Authors: David Mitchell
Then Gilbert Swinyard yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘
PIIIIIILE-ONNNNNN!
’ That was the signal for every Runner and every Bulldog on the lake to throw themselves on to a wriggling, groaning, growing pyramid of kids. The game itself was sort of forgotten. I held back, pretending to limp a bit from my dead leg. Then we heard the sound of a chainsaw in the woods, flying down the track, straight towards us.
The chainsaw wasn’t a chainsaw. It was Tom Yew on his purple Suzuki 150cc scrambler. Pluto Noak was clinging to the back, without a helmet. British Bulldogs was aborted ’cause Tom Yew’s a minor legend in Black Swan Green. Tom Yew serves in the Royal Navy on a frigate called HMS
Coventry
. Tom Yew’s got every Led Zep album ever made
and
can play the guitar introduction to ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Tom Yew’s actually shaken hands with Peter Shilton, the England goalkeeper. Pluto Noak’s a less shiny legend. He left school without even taking his CSEs last year. Now he works in the pork scratchings factory in Upton upon Severn. (There’s rumours Pluto Noak’s smoked cannabis but obviously it wasn’t the type that cauliflowerizes your brain and makes you jump off roofs on to railings.) Tom Yew parked his Suzuki by the bench at the narrow end of the lake and sat on it, side-saddle. Pluto Noak thumped his back to say thanks and went to speak to Colette Turbot, who, according to Moron’s sister Kelly, he’s had sexual intercourse with. The older kids sat on the bench facing him, like Jesus’s disciples, and passed round fags. (Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake smoke now. Worse still, Ross Wilcox asked Tom Yew something about Suzuki silencers and Tom Yew answered him like Ross Wilcox was eighteen too.) Grant Burch told his servant Phelps to run and get him a peanut Yorkie and a can of Top Deck from Rhydd’s shop, yelling after him, ‘
Run
, I told yer!’ to impress Tom Yew. Us middle-rank kids sat round the bench on the frosty ground. The older kids started talking about the best things on TV over Christmas and New Year. Tom Yew started saying he’d seen
The Great Escape
and everyone agreed everything else’d been crap compared to
The Great Escape
, specially the bit where Steve McQueen gets caught by Nazis on the barbed wire. But then Tom Yew said he thought it’d gone on a bit long and everyone agreed that though the film was classic it’d dragged on for
ages
. (I didn’t see it ’cause Mum and Dad watched
The Two Ronnies Christmas Special
. But I paid close attention so I can pretend to’ve watched it when school starts next Monday.)
The talk’d shifted, for some reason, to the worst way to die.
‘Gettin’ bit by a green mamba,’ Gilbert Swinyard reckoned. ‘Deadliest snake in the world. Yer organs burst so yer piss mixes with yer blood.
Agony
.’
‘Agony, sure,’ sniffed Grant Burch, ‘but you’re dead pretty quick. Havin’ yer skin unpeeled off yer like a sock, that’s worse. Apache Indians do that to yer. The best ones can make it last the whole night.’
Pete Redmarley said he’d heard of this Vietcong execution. ‘They strips yer, ties yer up, then rams Philadelphia cheese up yer jax.
Then
they locks yer in a coffin with a pipe goin’ in.
Then
they send starving rats down the pipe. The rats eats through the cheese, then carry on chewin’, into
you
.’
Everyone looked at Tom Yew for the answer. ‘I get this dream.’ He took a drag on his cigarette that lasted an age. ‘I’m with the last bunch of survivors, after an atomic war. We’re walking up a motorway. No cars, just weeds. Every time I look behind me, there’re fewer of us. One by one, you see, the radiation’s getting them.’ He glanced at his brother Nick, then over the frozen lake. ‘It’s not that I’ll die that bothers me. It’s that I’ll be the last one.’
Nobody said a lot for a bit.
Ross Wilcox swivelled our way. He took a drag on his cigarette that lasted an age, the poser. ‘If it wasn’t for Winston Churchill
you
lot’d all be speakin’ German now.’
Sure, like Ross Wilcox would’ve evaded capture and headed a resistance cell. I was
dying
to tell that prat that
actually
, if the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor, America’d never’ve come into the war, Britain’d’ve been starved into surrender and Winston Churchill’d’ve been executed as a war criminal. But I knew I couldn’t. There were swarms of stammer-words in there and Hangman’s bloody merciless this January. So I said I was busting for a waz, stood up and went down the path to the village a bit. Gary Drake shouted, ‘Hey, Taylor! Shake your dong more than twice, you’re
playing
with it!’, which got fat laughs from Neal Brose and Ross Wilcox. I flashed them a V-sign over my shoulder. That stuff about shaking your dong’s a craze at the moment. There’s no one I can trust to ask what it means.
Trees’re always a relief, after people. Gary Drake and Ross Wilcox might’ve been slagging me off, but the fainter the voices became, the less I wanted to go back. I
loathed
myself for not putting Ross Wilcox in his place about speaking German, but it’d’ve been
death
to’ve started stammering back there. The cladding of frost on thorny branches was thawing and fat drops drip-drip-dripping. It soothed me, a bit. In little pits where the sun couldn’t reach there was still some gravelly snow left, but not enough to make a snowball. (Nero used to kill his guests by making them eat glass food, just for a laugh.) A robin, I saw, a woodpecker, a magpie, a blackbird and far off I
think
I heard a nightingale, though I’m not sure you get them in January. Then, where the faint path from the House in the Woods meets the main path to the lake, I heard a boy, gasping for breath, pounding this way. Between a pair of wishbone pines I squeezed myself out of sight. Phelps dashed by, clutching his master’s peanut Yorkie and a can of Tizer. (Rhydd’s must be out of Top Deck.) Behind the pines a possible path led up the slant. I know
all
the paths in this part of the woods, I thought. But not this one. Pete Redmarley and Grant Burch’d start up British Bulldogs again when Tom Yew left. That wasn’t much of a reason to go back. Just to see where the path might go, I followed it.
There’s only one house in the woods so that’s what we call it, the House in the Woods. An old woman was s’posed to live there, but I didn’t know her name and I’d never seen her. The house’s got four windows and a chimney, same as a little kid’s drawing of a house. A brick wall as tall as me surrounds it and wild bushes grow higher. Our war games in the woods steered clear of the building. Not ’cause there’re any ghost stories about it or anything. It’s just that part of the woods isn’t good.
But this morning the house looked so hunkered down and locked up, I doubted anyone was still living there. Plus, my bladder was about to split, and that makes you less cautious. So I peed up against the frosted wall. I’d just finished signing my autograph in steamy yellow when a rusty gate opened up with a tiny shriek and there stood a sour aunt from black-and-white times. Just standing there, staring at me.
My pee ran dry.
‘God! Sorry!’ I zipped up my fly, expecting an
utter
bollocking. Mum’d flay any kid she found pissing against
our
fence alive, then feed his body to the compost bin. Including me. ‘I didn’t know anyone was living…here.’
The sour aunt carried on looking at me.
Pee dribbles blotted my underpants.
‘My brother and I were born in this house,’ she said, finally. Her throat was saggy like a lizard’s. ‘We have no intention of moving away.’
‘Oh…’ I still wasn’t sure if she was about to open fire on me. ‘Good.’
‘How noisy you youngsters are!’
‘Sorry.’
‘It was very careless of you to wake my brother.’
My mouth’d glued up. ‘It wasn’t me making all the noise. Honestly.’
‘There are days,’ the sour aunt never blinked, ‘when my brother loves youngsters. But on days like these, my oh my, you give him the furies.’
‘Like I said, I’m sorry.’
‘You’ll be
sorrier
,’ she looked disgusted, ‘if my brother gets a hold of you.’
Quiet things were too loud and loud things couldn’t be heard.
‘Is he…uh, around? Now? Your brother, I mean?’
‘His room’s just as he left it.’
‘Is he ill?’
She acted like she hadn’t heard me.
‘I’ve got to go home now.’
‘You’ll be
sorrier
,’ she did that spitty chomp old people do to not dribble, ‘when the ice cracks.’
‘The ice? On the lake? It’s as solid as anything.’
‘You
always
say so. Ralph Bredon said so.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Ralph Bredon. The butcher’s boy.’
It didn’t feel at all right. ‘I’ve got to go home now.’
Lunch at 9 Kingfisher Meadows, Black Swan Green, Worcestershire, was Findus ham’n’cheese Crispy Pancakes, crinkle-cut oven chips and sprouts. Sprouts taste of fresh puke but Mum said I had to eat
five
without making a song and dance about it, or there’d be no butterscotch Angel Delight for pudding. Mum says she won’t let the dining table be used as a venue for ‘adolescent discontent’. Before Christmas I asked what not liking the taste of sprouts had to do with ‘adolescent discontent’. Mum warned me to stop being a Clever Little Schoolboy. I should’ve shut up but I pointed out that Dad never makes her eat melon (which
she
hates) and Mum never makes Dad eat garlic (which
he
hates). She went
ape
and sent me to my room. When Dad got back I got a lecture about arrogance.
No pocket money that week, either.
So anyway, this lunch-time I cut my sprouts up into tiny pieces and glolloped tomato ketchup over them. ‘Dad?’
‘
Jas
on?’
‘If you drown, what happens to your body?’
Julia rolled her eyes like Jesus on his cross.
‘Bit of a morbid topic for the dinner table.’ Dad chewed his forkful of crispy pancake. ‘Why do you ask?’
It was best not to mention the frozen-up pond. ‘Well, in this book
Arctic Adventure
these two brothers Hal and Roger Hunt’re being chased by a baddie called Kaggs who falls into the—’
Dad held up his hand to say
Enough!
‘Well, in
my
opinion, Mr Kaggs gets eaten by fish. Picked clean.’
‘Do they have piranhas in the Arctic?’
‘Fish’ll eat anything once it’s soft enough. Mind you, if he fell into the Thames, his body’d wash up before long. The Thames always gives up its dead, the Thames does.’
My misdirection was complete. ‘How about if he fell through ice, into a lake, say? What’d happen to him then? Would he sort of stay…deep frozen?’
‘
Thing
,’ Julia mewled, ‘is being gro
tesque
while we’re eating, Mum.’
Mum rolled up her napkin. ‘Lorenzo Hussingtree’s has a new range of tiles in, Michael.’ (My abortion of a sister flashed me a victorious grin.) ‘Michael?’
‘Yes, Helena?’
‘I thought we could drop by Lorenzo Hussingtree’s showroom on our way to Worcester. New tiles. They’re ex
quisite
.’
‘No doubt Lorenzo Hussingtree charges exquisite prices, to match?’
‘We’re having workmen in anyway, so why not make a proper job of it? The kitchen’s getting embarrassing.’
‘Helena, why—’
Julia sees arguments coming even before Mum and Dad sometimes. ‘Can I get down now?’
‘
Darling
,’ Mum looked really hurt, ‘it’s butterscotch Angel Delight.’
‘Yummy, but could I have mine tonight? Got to get back to Robert Peel and the Enlightened Whigs. Anyway, Thing has ruined my appetite.’
‘Pigging on Cadbury’s Roses with Kate Alfrick,’ I counter-attacked, ‘is what’s ruined
your
appetite.’
‘So where did the Terry’s Chocolate Orange go, Thing?’
‘Julia,’ Mum sighed, ‘I
do
wish you wouldn’t call Jason that. You’ve only got one brother.’
Julia said, ‘One too many,’ and got up.
Dad remembered something. ‘Have either of you been into my office?’
‘Not me, Dad.’ Julia hovered in the doorway, scenting blood. ‘Must’ve been my honest, charming, obedient, younger sibling.’
How did he know?
‘It’s a simple enough question.’ Dad had hard evidence. The only adult I know who bluffs kids is Mr Nixon, our headmaster.
The pencil! When Dean Moran rang the doorbell I must’ve left the pencil in the sharpener.
Damn
Moron. ‘Your phone was ringing for
yonks
, like four or five minutes,
honestly
, so—’
‘What’s the rule,’ Dad didn’t care, ‘about not going into my office?’
‘But I thought it might be an emergency so I picked it up and there was’ – Hangman blocked ‘someone’ – ‘a person on the other end but—’
‘I believe,’ now Dad’s palm said
HALT!
, ‘I just asked you a question.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘
What
question did I just ask you?’
‘“What’s the rule about not going into my office?”’
‘So I did.’ Dad’s a pair of scissors at times.
Snip
snip
snip
snip. ‘Now, why don’t you
answer
this question?’
Then Julia did a strange move. ‘That’s funny.’
‘I don’t see anyone laughing.’
‘No, Dad, on Boxing Day when you and Mum took Thing to Worcester, the phone in your office went. Honestly, it went on for
aeons
. I couldn’t concentrate on my revision. The more I told myself it wasn’t a desperate ambulanceman or something, the likelier it seemed it was. In the end it was driving me crazy. I had no choice. I said “Hello” but the person on the other end didn’t say anything. So I hung up, in case it was a pervert.’
Dad’d gone quiet but the danger wasn’t past.
‘That was just like me,’ I ventured. ‘But I didn’t hang up straight away ’cause I thought maybe they couldn’t hear me. Was there a baby in the background, Julia?’