Raven Summer (8 page)

One night during Spotlight I’m deep in a ditch in the darkest shadows when Nattrass slithers in beside me.

“Aye, aye, brother,” he whispers. “Mind if I share your ditch?”

I try to shift away from him, but we’re crammed close together.

“I could do you now and nobody’d know who it was,” he whispers.

He holds up a knife. It shines in the moonlight.

“I could, couldn’t I?” he says.

“Yes,” I sigh.

He laughs. He holds the blade to my throat. I push it away. He holds it to my throat again.

“Come on,” he says. “Fight me off.”

“Piss off,” I tell him.

“Dangerous thing to say to somebody with a knife at your throat,” he says.

I feel the edge of the blade on my skin. I lie there, tense, still.

“One wrong little move and you’d be gone,” he whispers.

But he takes the knife away, and laughs softly.

“Just joking, brother,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”

He laughs.

“I like to keep you on your toes, that’s all.”

I look past him, see the torch beam swerving through the dark.

“I found a video on the Net today,” Nattrass whispers. “I seen a man getting his head chopped off. It was a piece of cake to find.”

The torch beam sweeps across us, doesn’t shine down into the ditch.

“They said the bloke was evil,” he continues. “They said he was against God. They said that what they were doing was for God. Then they got a knife, a great big one …”

“It wasn’t Greg Armstrong, was it?”

“No, some Frenchie or a Kraut. So there’s still a bit of hope for poor old Greg.”

“Why you telling me?” I say.

He laughs.

“Haven’t a clue. Mebbe I want to shock you, Liam. Mebbe I want to scare you a little bit. Mebbe I want to get you imagining the worst things in the world.”

“I don’t need you for that,” I tell him.

He grunts, grins. “They held his head right up in front of the camera. Hey, even I had to look away.”

His skin gleams in the starlight.

“You think I’m a pain in the neck,” says Nattrass. “You think I’m weird. You even think I might be evil.”

I don’t say anything. I listen. I wait for the torch to find us.

“I’m not, you know,” he says. “I’m just me, and I’m like lots of other folk. Mebbe a bit dafter, a bit wilder, that’s all.”

“Is that right?”

“Aye, that’s right. There’s lots like me. Why d’you think they put them videos on the Net? Cos they know there’s millions wanting to see them.”

“And millions that don’t.”

“Ha! Think about when you go to the flicks, Liam. When you’re sitting in the dark down at the Forum watching a film. What happens at the violent bits, eh? At the really savage bits. Like the last James Bond film when Bond smashes that guy’s head on the washbasin and there’s the crunch of bone and the splattering of blood and he goes on smashing him till the washbasin’s all smashed up as well. You hear it, don’t you? And you even—don’t you?—hear them
laugh.
That’s what I’m on about.”

“That means nothing,” I say. “A movie’s all made up. The video you saw was—”

“Real. Aye. But you don’t get it, do you? There’s no difference. Aye, you watch the picture with loads of others in the Forum. And aye, you watch the beheading all alone. But while you’re watching it in secret, you know you’re watching with a million others all around the world.”

He holds up the knife again and turns it so that it glows in the moonlight. I think of Death Dealer, resting in a drawer in my bedroom. I could do you, too, I think. I smile at the vision
of it, of Nattrass stretched out dead on the icy earth like an ancient fighter, with Death Dealer thrust into his heart.

“It’s a vicious world, Liam. And you know why? Cos people love it that way. Cos all of us are beasts at heart. Your new mate, whatdeyecallim, he’ll know all about that. And so do you, Liam Lynch.”

And he prods me in the chest with the knife point. Once. Twice. I feel it through my clothes.

“Don’t you,” he says. “Even you. Don’t you? You know all about getting wild. We seen it with the snakes that day, didn’t we?”

He prods me.

“Go on,” he says. “Have a go at me. Go on. Go on.”

I punch him in the face. I snarl at him to shut up. He laughs and stabs the knife at me again. I grip his wrist and try to twist the knife back towards him. We wrestle. The knife gleams right by my face. He’s stronger than me but he’s holding back. He’s grinning. The knife comes closer. Then he jumps free.

“Whoops!” he laughs. “Get running, Liam!”

The torch beam glares into my eyes. I jump up, sprint, don’t get back in time.

Spotlight spotted you in the night! You’re out!

That night I dream of Nattrass.
We’re fighting on the field. We struggle for hour after hour. I think it will never end, but at last I plunge Death Dealer into his heart. I stand over him as his blood leaks out into the earth. Next morning, I see the horizontal cut on my cheek. Shallow, just a couple of inches long. A dark red line of dried blood. I close my eyes. I dream again of plunging the knife into his heart.

At breakfast, Mum reaches out, touches it.

“What’s that?”

I feel the line.

“Hawthorn tree,” I say.

“Hawthorn?”

“I was hiding. I ran into the tree. A thorn got me.”

She gets her camera.

Crystal continues to e-mail.

There’s a big gathering in Hexham for Greg Armstrong.
It starts with prayers outside the abbey. I’m standing beside Max and Kim. Becky Smith’s on the other side of them. I take no notice of her. Prayers are led by a vicar, a priest, a rabbi and a muezzin. I don’t join in. Afterwards we all head towards the marketplace, where a little stage has been put up. A few old hippies are singing “We Shall Overcome.”

“There’s no harm in praying, you know,” says Max as we move towards the stage.

“There’s no good in it, either,” I say. “What’s God going to do to get anybody free? And if he can do it, why hasn’t he started by now?”

“It’s better than doing nothing,” Max says. “It’s as good as singing along with that wrinkly lot.”

“Is it?”

I see Kim and Becky are trying to hear what we’re saying. I raise my voice. “Maybe it’s God that’s the problem,” I say. “If there
is
a God, maybe we should be praying to him to get himself down here right now and explain himself. Because if there
is
a God, he’s the biggest war criminal of them all.” I check to hear that Becky’s listening. “And anyway, there isn’t a God. He’s dead, he’s gone, there’s only us.”

Greg’s wife’s on the stage. She appeals to his captors. Poets step up and read their poems.

Kids from school carry homemade banners.

SET GREG FREE
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
TROOPS OUT NOW

We keep clapping our hands and stamping our feet and chanting the words. I yell louder than anyone.

Dad steps up. He reads a page from something he’s working on. Mum and I stare at each other when he quotes her own words.

“We all have the capacity to harm,” he says. “But we have to transcend that capacity. We have to help the angel in us to overcome the beast. Or we are doomed.”

I hold Alison for a while. She smiles and giggles and loves it all. Everyone sings “Blowin’ in the Wind” and she moves in my arms to the rhythm.

Becky slides past Kim. I shift away.

“Are you avoiding me?” she says.

I put a sneer on my face.

“Why would I be avoiding
you
?” I say.

She tickles the baby’s chin.

“Oh,” she says. “Your big brother is such a toughie, such a weirdo!”

She walks away.

Nattrass passes by with Eddie and Ned. They stand watching the stage, grinning. They link arms, they sway, they start dancing like there’s a barn dance going on, winding and twisting their way through the crowd.

Nattrass chants:

“A-one two three, one two three, Down with
evil!
A-one two three, one two three, Down with
death!
”

There’s an e-mail from a name I don’t recognize.
I want to click it away, but it says
For Liam Lynch, the Foundling Kid.
I grit my teeth and open it. There’s an attachment. I open that as well. A video begins.

The picture’s blurry. There’s a figure sitting on a chair at the center of a small poorly lit room. He’s wearing jeans and a striped shirt and there’s a black hood covering his head. His head’s tilted forward, like he’s asleep. Music’s playing: a beaten drum, a scratchy squeaky stringed instrument. There’s some chanting. None of the words are recognizable. Three figures walk into view. They’re small, with padded jackets on, with full face masks on, circles for eyeholes, slits for mouth and nose. They stand around the man on the chair—one at his back, one at each side—and they face the camera. They hold
the man’s shoulders as if to restrain him. The figure at his back has a piece of paper. He unfolds it and begins to read in a grunty guttural weird voice. Again hardly anything’s recognizable:
Jabber jabber jabber God jabber jabber jabber Allah jabber jabber jabber Blair jabber jabber jabber Bush.
It goes on for a couple of minutes. The man on the chair doesn’t move. The men at his side stare into the camera. The man at the back closes the paper, drops it. He goes,
Jabber jabber jabber death.
I click Pause. I can’t go on. Lean back from the computer screen and breathe. Look around my room, my ordinary world. Look out of the window into cold, empty Northumberland. Breathe deeply and click Play again. The man at the back has a long-bladed knife. I lean right back, grit my teeth, hold my head, but I watch. Can it be real? Surely not. It’s just not possible, is it? The man on the chair just sits there. He hardly moves as the man at his back leans over him with the knife. The picture goes all blurry. When the picture clears, the man with the knife is lifting the head free of the body. He takes the hood off it. It’s a pig’s head, staring out of the screen. The body beneath is a scarecrow. The men are teenagers, hooting with the thrill of it. They’re teenagers, just like me. Then they’re gone, the screen’s blank.

I lean back, then I curse.

“Nattrass.”

I pause and play, pause and play. I run it in slow motion. I watch closely, to see the boys behind the masks, the scarecrow behind the clothes, the pig behind the hood. Listen to hear the voices within the mumbo jumbo.

“Nattrass.”

“Yes,” I whisper back towards the screen.

But do I know? Do I know as deeply as Crystal knows? Do I want to know?

Next time I see Nattrass he’s walking through the village
with a sledgehammer across his shoulder. He doesn’t say anything at first, just stands and looks at me with his head tilted to one side, like he expects me to speak.

“So?” he says at last.

I don’t answer. He laughs and spits.

“No comment, eh? You watched it, though?”

I shrug.

“You did,” he says. “You couldn’t stop yourself, could you? You watched it all the way to the end, didn’t you. Just like millions all around the world would do?”

He grins.

“It’s funny, isn’t it, brother?”

“What is?”

“Well, even them that say they don’t like the violent stuff—like you, for instance …”

“What about me?”

“You watch it. You can’t stop. You—”

“It was stupid,” I say.

“Stupid? Ah, well. That’s what they say about lots of this modern art, isn’t it?”

“Art?”

“Aye, art. They call it stupid, meaningless. Absolutely shocking, man! Shouldn’t be allowed!”

He swings the hammer down and lets the head thud onto the pavement.

“Some people took it for real, you know,” he says. “Couldn’t tell the difference. They thought it truly was some barmy terrorist thing, that there was some message in the pig’s head. I knew you wouldn’t be fooled. You, with your background. I knew
you’d
know what’s real and what’s not real. That’s why I was wanting a word with you, Liam. Well, with your mother, really.”

“My mother?”

“Aye. I was thinking of them galleries. The ones she puts them pictures in.”

“What about them?”

“Well, they do that video art these days, don’t they?”

He laughs again.

“And I was thinking. Mebbe I could put some of my stuff in. What do you think?”

I roll my eyes.

“Aye,” I say. “Maybe you should. Maybe you’re a brilliant and talented artist.”

“Exactly what I was thinking, brother. So mebbe I should have a word with her, eh? What do you think she’d say?”

“I think she’d say piss off, Nattrass.”

“Get away. She uses language like that, does she? I’m shocked! Ah, well. Mebbe I should talk to somebody else, then. One of that arty lot at the brat’s christening. They look like they’d know the real stuff if they saw it, eh?”

“Aye,” I say. “Whatever, Nattrass.”

I move on. His laughter follows me.

“Hey, Liam!” he shouts. “Watch out for more. There’s shootings, beatings, stonings, lots more stuff we can get to work on. Did you see that Saddam Whatsisname getting hanged? That’d be easy to do, man! That’d be a piece of cake. That’d be a proper work of art!”