The Knife That Killed Me (3 page)

“Let’s have a talk,” he said. “In my room.”

Back in the classroom he sat me down in front of him. Close up, his face, even in the place where his beard was supposed to be, seemed to have more skin than hair. He smelled a bit cheesy. Not terrible—you wouldn’t say he stank—but just not very fresh. I didn’t know if he was married, but I doubted it. He had the look of someone who lived alone and didn’t have anyone to tell them that they looked stupid or didn’t smell too fresh.

“So, what was that all about?” he said. I was surprised by his tone—he sounded sad rather than angry.

“What, sir?”

“You know what I’m talking about, so don’t play the idiot. Look, Paul, you’re not the kind of kid who usually starts fights. And you’re not stupid—I know you’re not.”

So there was a first time for everything.

“I’m not brainy, sir.”

“How do you know? As far as I can see you’ve never really tried.”

I didn’t know what to say then, so I just looked down.

“I’ve noticed you, Paul,” continued Mr. Boyle, “just sitting there. I don’t know how much you take in, but … what’s happened to your hair?”

“Nothing, sir. I don’t know, sir.”

“Is it mixed up with why you were shouting in class?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Don’t know much, do you, Paul?”

“I told you I wasn’t brainy, sir.”

Then I looked at Mr. Boyle, thinking he might be smiling. But he wasn’t. He still looked quite sad.

“Can you play chess, Paul?” he said finally.

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Why not come to chess club to find out?”

Mr. Boyle ran the chess club. It was full of geeks. The kind of kids who brought in thermos flasks of hot soup for their lunch.

I looked up at his face, his wonky glasses, his sparse beard.

“Yes, sir, I might, sir.”

There was another pause.

“Maybe see you there then?”

“Yes, sir—just got to get something first.”

FIVE

So I
went outside and sat by myself on one of the concrete benches. A cold wet wind blew straight off the gypsy field, slapping my face with its clammy hands. It was called the gypsy field because gypsies sometimes camped there, but they hadn’t been around for ages, maybe two years. Perhaps there weren’t any gypsies left. Just the cold wind, blowing over the grass and picking up the stink from the brown water of the beck.

I wished I’d gone to fetch my parka from the cloakroom. But I didn’t want to bump into Boyle. So I pulled up
the collar on my school blazer and tried to sit on the tail of it. But it wasn’t quite big enough and so the bench was doing a good job of freezing my arse solid. I would have moved to keep warm, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. The boys I usually hung around with were playing football, but I didn’t feel like it. And, anyway, nobody had asked me to play.

For a second I thought about joining the kids at the chess club, just to keep warm. And maybe it would have been nice to have someone to talk to. Except they’d all be nerds, talking about nerd stuff.
Oh-and-did-you-see-that-really-good-yeah-yeah-documentary-yeah-about-volcanoes-yeah-I-have-the-latest-copy-yeah-of-what-sort-of-hard-drive-do-you-I-wish-I-yeah-what-kind-of-soup
. And I didn’t really know how to play chess. I mean, I knew how the pieces moved, but I’d never actually played a game, so I didn’t know how to string it all together, how to make sure you didn’t get mated in two moves, that sort of thing.

I tried listening to the kids playing, to see if I could single out voices from the general background noise. There were loud shouts of “Pass, pass” from the footballers. And I could hear the high screams from the Year Seven kids, who looked small, even to me. I don’t even know what game they were playing. Some kind of tag. Stupid. The girls were all standing about in little groups, and I couldn’t hear any noise from them at all, but I could see that some were happy and some were sad and some had a look of fury on their faces, as if they’d just found out that someone had been calling them sluts or something behind their backs.

The only group where boys and girls were together was the freaks. Maybe six of them. They were on the other side of the playground. Some were standing, some were sitting on a bench. Even though everyone was supposed to wear a uniform, they still looked different, as if they were standing in the shadows, while we were all in harsh sunlight.

And somehow you could sense the bad feelings being beamed at them. Mostly it was just that: feelings, a sense that all the other kids in the playground would rather they weren’t there. And sometimes it was more than that, like now, when one of the kids playing football deliberately blasted the ball at the group, hitting a girl in the face.

Why does everyone hate the freaks? Well, not everyone. The freaks don’t hate the freaks. Actually, even that might not be true. One of the things about them is that they hate themselves. But they don’t hate all the freaks, just the individual freak that happens to be them.

I know I shouldn’t just call them the freaks, although everyone does. There are other names. You could call them emo. You might even call them indie, or alternative, or scene. But indie and alternative and scene make them sound too cool, too in. They weren’t on the inside of anything, except maybe themselves. So emo is probably closer than scene or indie, but freak seems to fit them best of all.

Just
being hated by everyone would probably be OK for the freaks. In fact that might be their first choice. But they weren’t just hated. Not in our school, anyway. Our school was the kind of school where being hated was only the
beginning of things, like with that football blasted into the face of the girl.

The kids who aren’t freaks—the freak haters, if you like—come in different flavors. There are some punks, some chavs, some straights, some death metal kids, some glue sniffers, some nerds, and then some who you don’t know what they are. And any of them might have a go at a freak. The worst are probably the chavs, who seemed to take the quiet, looking-down way that the freaks had as a direct insult.

No, what am I saying? The chavs aren’t the worst. The worst are the droogs, the kids who live to hurt you and take your money. And to them, the freaks are like cattle, to be milked and then slaughtered.

The girl who got hit by the ball, I knew her name. Maddy Bray. She was the only one of them who was in any of my classes. She was standing on the outside of the group of outsiders. It was funny, but when the ball hit her, she didn’t move closer to her friends, but farther away, as if she knew that it was somehow her fault, or at least that it was embarrassing. And it was exactly what I’d have done, moving away, trying to disappear.

I watched them for a while, then I saw one of the boys who’d been sitting down stand up and go over to talk to her. I knew his name too. His name was Shane, and I knew it because he was the sort of leader of the freaks. Leader doesn’t really get it right, because he didn’t tell them what to do or anything. It was more that he was the best at being a freak; he was what they were all aiming at. And even if you hated
them and all they stood for, you still had to admit that there was something special about Shane, something cool.

So maybe I should call the freaks Shane’s gang, because that’s what they were.

Shane smiled and he must have said something funny as well, because Maddy Bray smiled back and nearly laughed, and then she edged a bit closer to the rest of them.

But she stayed on the outside, a watcher, like me.

SIX

And because
I was watching, looking over there, right the way across the playground, and not just
looking
there, but
thinking
there too, I didn’t see them coming until they were on top of me.

“Look, it’s Billy No-mates.”

I blinked and made my eyes focus on the pack. Five of them this time—Roth, of course, Bates, Miller, two others.

It wasn’t Roth who’d spoken, but Miller, and so he followed it with his hyena laugh.

“Nice haircut,” said Roth.

It was the first thing he’d ever said to me directly. He’d probably never even noticed my existence before the stuff in the classroom—the chewing gum, the shout, the chair.

“Yeah,” said Bates, “nice haircut. Bit messy, though. Shall I put a bit more gel in it?” And then he began to hawk up a greeny, making a big deal out of it, snorting back from his nose and up from his chest, getting a really big mouthful together.

What happened then was a bit weird. I had my hand in my pocket, and I suppose I’d been playing with them, rubbing my fingers on the metal without thinking about it, without ever knowing with the front bit of my brain that they were there. But the next thing I knew I had them, the scissors. The scissors I’d used to hack the chewing gum out of my hair, and I was holding them out, open so I was gripping the handle and one of the blades, with the other pointing straight at Bates.

I was mad. Mad because of the chewing gum. Mad because I thought he was going to spit on me, spit a thick foul greeny.

They should have laughed at me. It was only scissors. Useless school scissors.

They should have laughed, but they didn’t. Bates’s eyes went wide and he choked on the phlegm he was getting ready for me, and it sort of dribbled down his chin and onto the front of his school jumper, and then more of it went in a big line, right to the floor, without breaking. I didn’t know what to do next. I was feeling stupid, really stupid, standing there holding the scissors, while Bates choked on his slime.

It was Roth who saved me, in a way. Saved me from having to decide what to do next, I mean. He stepped forward, grabbed my wrist and just took the scissors off me, as easily as if I was a baby. His hand was enormous, like a man’s.

I thought for sure then that he was going to hit me. Maybe there’s something worse that can happen to you than being hit by Roth, but I don’t know what it is.

I once saw him have a fight with a Year Eleven kid when he was in Year Nine. Even though the other kid was two years older than him, they were about the same size, Roth being such a monster. And the other kid was cock of his year, not just some nobody. His name was …
Compson
, yeah, Compson. Most kids thought Compson was all right. He wasn’t really a bully at all, just hard.

I don’t know why he had the fight with Roth. Probably thought he had to put him down, because he’d been mouthing off. But as soon as the circle formed in the social club car park, with the two of them in the middle, you could see the fear in his eyes, see that he knew that Roth was too much for him. And I suppose there’s a kind of bravery in that, going on with a fight, I mean, even though you know you’re going to get your head kicked in.

And he did.

School fights come in different shapes. Sometimes the fighters think they’re in a boxing match and dance around each other, with the spectators usually jeering at them and telling them to get stuck in, but they never do, because they’re afraid of getting hurt and they’re really there to
dance, not fight. Or the two will rush straight at each other and grapple together, each one trying to land a punch or a kick, and as long as they stay locked close, then again usually no one gets hurt, because you can’t get any power behind a punch when you’re together like that, hugging each other.