by David Almond
“Forgive them,” he says. “They’re a bit overexcited today.”
“Leave the lad alone!” comes the voice again.
Fernando opens the haversack.
“What have we got here? Ah, Davie has brought a pie for us.”
He munches into it, then passes it to the others.
“Now be nice,” he tells them, “and share and share alike.”
He smiles broadly as they eat. He tries to give the last tiny piece to Davie, but Davie just spits it out.
Fernando shakes his head in disappointment.
“One of the children could have had that,” he says.
He opens the haversack again.
“Oh, look, children,” he says. “Colored pencils and a book. How very nice! Shall we make some pretty pictures?”
“Leave him alone!”
One of the kids runs off to a house. He comes back with a handful of tomatoes.
“Me mam says we can fling these at him,” he says. “They’re turning rotten.”
So they stand in front of Davie and throw them. He gets splattered.
Fernando’s looking through the book. He’s scribbling with some of the pencils.
“Get off them!” Davie says.
“Or what?” Fernando says, laughing.
He starts writing or drawing in it. He keeps on looking at Davie and at the pole and the fire. He seems almost kind when his eyes meet Davie’s.
“Keep still, will ye?” he says. “Stop lolloping about. I’m trying to get you right!” He laughs. “I’m trying to make you handsome.”
Davie stares back at him. Could they be related? Is Fernando’s face a bit like his own? Is that how Davie will look in a couple of years’ time?
Another kid comes with an armful of sticks and logs and an old broken chair. He throws them onto the fire and they blaze to life.
“Let’s burn him!” he says.
“Aye! That’ll learn him!”
“Get him in the fire!” they chant. “In the fire! In the fire!”
Davie starts to shudder. He can’t help himself. He’s going to cry.
“In the fire! Chop his head off! Put his skull on top!”
They start to stamp the earth. They yell at the skull on top of the pole.
“Great God of the Pole!” they yell. “Look down upon us as we prepare this sacrifice!”
They dance and swirl.
“We offer this creature up to you!” they yell.
They howl and laugh.
Fernando calmly keeps on drawing. He holds the book up to compare the lad in there with the lad that’s tied to the pole. He makes more marks.
He regards what he has done.
“Yes,” he says. “Very good, though I say it myself.”
He winks.
“And, yes,” he says. “I have made you handsome, Davie.”
The fire crackles. Smoke swirls around Davie. Sparks sting his cheeks.
The kids howl, dance and laugh.
“The time of death is almost upon us!” they yell.
A couple of blokes start walking slowly toward the pole. One of them puts his hand up.
“Now then, lads . . .” he starts.
Everybody pauses. There’s a police car coming along the road. It parks at the edge of the green.
Two policemen get out of it. The silver on their helmets glints in the sunlight. They amble across the grass.
“What is gannin on here?” says the taller one.
“We’re just playing, officer,” says one of the kids.
“Doesn’t look like playing to me. Set him loose.”
Fernando winks and puts the pencils and book back into the haversack and hands it over. He starts to untie Davie. He does it gently. He kisses Davie quickly on the cheek.
“Nice to meet you, Davie,” he whispers.
Davie recoils. His wrists are stinging. He scrapes the tomatoes off.
“What’s your name, son?” says the shorter policeman.
“Davie,” says Davie.
“And what might have caused you to come along here, Davie?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Are you mental?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you injured?”
The little boy in Davie wants to sob and to tell him about his wrists and his cheeks and the tomatoes.
But he just says no, he’s not.
“That’s good. Now listen. We’ve got bigger fish to fry today, so mebbe you should just get yourself away while you can. OK?”
“OK,” says Davie.
“And you won’t be daft enough to come back here again, will you, Davie?”
“No,” he says.
“Good lad,” says his partner.
Then he turns to the watching Craigs.
“Now then,” he says. “Have any of you lot seen Zorro today?”
Davie puts his haversack on and can’t stop himself from starting to run.
He pauses beside the girls at the entrance.
“Did you have a nice time?” says Lara.
She points the burned stick at him.
She pokes his chest and leaves a black ashy mark there.
“Fancy going in there!” she says. “What a daft nit!”
He’s about to hurry on, then he sees the Killens, gathering on the pavements.
They have dogs. They’re carrying sticks. There are a dozen or more of them, squatting on the pavements, leaning against gate posts and garden walls. There are kids as young as Catherine and Lara, teenagers like him, and older ones. Davie’s instinct is just to hurry home, to get back to his house, to his mother, to the smell of lemon meringue and bara brith. But whichever way he goes he has to pass by them, to pass through them. A girl comes to him. He’s seen her around. She knows him too. She’s about his age. He’s seen her laughing and smiling. He’s seen her with boys in the park, boys he knows, boys he’d like to be like. Today her eyes are cold. Her hands are tightened into fists.
“What you doing in there?” she says.
“What?” he stammers.
“What you doing in there? You’re not a Craig, are you?”
“N-no.”
“Are you on their side?”
The question is stupid. He knows that, but he can’t say that.
“No.”
“Do you know what they’ve done?”
“Yes.”
A man comes. He has long black hair, thick sideburns, broad shoulders, strong arms.
“You were down there, weren’t you?” he says. “At the church hall?”
“Yes.”
“You saw dead Jimmy, didn’t you?”
“Y-yes.”
“Let him go,” he says to the girl. “Nobody should have to see that, ’specially a kid like this one is.”
“What do you mean, like this one is?” she says.
“He’s not been brung up to face up to it, not like we have.”
He reaches out and rests his hand on Davie’s shoulder for a moment.
“You believe in peace, don’t you?” he says. “You believe everybody should get along, don’t you?”
“Yes,” says Davie.
“Good lad. We need good lads like you in this dark and troubled world.”
Beyond the man, other Killens are arriving, singly and in little groups.
The man tilts his head to the side.
“Your dad believed in that as well,” he says.
Davie catches his breath.
“You knew him?” he says.
“Went to school with him, long ago.”
He smiles.
“You look surprised, son. It’s a little town, isn’t it? ’Course we went to school together. Played football on the fields together.”
He smiles again.
“We were almost pals, till the day he saw me thrashing Sebastian Craig in the schoolyard one day. Then he kept his distance. And who could blame him?”
Davie looks at the man. He doesn’t
know what to say to that.
“Me name’s Anthony Killen,” says the man. He puts out his hand and Davie takes it. “I hope you’re right and we will all live in peace one day. But in the meantime there’s much battling to do.”
He steps aside as if to let Davie pass.
“I kept on seeing him through the years. He was a good soul. He was kind to me when we lost our little Alice. I poured my heart out to him, if the truth be told.”
His eyes glaze over for a moment.
“I’m sorry for your loss, son,” he says.
Then he turns to the girl.
“Let him go,” he says. “Let him pass.”
The girl steps away. Others step aside. Davie walks.
Behind him a low chanting starts.
Killens kill.
Killens kill.
Killens kill.
Killens kill!
Feet start stamping on the pavement. Dogs start barking, howling.
Once he’s free, Davie turns and sees the policemen standing at the entrance to Balaclava Street, close to where Catherine and Lara are. The girls go on with their work, as if oblivious to what’s happening around them.
Davie walks. He thinks of Peace. He thinks of Death.
More Killens are coming downhill as he is going up.
There’s a bunch of children with war paint on their faces and sticks carved into the shapes of swords in their hands.
“Which side are ye on?” yells a little girl in blond pigtails with black and orange stripes on her face. “The Killens’ or the Craigs’?”
She runs closer when he doesn’t answer.
She giggles as she raises her wooden sword.
She can’t be more than six or seven.
“Whose side?” she says again.
“Go away,” he tells her. “Don’t be so stupid.”
She giggles again.
“I can’t,” she says. “We’re gannin to war!”
Her friends call her back to them.
She leaves him and joins them.
They bounce their open palms against their mouths and make whooping noises, the kind that the Indians make in The Lone Ranger. They stamp their feet and dance, and for minutes they get lost in the wildness of it, swirling and howling together, dancing in circles together beneath the blazing sun.
He walks on.
His breathing and heart start to slow as he gets closer to the allotments on Windy Ridge. He drops down onto a wide patch of grass under an ash tree. Yes, he cries a little as he leans against the trunk and brushes the tomato seeds and flesh off himself, as he rubs his wrists and rubs his cheeks with spit. What a mess I must look, he thinks. He opens the book to see Fernando’s drawing of himself. He sighs to see how beautiful it is, how beautifully drawn and shaded, even though the boy at the heart of it is wide-mouthed and wide-eyed in terror, even though Fernando has drawn the cry coming from the boy’s mouth, a cry that winds up around the pole and around the skull on top and all the way up into the wide blue sky.
AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!
Davie stays here for a while. The book rests in his lap.
He thinks about Fernando Craig. Like his dad said, if you go back far enough, everyone must be related to everyone. We’re all from different strands of a single ancient family. But could Fernando be really close, some kind of second or third cousin or something? Is he really like Davie? He thinks about Fernando’s chest and his wolf tattoo and his weirdly kind eyes and his voice and the way the little kids responded to him and the way the lass in Holly Hill Park was holding him. He thinks of Fernando’s quick kiss on his cheek. And he thinks of how beautifully he draws. And Davie knows that part of him would love to be like Fernando. And he could have been just like him, if he’d been born a Craig, if he’d grown up on Balaclava Street. And when he thinks about that he knows that Zorro Craig could have been just like him. And Davie knows he could have been any of those Killens that he walked through as they prepared for war. He could have been Jimmy Killen. It could have been Davie lying there on the rubble of the church hall, dead.
He turns the page and draws a part of the Gardin of Fairys and Monstas, and, like Lara and Catherine, he dreams of the garden creeping inch by inch through the whole town. He dreams of angels flying high above. He dreams of creatures that are half-human, half-beast, prowling through the town.
It calms him down. He keeps on drawing. He loses himself in drawing, wondering, dreaming. He ponders the idea that God, if he did exist, could be a kind of artist, creating worlds on pavements or pages with colored pencils or chalk. He looks toward the emptiness above. He tries to imagine a god far beyond the wide blue sky, sitting beneath a tree with a book spread on his lap and with colored pencils in his hands. He grins.
“Hello, God,” he whispers.
He wonders further. Maybe God is a kind of writer, endlessly composing stories. Maybe Davie’s just part of one of those stories. Maybe he’s just black words on a white page. But how could he be? He looks at his hands and arms, at his legs stretched out on the grass. They can’t be just words, can they? He’s troubled by the thought, and by the thought that if the story is already written then he has no choice in what he does or where he goes. Then he just laughs. He looks into the empty spaces around him like he’s looking out from a page into the eyes of someone looking down at him.
“Hello, Reader,” he whispers. “My name is Davie. Who are you?”
No answer, of course.
He says it again.
“Hello, Reader. Who are you?”
Then there’s a padding, a snuffling. Hell’s teeth. It’s the slobbery dog from outside the Columba Club. It pads toward Davie with its tongue dangling from its wet gob.
“What you doing here?” says Davie.
It says nothing, of course.
“Go away,” he tells it.
He waves his hands at it.
He pretends to be about to throw a rock at it.
“Get lost!” he says.
But it just stands and watches Davie like it wants something or like it’s just dead stupid.
Davie draws a quick picture of it with black and brown pencils and makes it really ugly. Then he scribbles all over it so it’s nothing but a meaningless scrawl. He shows the page to the dog.
“Look,” he says. “I’ve made you and got rid of you. You’re dead, like Stew. So disappear.”
It doesn’t disappear.
Davie stands up and tries to look as if he’s going to kick it.
That just makes it mad.
It bares its teeth and snarls.
Stupid dog.
It does move away but it turns back to stare at him, as if it wants him to follow. Davie gives up. He puts his stuff away and lifts the haversack to his back and follows. He was going that way, anyway. He walks on the narrow pathway by the allotments. He tries to take no notice of the dog, but he can’t not see it just a few paces ahead, can’t not hear it, panting and slobbering.
So horrible.
“What’s its name?”
Davie stops suddenly and blinks.
There’s a bloke leaning on his allotment fence. He’s grinning.
“You’re in a dream, son, aren’t you? I said, what’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“Your dog’s.”
“He isn’t mine.”
“Ah. Just taken to you, has he?”
“Aye.”
“That’s the way of them, the devils.”
He reaches over as if he wants to stroke the dog, but it backs away. The bloke laughs.
“You don’t know me, do you?” he says.
Now he mentions it, he does look kind of familiar to Davie.
“I knew your dad,” says the bloke.
Oh, aye, thinks Davie. I’ve seen him around. He was at the funeral.
“Used to have a pint with him in the Columba,” says the bloke. “He was a good man. But you know that, don’t you?”
“Aye.”
There
’s a smell of opened earth and growing vegetables and creosote from the fence. There are hens clucking, and bees drone as they drift from bloom to bloom. The greenhouses glitter and sparkle in the sunlight. The sun is high above the crest of the hill, pouring and pouring its light and heat down upon everything.
“I’m Oliver Henderson,” says the bloke.
He reaches over the fence and Davie shakes his hand.
He has loose green overalls on and he’s as brown as a nut. His green eyes glint as he looks and speaks. He reaches into a pocket and holds out a pear.
“You’ll need the juice as much as anything,” he says. “Summers like this just dry you out. You found that?”
Davie bites into the pear and shrugs.
“You won’t have. Not yet. Too young. The last summer I knew like this was when my Angela was still with us.”
The pear is delicious. Davie catches its juices with his tongue. He feels its sweetness spreading through him.
They hear the calling of larks from high above, of children from far away. In some nearby street, a motorbike sputters and roars and moves away and disappears into the northern distance, and the children and the larks remain. A siren starts up in the town below, wails for a few moments, then falters and stops.
“I’m finding it’s a good year for peas,” says Oliver. “And the brassicas are doing well, as long as I keep on top of the watering, and as long as the damn deer keep away.”
“The deer?” says Davie.
“Aye. They’ve been coming down from over the top. And they love them blimmin’ cabbages.”
He has an accent from further north, from Northumberland. Softer vowels than Davie’s. The R’s are sounded in the back of his throat, and his voice rolls over them. Davie listens. The sounds are so rich, so tender.
“Surprising, isn’t it?” he says. “Wild deer coming down into our little town. Lovely beggars they are too, despite the havoc they bring. They’re beasts to be welcomed. Beautiful things. Sometimes at dusk I’ve seen them coming down, a little family of them.”
Oliver turns and points across the allotments toward the fields above. Davie sees children running where he points and beyond them a great red drift of poppies.
“They come over from the wild side and down through them poppies. See them?” Oliver says. “Second flush this year. Best flush any year.”
The poppies glow bright red against the green. They shimmer in the light.