Black Swan Green (40 page)

‘Thanks very much, Mr Taylor.’

Dad dropped the cone into an oil drum full of rubbish and walked off.

Suppose
, prompted Unborn Twin,
you never see him again?

‘Dad!’

I ran up to him and looked him square in the eye. Suddenly, I’m nearly as tall as he is. ‘I want to be a forester when I’m older.’ I hadn’t meant to tell him. Dad always finds problems with plans.

‘A forester?’

‘Yeah,’ I nodded, ‘someone who looks after forests.’

‘Mmm.’ That was the closest he came to smiling. ‘There’s kind of a big clue in the word, Jason.’

‘Well. Yeah. One of those. In France. Maybe.’

‘You’ll have to study hard.’ Dad made a
could do worse
face. ‘You’ll need the sciences.’

‘Then I’ll get the sciences.’

‘I know.’

I’ll
always
remember meeting Dad tonight. I know I will. Will Dad? Or will, for Dad, tonight’s Goose Fair just be one more of the trillion things you even forget forgetting?

‘What’s all this,’ asked Moran, ‘about a portable TV?’

‘It only works if you hold its aerial, which means you’re too close to watch it. Wait here a mo, will you? Just off to the wood for a waz.’

As I jogged over the village green, the Goose Fair slid off and fell away. Six hundred pounds: 6,000 Mars Bars, 110 LPs, 1,200 paperbacks, 5 Raleigh Grifters, 1 4 of a Mini, 3 Atari Home Entertainment consoles. Clothes that’ll make Dawn Madden dance with me at the Christmas village hall disco. Docs and denim jackets. Thin leather ties with pianos on them. Salmon-pink shirts. An Omega Seamaster de Ville made by snowy-haired Swiss craftsmen in 1950.

The old bus shack was just a box of black.

I told you
, said Maggot.
He’s not here. Go back now. You tried
.

The black smelt of fresh cigarettes. ‘Wilcox?’

‘Fuck off.’ Wilcox struck a match and his face hovered there for one flickery second. The marks under his nose might’ve been cleaned-up blood.

‘Just found something.’

‘And why d’yer s’pose,’ Wilcox didn’t get it, ‘I give a flying fuck?’

‘’Cause it’s yours.’

His voice lurched like a dog on its lead. ‘
What?
’

I dug out his wallet and held it towards him.

Wilcox leapt up and snatched it off me. ‘
Where?
’

‘Dodgems.’

Wilcox thought about ripping my throat out. ‘
When?
’

‘Few minutes ago. Sort of wedged down the edge of the rink.’

‘If yer’ve taken
any
of this money, Taylor,’ Wilcox’s fingers trembled as he took out the wodge of £20 notes, ‘yer fuckin’
dead!
’

‘No, really, don’t mention it, Ross. No, honest, you’d’ve done the same for me, I know you would.’ Ross Wilcox was too busy counting to really listen. ‘Look, if I
was
going to steal any of it, I’d hardly be here giving it
back
to you, would I?’

Wilcox got to thirty. He took a deep breath, then remembered me, witnessing his
utter
relief. ‘So now I’m s’posed to kiss yer arse, am I?’ His face snarled up. ‘Tell yer how
grate
ful I am?’

As usual, I didn’t know how to reply to him.

The poor kid.

The fairground man on the Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups locked the padded bars that’d stop me, Dean, Floyd Chaceley and Clive Pike being flung halfway to Orion. ‘So are you,’ Dean asked him, a bit sarkily, ‘the Great Silvestro?’

‘Nah. Silvestro died last month. His other ride, Flying Saucers, went and collapsed on him. Made all newspapers up in Derby, where it happened. Nine lads about your age, plus Silvestro – crushed, mangled, pitted, juiced.’ The fairground man shook his head, wincing. ‘The only way the police could sort out who was what was by calling in a team of dentists. Dentists with ladles and buckets. Guess why the ride collapsed. You’ll never guess.
One single bolt
hadn’t been tightened proper.
One bolt
. Casual labour, see. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Right. That’s the last of you done.’

He waved at an assistant, who pulled a big lever. A song that went ‘Hey! (HEY!) You! (YOU!) Get Off Of My Cloud!’ blasted out and hydraulic tentacles lifted our giant teacups higher than houses. Floyd Chacely, Clive Pike and Dean Moran and me did a rising oooooohhhhh!

My hand touched my flat pocket. Apart from £28 in my TSB account, all the money I had left in the world was the two pounds Dad’d given me. Perhaps giving Wilcox back his wallet
had
been idiotic, but at least now I could stop worrying about whether I should or not.

The Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups swung into motion and an orchestra of screams tuned up. My memories’re all sloshed out of order. The Goose Fair was sluiced from a bowl of starry dark. Clive Pike, to my left, eyes beetling bigger than humanly possible, G-force ribbling his face. (‘HEY!
HEY!
’) Starry dark, sluiced from a bowl of the Goose Fair. Floyd Chaceley, who
never
smiles, on my right, laughing like Lord Satan in a mushroom cloud. Screams chasing their tails as fast as the melting tigers in
Little Black Sambo
. (‘YOU!
YOU!
’) Goose Fair and November night propellering one into another.
Courage is being scared shitless but doing it anyway
. Dean Moran, opposite, eyes clenched, lips valving open as a cobra slithers out, a shiny cobra of half-digested toffee apple, candy floss and three of Fryer Tuck’s All-American Taste-Tastic Hot Dogs, highly recommended, writhing longer. (‘GET OFF OF MY CLOUD!’) That such a volume of food could
still
be uncoiling from Dean’s stomach is supernaturally peculiar, missing my face by inches, climbing higher, till it
lunges
and turns into a billion globs of puke, bulleting passengers of the late Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups (
now they’ve
really
got something to scream about
) and a thousand and one innocent civilians milling at the wrong time in the wrong part of the Goose Fair.

The giant machine groaned like the Iron Man as our teacup sank earthwards. Our heads slowed more slowly. People were still screaming, even half the village green away, which seemed to me a bit much.

‘Gonads,’ stated the fairground man, seeing the state of our teacup. ‘Shrivelled, syphilitic gonads. Ern!’ he yelled at his assistant. ‘Ern! Bring the mop! We’ve got a puker!’

It took a few seconds to realize the screams weren’t coming from near by, but from farther off. By the crossroads, over by Mr Rhydd’s.

Ross Wilcox must’ve marched back to the Goose Fair to find Dawn Madden right after I’d left him. (Dean’s sister Kelly filled in these missing pieces. She heard this bit from Andrea Bozard, who’d nearly got mown down by Wilcox as he passed by.) Ross Wilcox must’ve felt as saved as he’d just felt damned, I s’pose. Like Jesus, rolling the stone from his tomb when everyone’d thought he was a goner. ‘Sure, Dad,’ he’d be able to say, ‘here’s yer money. I kept it on me in case the pigs raided our house, like.’ First he’d find Dawn Madden, agree he’d been a dick-head, seal his apology with a fondling snog, and his world’d be the right way up again. Round the time me and Dean were being fastened into Silvestro’s teacup, Wilcox asked Lucy Sneads if she’d seen Dawn Madden. Lucy Sneads, who can be a nasty piece of work if the mood takes her, and who has some portion of responsibility for what happened next, helpfully told him. ‘Over there. In that Land Rover. Under the oak.’ Only two people’d’ve seen Ross Wilcox’s face, lit bright by Mary Poppins’ Merry-Go-Round, when he unpopped the flap on the back. One was Dawn Madden herself, her legs wrapped round the other witness. Grant Burch. Ross Wilcox, I imagine, gawped at the couple like a seal gawping at a seal-clubber. Ruth Redmarley told Kelly she saw Wilcox slam the Land Rover flap shut, howling ‘BITCH!’ over and over and banging the Land Rover with his fist. It must’ve hurt. Ruth Redmarley watched him then jump on Grant Burch’s brother’s Suzuki (the same scrambler that used to be Tom Yew’s), turn the keys, keys which Grant Burch’d left in the ignition ’cause it was right by the jeep (nobody’d steal it from under his nose, right?), and kick it into life. If Ross Wilcox hadn’t grown up around motorbikes ’cause of his dad and brother, it probably wouldn’t’ve occurred to him to nick the Suzuki. If it hadn’t started first time, even on a cold November night, Grant Burch might’ve managed to get his trousers on in time to stop what happened. Robin South reckons he saw Tom Yew on the back of the Suzuki as Wilcox fraped it over the village green, but Robin South’s so full of crap it’s untrue. Avril Bredon says she saw the Suzuki hit the muddy bit by the main road at about fifty miles per hour, and you can believe Avril Bredon. The police believed her. The bike slid round so the back faced front, clipped the Boer war memorial, and Ross Wilcox got cartwheeled over the crossroads. Two girls from the Chase comprehensive were phoning their dads from the phone box by Mr Rhydd’s. We won’t know their names till next week’s
Malvern Gazetteer
’s out. But the last person to see Ross Wilcox was Arthur Evesham’s widow, on her way home from bingo at the village hall. Ross Wilcox came bowling by and missed her by inches. She’s the one who knelt down by Ross Wilcox to see if he was dead or alive, the one who heard him grunt, ‘I think I lost a trainer,’ sputter out a bagful of blood and teeth, and garble, ‘Make sure no one nicks my trainer.’ Arthur Evesham’s widow’s the one who first saw Wilcox’s right leg stopped at his knee, looked back, and saw gobby smears streaking the road. She’s being helped into the second ambulance right now. See her face? Stony hollow in the flashing blue light?

Rule One is
Blank out the consequences
. Ignore this rule and you’ll hesitate, botch it and be caught like Steve McQueen on barbed wire in
The Great Escape
. That’s why, in metalwork this morning, I focused on Mr Murcot’s birthmarks like my life depended on it. He’s got two long ones on his throat in the shape of New Zealand. ‘Top of the morning, boys!’ Our teacher crashed his cymbals. ‘God save the Queen!’

‘The top of the morning, Mr Murcot,’ we chanted, turning towards Buckingham Palace and saluting, ‘and God save the Queen!’

Neal Brose, standing by the vice he shares with Gary Drake, stared back at me.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten
, his eyes told me,
Maggot
.

‘Projectwards, boys.’ Half the class’re girls but Mr Murcot always calls us ‘boys’ unless he’s bollocking us. Then we’re all ‘girls’. ‘Today’s the final class of 1982. Fail to finish your projects today, and it’s transportation to the colonies for the terms of your natural lives.’ Our project this term was to design and make some sort of a scraper. Mine’s to clean between the studs on my football boots.

I let about ten minutes go by, till Neal Brose was busy on the drill.

My heart pumped fast, but I’d made up my mind.

From Neal Brose’s black Slazenger bag I took out his Casio College Solar-powered Mathematical Calculator. It’s the most expensive calculator in WH Smith. A dark suction pulled me on, almost reassuringly, like a canoeist paddling straight at Niagara Falls instead of trying to fight the current. I took the prized calculator out of its special case.

Holly Deblin’d noticed me. She was tying back her hair to stop it getting caught in the lathe. (Mr Murcot enjoys going over the hideous face-first deaths he’s witnessed over the years.)
I think she likes us
, whispered Unborn Twin.
Blow her a kiss
.

I put Neal Brose’s calculator into the vice. Leon Cutler’d noticed too but just stared, not believing it.
Blank out the consequences
. I gave the rod-handle thing a strong turn. Tiny pleas snapped in the calculator’s casing. Then I put
all
my weight on the rod thing. Gary Drake’s skeleton, Neal Brose’s skull, Wayne Nashend’s backbone, their futures, their souls.
Harder
. The casing shattered, circuitry crunched, shrapnel tittered on the floor as the ten-millimetre-thick calculator turned into a three-millimetre-thick calculator.
There
. Powderized. Shouting’d broken out all over the metalwork room.

Rule Two is
Do it until it’s undoable
.

Those’re the only two rules you need to remember.

Giddy glorious waterfalls, down I went.

‘Mr Kempsey informs me,’ Mr Nixon laced his fingers into a mace, ‘that your father recently lost his job.’

‘Lost’. Like a job’s a wallet you’ll lose if you’re careless.
I
hadn’t breathed a word at school. But yes, it’s true. Dad’d got to his office in Oxford at 8.55 a.m., and by 9.15 a.m. a security guard was escorting him off the premises. ‘We must tighten our belts,’ says Margaret Thatcher, though
she
isn’t, not personally. ‘There is no alternative.’ Greenland Supermarkets sacked Dad ’cause an expense account was £20 short. After eleven years. This way, Mum’d told Aunt Alice on the phone, they don’t have to pay Dad a penny in redundancy money. Danny Lawlor’d helped Craig Salt to stitch him up, she added. The Danny Lawlor I met last August was dead nice. But niceness isn’t goodness, I ’spose. Now he’s driving Dad’s company Rover 3500.

‘Jason!’ barked Mr Kempsey.

‘Oh.’ Yes, I was in a silo of shit. ‘Sir?’

‘Mr Nixon asked you a question.’

‘Yes. Dad was sacked on Goose Fair day. Uh…some weeks ago.’

‘A misfortune.’ Mr Nixon has a vivisector’s eyes. ‘But misfortunes are commonplace, Taylor, and relative. Look at the misfortune Nick Yew has endured this year. Or Ross Wilcox. How is destroying your class-mate’s property going to help your father?’

‘It won’t, sir.’ The bad-kid’s chair was so low Mr Nixon might just as well saw off its legs completely. ‘Destroying Brose’s calculator hasn’t got a thing to do with my dad getting sacked, sir.’

‘Then what,’ Mr Nixon reangled his head, ‘
was
it to do with?’

Do it until it’s undoable
.

‘Brose’s “popularity lessons”, sir.’

Mr Nixon looked at Mr Kempsey for an explanation.

‘Neal Brose?’ Mr Kempsey cleared his throat, at a loss. ‘“Popularity lessons”?’

‘Brose’ (Hangman blocked ‘Neal’ but that was okay) ‘ordered me, Floyd Chaceley, Nicholas Briar and Clive Pike to pay him a pound a week for popularity lessons. I said no. So he got Wayne Nashend and Ant Little to show me what’ll happen if I don’t get more “popularity”.’

‘What manner,’ Mr Nixon’s voice hardened, a good sign, ‘of persuasion do you claim these boys employed?’

There was no need to exaggerate. ‘Monday they emptied my bag down the stairs by the chemistry lab. Tuesday I got pelted with clumps of soil in Mr Carver’s PE lesson. In the cloakroom this morning Brose and Little and Wayne Nashend told me that I’ll get my face kicked in on my way home tonight.’

‘You’re saying,’ Mr Kempsey’s temperature rose nicely, ‘that
Neal Brose
is running some sort of extortion racket? Under my very nose?’

‘Does “extortion” mean’ (I knew perfectly well) ‘beating someone up if they don’t give you money, sir?’

Mr Kempsey thought the sun, moon and stars shone out of Neal Brose’s arse. ‘That would be one definition.’
All
the teachers do. ‘Do you have evidence for this?’

‘What sort of evidence’ (
Let guile be your ally
) ‘do you have in mind, sir?’ Things were running enough in my favour for me to add, with a straight face, ‘Hidden microphones?’

‘Well…’

‘If we interview Chaceley and Pike and Briar,’ Mr Nixon took over, ‘will they confirm your story?’

‘It depends on who they’re most afraid of, sir. You or Brose.’

‘I
promise
you, Taylor, they will be most afraid of
me
.’

‘Casting aspersions on a boy’s character is a very serious act, Taylor.’ Mr Kempsey wasn’t yet convinced.

‘I’m glad to hear you say so, sir.’

‘What
I
am
not
glad about,’ Mr Nixon wasn’t letting an interrogation get pally, ‘is that you brought this matter to my attention, not by knocking on my door and telling me, but by destroying the property of your alleged persecutor.’

That ‘alleged’ warned me the jury was still out.

‘Involving a teacher means you’re a grass, sir.’

‘
Not
involving a teacher means you’re an
ass
, Taylor.’

Maggot’d’ve buckled under the unfairness of it all.

‘I hadn’t thought this far ahead.’ Just find what’s true, hold it up and take the consequences without whining. ‘I had to show Brose I’m not afraid of him. That’s all I thought of.’

If boredom had a smell, it’d be the stationery storeroom. Dust, paper, warm pipes, all day, all winter. Blank exercise books on metal shelves. Piles of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, of
Romeo and Juliet
, of
Moonfleet
. The storeroom’s also an isolation cell in drawn-out cases like mine. Apart from a square of frosted glass in the door, the only light’s a brown bulb. Mr Kempsey’d told me, curtly, to get on with my homework till I was sent for, but for once I was up to date. A poem inside kicked my belly. Since I was in so much shit already, I nicked a nice exercise book with stiff covers off a shelf to write in. But after the first line I realized it wasn’t a poem. More of a…what? A confession, I s’pose. It began, and on it went. When the bell went for morning break I found I’d filled three sides. Fitting words together makes time go through narrower pipes but faster. Shadows passed the frosted-glass window as teachers rushed to the staffroom to smoke and drink coffee. Joking, moaning shadows. Nobody came into the storeroom to get me. The entire third year’d be talking about what I’d done in metalwork, I knew. The whole school. People say your ears burn when people’s talking about you, but I get a hum in the cellar of my stomach.
Jason Taylor, he didn’t, Jason Taylor, he did, oh my God really he grassed
who
off?
Writing buries this hum. The bell went for the end of break and the shadows passed by in the other direction. Still nobody came. In the outside world Mr Nixon’d be summoning my parents. He wouldn’t have much luck till tonight. Dad’d gone to Oxford to meet ‘contacts’ about a new job. Even Dad’s reel-to-reel answering machine’s been sent back to Greenland. Through the wall the school Xerox machine was droning, droning, droning.

A twitch of fear lunged when the door open but I trampled it dead. It was just a pair of second-year squirts, sent to get a pile of
Cider with Rosie
. (We read it last year too. One scene gave every boy in the classroom boners you could actually
hear
growing.) ‘Is it
true
, Taylor?’ The larger squirt addressed me like I was still in my Maggot period.

‘What the fuck is
that
,’ I replied, after a pause, ‘to
you
?’

I managed to say it so evilly the second-year spilt his books. The smaller squirt spilt his books too as he bent down to help.

I clapped, dead slow.

‘What
appals
me, 3KM,’ Mr Kempsey’s nickname may be ‘Polly’ but he’s dangerous when he’s this angry, ‘is that these acts of intimidation have been going on for weeks.
Weeks
.’

3KM hid behind a funeral silence.

‘WEEKS!’

3KM jumped.

‘And not
one
of you thought to come to me! I feel sickened. Sickened and scared. Yes, scared. In five years you’re going to have the vote! You are supposed to be the elite, 3KM. What kind of citizens are you going to make? What kind of police officers? Teachers? Lawyers? Judges? “I knew it was wrong but it wasn’t my business, sir.” “Better to let someone else blow the whistle, sir.” “I was afraid if I said anything, I’d be next, sir.” Well, if this
spinelessness
is the future of British society, heaven help us.’

I, Jason Taylor, am a grass.

‘Now I strongly disapprove of
how
Taylor brought this woeful business to my attention, but at least he
did
. Less impressive are Chaceley, Pike and Briar, who only spoke up under duress. What is to your collective
shame
is that it took Taylor’s rash act this morning to force events to a head.’

Every kid in front’d turned round to look at me, but it was Gary Drake I went for. ‘What
is
it,
Gary
?’ (Hangman’d handed me a free pass for the afternoon. I sometimes think Hangman wants to come to one of Mrs de Roo’s ‘working accommodations’, too.) ‘Don’t you
know
what I look like after three years?’

The eyes switched to Gary Drake. Then to Mr Kempsey. Our form teacher
should
have opened fire on me for talking while he was talking. But he didn’t. ‘Well, Drake?’

‘Sir?’

‘Feigned incomprehension is the last resort of the fool, Drake.’

Gary Drake actually looked awkward. ‘Sir?’

‘You’re doing it again, Drake.’

Gary Drake nicely stamped on. Wayne Nashend and Ant Little suspended. Chances are, Mr Nixon’s going to expel Neal Brose.

Now they’ll
really
want to kick my face in.

Neal Brose normally sits up front in English, slap bang in the middle.
Go on
, said Unborn Twin,
take the bastard’s seat. You owe it him
. So I did. David Ockeridge, who sits next to Neal Brose, chose a seat farther back. But Clive Pike, of all people, put his bag next to me. ‘Anyone sitting here?’ Clive Pike’s breath smells of cheese’n’onion Outer Spacers, but who cares?

I made a
Go ahead
face.

Miss Lippetts shot me a look as we chanted, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Lippetts.’ So swift and crafty it was almost not there, but it was. ‘Sit down, 3KM. Pencil cases out, please. Today, we’ll exercise our supple young minds on a composition, on
this
theme…’ As we got our stuff out, Miss Lippetts wrote on the board.

A SECRET.

The slap and slide of chalk’s a reassuring sound.

‘Tamsin, do me the honour, please.’

Tamsin Murrell read, ‘“A secret”, miss.’

‘Thank you. But what
is
a secret?’

It takes everyone a bit of time to get going after lunch.

‘Well, say, is a secret a thing you can see? Touch?’

Avril Bredon put her hand up.

‘Avril?’

‘A secret’s a piece of information that not everybody knows.’

‘Good. A piece of information that not everyone knows. Information about…who? You? Somebody else? Some
thing
? All of these?’

After a gap, a few kids murmured, ‘All of these.’