The Verdict by Nick Stone Read Free Book Online Page A

threw another. Hit a kid smack in the face. Busted his nose, I think. They all ran off. I helped VJ pick his stuff up and walked him home.
    ‘Me and VJ walked to school together every day after that. We got to know each other. He was a total laugh. A really funny guy. Ultra-sharp. King of the one-liners.
    ‘As you know, my family isn’t academically inclined. There were no books in our house at all. No one read unless they had to. Not even a paper. I was expected to leave school at sixteen and go into the job market. I was dreading that.
    ‘The options were limited in Stevenage. But, thanks to being around VJ, I started taking my school work seriously. I saw it as a way out of a pre-planned life, that slo-mo trot to the knacker’s yard.
    ‘It was cramped where we both lived, so me and him used to do our homework in the local library. Studying became fun. We pushed each other.
    ‘For the first time, I started doing well in tests and exams. I suddenly had drive and focus. Where I’d been middling before, now I was coming second in the year. VJ was always top, of course. But there wasn’t much between us, grades-wise. I got twelve O levels, three A levels. Straight As. And we both got into Cambridge. We were the first people from our school to do that.
    ‘I owe it all to VJ. If he hadn’t come into my life, I don’t know what would’ve happened. And I mean that. No matter how bad things turned out later, I’d never take that away from him. And I never will. I hope our kids find a friend like that, I really do.’
    I paused there. I couldn’t quite believe what I’d just said, the warmth of my tone, the stir of conciliatory feelings.
    ‘Now, VJ’s home life was horrible. They lived in two rooms in a basement. His dad – Rodney – was a nasty,
nasty
man. Six foot tall, bald and skinny. Looked like this dark praying mantis. He was bitter as hell, almost permanently angry and hateful with it. You’d be talking to him and suddenly he’d just grow quiet. And he’d get this look in his eye. You’d swear you’d said or done something wrong, but it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t you. It was all his rage boiling up.
    ‘Rodney had come over to England from Trinidad. He’d been a “somebody” there – a bank manager in Spanish Town, the capital. When he came here, the only work he could get was manual – or “
de menial
” as he called it.
    ‘He took his frustrations out on his family. VJ, most of all. Not physically, but mentally. Rodney was always putting him down. In public too. Nothing VJ ever did was good enough. Nothing. He just kept on trying to crush him.
    ‘I once asked VJ why his dad treated him so badly. And do you know what he said? “It’s ’cause he knows that, one day soon, I’ll do something he can’t – and that’s leave and
never
come back.”’
    ‘How old was he then?’
    ‘Twelve or thirteen. Rodney was never going to get in VJ’s way, because VJ was one of those people who always knew what he wanted,’ I said.
    ‘I think there’s three kinds of people in the world. Those that know what they want from the start, and they get it. Then there’s those that don’t know what they want, but find out later and settle down. And then there’s the ones who never know what they want, and they never get anywhere. Life’s lost causes, the born losers. They drift and then they die.’
    ‘Which are you?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ve been the second and the third, but never the first. That was VJ,’ I said, fiddling with my cup handle.
    ‘In the early 1980s Rodney bought an old betting place opposite Stevenage train station. He reopened it as a cornershop. We used to work there, me and VJ, on weekends. It was one of the busiest shops in town. It was open seven days a week, six in the morning to ten at night. You knew if you ran out of essentials, you could always go to Rodney’s. Rodney as good as lived behind the counter. Never took a day off. Except Christmas – and that’s only