Talent...and what to do with it

Chapters 1 and 2 Part 1

Chapter 1: Jonah

I was bored. That was a good thing. I bounced the tennis ball against the wall and caught it with the same hand. I must have done this over a hundred times today alone. I hadn't missed once, and it had never gone over the wall and into the ginnel. I was down south now. No one would know what I was talking about if I called the alleyway behind the houses a ginnel. It was one of many things that made me feel I was lost in a foreign land.

The wind tore at the trees and dark clouds were rolling in. The dog days of summer, I thought. I had heard that somewhere, maybe in an English lesson, or more likely in a song. I didn't really know what it meant, except it seemed to kind of suit today somehow. It had been a weird summer for us. We had started the summer still reeling from the turmoil my dad had unleashed, and then Mum had brought us down here. It was a fresh start, apparently, but it felt more like being buried alive.

And now the summer was ending and tomorrow was my first day at my new school. I supposed some kids would recognise me from years back when I went to primary school down here mainly because there didn't seem to be that many tall, mixed race kids round here. I didn't remember anyone in particular from those times, apart from Lauren and Max of course. I doubted my ex-stepsister and her dad would be delighted to see us again. We had been a family for two years, and then we'd walked away from them without a backward glance. Mum hadn't spoken about making contact with them now we were back, and I wasn't planning on suggesting it. But it was inevitable Lauren and I would see each other at school.

The first raindrops fell, and I pulled myself up and headed inside. This house seemed smaller and smaller every time I walked into it. I wondered if Dad's walls felt like they were closing in on him in the same way. I hoped so.

This house was still Grandad's home, even though he'd died six months ago. When I was really small we used to come and visit. I vaguely remembered Grandma as a kind and warm lady who cooked great roast dinners and told me bedtime stories. She was long dead. Grandad had let his latent racism come to the fore once Grandma had died. We hadn't visited much after that. The house still had a stale, bitter old man smell about it. I suppose it was sad that nobody missed him, but after the way he'd treated Mum and me he didn't deserve my pity.

The house was a two up two down terraced, and it was tiny – it was a good job we didn't have a lot of stuff to fill it with. The house had been kept tidy but it didn't seemed to have been decorated since about 1982. The front room at least felt vaguely like ours. Mum had been enthusiastic to revamp the house when we first got here, and she spent all of August's money at the start of the month on wallpaper and decorating equipment. She gave up after the second strip of paper wouldn't line up with the first. The room would probably still have the bucket of paste in the middle of the floor and the table still set up if I hadn't taken over and finished the job. I couldn't see us being able to decorate any other rooms for a while. Not unless Mum hung onto her new job or I managed to find a way to bring some cash in. Mum was having a lie down right now. She did that a lot these days.

I lay on the sofa and flicked on the TV. It was one of those programmes about doing up houses and making a fortune. I sighed.

Was Dad as bored as me right now? I doubted it. Whatever else you could say about Dad, he made sure life was never boring. I guessed he'd probably worked out a way to call the shots by now and would have recruited a crew of idiots to do his bidding. Idiots like I was once. He'd been my hero. He wasn't at home much, but that was forgotten as soon as he walked in the door. It was like there was some new energy source in the room when he laughed, his dreadlocks shaking in a way that fascinated me. Mum and I were in his thrall. I'd wanted to be exactly like him. I would have done anything he asked, just to be near him, just to be rewarded with that cuff round the ear which meant he approved of something I'd done. Life wasn't boring then.