Dance On My Grave (27 page)
Authors: Aidan Chambers
It was when my dance became more celebration than memorial that the black shape of the hidden B.-in-B. rose, like Death himself, from behind a gravestone only a row away and came swooping down upon me in a flying
rugger tackle. We both crashed to the ground on the path by Barry’s grave. Instantly the B.-in-B. was on his booted feet again, grabbing me by the collar and an arm, and braying with evident satisfaction, ‘All right, sonny, that’ll do for now. You’re under arrest.’
What he, poor bloke, couldn’t understand, was why I burst into squalls of uncontrollable laughter.
39/You know the rest.
So I’ll add only this. Yesterday, after I’d written Bit 38, I wandered down to the beach by Chalkwell station, thinking my Record of Death was finished, and feeling happy-tired. Happy to have finished, tired because I’ve done nothing much else for three weeks now but write everything down and relive my seven weeks with Barry, and face his death again.
I was feeling relieved too, but sad, in a way, to be done with it all—except for my court appearance, which seems now like an irrelevance. I don’t care what they decide to do with me, because I’ve decided what I have to do with myself. I’m going back to school, for a couple of years in Ozzy’s Sixth. Not that I want the exam qualifications; and I don’t have any ambition to go on to university. What I want is the time. To let everything settle. I want to read more, and write some more too, because I’ve enjoyed doing that so much. There’s something ahead for me; I can’t see what it is yet, but I know it is there, waiting. And I just feel I’ll get to it better by staying on at school than by getting a job.
I was thinking all this as I sat on the wall between the beach and the esplanade gazing out at the sea, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. The sensational Spike, succulent as ever, and a paintbrush in his hand. He
had pulled
Tumble
on to the beach and was overhauling her, ready for laying up during the winter.
I gave him a hand; I reckoned I owed him for borrowing his beloved boat and turning her over so ignobly. We laughed a lot and larked about while we worked, and talked school and sailing and sex and jobs. He’s starting as a labourer for a painter and decorator next week, and glad to be free of school. He’s been sculling about all summer, doing as little as he can, but now he’s broke and his father won’t stump up for him any longer.
He thought I was mad to be staying on, of course, and mad without hope of rescue for opting for Ozzy’s Sixth. I tried to explain, but it was all too confused still, and so I changed the subject.
All the time I was getting a charge just from being with him, but for the first time—and this is the important bit of this Bit—I didn’t wonder once if Spike might be a boy with a can of magic beans, the real and everlasting bosom pal. Because it doesn’t matter any more.
‘Look,’ I said to Spike, ‘how about a movie tonight?’
‘I told you I’m skint. I really am,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m flush. I’ve done nothing for weeks. Feel like a night out. We could grab some land-and-sea somewhere when we’ve finished here and catch the five-thirty showing.’
‘What’s on?’
‘Couldn’t care less,’ I said laughing.
He looked across the upturned hull at me and laughed as well. ‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ he said.
‘So who wants to be sane?’ I said.
And that night I gave him a present from Southend.
Wish you were here?
40/I wouldn’t want you to think this is the end. How can it be the end when even I don’t know what the end is yet? Maybe it’s just the beginning. And not even the beginning either. Maybe it isn’t anything at all. Not beginning or end. But just a bit of the middle of something that has a beginning and an end so far out of sight you might as well forget about them, as if they weren’t there at all, which they aren’t when you come to think about it. I have written all this so you can see how I got to be what I am. But that is not what I am any more, because what I am now is someone who is making sure that he is no longer influenced by what made him what he has become.
The only important thing is that somehow we all escape our history.
1
When Osborn read this, he said, ‘If you go on like this you’ll turn religious, you know that don’t you?’ I said, ‘Only over your dead body, eh, sir!’ He said, ‘You really do have death on the brain, Hal.’ I said, ‘All unconscious.’ He said, ‘With death on the brain you would be.’
2
Cf. Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five
. This is how I found out Kari had read it.
The passage quoted on
see here
is from
Slapstick
by Kurt Vonnegut, pulished by Jonathan Cape Ltd; the lines on
see here
are from the poem ‘Lullaby’, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. from
Collected Poems
by W.H. Auden.
The author would particularly like to thank Glenys Salway for her generous help with the social work background to this book.
Aidan Chambers lives in Gloucestershire with his American wife, Nancy, who is the editor of
Signal
magazine. He divides his time between his own writing and lecturing which he does extensively in Australia, the USA and Europe. His provocative and challenging novels for teenagers and young adults have won him international acclaim.
Postcards from No Man’s Land
is the fifth novel in what he perceives as a sequence; this starts with
Breaktime,
continues with
Dance on my Grave,
and carries on through
Now I Know
to
The Toll Bridge
.
A sixth book is planned. Each novel stands on its own exploring a different aspect of contemporary adolescence.
BREAKTIME
NOW I KNOW
THE TOLL BRIDGE
POSTCARDS FROM NO MAN’S LAND
DANCE ON MY GRAVE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 01278 8
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Aidan Chambers, 1982
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 1982
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