more of an effort I could be one of them, but it would mean not being me – it would mean compromise. I don’t do compromise.
I wondered if I just went home, would anyone notice? And then the idea of home suddenly became appealing. The club was hot and my shirt was sticking to me. My feet were hot in my trainers. Time was passing slowly. Outside it would be dark and cool and I would be free. Every single one of the girls I’d come with was with someone now, and I noticed a greasy old bloke staring at me. That did it. I pushed my way through the crowd of drinkers and left the club.
It was a relief. I hoped the girls would wonder where I was and maybe even worry about me. If they did worry, it would serve them right. I knew I was supposed to get a taxi home with them, but as I’d left early the buses were still running, so I’d be OK. Technically I wasn’t supposed to travel alone at night, but my mum worried needlessly a lot of the time. Most people were OK. It’s just the media that want you to believe the streets are full of paedophiles so they can whip up mass hysteria and sell more papers. Everybody’s on the make these days.
It was only a short walk to the bus station, down the High Street and then across King’s Gardens where the moshers hang out. Another place I wasn’t supposed to go at night. It was a square lined with bushes. Each street bordering it had a path that led to the middle, where there was a fountain that hadn’t had water in it for years.
Tonight it seemed empty. Maybe it was too early for the moshers – they were probably all at one of their clubs – Medusa’s or Hell’s Kitchen. I wondered if they also had to pay a fiver for entry. What annoyed me was the fact I’d wasted my money. Five quid entry, two fifty for a Coke, one fifty for the bus. Why was everything so expensive? Where did they expect people like me to get money from? I’m supposed to stay on at school to go to college and not earn money, but also go to clubs, buy the right gear, have a mobile, an MP3 player, a computer. ’Cause people know teenagers want to fit in they target us with all the consumer goods on the market. It just isn’t—
I would have said “fair”, but I didn’t have the opportunity. My conscious thoughts stopped there as in that split second someone ran at me and grabbed at my bag. Pure instinct took over. Not to run – you don’t run when someone is trying to take something from you. The instinct is to hold on tight. I did. I also filled with rage – how dare they? They? I looked at my attacker. A bloke. So I kneed him, as I’d been taught to do. Amazing! He let go of my bag and fell to the floor. I’d won.
I was still too full of adrenaline to realise properly what had happened to me. I should have run then, but in an odd kind of way I felt sorry for the bloke I’d just crippled. He was doubled up on the floor. He was wearing trackies, trainers and a hoodie. The hood had fallen over his face so I couldn’t see him.
But then he looked up at me.
“Ritchie?” I questioned.
“Anna,” he said.
Knowing it was Ritchie who’d attacked me made me feel better and a whole lot worse at the same time. I could feel myself trembling, and now the initial shock was over, anger replaced it.
“You tried to mug me!” I accused him.
I know this was stating the obvious, but give me a break – someone had just tried to snatch my bag.
“I didn’t know it was you,” he winced, clearly still in pain.
“So that makes it all right then?”
He didn’t reply. Now I began to feel sorry for him. Which was pretty crazy, really – I can be a bit pathetic at times.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He swore, and told me he wasn’t. But slowly he got to his feet. Once he was on a level with me, the situation began to normalise. I was in King’s Gardens with Ritchie, late on Saturday night. Ritchie, the new boy in our English set. Never mind that he’d tried to rob me. It almost seemed natural that we should go and sit on a bench together, and he should take a crushed packet of cigarettes from his trackie bottoms pocket and light one, his fingers shaking. He offered me one too.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“I’m trying to give up,” Ritchie replied.
The few people who walked past us gave us superficial glances but then ignored us.
“Do you often do this?” I asked him. “Like bag snatching?”
“No. But I need the money. I owe twenty quid to a bloke I know, and if I don’t pay tomorrow there’ll be trouble. He’ll do me over.”
I was going to lay into him myself – verbally – for thinking the best way to get money was violent robbery, but something in his manner stopped me. The way he hung his head, the blankness in his eyes – he wasn’t mean, but desperate. Plus I was flattered that he’d confided in me. When you have someone’s confidence, you don’t want to lose it. I didn’t feel like criticising or judging him.
“Is there any other way you can get the money? Can someone lend it to you? Your mum?”
Ritchie shook his head. “No. She’s hard up at the moment, what with moving and everything.”
That was fair enough. Even though my mum was off work, we probably had more money than Ritchie and his mum. My mum would have lent me the money. She wouldn’t have been best pleased, but she’d have given it. Ritchie’s mum didn’t have the money. So if he didn’t have a job, and had no one to ask, and he was being threatened with violence, it was hardly surprising he had to resort to mugging. Or was it?
“Couldn’t you have just nicked some money without attacking someone?” I asked.
At that point Ritchie looked up at me, surprised. I understood why. I’d surprised myself. Here I was, suggesting he commit another crime – me, who’d never done anything illegal in my life. Except fare-dodging a couple of times, or noticing someone had given me too much change in a shop and not saying anything – oh, and keeping a twenty-pound note I found on a bus last year. But looking at Ritchie’s situation from his point of view, theft seemed the only logical answer. But it was wrong. Crime was wrong.
“I tell you what – I could lend you the twenty. It’s not a problem.”
“But you don’t know me,” he said. “I might just run off with it.”
“Because you’ve said that, I know you won’t.”
We both heard the urgent waah-waah of a police car – one followed by another. A typical Saturday night in town.
Ritchie spoke again. “You must think I’m a bleedin’ idiot.”
“I don’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Listen, let me tell you. My life stinks right now. First I get all the truant people on my back and my mum stressing about my education, and having to go back to school. I even thought I’d give it a try but it’s no bloody good. It’s pointless for me – I’m not going to get any GCSEs as I’ve missed too much. It’s all wasted effort. And then the
