Southsiders Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    T he alarm woke Jesse early. Meant he was able to call the school before anyone was there and leave a message on the answer machine.
    Once that was out of the way, he pulled up the blinds in the kitchen to find that it still looked like the middle of the night outside. He set to making breakfast – a mug of hot chocolate, a couple of croissants and a handful of Jaffa cakes.
    The smashing little orangey bits in the middle and the warming of the chocolate raised his spirits and after he’d tidied up and swept the tiled floor, he went on a mission to find anything of value that his mum and dad possessed.
    Before he went to bed, he’d dug out a grand total of £3.07 from down behind the cushions of the sofa. There was another 55p on his dad’s bedside table and the jackpot, a crumpled £5 note in one of his mum’s jacket pockets. It wasn’t enough to dig him out of the hole, but it gave him a momentum that he intended to use to salvage the situation.
    The laptop was one of the most expensive items they possessed. It might have been worth a few quid if it hadn’t been for the cigarette burns on the top and the streak of purple nail-polish on the screen. Besides, he didn’t want to get rid of it – after the TV and his dad’s records, it was his only form of entertainment.
    Instead of selling it, he set it up for a Google search and surrounded it with all of the ornaments, vases and antique-looking things he could find. The kitchen table looked like a stall at a car-boot sale by the time he’d finished, with all the tat collected together. He was sure he’d found something of value. After all, they always made a packet on Cash In The Attic .
    The vase he started with was marked Made In China. So was the ceramic figure of the old man painting at his easel. The cutlery was all steel rather than silver. He found stamps for Tesco, Thailand and Tibet, but nothing suggesting age or good provenance. Just to be sure, he checked out the items on eBay. If he sold the lot and made a tenner after postage he’d be lucky. Except not that lucky, as the money would go into his dad’s account and he wouldn’t get a look in.
    As the state of his inheritance became clear, Jesse’s bowels called out to him.
    It was while he was sitting on the toilet that he realised that the one thing he’d been hoping to avoid had now become the only thing he could do.
    To his dad, his records and music were everything. More important than football, more important than money, even more important than Jesse.
    There were hundreds of them in the main bedroom, filling the bottoms of the wardrobe and most of the floor space on his dad’s side of the room.
    Jesse had been taught to handle them with respect. He was never to touch the playing surface if he took a disc from its sleeve. They were never to be left lying flat. When they’d been played, they had to be replaced inside their sleeves before another one was selected and when they were being put back in their place, they had to be returned into the correct category and put into its position in alphabetical order.
    The records were the only part of his dad’s life that Jesse really understood. They’d been the way Jesse had learned to read and write, and that after the school had told his parents that he was a hopeless case. He could read Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and ‘rock and roll’ way before he mastered Biff, Kipper and Chip.
    There was some rubbish in the collection as far as Jesse was concerned. The Smiths, for example, were utter crap. The dance and hip-hop stuff gave him a headache. The pop music grated on his nerves and made him want to leave the house or chop his ears off. Worse than that, it wouldn’t be worth a penny.
    Inside this mass of cardboard covers, though, were some rare gems that collectors would kill to get their hands on. Most of them had been bought by Jesse’s grandfather and passed down.
    His grandad, Tam, had