Black Swan Green (19 page)

Mr Castle’s puppety head popped over the garden fence.

Mum’s staring at the heron, appalled, as it shrinks into the lost blue.

Moby’s flipping in the Day of Judgement light.

Dad watched all this through the kitchen window. Dad isn’t laughing. He’s won.

Me,
I
want to bloody kick this
moronic bloody
world in the bloody
teeth
over and over till it bloody
understands
that
not hurting people
is ten bloody
thousand
times more bloody important than being
right
.

So here I was, tying cotton to Mr Blake’s door knocker,
cacking
myself. The knocker was a roaring brass lion.
Here be the fumbler who should be in bed, and here be the beast who
bites
off his head
. Behind me, in the playground, Ross Wilcox was
will
ing me to balls it up. Dawn Madden sat next to him on the climbing frame. Her beautiful head was haloed by the street lamp. Who knows what
she
was thinking. Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley spun on the witch’s hat, slowly, assessing my performance. On the high end of the seesaw perched Dean Moran. Pluto Noak weighed down the low end. His fag glowed. Pluto Noak’s why I was where I was. When Mr Blake’d confiscated the football after Gilbert Swinyard’d booted it into his front garden, Noak’d said, ‘If you ask
me
, that old git deserves a’ (he’d licked the words) ‘
cherry-knocking
.’ ‘Cherry-knocking’ sounds a pretty term but prettiness often papers over nastiness. Knocking on a door and running off before the victim answers sounds a harmless prank, but cherry-knocking says,
Are we the wind, or kids, or have we come to murder you in your bed?
It says,
Of all the houses in the village, why you
?

Nasty, really.

Or maybe it was Ross Wilcox’s fault. If he hadn’t snogged Dawn Madden
so
tonguily, I might’ve sloped off home when Pluto Noak mentioned cherry-knocking. I might not’ve bragged how Hugo my cousin does it by tying one end of a reel of cotton to the knocker and then drives his victim
crazy
by knocking from a safe distance.

Wilcox’d tried to snuff the idea out. ‘They’d see the thread.’

‘
No
,’ I counter-attacked, ‘not if you use black, and let it go slack after knocking so it’s lying along the ground.’

‘How’d
you
know, Taylor?
You’ve
never done it.’

‘I bloody have. At my cousin’s. In Richmond.’

‘Where the fuck’s Richmond?’

‘Virtually London.
Ace
laugh, it was, too.’

‘Should work.’ Pluto Noak spoke. ‘Trickiest part’d be tyin’ the thread in the first place.’

‘It’d take balls,’ Dawn Madden wore snakeskin jeans, ‘would that.’

‘Nah.’
I
’d started it all. ‘It’s a piece of piss.’

Tying a thread to a knocker when one fumble means
death
is no piece of piss, however. Mr Blake had the
Nine o’Clock News
on. Through the open window wafted fried onion fumes and news about the war in Beirut. Rumour has it, Mr Blake’s got an air rifle. He worked at a factory in Worcester that makes mining equipment but he got laid off and hasn’t worked since. His wife died of leukaemia. There’s a son called Martin who’d be about twenty now, but one night (so Kelly Moran told us) they had a fight and Martin’s never been seen since. Someone’d got a letter from a North Sea oil rig, another from a canning factory in Alaska.

So anyway, Pluto Noak, Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley bottled out so they were
pretty
damn impressed when I said
I
’d loop the thread. But my fingers were fumbling one simple granny knot.

Done.

My throat’d gone dry.

Dead
carefully, I lowered the knocker on to the brass lion.

The crucial thing was not to flunk it now, not to panic, not to think what Mr Blake and my parents’d do to me if I got caught.

I backtracked, trying not to scuff grit on the path, unspooling the cotton.

Mr Blake’s prehistoric trees cast tigery shadows.

The gate’s rusty hinges squeaked like glass about to shatter.

Mr Blake’s window snapped open.

An air rifle went off and a pellet hit my neck.

Only when the TV noise’d deadened did I realized that the window’d snapped
shut
. The bullet must’ve been a flying beetle or something. ‘Should’ve seen your face when the window went,’ snargled Ross Wilcox as I got back to the climbing frame. ‘Shat your cacks, it looked like!’

But no one else joined in.

Pete Redmarley flobbed. ‘Least he did it, Wilcox.’

‘Aye,’ Gilbert Swinyard gobbed, ‘took guts, did that.’

Dean Moran said, ‘Nice one, Jace.’

By telepathy I told Dawn Madden,
Your spazzo boyfriend hasn’t got the nerve to do
that.

‘Playtime, kiddiwinkies.’ Pluto Noak swivelled off the seesaw and Moran crashed to earth and rolled into the dirt with a squawk. ‘Gi’s the thread, Jason.’ (The first time he’d called me anything but ‘Taylor’ or ‘you’.) ‘Let’s pay wankchops a call.’

Warm with this praise, I handed him the spool.

‘Let us go first, Ploot,’ said Pete Redmarley, ‘it
is
my cotton.’

‘Yer lyin’ thief, it ain’t yours, yer nicked it off yer old biddy.’ Pluto Noak unspooled more slack as he climbed up the slide. ‘Anyway, it takes technique, does this. Ready?’

We all nodded, and took up innocent stances.

Pluto Noak wound the thread in, then delicately tugged.

The brass lion knocker answered.
One, two, three
.

‘
Skill
,’ mumbled Pluto Noak. That
skill
splashed on me.

A blunt axe of silence’d killed every noise in the playground.

Pluto Noak, Swinyard and Redmarley looked at each other.

Then they looked at me too, like I was one of them.

‘Yeah?’ Mr Blake appeared in a rectangle of yellow. ‘Hello?’

This
, I thought as my blood went hotter and waterier,
could backfire so shittily.

Mr Blake stepped forward. ‘Anyone there?’ His gaze settled on us.

‘Nick Yew’s dad,’ Pete Redmarley spoke like we were in the middle of a discussion, ‘is selling Tom’s old Suzuki scrambler to Grant Burch.’

‘Burch?’ Wilcox snorted. ‘What’s he sellin’ it to
that
cripple for?’

‘Breakin’ an arm,’ Gilbert Swinyard told him, ‘don’t make
no one
a cripple, not in my book.’

Wilcox didn’t quite dare answer back. To my delight.

All through this, Mr Blake’d been firing us this evil stare. Finally he went back in.

Pluto Noak snorted as the door closed. ‘Fuckin’
fierce
or what?’

‘
Fierce
,’ echoed Dean Moran.

Dawn Madden bit her bottom lip and sneaked me this naked smile.

I’ll tie fifty threads
, I thought-telegrammed her,
to fifty door knockers
.

‘Dozy old fucker,’ mumbled Ross Wilcox. ‘Must be blind as a bloody bat. He treaded on the thread, most like.’

‘Why,’ Gilbert Swinyard answered, ‘would he even be
lookin
’ for a thread?’

‘Gi’us a go now, Ploot,’ said Pete Redmarley.

‘Nokey-dokey, Sneaky Pete. Too much of a laugh, this. Round two?’

Mr Blake’s knocker knocked once, twice—

Immediately the door flew open and the cotton reel was jerked out of Pluto Noak’s hand. It clattered over the tarmac under the swing.

‘
Right
, you—’ Mr Blake snarled at the non-existent cherry-knocker who wasn’t cowering, terrified, on his doorstep, or anywhere else.

I had one of those odd moments when now isn’t now.

Mr Blake marched round his garden, trying to flush out a hiding kid.

‘So how much,’ Gilbert Swinyard asked Pete Redmarley in a loud, innocent voice, ‘are the Yews askin’ Old Burcher for that scrambler?’

‘Dunno,’ said Pete Redmarley. ‘Couple of hundred, prob’ly.’

‘Two hundred and fifty,’ Moran piped up. ‘Kelly heard Isaac Pye tell Badger Harris in the Black Swan.’

Mr Blake walked up to his gate. (I tried to keep my face half hidden and hoped he didn’t know me.) ‘
Giles Noak
. Might have known. Want to spend another night in Upton cop shop, do you?’

Wilcox’d grass me off, for sure, if the police got involved.

Pluto Noak leant over the side of the slide and dropped a spit-bomb.

‘You cocky little
shite
, Giles Noak.’

‘Talkin’ to me?
I
thought yer wanted that kid who just banged yer knocker and ran off.’

‘Bullshit! It was
you
!’

‘Flew back up here from yer door in one giant leap, did I?’

‘So
who
is it?’

Pluto Noak did a
fuck you
chuckle. ‘Who is it what?’

‘Right!’ Mr Blake took one step back. ‘I’m calling the police!’

Pluto Noak did this
devastating
imitation of Mr Blake. ‘“Officer? Roger Blake here. Yes, well-known unemployed child-beater of Black Swan Green. Listen, this boy keeps knocking on my door and running away. No, I don’t know his name. No, I haven’t actually seen him, but come and arrest him anyway. He needs a good
ramming
with a
shiny hard truncheon
! I
insist
on doing it myself.”’

That my cherry-knocking’d led to
this
was horrifying.

‘After what happened to your
waster
of a father,’ Mr Blake’s voice’d turned poisonous, ‘
you
should know where
human sewage
ends up.’

A sneeze exploded out of Moran.

Here’s a true story about Giles ‘Pluto’ Noak. Last autumn his then girlfriend Colette Turbot’d been invited by our art teacher Mr Dunwoody to Art Club. Art Club’s after school and it’s only open to kids Dunwoody invites. Colette Turbot went and found it was just her and Dunwoody. He told her to pose topless in his darkroom so he could photograph her. Colette Turbot said I don’t think so, sir. Dunwoody told her if she squandered her gifts she’d waste her life marrying pillocks and working at checkouts. Colette Turbot just left. Next day Pluto Noak and another mate from Upton pork scratchings factory appeared at lunch in the staff car park. Quite a crowd gathered. Pluto Noak and his mate each got a corner of Dunwoody’s Citroën and
rocked it over on to its roof
. ‘YOU TELL THE PIGS WHAT I DONE,’ he yelled at the staffroom window at the top of his voice, ‘AND
I
’LL TELL THE PIGS
WHY
I DONE IT!’

Loads of people
say
‘I don’t
give
a toss’. But for Pluto Noak, not giving a toss’s a religion.

So anyway, Mr Blake’d taken a cautious step or two back before Pluto Noak reached his gate. ‘Talk about someone’s father like
that
, yer’ve gotta see it through, Roger. So let’s sort this out like men. You and me. Right now. You ain’t scared, right? Martin said you’ve got quite a talent for smashin’ up disobedient teenagers.’

‘
You
,’ when Mr Blake found his voice it’d gone crackly and sort of hysterical, ‘
you
don’t know what you’re damn well
talking
about.’

‘Martin knew well enough, though, didn’t he?’

‘I never laid a
finger
on that boy!’

‘Not a finger.’ It took me a moment to realize the next voice belonged to Dean Moran. ‘Pokers wrapped in pillowcases’s more
your
style, weren’t it?’ You never know with Dean Moran. ‘So it didn’t leave any marks.’

Pluto Noak pushed his advantage. ‘Glory days, eh?
Rog?
’

‘Poisonous little crappers!’ Mr Blake marched back to his house. ‘All of you! The police’ll mop
you
up quickly enough…’

‘
My
old man’s got his faults and I ain’t sayin’ he ain’t,’ Pluto Noak called out, ‘but he
never
done
nothin
’ to me like what you done to Martin!’

Mr Blake’s door slammed loud as a shotgun.

Wished
I’d never opened my stupid gob about the cotton now.

Pluto Noak strolled back, all perky. ‘Nice shot, Moran. Fancy a zap on the old Asteroids up the Swan, me. Comin’?’

The invitation was for Redmarley and Swinyard only. Both answered, ‘Okay, Ploot.’ As they left, Pluto Noak nodded me a
Well done
.

‘But,’ Ross Wilcox
had
to say, ‘Blake’ll find the cotton in the morning.’

Pluto Noak spits at the polished June moon. ‘
Good
.’

Breaks at school’re normally pretty grim. Spend your break alone, you’re a No-friends Loser. Try to enter a ring of high-rank kids like Gary Drake or David Ockeridge, you risk a withering ‘What d’
you
want?’ Hang out with low-rank kids like Floyd Chaceley and Nicholas Briar, that means you’re one of them. Girls, like Avril Bredon’s cloakroom huddle, aren’t much of a solution. True, you don’t have to prove yourself so much with girls, and they definitely smell better. But pretty soon someone’ll start a rumour that you fancy one of them. Hearts and initials’ll appear on blackboards.

I try to spend my breaks on journeys between changing destinations, so at least I always look like I’ve got somewhere to be.

But today was different. Kids came seeking
me
out. They wanted to know if I’d
really
tied cotton to
the
Roger Blake’s front door. A certain reputation as a bit of a hard-knock’s useful, but not if teachers notice. So I told each kid, ‘Ah, you can’t believe everything you hear, you know.’ A skill answer, that. It meant,
Of course it’s true
as well as
Why would I want to talk
to you
about it?