Where was Deano?

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Robbie twisted on the swing. It had been broken like everything else in the playground, but he fixed it using a bit of wire from the chain fence. The seat was lopsided, but it worked.

It was the only thing that worked in the playground. The seesaw was broken in half, the junglegym toppled to one side and the sandpit filled with filthy water that was spotted with used cigarette packets and syringes.

He twisted about, making the sun sweep past his eyelids, making them flash ruddy-- dark-- red-- dark again. Getting dizzy he opened his eyes to see the old concrete and brick buildings rush past; the towering apartment blocks-- there was the one he lived in, the motorway bypass and for an instant the blue-grey haze that formed the London horizon.

The air smelt of smoke and diesel and of foul water from the culvert that had once been fenced, but the chain link fence was battered into a contorted heap now and the drain it had protected was filled with garbage.

Robbie looked down at his feet as he spun. The cords from his hoodie whipping against his face. His mouth filled with spit and he snorted up a gob and spat it away into the weeds that edged the rutted concrete.

He wanted to get dizzy, wanted to get sick.

He looked down at his feet. His trainers were old, the laces grey and black, the toes scuffed. His old school folder lay at his feet, opened up so that he could see where he had drawn cocks and tits in deep blue biro on the inside cover and practised his graffiti mark: \'Robbie\' with a silver \'R\'.

The printed pages inside the folder were from the internet. He and Deano had put them in the folder, used what they told them down at the old lean-to by the skeleton of the burnt out warehouse. Who\'d have thought a bag of cheap fertiliser and a two bob watch could do such a thing?

The pages fluttered gently in the breeze, getting splattered with muck as he kicked his feet out.

He spun about again, violently and slammed his feet down. He was going to throwup. He was... He gulped it down. Nah, he wasn\'t. He coughed up another gob of spit. He was shit tough.

Yeah, right. HE shot the spit away and sweat prickled at the back of his neck and his head hummed and hummed... He opened his eyes and focused. There was a pink condom on the ground by his shoes, used and shrivelled up and he thought about toeing it away, but instead he leant his head against the chain of the swing and watched it spin as he twisted his body slowly back and forth, back and--

“Fuck!” he spat of the word softly. He could see it all again. All of it, all of it splattered across his face, body, guts. \'Who would have guessed it would have been so real?\' He thought; \'and where the fuck was Deano?\'

He glanced up. A siren sounded in the distance. His ears pricked, his nose pinged with the sudden movement of his head...

The wailing sound faded into the sound of traffic and city noise.

He turned the swing about again and lifted his feet.

He was scared, he admitted it. Scared shitless to tell the truth. He felt sick, he put his feet down and stop spinning, to gently rock back and forth. The rubber seat bit into his side, the chains juddered with the movement.

\'Jesus. Where was Deano?\'

He hadn\'t seen him since everything went boom.

Fuck. If his mother ever found out... If his granny did? Fuck. The rest of London, the world in one long queue. He\'d be like those boys with that two year old on the railway track.

Fucked.

He looked at his folder and kicked his feet, sending the white pages flapping like a bird as it scudded across the cracked concrete and landed in a puddle.

He heard a noise, distant like the slamming of a door and then voices. They faded and his heart, pounding ever since it happened, lurched and stilled in his chest.

“Shit!”

He watched a car edge about the corner of the road, past the pile of wrecked cars and shopping trolleys and onto the street that ran infront of the playground. He watched the car sweep past him in slow motion, smooth and silent like a shark. A Police car, a dot of yellow and white against the shadows.

His heart kicked him in the gut and he gulped for air he didn\'t know he needed. Fumbling his hands off the swings chains he pulled his hoodie up and over his face and dropped his head down to his chest like a hanged man\'s.

\"Hey ya, Robbie!\"

\"Fuck it, yous wankers!\" he jumped, the chains chattered as his eyes bulged with fear.

Ricky and Ali smirked at him as they stood to one side, their faces were painted white in that new craze, their hands in their sweattop pockets.

Robbie quickly recovered and poorly joked, \"You look like a pair of tossers.\"

\"Hear about the terrorists?\" Ricky sniffed, whipping his nose smearing the white makeup on his sleeve and squinting up at the motorway bypass as a truck roared past, \"The Tubes out and half of London\'s closed down. My Mum\'s pissed \'cause she had an interview for some cleaning job and had to miss it and now the Welfare\'s going to be calling again.”

“Yeah?” Said Robbie, he was sweating, quickly he added, “Reckon it was Arabs?\"

Ali screwed up his face and jostled his shoulder, \"Yeah right, blame the Muslims, that shit\'s getting old. My Dad reckons it was the Americans trying to get us on side for \'the war against terrorism\'.\"

\"Your Dad\'s a tosser,\" Ricky replied, \"More like the French. Yeah, the frogs, \'cause they didn\'t get the Olympics.\"

\"Hey,\" Ali kicked out at Robbie so that he made the boy look up at him. \"Heard about Deano?\"

Robbie shook his head.

\"The Old Bill\'s been round to his place all morning.\"

“Yeah?” Robbie gripped the chains of the swing so hard his knuckles cracked.

\"It\'s been awfully quiet at his place since. Yous think he\'s been taken in?\"

\"Yeah,\" said Ali, pulling out a cigarette from his pocket and then a lighter. \"Yous been pinching from the Currymunchers again?\"

Ricky looked up and saw that the Police car had returned, slowing to a stop before the ruined playground. He got off the swing and stood up straight as the two cops approached them, “Yeah, must have...\" He looked at the muddied folder and back at his friends, suddenly shaking all over, \"something like that.”

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This is a work of fiction. It escaped me and had to be written.

I apologise if this story offends or belittles or causes distress -- that was not the intention.