Where's the bike?

‘I hate do-gooders,’ Babe said. He finished the dregs of lager in the can, crushed it, threw it towards the bin. It missed. ‘I hate social workers. Anyone who wants to offer a helping hand.’ He went on. ‘All those people who don’t even know you, telling you that they care.’ He leaned across and spat out of the open window. ‘When I was thirteen I had a social worker. Teri. She took a shine to me. Used to invite me over for tea. Show me off to her friends. Me, Underclass Savant; eating focaccia and drinking red wine. All these fucking well-wishers congratulating themselves.

He paused to open another can. Took a long drink. ‘I began stopping over. It was all above board. I knew what was coming though. One night, after a dinner party, it was my fourteenth birthday, they’re all getting drunk and Teri follows me into the bathroom and gives me a blowjob. We spend the entire night together. We do it all night. I’m fourteen and I’ve got more energy than anyone she’s ever been with. Not having fucked many fourteen-year-olds. She says.

‘Next day, I come home from school, tired all day, eyes like piss-holes. Back to the house where I live with my foster parents. There’s a present for me standing in the hall. A bike. I know who it’s from and I know what it makes me.’

He took another draw from the can.

‘Children’s homes provide a steady supply of whores without the social workers getting in on the game. My foster-parents are really proud. They think I’m doing well. Which means they are doing well. Fuck them, I thought.

‘I took the bike into the shed and hack-sawed it into pieces. Takes me two hours. I miss tea. Won’t let the fosters come in while I’m busy. Stupid. They think I’m in there polishing it. I come out of the shed, the whole bike’s just twenty pound of steel and rubber in my rucksack.

‘My foster dad goes in to look at the bike and it’s not there. “Where’s the bike?” he asks me. “Where’s the fucking bike?”’

‘I go into the house while he’s in the shed looking for the bike and steal the money in his wallet. I get a bus into town, go to the social services office and leave the rucksack there, in Teri’s office.’

He paused again. Pacing the lager. The story.

‘Now you might think my reaction was extreme. You might think I should have just kept on stiffing the old girl, and kept the presents too. Or maybe I should have done all that, and then grassed her up too.

‘But I didn’t want to be the victim in all this. I didn’t want to be the focus. I wanted to be normal, and being normal doesn’t mean getting fucked by your social worker, no matter how sexy and pretty and helpful and kind she might have been.

‘And she was,’ he said. ‘She was all that.’