Chapter 13 of 'The Knock 'em Down Boys' - Robin, El Pigface and Sparky's secret.
Robin opens up a little on her past. El Pigface shows his mates that he is starting to recover - and Sparky tries to hide the truth behind his bruises from his boxing coach.
Chapter 13
Robin
Two problems appeared after our fight with The Gasheads.
Firstly we had to apply for whatever it was we wanted to do when we left school. My plan wasn’t complicated. I had to get two A grades and an A* in order to get into Oxford.
The application process was simple. I filled in the dull stuff on the application form and then added the subjects I wanted to study at A Level: History (obviously), Classical Civilisation (definitely going to be some good stuff about Greeks and Romans in here), Philosophy and English Literature.
I would go for four A Levels and see how it went.
Sparky wouldn’t be too far away either. He had applied for a plumbing apprenticeship, and much of the theoretical learning would be conducted at the same college I had applied at.
When Sparky called me that evening, he was irritated by the questions he had been asked by Danny at the boxing gym when he went to train.
Danny had wanted to know where Sparky’s facial bruising came from.
As Sparky had changed before he went to the gym, Danny had no idea about the damage inflicted upon Sparky’s torso.
Danny’s view, and the view he expected from all fighters training at the gym, was that the last choice any of his students would take was to fight on the street.
And that was exactly what we were actively doing.
Sparky told me that it was difficult to get Danny to drop the subject of the bruises. He didn’t seem to have believed Sparky’s excuses – though Sparky said he didn’t exactly say as much. It was more that he kept asking the same questions about the bruises as if, like a detective, he felt that asking Sparky over and over again, might highlight some inconsistency in Sparky’s responses to him that he could then pounce on.
But it didn’t.
Sparky was too cute for that and he told me that his answers remained the same.
That didn’t stop Danny from keep on asking and he had finished by making sure Sparky knew that he was suspicious about what we were up to.
That was a problem.
Oh, and there was Pigface to consider too.
El Pigface had been discharged from hospital the day before, but he would be in no fit state to fight for a while. And, he would never get his eye back.
We had a result against The Gasheads because we hadn’t run. The word had got around and I’d seen a Twitter feed where The Gasheads had actually complimented us on our bollocks standing against them for as long as we did.
I went to see El Pigface and told him all about it.
I was trying to cheer him up as he had started recovering from the damage they had done to him. He told me to comment on the feed and tell The Gasheads that he wanted his eye back. And if they couldn’t give him that, then he’d take one of theirs as compensation when he met them next time.
Pigface was obviously on the mend.
When I left El Pigface, other than a monster great bandage on his face, he seemed to be sorting himself out fine – and his passion for a fight hadn’t dimmed at all.
I was pleased.
El Pigface was a really important Lad to us. He had balls and he didn’t run. We trusted him as one of the few who would stand with us, no matter what – a top Lad, even with only one eye.
We were meeting with Robin after school, which was becoming more of a regular thing.
At first she sort of felt obliged. But it wasn’t like that now. We were mates.
It was obvious to anyone now that Sparky had a thing for her, and I felt a bit weird sometimes when the three of us were together, like I was stuck in the middle or something.
As we got to know Robin, she told us that she lived in care, in a local authority place near The County Ground.
It sounded a bit grim from what Robin told us: a large, old building with lots of kids in dormitories either waiting for someone to want to look after them, or resigned to the fact that ultimately, they were on their own.
Robin seemed to be in the latter camp.
Robin was lucky, or so she said. At least she had her own room. Often the older kids got that privilege. If you had been bounced around care homes like Robin, she said that you appreciated the privacy when you’d been living in the dorms for so long.
We took her word for it.
She said she was lucky too in that one of the blokes who ran the place tried to look after her. Listened to her problems, helped her out when she was a bit down, that kind of thing.
Most of the people who worked at the home did their best Robin told us. But not all of them. What could a kid in care expect anyway? They were fed. They were clothed. They were allowed a certain amount of stuff. There was a TV room. And if you were one of the older kids, then there was a certain amount of freedom to come and go as you pleased.
She also told us that the lad who ran the place was pretty friendly with a local taxi firm, so he could get her lifts around sometimes, and she didn’t have to pay for them.
I got the impression from Robin that depending on who you were in the care home, there was a bit of turning a blind eye too. What did the carers think Robin and some of the others were doing when they were out of a night walking the streets of Manchester Road?
Whatever it was, it surely wasn’t what a social worker might advise.
It didn’t seem right to me, but it wasn’t really my business, was it?
She had smiled when I said that.
She had started smiling a lot more as we got to know her.
I suppose that she was pretty, in her kind of way, and I saw that Sparky would often be watching her as we talked. I tried not to talk too much when we were all together, but Sparky wasn’t much of a small-talker so I sort of filled in for him when it got a bit awkward, which meant, like with the lads, I often talked for both of us.
I genuinely felt sorry for Robin.
And not in that kind of soppy faced pretend version you see from everyone all the time. I meant it. I mean, the circumstances we had first met her in were purely shit. She hadn’t admitted to us what she might be doing on Manny Road, but it didn’t take a genius to know that most people didn’t hang around that place of an evening, and if you did, there was normally a reason for you to be there.
And the way she had been bounced around from care home to care home, how could that be good for her?
Robin didn’t tell us much about her parents, or her past.
I asked, but she seemed guarded, her father was dead, and she didn’t see her mother. It was a simple as that. I could sense there was a lot she wasn’t telling us.
You could often see dramatic changes in Robin’s face, because it was like two faces at the same time, as strange as that sounds.
Her face could one minute appear relaxed, carefree, young and innocent. And then the next minute, could seem old, hardened, coarse and lacking in all trust. It was in her eyes and the way her mouth sometimes twisted when she was asked questions she didn’t really want to answer.
There were times when she switched between the two expressions, almost like switching between two people, and I knew that I needed to change the subject of the conversation.
It was tough to know what to say sometimes.
When Robin did tell us about the care home or anything from her past, what could we say? She told us that sometimes she had been moved by the authorities, other times she had run away. And then, when she was discovered, she was placed in another care facility, much the same as the last one.
She wasn’t the only one, either. She had friends who had been doing the same thing – running, moving, and then being placed somewhere else that was exactly the same.
She said that once you got a reputation for doing a runner, you were carefully placed because they didn’t like having runners together, too much hassle.
She also said that the care home would normally turn the screw on you and in effect lock you up if you had done a runner too many times. They couldn’t trust you, could they? That’s why she felt lucky she said, because the bloke in charge at the care home knew her history, but he hadn’t locked her up. And so she hadn’t done a runner this time, at least not yet.
I would nod, and say what I thought she might want to hear. Things like, “that’s pretty bad,” or “that’s shitty” or “that doesn’t sound fair.” They were statements that sort of tried to express sympathy with her crappy situation, but without coming across as pitying her. Maybe they were successful. Like I said, it was hard to know what to say.
Sparky remained quiet a lot of the time.
I knew he was listening. It was just that when the three of us were together, he found it harder. But he was my mate and I knew him well, so I knew that his quietness didn’t mean anything. I could only guess at whether Robin could see that he was really listening.
We hung around for a bit, just talking about this and that, nothing important and agreed to meet the next night. Sparky had boxing training after school, and I said that I would meet Robin at the Train station and we could go and watch him a bit if they would let us in.
We walked Robin to the place she had to call her home, but she wouldn’t let us walk her up to the front door.
At least we knew that Robin only had to go about a hundred metres and she would be safe.
At least as safe as she could be.