The Knife That Killed Me (14 page)

“Barbarians. That’s it. You’re a clever kid, aren’t you, eh, yeah? You’ve listened in history. You know about the Spartans, don’t you?” Roth’s eyes weren’t on me now, but were focused somewhere else, thousands of years ago, many many miles away. “You know about how they stood together, shield to shield, while the Persians splashed against them like waves on a rock?”

That was the thing about Roth. He could say things like that, things you’d never think were in him. Maybe if things had been different for him, if he’d been brought up somewhere else, with a different mum and dad, he’d have achieved something, done something amazing.

“That’s us. Spartans. The Templars are the barbarians. The way white men beat barbarians is by sticking together, keeping that shield wall tight. You get me?”

I nodded. There wasn’t much else I could do. But I also looked quickly at Miller, a black kid, not a white man. And I thought I saw something there, something beneath that cowed, craven look of his.

Roth caught my glance, but he couldn’t have seen Miller’s expression.

“You don’t worry about him,” he said, and I wasn’t sure who he was speaking to. Maybe it was himself. “Miller’s all right. Miller’s one of us. We’ve civilized you, eh, yeah?”

And Miller didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he grunted, which I suppose meant yes.

And then Roth focused on me again.

“You’ve still got it, yeah?”

Of course I knew what he meant.

“Yes.”

“Got it here?”

I shook my head. It was in my secret hiding place.

“Sensible. I knew you had brains. Some thick kid would have carried it around like a mobile. Not you. Feels good, though, doesn’t it? Having it, touching it.”

I thought about the knife, felt it invisible in my hand.

“It feels … good, yes.”

Bates made a hissing noise. A sigh, I think.

“Tomorrow. You’ll bring it tomorrow?”

I wanted to say no; to say that I didn’t want anything to do with the stupid fight. The best I could manage was to say nothing.

“Reckon he’s chicken,” said Bates.

“Nah, not my mate Paul. He’s a good lad.”

Roth squeezed me again with his big arm.

“And when he hears what they were saying, well, then he’ll be up for it, won’t you, eh?”

I didn’t get it for a second.

“Who do you mean? What did they say?”

“It’s all right, we know there’s nothing in it. We know they’re a bunch of lying savages, monkeys, apes, don’t we, eh?”

“What did they say?”

“Forget it.”

“Tell me.”

“They said you liked it when they made you kiss the dog. They said it was the kind of thing you liked. They said stuff like that.”

And then he told me some other things. The kind of things that had been written on the wall, about him.

“Now, the point is,” he said, his voice low and reasonable, like we were talking about what was on the telly tonight, “that kind of thing gets around. When it gets around, it becomes true. As good as true, I mean. I’m saying that no one can tell the difference between the lie and the truth. And when you can’t tell the difference between a lie and the truth, then, you know what, there isn’t a difference. Because the truth is only what people think it is. So what you need to do is put any thoughts like that out of people’s heads. You get stuck in tomorrow, and what are people gonna say then? Not that you’re the dog snogger. No, they’re gonna say you’re a hero. They’ll remember you for a long time.”

I felt sick. I didn’t believe that lies and the truth were the same—the same underneath, I mean. But Roth was right in that the truth sometimes can’t protect you against the lie; that the lie is sometimes stronger than the truth.

But feeling sick isn’t the same as wanting to fight.

“I don’t care what people say about me.”

Roth’s face changed slowly. He’d been working it up to now, making the muscles move into the human shapes that other faces had. But now it was slack and empty, and I knew that I was in terrible trouble.

“He doesn’t care what people say about him,” he said, his voice like the voice of a dead man, a spirit, calling from beyond the tomb.

And then action.

I was against the wall, my face crushed in his hands.

“But what about his dad, eh? Yeah, his dad.” I could feel his breath on my face, but it had no odor, nothing, nothing at all. “I’ve heard how he was always going on about what a tough guy he was at school. Oh yeah. How he was the hero at the big fight up at Temple Moor all them years ago. Well, you know what? I heard different. I heard that he shat himself. I heard he was a coward. You a coward too, eh, Varderman? Another good story to put around, that one, eh? Your dad, shitting himself.”

And I fought against the hand on my face and the weight of Roth pushing me against the wall, fought as hard as I could, but I was like some soft creature writhing under the tracks of a tank. And Roth laughed.

“That’s a bit more like it,” he said. “A bit of fight in you, eh? That’s good, really good. Doesn’t matter so much if your dad was chickenshit. You can put that right. You can be the one with guts in your family. That’s it, eh, yeah?”

And then he put his hand inside my blazer and began to feel me, and then he moved his hand down to my trousers, and then up again, and then he said, “You sure you haven’t got it, my little girl, my baby?”

“I told you, no, it’s not here,” I said, squirming under his grip.

“Yeah, well, that’s good, good. But I told you what a friend that knife could be to you. And you haven’t got many, have you?”

“He’s got them weirdos,” said Bates.

“They’re not really your friends, you know, Paul. They don’t care about you. You’re not one of them. When push comes to shove, they won’t watch your back. They’ll leave you in the shit.”

I should have defended them, but it was easier to say nothing.

“But tomorrow, you’ll bring it?”

“The knife.”

“Yeah, the knife. Bring it. Use it. Make everything right.”

I nodded my head. But in my heart I said no.

TWENTY

I opened
the door. The telly was on in the living room, but there was nobody there. I once asked my mum why she left the telly on all the time, even when she was out. She said she liked it, that it felt friendly. I turned it off.

I went up to my room. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for the rest of the day. At lunch I went to the library and sat in a corner and opened a book. I don’t know what the book was about. I didn’t try to read it. For a while I thought about what Roth had said. About the Temple Moor kids saying bad things about me. About my dad being a coward, and not
brave at all. About him being a liar. To say that I thought about it gets it wrong. I didn’t think about it: it was just there in my head like a cancer or something. Yeah, a brain tumor. And it’s not as if you can do anything about a brain tumor by thinking about it.
Hey, brain tumor, I’ve decided you’re a bad idea, so why don’t you go away now? Oh, OK, if you say so. Bye then. Yeah, bye
.

I looked around my room. Ever since I’d got to know Shane and his gang I’d begun to feel funny about lots of things in my life. I mean, funny in a bad way. Feel that they weren’t right, weren’t good. My clothes, my hair, my things. There was nothing good about my room. The walls were plain. I don’t even know what you’d call the color. It wasn’t gray, but it was grayish, and with something a bit yellow in the gray, and maybe something a bit pink. The curtains were blue with lines on. The lines were black. There was a chest of drawers that was older than me, but not old enough to be interesting. There was a wardrobe with a tall mirror on the inside of the door. So you had to open the door to look at yourself. That was stupid.

I opened the door and looked at myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I wasn’t ugly. I wasn’t good-looking. I was nothing. My hair was like the walls—no real color. There was still something unformed and babyish about my face. I squeezed it with my hands, the way Roth had squeezed it. Wanting to hurt myself, wanting to squeeze out the thoughts.

And then I remembered, and the thoughts of Roth and my dad, the coward, shitting himself when he should
have been fighting, were blown away like leaves in an autumn gale.

Maddy.

I was going to the cinema with Maddy.

And suddenly I was happy and excited, and looking back at myself in the mirror, I thought that maybe I didn’t look too bad.

I changed out of my school clothes. I had some OK jeans—nothing special, nothing great, but not embarrassing. And I had an OK shirt. It was actually an old one of my dad’s. It was a creamy color, and the thick cotton was smooth with age, and it only had buttons down to the middle, so you had to put it on over your head. I suppose it was kind of old-fashioned, but I thought it looked timeless. Jeans and a shirt and trainers. The trainers were OK too, just a pair of standard black and white Adidas. You wouldn’t notice them either way, to love or to hate.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I got some water on the front of the shirt and some toothpaste on my jeans, and I felt stupid for not getting washed before I got dressed. But my mind was all full up with the excitement and the fear of seeing Maddy.

And when I was washing, I decided that I wasn’t going to go to the fight tomorrow, wasn’t going to have anything to do with Roth and his thugs. Let them fight. I didn’t care what the Temple Moor kids had said. And I didn’t know what my dad had done all those years ago, and didn’t much care about
that either. None of it mattered, not compared to seeing Maddy.

I heard voices and smelled food. I hadn’t noticed my parents come in. I went downstairs.

“Got fish and chips,” said my dad.

I didn’t want to meet Maddy stinking of chip fat. Anyway, I wasn’t hungry.

“I’m off out.”

“Have something first,” said Mum. She was smoking as she unwrapped the fish from the paper, glistening translucent with the fat.

Dad was sitting at the kitchen table. He had already started to eat his chips, picking some off the paper as he rolled the rest onto his plate.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?” he said, not looking up. The bald top of his head was pointing at me. It also glistened, as if he’d rubbed it in the chip paper.

I was glad that Maddy and the others weren’t here to see this. Because there was another thing that they had taught me: to be ashamed of my parents, and our house, and the way we lived. And, still looking at the strangely soft, vulnerable, glistening head of my dad, the skin pink and blotched with brown freckles, the shame I’d felt was replaced, slowly, by guilt. My mum and dad had worked hard all their lives. When they weren’t working, they were tired, and what they liked to do was sit and watch the telly eating fish and
chips. It wasn’t a crime that they didn’t like opera or talking about politics.

Suddenly my dad looked up, his face puzzled and quizzical. “What’s up, Paul? You look like you’ve lost a penny and found a pound.”

“Other way round, love,” said Mum.

“Oh yes, lost a pound and found a penny.”

But by then the moment for talk was past, and they were back to their fish and chips, and slices of bread and margarine, and their cups of sweet tea, and so I left them there, and went to meet Maddy at the cinema of dreams.

TWENTY-ONE