Authors: David Mitchell
This druid feeling I get in woods’s so thrilling it makes me want to crap, so I dug a hole with a flat stone inside a clump of mitten-leafed shrubs. I pulled down my cacks and squatted. It’s ace shitting outside like a caveman. Let go, thud, subtle crinkle on dry leaves. Squatted craps come out smoother than craps in bogs. Crap’s peatier and steamier in open air, too. (My one fear is bluebottles flying up my arsehole and laying eggs in my lower intestine. Larvae’d hatch and get to my brain. My cousin Hugo told me it actually happened to an American kid called Akron Ohio.) ‘Am I normal,’ I said aloud just to hear my voice, ‘talking to myself in a wood like this?’ A bird
so
near it might’ve perched on a curl of my ear musicked a flute in a jar. I
quivered
to own such an unownable thing. If I could’ve climbed into that moment, that jar, and never
ever
left, I would’ve done. But my squatting calves were aching, so I moved. The unownable bird took fright and vanished down its tunnel of twigs and
now
s.
I’d just wiped my arse with mitten-leaves when this
massive
dog, big as a bear, this brown-and-white wolf, padded out of the murky bracken.
I thought I was going to die.
But the wolf calmly picked up my Adidas bag in its teeth and trotted off down the path.
Only a dog
, trembled Maggot,
it’s gone, it’s okay, we’re safe
.
A dead man’s groan unwound itself from deep inside me. Six exercise books including Mr Whitlock’s plus three textbooks. Gone! What’d I say to the teachers? ‘I can’t hand in my homework, sir. A dog ran off with it.’ Mr Nixon’d bring back the cane just to punish my lack of originality.
Far too late I jumped up to give chase, but my snake-clasp belt twanged undone, my trousers unhoiked and I flew head over arse like Laurel and Hardy. Leaf mould in my underpants, a twig up my nose.
Nothing for it but follow the way the dog might’ve gone, scanning the clotted woods for patches of trotting white. Whitlock’s sarcasm’d be everlasting. Mrs Coscombe’s fury’d be hot as ovens. Mr Inkberrow’s disbelief’d be as unbendy as his blackboard ruler.
Shit, shit, shit
. First every kid labels me as a tragic case, now half the teachers’ll think I’m a waste of space. ‘What were you doing traipsing through the woods at that hour?’
An owl? Here was a bent glade I knew from when us village kids used to fight war games in the woods. Pretty seriously we took it, with prisoners of war, ceasefires, flags one side had to steal (footy socks on a stick) and rules of combat that were half tag, half judo. More sophisticated than those Passchendaeles back on the Malvern Road, anyhow. When field marshals picked their men I was snapped up ’cause I was an ace dodger and tree-climber. Those war games were ace. Sport at school isn’t the same. Sport doesn’t let you be someone you’re not. War games’re extinct now. Us lot were the last ones. Apart from the lake where people walk dogs, every season chokes up more and more paths in the woods. Ways in’ve been wired off or walled up by brambles and farmers. Things get dense and thorny if they’re left on their own. People’re getting edgy about kids running around after dark like we used to. A newspaper boy called Carl Bridgewater was murdered not long ago, in Gloucestershire. Gloucestershire’s only next door. The police found his body in a wood like this.
Thinking about Carl Bridgewater made me a bit scared. A bit. A murderer might
dump
a body in a wood but it’d be an idiotic place to wait for victims. Black Swan Green Wood isn’t Sherwood Forest or Vietnam. All I had to do to get home was backtrack, or keep going till I reached fields.
Yeah, without my Adidas school bag.
Twice I saw a patch of white and thought,
The dog!
One time it was just a silver birch. The second time, a placky bag.
This was hopeless.
The lip of the old quarry reared up. I’d forgotten it since the war games stopped. Not a big drop, but you wouldn’t want to tumble down it. The bottom was a sort of three-sided basin with a track going out that led to Hakes Lane. Or is it Pig Lane? I was surprised to see there were lights and voices on the quarry floor. Five or six caravans, I counted, plus motor homes and a truck, a horsebox, a Hillman van and a motorbike and sidecar. A generator was chugging.
Gypsies
, I thought,
has to be
. At the foot of the scree below my overhang about seven or eight figures sat round a dirty fire. Dogs, too.
No sign of the wolf who’d robbed me, and no sign of my Adidas bag. But surely, it was likelier my bag’d be here than anywhere else in the wood. Problem was, how does a kid from a four-bedroom house down Kingfisher Meadows with Everest double glazing go up to gypsies and accuse their dogs of nicking stuff?
I
had
to.
How
could
I? I went to that Village Camp Crisis Committee meeting. But my
bag
. At the very least, I figured, I should come into their camp by the main track, so they didn’t think I was spying on them.
‘Gonna stay spyin’ on us all evenin’, are yer?’
If Dean Moran’s dad’d put five shits up me, this rammed home
ten
. A broken-nosed face appeared in the clotted dark behind me. Fierce. ‘No,’ I might’ve begun pleading, ‘I just thought—’ But I didn’t finish ’cause I’d taken a step back.
Empty air.
Stones, soil sliding, me sliding with it, down and round and (
You’ll be lucky if you only break a leg
, said Unborn Twin) round and down and (‘
Feck!
’ and ‘
Mind it!
’ and ‘
MIND IT!
’ shouted real humans) and down and round and (dice in a tumbler) round and down and (caravans campfire collarbones) breath
whacked
out of my lungs as I came to a dead stop.
Dogs were going wild, inches away.
‘GERROUT O’HERE, YER GERT DAFT BUGGERS!’
Streams of pebbles and dirt caught up with me.
‘Well,’ the voice rasped, ‘where in bugger did
he
drop from?’
It was like when someone on TV wakes in hospital and faces swim up, but spookier ’cause of the dark. My body ached in twenty places. Scraper pain, not axed pain, so I reckoned I’d be able to walk. My vision spun like a washing machine at the end of its cycle. ‘A kid’s skidded down the quarry!’ rang out voices. ‘A kid’s skidded down the quarry!’ More people appeared in the firelight. Suspicious if not hostile.
An old man spoke in a foreign language.
‘Don’t have to bury him
yet
! T’ain’t a cliff he dropped!’
‘It’s okay,’ grit clogged my mouth, ‘I’m okay.’
A near one asked, ‘Can yer stand up, boy?’
I tried but the ground hadn’t stopped tumbling yet.
‘Wobbly on his trotters,’ the raspy voice decided. ‘Park yer arse a mo,
mush
, round the fire. Help us, one of yer…’
Two arms supported me the few steps to the fire. An aproned mother and daughter stepped from a caravan where
Midlands Today
was on. Both women looked hard as hammers. One held a baby. Kids jostled to get a better look. Wilder and way harder than
any
kid in my year, even Ross Wilcox. Rain, colds, scraps, bullies, handing in homework on time, such things didn’t worry these kids.
One teenager was whittling at a lump and not paying me the blindest bit of notice. Firelight flashed off his sure knife. A mop of hair hid half his face.
The raspy man turned into the knife grinder. This reassured me, but only a bit. Him on my doorstep was one thing, but me crashing down here wasn’t the same. ‘Sorry to…thanks, but I’d best be off.’
‘
I
caught him, Bax!’ Bust-nosed Boy came bum-skiing down the scree. ‘But the
divvy
fell off himself! I never pushed him! But I should of! Spyin’, he was, the spyin’ bugger!’
Knife Grinder looked at me. ‘You ain’t ready to leave yet,
chavvo
.’
‘This’ll, er’ (Hangman blocked ‘sound’) ‘appear weird, but I was in the woods over by St Gabriel’s – the church – and I’d just’ (Hangman blocked ‘sat’) ‘I’d just rested when this dog’ (God, this sounded
so
pathetic) ‘this
massive
dog came up and grabbed my bag and ran off with it.’ (Not one flicker of sympathy on not one face.) ‘It’s got all my exercise books and textbooks in.’ Hangman was making me duck words like a liar does. ‘Then I followed the dog, well, I tried to, but it got dark, and the path, well, kind of path, just led me to…’ I pointed up behind me. ‘Up there. I saw you down here but I
wasn’t
spying on you.’ (Even the baby looked dubious.) ‘Honest, I just wanted my bag back.’
The whittler still whittled.
A woman asked, ‘Why was yer in the wood in the first place?’
‘Hiding.’ Only the unpretty truth’d do.
‘Hiding?’ her daughter demanded. ‘Who from?’
‘A bunch of kids. Village kids.’
‘What yer do to ’em?’ asked Bust-nosed Boy.
‘Nothing. They just don’t like me.’
‘Why not?’
‘How should I know?’
‘’
Course
yer know!’
Of course I do. ‘I’m not one of them. That’s it. That’s enough.’
Warmth slimed my palm and a fangy lurcher looked back up. A man with greased-back hair and sideburns snorted at an older one. ‘Should o’ seen yer face, Bax! When the boy came tumbling down out of nowhere!’
‘Frit as sin, I was!’ The old man chucked a beer can into the fire. ‘An’
I
don’t mind ownin’ it, Clem Ostler. Thought he was a mulo up from the graveyard. Or gorgios chuckin’ stoves or fridges down like that time up Pershore way. Nah, I never got a good feelin’ about this atchin-sen.’ (Either gypsies bend words out of shape, or they have new words for things.) ‘This ’un’ (I got a suspicious nod) ‘a-creepin’ up on us jus’ proves it.’
‘Ain’t it more polite,’ Knife Grinder turned to me, ‘just to
ask
’ bout yer bag, if yer thought we had it?’
‘Reckon we’d skewer yer an’ roast yer alive, didn’t yer?’ The woman’s folded forearms were thick as cables. ‘Everyone knows us gypsies’re
all
partial for a bit o’ gorgio in the pot, ain’t that right?’
I shrugged, miserable. The whittler still whittled. Wood smoke and oil fumes, bodies and cigarettes, bangers and beans, sweet and sour manure. These people’s lives’re freer than mine, but mine’s ten times more comfortable and I’ll probably be alive longer.
‘S’pose, now,’ a short man spoke from a throne of stacked-up tyres, ‘we help yer look for this bag o’ yours? What’d yer give us back?’
‘
Have
you got my bag?’
Bust-nosed Boy shot back, ‘What you accusin’ my uncle of?’
‘Steady, Al.’ Knife Grinder yawned. ‘He ain’t harmed us so far as I can see. But how he might earn a bit o’ goodwill is tellin’ us if that carry-on at the village hall Wednesday last was over that “perm’nent site” the council’re after building down Hakes Lane. Half the bones o’ Black Swan Green was sardined in there. Never seen the like.’
Honesty and confessing’re so often the same. ‘It was.’
Knife Grinder leant back pleased, as if he’d won a bet.
‘
You
went along, did yer?’ asked the one called Clem Ostler.
I’d already hesitated too long. ‘My dad took me. But the meeting was interrupted halfway because—’
‘Find out everything about us,’ demanded the daughter, ‘did yer?’
‘Not a lot’ was the safest thing to say.
‘Gorgios,’ Clem Ostler’s eyes were slits, ‘don’t know one fat rat squeak about us. Yer “experts” know even less.’
Bax the old man nodded. ‘Mercy Watts’s family got moved on to one o’ them “official sites” down Sevenoaks way. Rents, queues, lists, wardens. Council houses on wheels, they are.’
‘That’s the dumbfool joke of it!’ Knife Grinder poked the fire. ‘We don’t want ’em built any more’n yer locals. That new law, that’s what this whole blue-arsed carry-on’s about.’
Bust-nosed Boy said, ‘What new law’s that then, Uncle?’
‘Goes like this. If the council ain’t built their quota o’ perm’nent sites, the law says we can atch wherever we please. But a council what
has
got the quota can get the gavvas to move us on if we’re atchin’ anywhere what
ain’t
a perm’nent site. This is what this place down Hakes Lane’s about. Ain’t ’bout kindness.’
‘Learn
that
at yer meetin’,’ the mother scowled at me, ‘did yer?’
‘Once they get us tied down,’ Clem Ostler didn’t let me reply, ‘then they’ll be crammin’ our chavvies into their schools, turnin’ us all into
Yessirs, Nossirs, Three Bags Full, Sirs
. Turn us into a bunch o’ didicois an’ kennicks, stuffed up in brick houses. Wipe us off the Earth, like Adolf Hitler tried to. Oh, more gradual like, much gentler, but get rid of us all the same.’
‘“Assimilation”.’ Bust-nosed Boy glared my way. ‘That’s what social workers call it, ain’t it?’
‘I’ – I shrugged – ‘don’t know.’
‘S’prised a gyppo knows a big word like that? Yer don’t know who I am, do yer? Oh, I remember
you
all right. These yots don’t forgets a face. We was both at the littl’uns school in the village. Frogmartin, Figmortin, the teacher’s name was, summat like that. Yer was stuttery then, too, wasn’t yer? We was playin’ that game, that Hangman game.’
My memory passed me the gypsy kid’s name. ‘Alan Wall.’
‘That’s my name, Stuttery, don’t wear it out.’
‘Stuttery’ was an improvement on ‘Spy’.
‘What,’ the mother lit a cigarette, ‘gets
my
goat about gorgios is how they call
us
dirty when they have toilets in the same room they wash in!
And
all use the same spoons and cups and bath water and don’t throw their rubbish for the wind an’ rain to sort out natural, no, they
keep
their muck to go rotten in
boxes
!’ She shuddered. ‘Inside their houses!’
‘Sleepin’ with their pets an’ all.’ Clem Ostler poked the fire. ‘Dogs’re mucky enough, but
cats
. Fleas, dirt, fur, all in the same bed. Ain’t that right? Oy, Stuttery!’