Golden Boys Read Online Free Page B

‘Yep.’ But in the past minutes his knee has stiffened, and when he moves, he limps. He limps across the naturestrip to the footpath, hoisting and shuffling the damaged leg. It’s an injury, Syd is wearied to see, which is going to take a long time to heal, which will glaze over and break open and glaze and break for days before it finally scabs, and the scab will crack and pull, and weep. It will be their damp companion all summer, they’ll be witness to its entire lifespan. From the footpath Declan looks back at his brother. ‘You coming or not?’
    Avery, too, has looked around, his bad leg posed on its toes. He freezes like that and says, ‘Oh, shit.’
    And then, with a rodent’s instincts, he bolts: forgetting his pain he flees across the naturestrip and onto the open ground of the bitumen. The road sweeps downhill and around a broad corner, and Avery, following it, is gone like a dart shot from a blowpipe. Declan and Syd stand stupefied, staring after him. Then they look to see what their friend must have seen, and there’s Garrick Greene lumbering toward them like a cannonball. And Declan says, ‘Ah, cods.’
    The boy arrives claret-faced and heaving – he’s heavy-set and nuggety, not built for speed. His burning sights are on the spot where Avery was last seen, but he cannot take another step and thunders to a halt beside the brothers. ‘I’m gonna kill that prick,’ he gasps.
    â€˜What’s he done?’
    Garrick bends double, his hands on his knees, blowing like a bellows: Syd stares in revulsion at the flesh bunching at his neck. At school he’s read a book about medieval farmers, and Garrick could have posed for the picture of the farmer’s leather-aproned son. His limbs are weighty, over-stuffed, equal parts lard and muscle. His black hair is thin and floppy, groomed into greasy strings. His deep-set eyes are skidmarks left by the tyres of a crashing car. His hands are remindful of the vice bolted to a bench in the Kiley garage. Certain factors make Garrick Greene worth knowing – he sometimes has money, he has no respect for the law, he’s as strong as he looks, and he looks like a bull – but to Syd’s mind these virtues are rarely reason enough. Garrick, however, is a neighbourhood boy, he comes with the territory and he’s impossible to avoid: being his friend is smarter than not being his friend. He hasn’t yet caught enough breath to speak, is huffing and puffing into his thighs, and Syd throws a jeering smile at Declan, who ignores it. Garrick heaves more, then straightens, swiping a wrist across wet lips. His gaze jumps around the brothers as if he’s never seen them before. ‘He called my sister a bitch!’
    Declan says, ‘What?’
    â€˜He called my sister a bitch!’
    A yelp of laughter would escape Syd, but he wisely keeps it imprisoned. Garrick is the youngest of a large family, each member of which has a toe-curling reputation. The brothers can guess which of his many sisters is in question, a terrifying girl of sixteen who, wishing Declan to step aside at the milkbar counter one day, flicked her finger against his temple so hard it made him cry. She is either lying about the name-calling, or Avery has gone insane. The Kileys know that Garrick has no particular fondness for his sister, upon whom they have heard him bestow descriptions far worse than
bitch
– indeed, Garrick never shies from exposing much about his sister that the girl would presumably prefer to remain unpublicised. He tells them when a tampon has been fished out of the box and when she has a particularly gross pimple, he’s shown them a love letter she had written, at the bottom of which the admired boy had printed,
Get lost mole
. He once stole a bra from her drawer and jiggled it in his friends’ faces. ‘So what?’ Avery had said urbanely. ‘I see bras on the clothesline every