The Fearless Five Read online

  We walked to the meeting place, where Sumo and Walker were waiting for us. Sumo rested his huge hands on Johnny J’s shoulders. ‘Show me,’ he said. Johnny J took the peas away from his eye.

  ‘Ohhhhhh, that’s a shiner,’ Walker said. Johnny J’s eye was black, blue and even a little swollen.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘How much more do we need for the plane ticket?’ I asked.

  ‘A boatload more,’ Walker said. ‘We’ve only got one hundred and fourteen pounds and fifty-one pence.’ A boatload was at least seven hundred quid.

  Johnny J was worried. ‘But we need to send my mam to America soon.’

  ‘I know. We’ll find a way,’ I promised.

  ‘The chemo is really hard on her,’ he said.fn2

  Johnny J looked so sad that it made Charlie well up. She didn’t wail or anything. Tears just sparkled in her eyes, and when one escaped she wiped it with her sleeve and turned away.

  I panicked. I couldn’t deal with crying! ‘Right! Fine! I’ll fight. I’ll fight them all.’

  ‘It’s no good, Jeremy. If Johnny J got knocked out first go, no one’s going to pay to see you,’ Walker said, before shrugging his shoulders and adding the word ‘fact’.

  ‘He’s right. You’d be terrible,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Sorry, Jeremy – you promised them Sumo and you’d get pummelled,’ Johnny J said, and coming from Mr Knocked-Out-In-One-Hit that hurt.

  ‘I don’t fight, and Jeremy can’t fight,’ Sumo said, folding his arms and widening his stance like that bouncer outside Barry’s Betting Shop.

  ‘All right, all right! What’s this? National Pick-on-Jeremy Day?’ I asked.

  Sumo relaxed and put his arm around me in a kind of suffocating bear hug. ‘But I think you’d be great,’ he said, confusing everyone.

  ‘You just told me I can’t fight,’ I said.

  ‘I mean you’ll be great at something else,’ he said, and he smiled at me and patted me on the back.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said sarcastically.

  He grinned at me. ‘You’re very welcome.’ He was serious. He even gave me the thumbs up to prove he was serious.

  Johnny J was quiet all the way home. We lived four doors down from one another. I used to pass my house to walk him home. Sometimes we’d sit on his front wall and talk for a while, but not that evening. When we got to his gate, we could hear his mam calling out for him through the open window on the second floor.

  ‘I have to go.’ He ran in and left the door swinging behind him. I stood there for a minute, long enough to watch him take the stairs two by two and disappear behind the bathroom door.

  I shouldn’t have stayed but I couldn’t leave. I don’t know why. I walked inside the small hall and I climbed halfway up the stairs, with the faded orange carpet that smelled of disinfectant and mint, and I sat listening to Mrs Tulsi throwing her guts up and Johnny J playing a game of I spy with her whenever she could talk.

  ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with b?’ Johnny J said.

  ‘Bruise,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘Do we need to talk about what happened?’

  ‘I just fell.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ she said, and then she threw up again. ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘No, Mam. I swear. It’s all good.’

  ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with b,’ she said.

  ‘Brush.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bath.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I dunno. I give up,’ he said.

  ‘Bile,’ she said, and he laughed.fn3

  ‘Gross,’ he said, and they laughed together.

  ‘I can’t do this any more, love,’ she said, and Johnny J stopped laughing.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The chemo, love. I’m stopping it.’

  ‘But it’s keeping you alive!’ my friend shouted in a voice that screamed panic.

  ‘The doctors say it’s time, Johnny J.’

  ‘Ah no, please, Mam,’ Johnny J cried out.

  ‘It’s not working any more, son. I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Tulsi said, and although I couldn’t see either of them, I could hear them crying. I instantly felt a combination of sadness and sickness, so I got up and ran down the stairs and out the front door and down the small pathway that led to the street and past the four doors that separated my house from Johnny J’s, their terrible conversation echoing in my mind.

  3

  The Family

  When I reached home, Dad was in the garden, leaning over the railings talking to the neighbour, Mr Lucey,fn1 about Ireland qualifying for the World Cup.

  ‘I tell you, the country will shut down for the next game. We’ll never see anything like it again. Even the missus is coming to the pub,’ my dad said.

  ‘Sure the whole country’s taking the day off,’ Mr Lucey said. ‘There won’t be a man, woman or child in Ireland not watching that match.’

  ‘I was over in Rolands’ Garage earlier – they have to stay open, so they’ve only talked the granny into minding the shop for the match,’ my dad said.

  ‘Go on! Sure she’s a hundred if she’s a day.’

  ‘Nah, she’s in her seventies, but she spent a lot of time in Spain,’ my dad said.

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Lucey said. ‘God love her, she’s got the face of a battered leather sofa.’ (He should talk.)

  ‘Sun’s a killer, Lucey,’ my dad said. ‘And I wouldn’t thank you for it.’

  ‘I’d take a bit of sun to get over to see those lads play in Italy,’ Mr Lucey said.

  ‘Oh God, I’d sell one of me kids for tickets,’ my dad said, before noticing I was sitting on the wall listening to him. ‘There you are, son.’ He didn’t apologise for threatening to sell me. He just smiled and carried on talking. ‘I tell you, Lucey, I’d die a happy man if I could travel to see those boys play for Ireland.’

  ‘Do you know something? I think the real fun will be here. I’m telling you, Ron,’fn2 he said, and he wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jumper, ‘the streets will be empty, every pub will be full and it will be something. Mark my words,’ he said, and my dad nodded solemnly.

  ‘You’re not wrong, Lucey,’ he said. They parted, and my dad went inside.

  My dad and Mr Lucey were excited, jubilant even, and I felt terrible, because even though the best thing ever was happening to Ireland, the worst thing was happening to my best friend. I sat on my small front garden wall, battling the urge to throw up while thinking about Mrs Tulsi and wondering what lay ahead for Johnny J if she died.

  I thought about going to Sumo’s den to hide away for a while. He was an only child so he was treated like a king. The thing is, Sumo didn’t want much. All he cared about was Spam sandwiches and collecting comics. He had the whole Marvel Universe comic collection. It was through Sumo I discovered Iron Man, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, Captain America, Black Widow and the rest. We spent hours poring over his comics, arguing which superhero was stronger, faster, better or which villain was the most evil, most dangerous or scariest. Sumo liked his own space, which made sense seeing as he was a giant. His father was a builder, so to mark his eighth birthday he built him his very own den in the back garden. It was a large room, with a video recorder, an Atari games console and a ghetto-blaster stereo. He also had a TV, a sofa and two armchairs, so for a kid who didn’t want much he had everything.

  The first time I walked into that den (it quickly became our den), it was the absolute coolest moment of my life. I was home! After that we hung out there all the time, even when Sumo wasn’t around. If life in the Finn household was getting too much for me, I’d go and watch a video or play a game of Space Invadersfn3 on the Atari or read a comic in Sumo’s den. It was always open. I was always welcome. It felt safe. It was our sanctuary.

  Mrs Lane was very good about respecting that. She knocked when she brought in sandwiches, tea and biscuits. Sumo lived on Spam sandwiches. Mrs Lane always made enough for everyone, but t
hat just meant that Sumo ate enough Spam sandwiches to feed a roomful of kids. He could clear a stacked plate of them in under two minutes. It was a sight to see. Even though Sumo had a super-cool den, an Atari, a telly, a video recorder and thousands of comics, he always said he’d swap it all for a little brother or sister. Did I mention before that Sumo was nuts?

  I checked my watch, but it was too close to dinner to go anywhere. I exhaled loudly and with a heavy heart made my way inside.

  I was the youngest in my family. My sister Rachel was nineteen and studying to be a nurse. She lived away from home and visited every now and again with her posh boyfriend Rupert, who was studying to be a doctor. He wore a wool scarf even in summer and spoke like he was gargling marbles. All my friends said my sister was beautiful, and when she walked by, boys stopped and stared. It was gross. She had blonde hair like my mam’s, about my length, freaky blue steely eyes that shone in the dark and she had a bad temper. Rachel did not like her stuff being touched and she hated being told what to do, but if you didn’t touch her stuff and stayed out of her way, most of the time she was pretty nice.

  My brother Rich was fifteen, and while I was tall, he was short. Looking down on my older brother was cool, except for the fact that it made him work harder to make my life difficult. Despite being small he was strong, and if he managed to get me in a headlock I was done for. He had short brown hair, small brown eyes, stubby little fingers and really sharp fang teeth either side of his mouth. My mam wanted him to get them filed down before he did himself damage, but Rich thought they made him look dangerous. He also liked singing and dancing and was in a boy band. When he wasn’t putting me in headlocks, licking his sharp teeth, singing or dancing, he was bossing me around. He called me Numbnutbutt instead of Jeremy. He was hoping Numbnutbutt would catch on, but it was just too hard to say.

  My mam was the real boss in the house. Dad didn’t seem to mind, because while she was busy bossing, he could fade into the sitting room and settle into his favourite chair with his feet up, a newspaper on his lap and either news or sport on the telly. My dad was the local butcher, so he knew everybody. Everyone liked my dad because he took care of people during the bad times; when people had nothing and were struggling to feed themselves, they went to my dad. We weren’t rich. We lived in a small house that hadn’t been decorated in twenty years, but it smelled of roses and my mam always boasted you could eat your dinner off the floor it was so clean. Rich tested that theory when he tried to lick a dropped ice cream from it and she threatened to belt him with a wooden spoon.

  My dad’s hair went grey in his twenties and he grew a long beard around that time too. He never shaved it, and Mam said it made him look very handsome. We were mostly a happy family.fn4 I still wished I were an only child like Sumo and Johnny J. Johnny J didn’t mind being an only child. He had his mam and his Uncle Ted and that was enough for him. They didn’t have a lot of money. Uncle Ted did his best to help out, but his garage had struggled too. He let all his workers go and fixed cars by himself. Johnny J helped out every Saturday. He brushed the floor and bought the sandwiches from the shop across the road. He cleaned the cars and he fetched the tools Uncle Ted needed when he was under a car. When he turned eleven, Uncle Ted taught him how to move a car from the service area in the garage into the car spaces outside. It was in a very small space and under his uncle’s watchful eye, but he was driving and that was the coolest thing ever. When he wasn’t working in his uncle’s garage, hanging with us or minding his mam, Johnny J spent time in his room, playing guitar. He was lucky not to have anyone to burst in and deliberately mess up his bed. He had peace and privacy. He had a sign saying ‘Do Not Enter’ on his bedroom door and he swore that Mrs Tulsi didn’t ever go in. My mam would have taken a bulldozer to my door if I dared to put a sign up. My sister Rachel got her temper from Mam. I used to wish I was Johnny J, before his mam got really sick.

  4

  The Idea

  A week before the Freaky Fitzer fight fiasco we were sitting on the footpath watching other kids playing football on the green. I was a Man U supporter, Johnny J was a Liverpool man. We were arguing about who was the better team. Then out of nowhere he turned to me.

  ‘I overheard Ma and Uncle Ted talking last night,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And …’ He stopped talking for a moment or two. He put his hands in his corkscrew curls and shook his head like he was shaking them out. I knew it meant he needed a minute, so I just looked out at the kids playing football.

  ‘Auntie Alison thinks I should live with her.’fn1

  I got such a fright I jumped up. ‘What?’ I shouted. ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘She lives in England!’

  ‘I know,’ he whispered.

  ‘Ah no,’ I said. ‘No, no, no.’ I really wasn’t taking it well at all.

  ‘It will be OK. I won’t have to go. My mam won’t let that happen,’ he said, trying to comfort me.

  ‘What did Uncle Ted say?’ I almost screeched.

  ‘Nothing. He just got real quiet.’

  ‘Ah no,’ I wailed. ‘Well, you can’t go!’ I said. ‘And that’s it.’ Then I started crying so much that green snot rolled from my nose to my chin and I coughed till I nearly choked. It was embarrassing and more than a little shocking.

  Johnny J knew I didn’t cope well with change.fn2

  ‘Don’t start wetting the bed again,’ he said.

  ‘We agreed we’d never talk about it,’ I mumbled.

  And all of a sudden he looked like he was going to cry, and he NEVER cried. ‘I can’t leave my mam, Jeremy. I don’t want to live in England.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, because you’re not going anywhere,’ I said, and I really believed it. I COULD NOT LOSE MY BEST FRIEND!

  He didn’t bring it up again and neither did I. Instead we put our efforts into fundraising to send Mrs Tulsi to America. From then on I noticed him talking to Charlie more. I didn’t know why and I didn’t like it.

  Charlie Eastman’s mother was a district nurse. She visited sick people in their homes and helped them with their medication. She started visiting with Mrs Tulsi the year before. In the beginning Charlie would sit on the wall outside alone, waiting for her. Then one day Johnny J joined her. The next day was when she started following us around on her bike.

  Charlie had three older brothers, Louis, Sean and Ben. Ben was still in school but the others were finished and working in the local paper factory. They all had red hair, and Louis, the oldest, had a mad red beard. I knew them because they were all huge fellas and brilliant at hurling. Mrs Eastman was a redhead too, and so was Declan Eastman, her husband and the children’s father. You could spot the orange hue of Eastmans from a mile away, and still Charlie had a way of creeping up on me that made me anxious.

  Walker Brown spent a lot of time being anxious. He said it was because of the asthma attacks. He always had to have an inhaler on hand because if he didn’t he could die. At least that’s what he said. Mam said that breathing into a brown bag would work just as well, but then Mam believed that flat 7Up could cure every disease on earth, so she wasn’t exactly reliable when it came to that sort of thing.

  If Mam was bossy, Walker’s mother was like a sergeant major. Sheila Brown walked around the place in tight trousers, high leather boots, shirts and blazers. She wore her hair in a tight bun, and when she gave you a certain look, it was hard not to poo in your pants. Her husband Denis drove a security van for the bank. Johnny J always joked that he must be really well paid or must’ve robbed a few quid every time he was in the van because Walker and his family lived in a fancy house and Denis Brown was the only one we knew who travelled to Italy for the matches. When I told my dad that Denis Brown was in Italy, he shook his head and said, ‘I never thought I’d envy that man,’ before he took himself to bed for a lie-down.

  Walker had three sisters, April, May and June (I kid you not). They were triplets and they were eighteen and living in a flat in London. Walker had been what my
mam described as a surprise. Rich said surprise was code for unwanted, before telling me I was also a surprise! I once asked Walker if he liked having three sisters. He said he hated it.

  ‘Girls are evil,’ he said. ‘Fact.’

  Walker really wished he was an only child too. ‘Genius kids thrive without siblings. If it weren’t for April, May and stupid June, I could be an astronaut by now.’ He was ten when he said that and he really believed it.

  Even though my brother made my life hell, and Sumo was sometimes lonely, and Walker’s sisters held him back, we were all lucky. Every time we witnessed Johnny J holding his sick mother’s hand, sitting in the back of an ambulance with the doors closing on them, we were reminded of how lucky we really were.

  So not only was Johnny J’s horrible Auntie Alison threatening to steal him away to England, now his mam was giving up chemo! This was worse than bad. I sat on my front wall after Dad and Mr Lucey had gone inside, thinking, until the sky threatened rain and my mam threatened to murder me if I didn’t get in for my dinner.

  Over dinner Rich talked about his stupid boy band. Dad read the newspaper and my mam pretended to listen, but it was obvious her mind was somewhere else.

  ‘Numbnutbutt, did you hear what I said?’ Rich asked.

  ‘I don’t care what you said.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t care that you don’t care what I said. We’re nearly ready to gig any day now.’

  ‘No, you’re not – you’re terrible.’

  ‘What would you know?’ he said.

  ‘I have ears.’

  My dad laughed. Rich punched me in the arm.

  ‘Ouch,’ I shouted.

  ‘How terrible?’ Rich asked, poised to give me another dig, and then all of a sudden my mam started bawling. It was terrifying. She and Mrs Tulsi were friends. She knew.

  Rich stopped talking. Dad stopped reading his newspaper. He just placed his hand on hers and nobody spoke. She sobbed and mumbled, ‘I’m sorry,’ and sobbed some more. It must have only been seconds but it felt like hours.