29 LOCKS by Nicola Garrard

Author:Nicola Garrard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HopeRoad Publishing.com

Chapter 11

X marks the spot in Downview. I searched it up on Google maps at school. If them drones could drop photos as well as phones and smack and spice, they’d know that. All them prison buildings is made like Xs and I don’t know if it’s because that’s where they buried the treasure or if they’re making kisses on the ground for planes to see.

It takes three hours to get there on account of the M25 and all them other road miles but that don’t mean they give you more than an hour for your visit. It don’t make no difference to them if you walked there because you live down the same endz or if you came all the way from the next-along-next-along county.

Same hour. Same sixty minutes. Same three thousand six hundred seconds.

‘I’m getting a job,’ I tell mum. ‘Down the canal. Going to work on boats.’

Mum don’t say nothing. I’ve started thinking she don’t want to be out. I understand. They make it nice here. Not nice-nice, but at least you don’t have to think about nothing, plan nothing, lose nothing; ain’t no meter to feed and the food’s free. I know she works in there, and she’s always learning some new thing. They got a nice library and all, but it’s not the same as outside.

Outside is hard. I feel her slipping away in the kind of nice they give here and I can’t reach her. I don’t know if I’m enough to make outside the place she’d rather be.

‘Me and you’s going to be okay,’ I say.

She don’t say nothing because she’s watching the TV they put on in there for little kids.

‘I’m going to look after you.’

I hold her hand.

‘I ain’t a kid no more,’ I say.

Maybe that was a squeeze. I ain’t sure.

‘Come September …’ I say.

She looks at me like she ain’t never been more sorrier and I want to tell her she don’t need to be. It’s cool, because when I’m sixteen, they can’t tell us shit no more.

‘Please, mum,’ I say, but it don’t make no difference if getting here takes three hours or five little minutes. You ain’t going make nobody talk if they don’t want to.

‘You know you’re living in a massive X?’ I say. ‘You can see Downview from space. Serious! International Space Station people wave at you every hour when they go by. They go, “Hi, Mrs Samson! Nice weather we’re having,” except weather’s always nice in space, innit.’

I get the littlest smile but that’s okay. I’ll take that.

‘No shit. Google it up, mum. Next time you do IT and the teacher ain’t looking, search it up. You only can’t see the X because you’re living in it. You got to look at the big picture. It ain’t all here. This ain’t all it is. There’s more, you know.’

Andrew yells at me from the other side of the lock gate. I ain’t done nothing wrong, it’s only that the water’s bare loud.

‘Harder, lad. Give it

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