Essex Boy Read Online Free

long-lost offspring will be mine.
    My absence from school attracted the attention of the local authority and they threatened all sorts of legal action against my mother if I did not attend. My mother’s pleas for understanding fell on deaf ears and so, with a heavy heart, she was forced to pack me off to school each morning. Once I was out of her sight I would make my way to the local church and hang around the graveyard or, if it was raining, I would seek shelter and warmth in the local launderette. I wasn’t a ghoul or some sort of morbid weirdo; I chose to hide among the dead simply because I couldn’t be seen from the road and few people ever ventured into the church grounds. Even if they did, they were so preoccupied thinking about their dearly departed that they rarely even noticed me.
    At the age of 15, I left school without any qualifications or indeed much basic education. Hands up, I admit that I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, but I had done something few other kids my age had ever done: I had stared death in the face twice and walked away to tell the tale. As I grew older, the knowledge that I had survived such an ordeal, not once but twice, gave me great confidence and a strong belief in myself. If I was strong enough to cheat death, I knew that I had the inner strength to face any adversity, and so I vowed that nobody would ever get away with bullying or intimidating me again.
    The first job I had after leaving school was cutting cheese into blocks, for which I was paid the princely sum of 50p an hour. I suppose that potential employers regarded me as thick and so it was a case of doing what I was given rather than choosing a career. I wasn’t cutting cheese for long. A friend of the family offered me a job rubbing down cars prior to their being re-sprayed and I gladly accepted. The hours were long, the work repetitive and exhausting, and so after just a few weeks I walked out.
    My illness, appearance and reluctance to attend school had alienated me from other children and so I didn’t have any true friends to speak of. I would roam the streets alone, gazing into shop windows thinking of all the things that I could buy if I had money, but I no longer had a job and, therefore, there was no chance of me obtaining any. It then occurred to me that if I did my shopping when the stores and shops were closed, money would not have to exchange hands.
    The first place I ever broke into was Oxfam. In my defence I didn’t commit the crime for my own benefit. I had been walking past the shop one day with my father when he pointed to two vases in the window and said that he liked them. I didn’t have the money to buy them for him, so I decided to break in and steal them instead. That night I tipped all of my father’s tools out of a canvas holdall, jumped onto my bike and headed for the Oxfam shop. After parking near my intended target, I checked that the road was clear before jogging across and into the Oxfam shop doorway. People had left bin liners full of old clothing at the door and so I tore one open, took a jumper out and went in search of a house brick. I soon found one of a suitable size, wrapped it in the jumper and smashed the glass pane in the shop door. While I was doing this a man walked past, so I dropped the jumper and went after him. ‘Excuse me. Have you got the time, please?’ I asked. The man looked at me as if I were something disgusting that he had just stood in and continued to walk away. Fuck him, I thought, before running back to the shop.
    I climbed through the broken window and put the vases into my holdall. I glanced across the road to ensure that nobody was coming and noticed that a man was trying to steal my bike. I clambered back through the window and ran towards the would-be thief but he saw me coming and made off in the opposite direction. Muttering something about fucking crooks and nothing being safe unless it’s nailed down, I climbed back into the shop. Behind the counter