Almost True by Keren David Page A

consequences?’
    â€˜Umm . . . Carl . . . he was a boy at my last school. I got suspended and then we had to sort out the lost property cupboard together. Restorative justice.’
    Patrick is enormously interested in restorative justice and asks me loads of questions about it. Then he asks, ‘And why did you hit him?’
    â€˜He tried to drown me in the swimming pool. . .’ and I have to explain all about the contact lenses I wore as part of my disguise when I was Joe, and why it was so dangerous when Carl ducked me in the water, and about how he’d broken my ribs as well by kicking me.
    â€˜And Archie? What heinous crime did he commit that you needed to punish him by pulling his hair?’ he asks, once I’ve ground to a halt.
    Meg’s lying on the ground now, and she rolls over so I can tickle her tummy. Her fur is really silky and soft and I’m not thinking about germs at all.
    â€˜He was moving my stuff from my bed to the bunk bed. He was touching my stuff, stuff that’s not his to touch.’
    â€˜I’ll talk to him,’ says Patrick.
    â€˜Does he have to stay?’
    â€˜Apparently so,’ he says. ‘I think it might be quite interesting for you and Archie to get to know each other. You’ve both grown up without brothers or sisters.’
    â€˜I don’t want to get to know him.’
    â€˜You seem to have no choice,’ he says. ‘But you may have more in common than you realise.’
    I don’t think I’ve got anything in common withthat spoilt baby.
    â€˜Ty,’ he says. ‘I know you think I’m being dictatorial about the computer and the phone, and I’m sorry if you don’t feel fully at home. But Louise did say no contact with anyone, and that means no email and no phone calls, and from what I know about teenagers and the internet, I’d prefer you to avoid dubious chatrooms and illegal downloads.’
    â€˜Yeah . . . but. . .’
    â€˜I suspect that so many huge changes have happened in your life recently that it would be understandable if you started to act . . . how should I put it . . . without discipline. If you start punching people, taking things that don’t belong to you, and so on . . . because, compared to the things you’ve seen and the things you’ve experienced, nothing seems to matter very much. Understand?’
    I’m not sure. I concentrate on stroking Meg’s soft ears. He’s right that things did get a bit out of control when I was Joe, but I don’t know where he’s going with this.
    â€˜I think you need me to set clear boundaries,’ he says. ‘From what Louise has told me, neither Nicki nor Julie have ever been really tough with you. Has anyone ever given you any discipline at all?’
    I’m not really sure what he means. Is he going to hit me? Gran never ever told me off, but there was nothingto tell me off about. I used to go round to her flat and have my supper and do my homework and watch TV, and what’s the problem with that? Nicki would explode at me pretty randomly, not all that often, and I learned to keep my head down and say what she wanted to hear. That policy worked well at school too. Arron used to laugh at me because I was such a good boy.
    There was one boyfriend of my mum’s, Chris the plumber, who said I needed a firm hand and more discipline. He used to boss me around and shout at me, and I was a bit scared of him. Once, I remember, we went out for the day with him and in the car going home he got angry – ‘Crumbs all over the bleeding upholstery’ – and he went on and on and in the end I felt something warm on my leg and I’d wet myself. I was only about five.
    Nicki looked over her shoulder and saw my face and said, ‘Tell you what, Chris, let’s drop him off with my mum and then we can have some fun by ourselves.’ When we got to Gran’s, she shoved Chris’s A-Z over