Kidnap by Tommy Donbavand Page B

confronted him with it. He confessed everything, there and then. I sat at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the bathwater splash onto the floor as my parents yelled and screamed at each other.
    My dad walked out the next day.
    No, that’s too simple a way of putting it…
    My dad destroyed us the next day.
    He left to go and live with Liz, and took everything with him. The TV, the DVD player, the car – and all the savings he and my mum had in their joint bank account.
    He left us with nothing.
    My mum tried to make the best of it, telling me we were better off without him – but I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me. She tried to get a job, but she hadn’t worked since she’d fallen downstairs and hurt her back when I was a toddler, and she really struggled to find anything. In the end, she was taken on as a cleaner in an office block on the other side of town. By the time she’d paid for her bus fare there and back, there wasn’t much left, but at least she was doing something positive.
    Then, the bank repossessed our house.
    While my mum had been looking for work, she’d fallen behind on paying the mortgage, and my dad wasn’t coughing up anything to help. Mymum went round to Liz’s house more than once to try and get him to man-up and pay his fair share, but it fell on deaf ears.
    My mum and me ended up in a hostel for the homeless, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. It’s not too bad, I guess. We’ve got our own room, and we’re not on the same floor as the drunks. But there’s a lot of noise at night, and the police are called to a fight at least once a week, but we do our best to keep ourselves to ourselves.
    The really sad part was that my mum lost her job not long after we moved in here. The bosses accused her of stealing a printer from one of the offices. A printer? What the hell would we need one of those for? Still, it didn’t matter in the end. They fired her, and that was that.
    She signed on for benefits, but we weren’t entitled to much at all. I remember sitting in our room one evening, picking the bits of meat out of a supermarket own-brand ready-meal when shesaid that she wished she
had
stolen that printer. At least that way she could have sold it and bought us a decent dinner.
    It was a joke, of course. At least, I thought it was. But, the next night, I came home from school to find fish and chips waiting for me on the table. Not the cook-your-own kind, either – proper fish and chips with salt and vinegar, from the chippy! I hadn’t tasted anything so delicious in months.
    At first, my mum didn’t want to tell me where she’d got the money for them but, in the end, she confessed that she’d nicked an X-Box game from the shop on the corner and sold it to some bloke in the local pub for ten pounds.
    I didn’t know what to think. My mum and dad had always brought me up to be honest and not to steal other people’s belongings. But we were desperate, my mum said, and big shops had insurance policies for stuff that was stolen. The game she’d taken didn’t actually belong to anyone, yet. Not really.
    I could tell she was trying to convince herself again.
    It wasn’t long before I was going out with her to nick stuff. Unlike my dad, I’ve always been pretty good at drama, and it was my job to fall to the floor and pretend I was ill. While the shop staff gathered round to see what was wrong with me, she’d fill her bag with stuff. We always took food at first, because there was no way they could trace empty containers back to you. But, before long, we were also nicking stuff my mum could sell to her contacts in the local pubs and clubs.
    We got caught – just the once – as the staff helped me up to my feet and double-checked again that my mum didn’t want them to call an ambulance for me. The shop manager came out of the office saying he’d seen