Hello everyone! I'm back with a new chapter, and a word of advice for the Guest reviewer who sent a review to me telling me how many days it had been since my last update, it takes as long as it takes. I can't rush these chapters.
"It's time to go."
Harry 'Palmer' was at the Brighton foster home for no more than 8 months, a much shorter amount of time than he'd previously expected or wanted. While he could have left at any time he chose, Harry had decided to simply stay and become comfortable; the years he had spent locked in that disgusting cupboard under the stairs and the time he'd spent on the streets of London forced to live on a meagre living with no actual support system had toughened him up a bit, but since Harry knew he would need to leave soon he didn't let himself become too comfortable or complacent. It had taken time for him to earn the basic trust extended to every kid in the foster home because everyone knew of his tendencies towards violence and theft, but Harry had always returned to the home without any issue and he never (as far as they knew) broke their oh so important curfew, so they'd loosened up around him which meant he could visit the beach and basically enjoy himself.
He had to endure the stupidity of the social workers, but that was expected, but since he generally ignored them, they gave up and eventually left him alone while he concentrated on a plan to escape. He had been in the foster home for eight months now and he had come up with no less than a hundred plans, but he had one that was logical enough for him to follow. Figuring out a way to escape the home was one thing, and he had learnt that he could escape during the night as silently as he could and he could climb down using the skills he'd picked up from the burglary gang, he'd run around with before the police stopped them and then climb back up again, it was quite another to decide where he could go afterwards. The window that was inside his bedroom was blessed by a wide enough window that he could open and squeeze himself through and there happened to be a drainpipe made from metal that had branches like a tree built in to facilitate the water flow, but it was further blessed by having trees and thick bushes that made it very hard for anybody to see him.
Harry could have escaped that way, but he wasn't stupid - he knew as soon as he got out the police and social workers would know and they'd rip Brighton to pieces trying to find him. He would need cash just to get away from Brighton and go somewhere else to live - his old haunts in London were probably no longer safe for him anymore, they'd probably been overtaken by other runaways who wouldn't take too kindly to having their old owner coming back to live in them again. Maybe he could go further along the coast? Portsmouth or Southhampton were reasonably far from Brighton and with his morphing he could change his appearance at will, and the picture the social workers had of him in his current form could easily not be used again. He would simply choose a different form.
In the meantime, Harry used the 8 months to try to form basic connections in Brighton. He needed to have a fence or two who could deal with anything he'd stolen in order to get some hard cash, and he found one or two of them fairly quickly. It was so good being able to morph again after being in the same shape so frequently. After finding a decent enough fence, Harry began committing burglaries in the dead of night once he was sure everyone had gone to bed. It was so easy for him to climb down the piping outside his room, change his appearance and head out to one of the houses he'd targeted. Some of the houses may have looked unattractive on the outside, but that didn't mean they couldn't hold something valuable inside their walls. After going through their possessions Harry would then leave and return to the foster home, changing his appearance along the way and always being on the lookout for CCTV, but once he returned to the home he was faced with a problem, and it wasn't climbing back up the drainpipe again - no, he had been taught the tricks of that part of the trade - it was how he was going to hide all he had taken in his room. Harry was almost sure that the social workers or the foster home staff, perhaps both, were going through what little he had. He had lost count of the number of times he had returned to the bedroom and found a number of things moved, say a pen a few centimetres away from where it had been before.
But before he had committed his first burglaries, he set up a little trap to be sure if someone other than himself went into his room. Harry had moved his bedroom around a little bit and planting a few things underneath his bed in a sort of maze like pattern, moving the bed much closer to the door than it had been originally and then he had gotten hold of a small jar and placed it on a very uneven stack of books before filling it with marbles and a few golf balls. The idea was when someone opened the door it would knock down the books and the jar and the marbles and golf balls would spread out, and that person would have no choice but to put them all back inside and try to stack the books back the way they'd been stacked, but they would have made mistakes. Harry had tried it out twice as a practice test, and quite a few of the marbles and golf balls had gone underneath the bed until he'd retrieved them and put them back in the jar.
The day Harry put the trap into operation, he left the foster home full of anticipation - he knew that someone was probably going through his room, and he needed to know for sure otherwise they'd probably find what he'd nicked. When he'd returned from school, the first thing he had done was check the trap. The moment he laid eyes on the set up - the stack of books, the jar, he knew he was right. He had memorised and drawn the general shape and angle of the slant of the stack, and what he had seen that afternoon showed him that not only was the stack set up differently, it was a little more neater than it had been before. When Harry had left it was slanted on forwards, but when he got back it wasn't slanted at all. And the jar….he found three marbles and a golf ball underneath the bed.
The moment he found them, he realised the room was a big no when it came to the question should I hide my gear here? But Harry had been tempted not to do so anyway, it was just so disappointing these people didn't care about his privacy and thought nosing through his things would give them a better insight into him, or at least work out what he was doing with his time. Their arrogance staggered him no end, and it deepened the lack of trust he had for them. So he decided to hide whatever he took in his school bag.
It wasn't just burglary Harry was interested in while living at the foster home, he was interested in broadening his knowledge about harnessing his magic, and he found the perfect teacher in the form of Matilda, the film adaptation directed by Danny DeVito. While Harry doubted the Matilda in the film was a witch, he took heart some of the hints and tips in the film, and he began experimenting, using the anger and frustration he had let build up over the years and he concentrated had. Harry was a little cynical he'd succeed at first, but he managed to perform a few basic spells and things became easier for him.
Unfortunately, that was when things went wrong for him, as he soon discovered. His control of his powers was still a little shaky, but they were still governed by his emotions which made them unstable. He guessed it was inevitable this would happen to him. Sitting in his bedroom alone, Harry guessed that downstairs, well throughout the whole home for that matter, the old hated words "freak" and "weirdo" were being passed around like chocolate. Why was it every time he was in a school other kids had to fuck around with him? That old group he had dealt with very quickly in the early days of his time at the school had gathered their courage again. Harry shook his head to himself, thinking that he had become too complacent otherwise he wouldn't have been taken by surprise. He had been trapped in this fucking house too long.
After nursing their injuries the boys had plotted revenge and they had obviously taken their time, but what Harry couldn't work out was how they'd managed to get an idea of his patterns since he was careful to always vary his routine. It didn't matter anymore, he conceded as he remembered walking through the door out of the school, only for one of the boys to grab him and haul him out before he could blink and then they started beating him up. Reeling and stunned Harry found it hard to fight back, but that hadn't stopped him from trying, but he simply couldn't get up to fight them off. Maybe it wasn't a surprise his magic had reacted the way it had, it was just frustrating that he didn't have that vital control yet. To cut a long boring story short, he was on the ground, trying to stop the boys beating him to a pulp, but no matter what he tried to do they kept punching and kicking him. One of the punches was to the head, and another in the stomach and both had worked well to stun him, and with all the blows hammering down on his body Harry needed a few minutes to get his brain back together. After failing to stand up and fight them off and no one bothering to help, not that he'd expected any, and he'd felt his anger bubble away within him. His magic had done the rest, all of the boys had been blasted off their feet and they'd been knocked about 5 feet away from him, but that wasn't the worst of it. No, his morphic powers had played up, and instead of the appearance that he had spent the last 8 months sporting his hair had long, blond and his eyes were black. It had taken him no less than 10 minutes to restore his disguise, but the damage was done, and everyone in the school had either seen the whole mess and hadn't given a thought about it since it was him who was being beaten - why would they lift a finger? To them, he was an oddball since everyone knew he had lived on the streets, didn't socialise though why was anyones guess since socialising meant having to deal with people who had their own agendas, who could betray him in an instant. Harry hadn't bothered telling them about his reticence because it wasn't worth his time, he thought, explaining his reasons for just wanting to be left alone to get on with his life.
Anyway, it didn't make any difference now, did it? Everyone had seen his face and hair change, so it was incredibly hard for Harry to hide. Too many people had seen it, including a few of the teachers, so it was likely the social workers would get wind of it. They would never believe it, Harry knew that, but they would hear of it and they might become intrigued.
Harry had to escape now. He had no choice, and besides on the streets he knew he would be safe because he could change his appearance and just blend in with the crowd, but most of all he needed to get away from this place. It was making his brain go soft. Gathering his things, packing the clothes he'd bought over the months, and the money he'd accumulated over the last few months from the burglaries he'd carried out, Harry opened the window and began the climb down the drainpipe to the ground. As he approached the ground, he could hear the sounds of people talking and he heard his name mentioned, but Harry didn't give them much thought as he just left the home and walked away.
As Harry neared Brighton station he realised he had the perfect opportunity to just travel the country and see the sights, and besides who would guess he was a homeless boy again who was running away? He had changed his appearance and now sported dark blond hair and grey eyes and he had made his nose a bit more beaky to give him a hawklike visage. As he boarded the train bound for Portsmouth where he would then get on a boat to the Isle of Wight where he would find new places to burgle, Harry considered his plans when he realised he didn't have any.
When he found himself in Ryde on the island, Harry wondered how long he could actually stay here. Brighton had been a bitter disappointment to him, but that was only because he had gotten careless. Here he would need to be more careful, less complacent in how he scavenged for food and water. He would have to use his burglary skills to ensure he had a stable income so he could buy his own food. For weeks Harry broke into houses and flats and looked for money and anything else he could flog before getting some basic foods. He didn't have a kitchen so he couldn't exactly cook anything complicated, so he was forced to make do at first but then he decided to simply break into a few holiday homes on the island, there were quite a few of them so he could cook larger meals. As long as he didn't leave an almighty mess he would be fine.
But one of the better comforts he had access to when he broke into holiday homes and places where he knew there were lets available was a bath and a shower so he could wash himself properly.
Harry spent over 5 months on the Isle of Wight before he boarded another ferry which would take him back to Southhampton, back to the mainland. As he got his new backpack filled with what other things he had stolen over the last few weeks, some clothes and a little food, he looked around the holiday home he had 'letted' for himself. He didn't feel any real shame in breaking into this place and using it for a few days, to him a holiday home was a hotel after spending so much time on the streets. But he saw it as the symptom of a much larger problem.
He was getting too soft.
Living on the streets had hardened him and made him strong, but when he was in the foster home he had made the mistake of becoming too comfortable than he had expected or hoped for since he had sworn it would never happen, living under a roof with hot water, gas and electricity laid on with a plentiful supply of food only a few meters away without having to go to all the trouble of shoplifting and sneaking away small pieces of food from an open stall, and being allowed to go to school without anyone knowing who he was. Harry was rapidly regaining those skills and the mindset he'd lost, and as he stood on the deck of the ferry as it drew away from the town of Newport, heading all the way towards Southhampton, he was delighted to be heading for another city.
Feedback would be nice.
