Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  I noticed a kid sat on the graveyard wall. Too small for Pluto Noak. Too scrawny for Grant Burch or Gilbert Swinyard or Pete Redmarley. Silent as a Ninja, I sneaked up on him. He wore an army baseball cap with the flap turned back, like Nick Yew.

  I knew Nick Yew’d be a Spook.

  ‘All right, Nick.’

  But it was Dean Moran who went Gaaa! and dropped off the wall.

  Moran jumped up from a pond of nettles, swatting his arms, legs and neck. ‘These bastard stingers’ve stinged me like bastards!’ Moran knew he looked too much of a tit to get bolshy. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Got a note, didn’t I? Invitation to join—’ You can see Moran think. ‘Eh. You’re never a Spook, are yer?’

  ‘No. I thought…you were.’

  ‘Then this note in my pencil case?’

  He unscrumpled a note identical to mine.

  Moran read my confusion right. ‘You got a note too?’

  ‘Yeah.’ This development was confusing, disappointing and worrying. Confusing ’cause Dean Moran’s just not Spooks material. Disappointing ’cause what was the point of joining the Spooks if losers like Moran’re being recruited too? Worrying ’cause this smelt like a wind-up.

  Moran grinned. ‘That’s brilliant, Jace!’ I pulled him back on to the wall. ‘Spooks havin’ both of us, at the same time, like.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘They must reckon we’re a natural team. Like Starsky and Hutch.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I looked round the graveyard for signs of Wilcox.

  ‘Or Torvill and Dean. I knows yer like those little spangly skirts.’

  ‘Bloody hilarious.’

  Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon.

  ‘D’you think,’ Moran asked, ‘they’re really comin’?’

  ‘Told us to be here, didn’t they?’

  A muffled trumpet sounded from one of the glebe cottages.

  ‘Yeah, but…yer don’t think it’s a wind-up?’

  Making us wait might be some sort of secret test. If Moran gives up, pointed out Maggot, you’ll look a better Spook. ‘Go home, if you think so.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I just meant…hey! Shooting star!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Nope.’ If you have to learn it from a book, Moran doesn’t know it. ‘It’s a satellite. It isn’t burning out. See? Just going in a straight line. Might be that Skylab space station, losing altitude. No one knows where it’ll crash.’

  ‘But how come—’

  ‘Shush!’

  There’s a wilder corner where broken slabs’re stacked under corkscrewed holly. Mutterings there, I heard, for sure. Now I smelt cigarettes. Moran followed me, saying, ‘What is it?’ (God, Moran can be a pillock.) I stooped to enter this tent of dark green. Pluto Noak sat on one stack of old headstones, Grant Burch on a pile of roof tiles, John Tookey on a third. Wished I could’ve told them it was me and not Moran who’d spotted them. Even saying ‘Hello’ to hard kids is gay so I just said, ‘All right?’

  Pluto Noak, Lord of Spooks, nodded back.

  ‘Ooops.’ Stooping Moran head-butted my arse and I stumbled forward. ‘Soz, Jace.’

  I told Moran, ‘Don’t say “soz”.’

  ‘So you knows the rules?’ Grant Burch flobbed. ‘Yer gets a leggy over this wall, then yer’ve got fifteen minutes to get across the six back gardens. Once yer done, yer legs it to the green. Swinyard ’n’ Redmarley’ll be waitin’ under the oak. If yer in time, welcome to the Spooks. If yer late, or if yer don’t show, yer ain’t Spooks and yer never will be.’

  Moran and me nodded.

  ‘And if yer caught,’ added John Tookey, ‘yer ain’t Spooks.’

  ‘And,’ Grant Burch pointed a warning finger, ‘and, if yer caught, you ain’t never even heard of Spooks.’

  I defied my nerves and Hangman to say, ‘What’s “Spooks”, Ploot?’

  Pluto Noak granted me an encouraging snort.

  The holly shivered just as St Gabriel’s chimed a quarter to nine. ‘Starting positions!’ Grant Burch looked at me and Moran. ‘Who’s first?’

  ‘Me,’ I said, without glancing at Moran. ‘I ain’t chicken.’

  The back garden of the first cottage was just a marsh of triffidy weeds. Straddling the wall, I gave the four faces in the graveyard one last glance, swung over and plummeted into long grass. The house said, They’ve gone. No lights, an unfixed drainpipe, slack net curtains. All the same, I crept low. Some squatter might be watching, with the lights turned off. With a cross-bow. (That’s the difference between me and Moran. Moran’d just tromp across like he owned the place. Moran never takes snipers into account.) I climbed up the plum tree that grew by the next wall.

  A coat rustled, just above my head.

  Idiot. Just a placky bag, flapping in the branches. That trumpet started up again, dead close now. I slithered off a knobbly branch and balanced on the next wall. A doddle so far. Better yet, the flat roof of the next garden’s oil tank was just a foot below me, and screened by coal-blue conifers.

  The tank boooooomed, thunder underfoot.

  The second back garden was miles dodgier. The curtains and even half the windows were open. Two fat ladies sat on a sofa watching Asterixes and Obelixes on the European It’s a Knockout. The TV commentator Stuart Hall was laughing like a Harrier jump jet taking off. The garden had no cover. A badminton net dropped over the threadbare lawn, that was it. Plasticky bats, bowls, an archery target and a paddling pool lay littered, all dead cheap and Woolworths-looking. Worse, a camper van was parked round the side. This roly-poly guy with an upside-down face was playing his trumpet in it. His cheeks swelled bullfroggishly but his gaze was fixed down his garden.

  Notes went up.

  Notes went down.

  Three whole minutes must’ve gone by. I didn’t know what to do.

  The back door opened and a fat lady trottered over to the van. As she opened the door, she said, ‘Vicky’s sleepin’.’ The trumpeter pulled her in, threw down his trumpet, and they started snogging as hungrily as two dogs attacking a box of Milk Tray. The camper van began to vibrate.

  I dropped off the oil tank, slipped on a golf ball, got up, dashed over the lawn, fell over an invisible croquet hoop, got up, then misjudged my jump on to the fence-beam. My foot made a splintering whack!

  You’re bacon, stated Unborn Twin.

  I swung myself over the fence and fell to earth like a sack of logs.

  The third cottage was where Mr Broadwas lives. If Mr Broadwas saw me, he’d phone my dad and I’d be dismembered by midnight. Sprinklers swwsss-swwsss-swwwsssed. Drops swept my face where I sat. Most of the garden was hidden by a screen of runner beans.

  I had another problem. In the trumpeter’s garden behind me, a woman’s voice called out. ‘Come back, Gerry! It’s only them foxes again!’

  ‘Tain’t no fox! It’s one o’ them kids!’

  Two hands, right above my head, gripped the fence.

  I sprinted to the end of the runner beans. I froze.

  Mr Broadwas sat on the doorstep. Water chundered into a metal watering can from a tap.

  Panic swarmed up me like wasps in a tin.

  The woman’s voice behind me said, ‘It’s a fox, Gerry! Ted shot one last week what he thought was the Beast o’ Dartmoor first off.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ The hands left the top of the fence. One hand appeared in a hole my foot’d punched through the fence. ‘A fox did this, did it?’

  Once again, the trumpeter’s fingers appeared on top. The fence groaned as he prepared to heave himself up.

  Mr Broadwas hadn’t heard ’cause of the water noise, but now he put down his pipe on the step, and stood up.

  Trapped, trapped, trapped. Dad’d murder me.

  ‘Mandy?’ A new voice came from the garden behind me. ‘Gerry?’

  ‘Oh, Vicks,’ said the first woman. ‘We heard a strange
noise.’

  ‘I was practisin’ my trumpet,’ said the man, ‘and I heard a funny sound, so I came out to take a gander.’

  ‘Oh aye? Then what’s this?’

  Mr Broadwas turned his back to me.

  The fence ahead was too high to jump over, with no finger-holds.

  ‘I CAN SMELL HIM ON YER! I CAN SEE YER LIPPY!’

  Mr Broadwas closed off the tap.

  ‘IT’S NOT LIPSTICK, YER CRAZY BINT,’ screamed the trumpeter over the fence, ‘IT’S JAM!’

  My dad’s gardener walked up to where I crouched, water sloshing in his can. His eyes met mine but he didn’t look remotely surprised.

  ‘I came in to find a tennis ball,’ I blurted.

  ‘The easiest way is down behind the shed.’

  This didn’t sink in at first.

  ‘You’re wasting precious time,’ added Mr Broadwas, turning to his row of onions.

  ‘Thanks,’ I gulped, realizing that he knew I’d lied but was letting me off scot-free anyway. I dashed down the path and around the corner of the shed. The air in the gap was heavy with fresh creosote fumes. Mr Broadwas must’ve been a Spook when he was younger too, then.

  ‘I WISH MUM’D DROWNED YER IN WORCESTER CANAL!’ The second woman’s scream sliced the cool murk. ‘BOTH OF YER! IN A SACK FULL O’ STONES!’

  The moon-rocky fourth garden was a spillage of concrete meringue and gravel. Ornaments everywhere. Not just gnomes, but Egyptian sphinxes, Smurfs, fairies, sea otters, Pooh Bear and Piglet and Eeyore, Jimmy Carter’s face, you name it. Himalayas divided the garden down the middle at shoulder height. This sculpted garden’d once been a local legend and so had its creator, Arthur Evesham. The Malvern Gazetteer’d printed photos with the headline THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE GNOME. Miss Throckmorton’d brought our class to have a look. A smiley man’d served us all Ribena and iced biscuits with pin-men doing sports on them. Arthur Evesham’d died of a heart attack a few days after our visit, in fact. That was the first time I’d heard ‘heart attack’ and I thought it meant your heart suddenly went crazy and attacked the rest of your body like a ferret down a rabbit warren. You sometimes see Mrs Evesham in Mr Rhydd’s, buying old people’s groceries like Duraglit and that toothpaste that tastes of Germolene.

  So anyway, Arthur Evesham’s kingdom’d uglified since his death. A Statue of Liberty lay like a dropped murder weapon. Pooh Bear looked like an acid attack victim. The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it. Jimmy Carter’s nose’d fallen off. I pocketed it, just because. The one sign of life was a candle in an upstairs window. I walked up the Great Wall of China and almost debagged myself on Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing, pointing up to the evening moon. Beyond was a tiny square of lawn set in a bed of mint imperial pebbles. I jumped on to this grass.

  And sank up to my dick in cold water.

  You prat, laughed Unborn Twin, you ponce you pillock you plonker.

  Water sluiced out of my trouser legs as I scrambled out of the pond. Tiny leaves clung to me like globules of sick. Mum’ll go apeshit when she sees. But I had to put that out of my mind, ’cause over the very next fence waited the most dangerous garden of all.

  The good news was, Mr Blake’s garden was empty of Mr Blake and the far side had monkey-puzzle trees and sword plants. Excellent cover for a Spook. The bad news was, a greenhouse ran the entire length of the garden, right under the fence. A ten-foot-high, unstable fence, quivering under my weight. I’d have to inch along the fence in a sitting position, tilll I was right at Mr Blake’s living-room window. If I fell, it was smash through a glass pane and slam on a concrete floor. Unless I got impaled on a tomato cane, like the priest in The Omen who gets spiked by a falling lightning conductor.

  I had no choice.

  The splintery fence-top sawed my bum and palms as I inched along it. My pond-soaked jeans were clammy-heavy. I nearly fell. If Mr Blake’s face appeared in any of the windows, I was dead meat. I nearly fell again.

  I cleared the greenhouse and jumped down.

  The slab made a kerklonky noise. Luckily for me the only person in Mr Blake’s lounge was Dustin Hoffman in Kramer versus Kramer. (We’d seen it on holiday in Oban. Julia’d sobbed all the way through and called it the greatest film ever made.) Mr Blake’s lounge was sort of womanly, for a man who lives alone. Lacy lamps, pottery milkmaids and paintings of African grasslands you buy on the stairs at Littlewoods, if you really want to. His wife must’ve bought it all before she caught leukaemia. I crept under the kitchen window and then down the garden in the far shrubbery till I got to a water butt. I don’t know why I looked back at the house right then, but I did.

  Mr Blake, gazing out of an upstairs window. Sixty seconds before there’d’ve been no way he wouldn’t’ve seen me balancing on his fence. (Winning needs luck and bravery. I hoped Moran had fat reserves of both.) A Rolling Stones tongue sticker on the window pane’d resisted all attempts to scrape it off. Ghosts of other stickers surrounded that one. It must’ve been his son Martin’s room, once upon a time.

  Creased Mr Blake just stared out. What at?

  Not me. I was hidden by leaves.

  Into his own reflected eyes?

  But Mr Blake’s eyes were holes.

  The last garden was Mervyn Hill’s. Squelch’s dad’s only a dustman but his garden’s like a National Trust property. ’Cause it was the end glebe cottage, it spread out more. A crazy-paving path climbed up to a bench under a trellisy arch of roses. Through the French windows I saw Squelch playing Twister with two younger kids and a man I guessed was their dad. Must be visitors. Squelch’s dad spun the spinner. Past the sofa was a TV showing the very end of Kramer versus Kramer where the kid’s mum comes to take him away. I plotted my route. A cinch. A compost heap on the far side’d let me vault over the wall. Crouching, I ran towards the trellisy arch. The roses brewed the air. ‘Shush up,’ a shadow-woman sat on the bench five feet away from me, ‘ooh, yer little tyke!’

  ‘Aw,’ said her shadow-friend, ‘littl’un kicking again, love?’

  (I couldn’t believe they hadn’t heard me.)

  ‘Ow, ow, ow…’ Huff. ‘She’s excited to hear yer, Mum. Here, touch the bump…’

  The gap between the trellis arch and the back wall was wide enough to hide me, but too thorny to let me pass.

  ‘You was a proper little acrobat, too, love,’ said the older shadow, ‘now I think back.’ (I recognized Squelch’s mum.) ‘Cartwheels and kung-fu it was. Merv was always quieter, truth be told, even before he was out.’

  ‘Shan’t be sorry when this little miss decides it’s time. I ain’t half fed up of bein’ a whale on legs.’

  (Oh God. A pregnant woman. One thing everyone knows about them is if you give them a shock the baby pops out too early. Then the kid might be a retard like Squelch and it’d be my fault.)

  ‘So you’re still sure she’s a girl?’

  ‘Eleanor in Accounts, right, she did her test. Looped my weddin’ ring through a strand of my hair and hung it over my palm. If it swings, yer baby’s a boy. Mine loop-the-looped, so she’s a girl.’

  ‘So that old one’s still doing the rounds, is it?’

  ‘Eleanor says she’s never been wrong yet.’

  (My Casio said my time was nearly up.)

  The game of Twister collapsed into a mound of crushed bodies, bent arms and wriggling feet. ‘Look at that rabble!’ Squelch’s mum tutted, pleased.

  ‘Ben’s so sorry his mate in the warehouse at Kay’s Catalogues said no, Mum. About when Merv leaves school, I mean.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, love. Nice of Ben to try.’

  (Time, throbbed my Casio, time. I care too much, that’s my problem. The whole point about being a Spook is that you’re so hard you don’t care.)

  ‘I do worry what’ll become of Merv, though. Specially when Bill and I, y’know, well, aren’t around any longer.’

  ‘Mum! Will you listen to yourself?’

  ‘Merv can’t think of his future, can he? Merv can’t think p
ast the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s always got me and Ben, if it comes to it.’

  ‘You’ll have three of yer own to look after soon, won’t yer? Merv’s gettin’ more of an handful as time goes by, not less. Did Bill say? Found him in his bedroom one day last week flickin’ through one o’ them Penthouses. Bare naked ladies and that. That stage.’

  ‘I s’pose it’s only natural, Mum. All boys do it.’

  ‘I know, Jacks, but in, y’know, an ordinary boy, that sort of thing, it finds an outlet. Courtin’ girls and that. I love Merv but what girl’ll want to walk out with a lad like him? How’d he support a family? Merv’s neither fish nor fowl, see. Ain’t backward enough when it comes to allowances and whatnot, ain’t quick enough on his pegs for jobs like shuntin’ boxes in Kay’s Catalogues.’

  ‘Ben said that’s only ’cause they ain’t hirin’. The recession and that.’

  ‘Tragic part is, Merv’s craftier by half than what he makes out he is. It suits Merv to act the village idiot, ’cause all the other kids expect it.’

  A moon-grey cat crossed the lawn. The chimes’d start any second.

  ‘Ben says the pork scratchings factory down Upton’ll have anyone. They even took Giles Noak, after his old man got sent down.’

  (I’d never thought of that. Squelch was just this kid you laugh at. But think about Squelch aged twenty, or thirty. Think about what his mum does for him, every single day. Squelch aged fifty, or seventy. What’d happen to him? What’s so funny about that?)