Read Online Essex Boy: My Story by Kirk Norcross - Free Book Online Page B

grafter, one of a kind,
your dad’. Which always makes me feel proud of him.
    But it was the property that instantly took off for Dad. He hit the market at the perfect time, and started buying and selling houses all over the place, doing some up and selling them on,
renting others out . . . and his profits were growing steadily. Not that I was to see any of that for the time being.
    When I look back on myself as a ten year old, I feel like I was missing certain things. I don’t know if it was because of the timing of my parents’ split, but I
ended up lacking a few pretty basic social skills. While Mum had done her best to get us ready for the real world, I had developed some habits and fears that she couldn’t get out of me, and
that she didn’t really know how to change. For example, I wouldn’t answer the house phone. There was no way I was going to pick that up, when I didn’t know who was on the other
end of the line. I would get butterflies in my stomach and feel sick just at the thought of it.
    And I wasn’t happy about eating in public. I felt like people might laugh at the way I ate – not that I had bad table manners – or that I might have a bit of food stuck on the
side of my mouth or in my teeth that I didn’t know about. It wasn’t so bad at school lunches, as everyone was just head down in their lunch boxes, munching away, but anything more
intimate, like dinner at a friend’s house, was torture. It is only now that I can see this was the start of anxiety, which became so crippling for me later, setting in.
    And my schoolwork was so bad that I still couldn’t do my times tables, basic maths, basic spelling or tell the time . . . Plus I was mixing things up a lot when reading or looking at
numbers – yet another clear sign that I was dyslexic, but no one seemed to see this.
    Deep down I felt like, ‘I can’t do the work, so I don’t want to.’ But I was not about to admit I was struggling – instead I would play up and make out like I just
didn’t want to do it. My entire focus at school was on being the ring leader, the cool kid who would do anything naughty if it got me noticed.
    One day I was round at my mate Pete’s house after school, just messing about and trying to think of things to do. He disappeared for a minute, then came running back and pushed me out the
door. ‘Get round the corner!’ he whispered, and we sped off before he dived into a bush, pulling me with him.
    ‘I stole a fag off me dad!’ he announced, holding out a slightly squashed and misshapen cigarette that he had been gripping in his hand. In the other hand he held a lighter. It had
never really occurred to me to smoke before, but there was no way I wasn’t going to give this one a go. So we got right into this huge bush on our hands and knees – we didn’t care
that we were getting dirty – and crawled through into the middle. We didn’t want to be seen, although I think we were more afraid of Pete’s dad finding out we’d taken his
cigarette than we were of being caught smoking!
    Pete put the cigarette in his mouth, trying to look all cool, like he had smoked all his life, then he looked at the lighter, confused, before finally taking the cigarette back out.
    ‘What do you do?’
    ‘I dunno,’ I had to admit. ‘Just smoke it.’
    ‘I don’t know how to!’ he said, handing me the lighter and putting the cigarette back in his mouth.
    I flicked it, and the flame sparked at the end of his cigarette, but it wasn’t catching, even though he was blowing and puffing on it.
    ‘No, you need to suck!’ I knew that much . . . Well, he did, and straight away he was collapsed on the floor coughing, but trying to pretend like he was fine. Then it was my turn,
and I tried not to cough either, even though, mate, it was disgusting. And we worked our way through the whole cigarette, until by the end I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m proper dizzy!’ but we both agreed that what we had done was a cool