. Will came back at night three days later and stuffed a turd through the Laundrette’s letter box. Two weeks after that Tom and Will threw a brick through the window of the News and Booze shop.
When they were out of sight I closed my eyes and felt my brain spin in my skull. I opened them again and thought that I had settled, but there was a surge in that electronic scream and I threw up.
“You alright there?” It was the woman who ran the News and Booze shop. She was looking down at the puddle of sick on the floor.
“You should go home,” she said.
Jake, to his credit, did not tell her to fuck off.
“You could turn off that noise,” he said.
“What noise?” She was laughing and her arms were folded. “I don’t hear any noise.”
But she knew. From the gloat in the set of her mouth and her eyes you could see that she knew.
“Fuck off,” Jake said.
It was like the inconsolable scream of a teething infant. It was like the sound of distressed metal, of breaking machinery.
They all came, then, when it was clear he was going to resist. The shopkeepers, his parents, the police, the devil. They offered taunts, violence, warm milk and cookies. He had a Swiss army knife in his pocket. He teased out the blade and started to etch his name into the bench.
“You coming back for tea?” his father asked.
Jake did not know how to answer. It seemed important to keep scratching his name, though. The rationale for his rebellion could not be vocalised, his father would never allow himself to be reasoned with, but the seam within his spirit that was driving him would not allow him to stop. He had completed the “J” and the “A” and was starting work on the “K”.