‘Yeah. That was me.’
‘Did you know who I was? Even then?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I did.’
‘Is that why you spoke to me?’
‘Yup.’
‘I was so embarrassed. You were so pretty.’
‘Yeah, you can stop saying that now.’
‘Sorry.’
I smiled. I didn’t mind. There was something so easy about the boy. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’m only joking. Why did you stop going? To the dojo?’
He said, ‘I didn’t. I still go. I just changed my class times. I go on Fridays now.’
‘Are you any good?’
He said, ‘Yeah. Green belt. So, you know, getting there.’
‘Remember you told me you wanted to be able to defend yourself? That’s why you were taking lessons? You told me you’d been mugged?’
He nodded.
‘What happened?’
He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a little bag. As he talked he constructed a spliff on his thigh.
‘This guy,’ he said, pulling out a Rizla from a paper packet. ‘Came up behind me. Last summer. Just down there.’ He pointed down the hill. ‘Put his arm round my throat, quite tight. Said, What you got? Put his hands in all my pockets. I tried to push him off but he said, I’ve got a knife. OK? Then he took my phone and my earbuds and my debit card and he pushed me, really hard, so I nearly fell on to my face and I grabbed hold of the wall to stop myself falling and then he ran. And I just stood there. My heart pounding. It was, like, the scariest, scariest thing. And I didn’t do anything. I just stood there and let him take my stuff. Stuff my mum and dad worked really hard to pay for. Stuff he had no right to. And it makes me so fucking angry. I just feel like now, if I saw him, I would kill him.’
His words hit me hard. I drew in my breath. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’
And then – and how weird is this, after three years of taxpayers paying for Roan to fix me in his warm room at the Portman, after all those hours and hours and hours of talking and talking and talking but never saying the one thing that really mattered? – I finally found the words to tell someone about Harrison John.
‘Something like that happened to me,’ I said. ‘Someone took something from me. And I let them.’
‘What was it?’
I let a beat of silence pass. Then I talked.
‘When I was ten years old, this boy in the year above groomed me. He was the tallest boy in the year. He had two younger sisters in the school who he was really protective of. He was naughty but the teachers all loved him. And he kind of picked me out. When we played dodgeball at breaktime he’d tell the other year sixes to get out my way. To let me have my turn. And he’d give me these looks like:Don’t worry, I’ve got your back. He made me feel really special. And then one day …’ I stopped briefly to step back from a wave of emotion. ‘One day he beckoned me into this little section of the playground where the receptions usually played, but they were all in their classroom or something and he said, Do you want to see something magic? And I said, Yes, yes and I followed him in and he said, You need to squat down, like this, and he squatted down to show me and I did what he said and I was looking up at him like, yes! I’m squatting! Now show me the magic! And then he … It was so quick. He inserted his fingers inside me and it hurt, it really hurt and I said, Ow! And he said,It’s OK. It only hurts the first time. After that the magic happens. He stroked my hair and then he took his hand away from me and he showed it to me and he smiled and he said, It’ll be better next time. I promise.’
It felt like a belt had been squeezed around my gut, and with every word I spoke, it was loosened a bit. By the time I got to the end I felt weirdly like I could breathe. Even though my eyes were full of tears and my head ached with the sadness of that little girl waiting for the magic that never ever came, I could breathe. Three times I let him do that to me. And then school finished for the summer and Harrison left and I never saw him again. But he stayed, inside my head, inside my DNA, my marrow, my breath, my blood, in every single part of me. He stayed. My tumour.
Josh licked the Rizla and stuck it down, twisted the tip, stuck in a tiny roll of cardboard to make a filter. He reached back into his coat pocket and brought out a lighter.
‘What a fucking bastard,’ he said. ‘That’s just so sick. So sick.’
‘Yeah. It was. But guess what? I saw him the other day. I saw the boy who did that to me.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Josh. ‘Shit. Where?’
‘There.’ I pointed down the hill. ‘He was just coming up from the Finchley Road. I was going down. He said my name. He recognised me and he said my name and it was like … It felt like the playground all over again. Like he had the right to me in some sort of way, like he was entitled to me, to my body, to my name. You know? And for a day or two I felt myself going backwards, like I’d climbed the top of a mountain and then lost my footingand started slipping back and was trying to find something to grab hold of to stop me slipping but there was nothing there. And then I found something.’
Josh looked at me wide-eyed, his face lit with orange shadows from the flame of the lighter he was using to light the spliff. ‘What?’
