Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  That my cherry-knocking’d led to this was horrifying.

  ‘After what happened to your waster of a father,’ Mr Blake’s voice’d turned poisonous, ‘you should know where human sewage ends up.’

  A sneeze exploded out of Moran.

  Here’s a true story about Giles ‘Pluto’ Noak. Last autumn his then girlfriend Colette Turbot’d been invited by our art teacher Mr Dunwoody to Art Club. Art Club’s after school and it’s only open to kids Dunwoody invites. Colette Turbot went and found it was just her and Dunwoody. He told her to pose topless in his darkroom so he could photograph her. Colette Turbot said I don’t think so, sir. Dunwoody told her if she squandered her gifts she’d waste her life marrying pillocks and working at checkouts. Colette Turbot just left. Next day Pluto Noak and another mate from Upton pork scratchings factory appeared at lunch in the staff car park. Quite a crowd gathered. Pluto Noak and his mate each got a corner of Dunwoody’s Citroën and rocked it over on to its roof. ‘YOU TELL THE PIGS WHAT I DONE,’ he yelled at the staffroom window at the top of his voice, ‘AND I’LL TELL THE PIGS WHY I DONE IT!’

  Loads of people say ‘I don’t give a toss’. But for Pluto Noak, not giving a toss’s a religion.

  So anyway, Mr Blake’d taken a cautious step or two back before Pluto Noak reached his gate. ‘Talk about someone’s father like that, yer’ve gotta see it through, Roger. So let’s sort this out like men. You and me. Right now. You ain’t scared, right? Martin said you’ve got quite a talent for smashin’ up disobedient teenagers.’

  ‘You,’ when Mr Blake found his voice it’d gone crackly and sort of hysterical, ‘you don’t know what you’re damn well talking about.’

  ‘Martin knew well enough, though, didn’t he?’

  ‘I never laid a finger on that boy!’

  ‘Not a finger.’ It took me a moment to realize the next voice belonged to Dean Moran. ‘Pokers wrapped in pillowcases’s more your style, weren’t it?’ You never know with Dean Moran. ‘So it didn’t leave any marks.’

  Pluto Noak pushed his advantage. ‘Glory days, eh? Rog?’

  ‘Poisonous little crappers!’ Mr Blake marched back to his house. ‘All of you! The police’ll mop you up quickly enough…’

  ‘My old man’s got his faults and I ain’t sayin’ he ain’t,’ Pluto Noak called out, ‘but he never done nothin’ to me like what you done to Martin!’

  Mr Blake’s door slammed loud as a shotgun.

  Wished I’d never opened my stupid gob about the cotton now.

  Pluto Noak strolled back, all perky. ‘Nice shot, Moran. Fancy a zap on the old Asteroids up the Swan, me. Comin’?’

  The invitation was for Redmarley and Swinyard only. Both answered, ‘Okay, Ploot.’ As they left, Pluto Noak nodded me a Well done.

  ‘But,’ Ross Wilcox had to say, ‘Blake’ll find the cotton in the morning.’

  Pluto Noak spits at the polished June moon. ‘Good.’

  Breaks at school’re normally pretty grim. Spend your break alone, you’re a No-friends Loser. Try to enter a ring of high-rank kids like Gary Drake or David Ockeridge, you risk a withering ‘What d’you want?’ Hang out with low-rank kids like Floyd Chaceley and Nicholas Briar, that means you’re one of them. Girls, like Avril Bredon’s cloakroom huddle, aren’t much of a solution. True, you don’t have to prove yourself so much with girls, and they definitely smell better. But pretty soon someone’ll start a rumour that you fancy one of them. Hearts and initials’ll appear on blackboards.

  I try to spend my breaks on journeys between changing destinations, so at least I always look like I’ve got somewhere to be.

  But today was different. Kids came seeking me out. They wanted to know if I’d really tied cotton to the Roger Blake’s front door. A certain reputation as a bit of a hard-knock’s useful, but not if teachers notice. So I told each kid, ‘Ah, you can’t believe everything you hear, you know.’ A skill answer, that. It meant, Of course it’s true as well as Why would I want to talk to you about it?

  ‘Far out,’ they told me. Saying that’s a craze right now.

  At the tuck shop Neal Brose was with the sixth-form prefects behind the counter. (Neal Brose managed to get special permission by persuading Mr Kempsey he wanted to learn about the business world.) Neal Brose’s been giving me the cold shoulder this term, but today he called out, ‘What’ll it be, Jace?’

  His friendliness made my mind go blank. ‘Double Decker?’

  A Double Decker flew at my face. I raised a hand to stop it. The chocolate bar landed there, moulded to my hand, perfectly.

  Loads of kids saw it.

  Neal Brose jerked his thumb to tell me to pay round the side. But when I held out my 15p he just did this sly grin and closed my fingers round my coins so it looked like he’d taken them. He shut the door before I could argue. No Double Decker ever tasted so good. No nougat ever so snowy. No curranty clag ever so crumbly and sweet.

  Then Duncan Priest and Mark Badbury appeared with a tennis ball. Mark Badbury asked, ‘Game of slam?’ Like we’d been best mates for years.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Okay!’ said Duncan Priest. ‘Slam’s better with three.’

  Art was with the same Mr Dunwoody whose car Pluto Noak’d turtled over last year. Mr Nixon’d stepped in to save his bacon, to avoid a scandal, so Julia reckons. Nothing happened to Pluto Noak and Mr Dunwoody came to school with Miss Gilver until his Citroën was repaired. They’d make a good husband and wife, we reckon. They both hate humans.

  So anyway, Mr Dunwoody’s face is fitted around his ginormous conk. He reeks of Vick’s Inhaler. Only a fellow stammerer’d notice his tiny slips on T-words. His art room’s got a clayey smell, for some reason. We never use clay. Mr Dunwoody uses the kiln as a cupboard and the darkroom’s a mysterious zone only Art Club members get to see. From the art room window you’ve got a view over the playing fields, so high-ranking kids bags those seats. Alastair Nurton saved me one. A solar system of hot-air balloons hung over the Malverns, over the perfect afternoon.

  Today’s lesson was on the Golden Mean. A Greek called Archimedes, Mr Dunwoody said, worked out the correct place to put a tree and the horizon in any picture. Mr Dunwoody showed us how to find the Golden Mean using proportions and a ruler, but none of us really got it, not even Clive Pike. Mr Dunwoody did this Why am I wasting my life? expression. He pinched the bridge of his nose and massaged his temples. ‘Four years at the Royal Academy for this. Out with your pencils. Out with your rulers.’

  In my pencil case I found a note that sent the art room spinning.

  One number and four words’d just changed my life.

  By the time you’re thirteen, gangs’re babyish, like dens or Lego. But Spooks is more a secret society. Dean Moran’s dad said Spooks started years ago as a sort of secret union for farmhands. If an employer didn’t pay what he owed, say, the Spooks’d all go round to get justice. Half the men in the Black Swan’d’ve been members in those days. It’s changed since then, but it’s still dead secret. Actual Spooks never talk about it. Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard were in it, me and Moran reckoned, and Pluto Noak had to be a leader. Ross Wilcox boasted he was a member, which means he isn’t. John Tookey is. One time he got pushed about by some skinheads at a disco in Malvern Link. Next Friday about twenty Spooks, including Tom Yew, rode up there on bikes and motorbikes. All the versions of what happened end with the same skinheads being made to lick John Tookey’s boots. That’s just one story. There’s a hundred others.

  My bravery last night obviously must’ve impressed the right people. Pluto Noak, most like. But who’d delivered the note? I put it in my blazer pocket and scanned the class for a knowing look. Nothing from Gary Drake, or Neal Brose. David Ockeridge and Duncan Priest’re popular, but they live out Castlemorton and Corse Lawn way. Spooks is a Black Swan Green thing.

  Some second-year girls jogged below the window in training for Sports Day. Mr Carver shook his hockey stick at a passing pack like Man Friday. Lucy Sneads�
�s tits bounced like twin Noddies.

  Who cares who slipped me the note? I thought, watching Dawn Madden’s coffee-cream calves. It got there.

  ‘Pearls before swine!’ Mr Dunwoody snorted on his Vick’s Inhaler. ‘Pearls before swine!’

  Mum was on the phone to Aunt Alice when I got home but she gave me this sunny wave. Wimbledon was on TV with the sound turned down. Summer gusted through the open house. I made a glass of Robinson’s Barley Water and made one for Mum too. ‘Oh,’ she said when I put it by the phone, ‘what a thoughtful son I’ve raised!’ Mum’d bought Maryland Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re new and totally lush. I grabbed five, went upstairs, changed, lay on my bed, ate the biscuits, put on ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO and played it five or six times, guessing what test the Spooks’d set me. There’s always a test. Swim across the lake in the woods, climb the quarry down Pig Lane, go nightcreeping across some back gardens. Who cares? I’d do it. If I was a Spook, every day’d be as epic as today.

  The record stopped. I sifted through the afternoon’s sounds.

  Spaghetti bolognese is mince, spaghetti and a blob of ketchup, normally. But Mum did a proper recipe this evening, and it wasn’t even anyone’s birthday. Dad, Julia and me guessed the ingredients in turn. Wine, aubergines (rubbery but not pukesome), mushrooms, carrot, red pepper, garlic, onions, toe-flake cheese and this red dust called paprika. Dad talked about how spices used to be like gold or oil nowadays. Clippers and schooners brought them back from Jakarta, Peking and Japan. Dad said how in those days Holland was as powerful as the USSR is today. Holland! (Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.) Julia talked about her afternoon in the solicitor’s office in Malvern. She’s doing a summer job there, filing, answering the phone and typing letters. She’s saving to go on holiday with Ewan in August on an Interrail. You pay £175 and can go anywhere on the trains in Europe for free for a month. Acropolis at dawn. Moon over Lake Geneva.

  Jammy thing.

  So anyway, it was Mum’s turn. ‘You won’t believe who was at Penelope Melrose’s today.’

  ‘I completely forgot to ask.’ Dad’s trying harder to be nice these days. ‘How was it? Who was it?’

  ‘Penny’s fine – but she’d only invited Yasmin Morton-Bagot along.’

  ‘“Yasmin Morton-Bagot”? That’s got to be a made-up name.’

  ‘Nobody made her name up, Michael. She was at our wedding.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Penny and Yasmin and I were inseparable, during our college days.’

  ‘The fairer sex, Jason,’ Dad gave me a crafty nod, ‘hunt in packs.’

  It felt all right to smile back.

  ‘Right, Dad,’ Julia remarked, ‘unlike the unfairer sex, you mean?’

  Mum pushed on. ‘Yasmin gave us the Venetian wineglasses.’

  ‘Oh, those things! The spiky ones without a base so you can’t put them down? Are they still taking up loft space?’

  ‘I’m rather surprised you don’t remember her better. She’s very striking. Her husband – Bertie – was a semi-professional golfer.’

  ‘Was he?’ Dad was impressed. ‘“Was”?’

  ‘Yes. He celebrated going professional by shacking up with a physiotherapist. Cleared out the joint bank accounts. Didn’t leave poor Yasmin a bean.’

  Dad went all Clint Eastwood. ‘What sort of a man does that?’

  ‘It was the making of her. She went into interior design.’

  Dad sucked air through his teeth. ‘Risky venture.’

  ‘Her first shop in Mayfair was such a hit, she opened another one in Bath within a year. She’s not one to name-drop, but she’s done work for the royals. She’s staying with Penny at the moment, to open a third shop in Cheltenham. This one has a big gallery space, too, for exhibitions. But she’s been let down by the manageress she’d originally hired to manage it.’

  ‘Staff! Always the tricky part of the equation. I was telling Danny Lawlor just the other day, if—’

  ‘Yasmin offered me the job, you see.’

  A very surprised silence.

  ‘Fantastic, Mum,’ Julia beamed, ‘that’s just brilliant!’

  ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’

  Dad’s lips smiled. ‘Certainly, it’s a very flattering offer, Helena.’

  ‘I ran Freda Henbrook’s boutique in Chelsea for eighteen months.’

  ‘That funny little place where you worked after college?’

  ‘Mum’s got a fabulous eye,’ Julia told Dad, ‘for colours and textiles and stuff. And she’s great with people. She’ll charm them into buying anything.’

  ‘Nobody’s denying it!’ Dad did a jokey-surrender gesture. ‘I’m sure this Yasmin Turton-Bigot person wouldn’t have—’

  ‘Morton-Bagot. Yasmin Morton-Bagot.’

  ‘—wouldn’t have floated the idea if she had any doubts, but—’

  ‘Yasmin’s a born entrepreneur. She hand-picks her staff.’

  ‘And…you said…what, to her?’

  ‘She’s calling Monday for my decision.’

  The bell-ringers in St Gabriel’s began their weekly practice.

  ‘Only, it’s not in any way a pyramid selling thing, is it, Helena?’

  ‘It’s a gallery and interiors thing, Michael.’

  ‘And you did discuss terms? It isn’t all commission?’

  ‘Yasmin pays salaries, just like Greenland Supermarkets. I thought you’d be pleased at the prospect of me having an income. You won’t have to shell out hills of money on my whims any more. I can afford them myself.’

  ‘I am. I’m pleased. Of course I am.’

  Black cows’d gathered in the field, just over our fence, past the rockery.

  ‘So, you’d be travelling to and from Cheltenham every day, would you? Six days a week?’

  ‘Five. Once I’ve hired an assistant, it’d be four. Cheltenham’s a lot closer than Oxford or London or all the places you manage to get to.’

  ‘It’ll mean pretty major adjustments to our lifestyles.’

  ‘They’re happening anyway. Julia’s off to university. Jason’s not a baby any more.’

  My family chose this moment to look at me. ‘I’m pleased too, Mum.’

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  (Thirteen is too old to be a ‘darling’.)

  Julia urged her, ‘You are going to take it, right?’

  ‘I’m tempted.’ Mum did this shy smile. ‘Being stuck in the house every day is—’

  ‘“Stuck”?’ Dad did an amused squeak. ‘Believe you me, there’s no “stuck” like being stuck to a shop, day in, day out.’

  ‘A gallery, with a shop. And at least I’d meet people.’

  Dad looked genuinely puzzled. ‘You know dozens of people.’

  Mum looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Who?’

  ‘Dozens! Alice, for one.’

  ‘Alice has a house, a family and a part-time business. In Richmond. Half a day away by glorious British Rail.’

  ‘Our neighbours are nice.’

  ‘Certainly. But we haven’t the blindest thing in common.’

  ‘But…all your friends in the village?’

  ‘Michael, we have lived here since just after Jason was born, but we are townies. Oh, they’re polite, for the most part. In front of us. But…’

  (I checked my Casio. My appointment with Spooks was soon.)

  ‘Mum’s right.’ Julia toyed with the Egyptian ankh necklace Ewan’d given her. ‘Kate says if you haven’t lived in Black Swan Green since the War of the Roses, you’ll never be a local.’

  Dad looked shirty, like we’d deliberately refused to get his point.

  Mum took a deep breath. ‘I’m lonely. It’s that simple.’

  The cows swished their tails at the fat flies around their dungy arses.

  Graveyards’re sardined with rotting bodies, so of course they’re scary places. A bit. But few things’re only one thing if you think abou
t them long enough. Last summer on sunny days I cycled as far as Ordnance Survey Map 150’d let me. Even Winchcombe, one time. If I found a Norman (rounded) or Saxon (stumpy) church with no one else around, I’d hide my bike round the back and lie down in the graveyard grass. Invisible birds, the odd flower in a jam jar. No Excalibur stuck in a stone, but I did find a tombstone from 1665. 1665 was the plague year. That was my record. Gravestones mostly flake away after a couple of centuries. Even death sort of dies. The saddest sentence ever I found in a graveyard on Bredon Hill. HER ABUNDANT VIRTUES WOULD HAVE ADORNED A LONGER LIFE. Burying people’s a question of fashion, too, like flares and drainpipe trousers. Yew trees grow in graveyards ’cause the Devil hates the smell of yew, Mr Broadwas told me. I don’t know if I believe that, but Weejee boards’re definitely real. There’re stacks of stories where the glass spells out something like ‘S-A-T-A-N-I-S-Y-O-U-R-M-A-S-T-E-R’, shatters, then the kids have to call a vicar. (Grant Burch got possessed one time and told Philip Phelps he was going to die on 2 August 1985. Philip Phelps won’t go to sleep now unless there’s a Bible under his pillow.)

  People’re always buried facing west so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people’ll claw their way up and walk due west to the Throne of Jesus to be judged. From Black Swan Green that means the Throne of Jesus’ll be in Aberystwyth. Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won’t be able to find Jesus ’cause dead people only walk in straight lines. They’ll all end up in John o’ Groats. Aberystwyth’s a bit of a dive, but Dad says John o’ Groats’s just a few houses where Scotland runs out of Scotland.

  Isn’t no god better than one who does that to people?

  In case Spooks were spying on me, I did an ace SAS roll. But St Gabriel’s graveyard was deserted. Bell-ringing practice was still going on. Close up, bells don’t really peal but tip, trip, dranggg and baloooooom. Quarter past eight came and went. A breeze picked up and the two giant redwoods creaked their bones. Half past eight. The bells stopped and didn’t start. Quietness rings loud as ringing at first. I began worrying about time. Tomorrow’s a Saturday, but if I wasn’t home in an hour or so, I’d be getting a hell of a What time do you call this? Nine or ten bell-ringers left the church, talking about someone called Malcolm who’d joined the Moonies and’d last been seen giving away flowers in Coventry. The bell-ringers drifted through the lych-gate, and their voices floated off towards the Black Swan.