Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  ‘I dare say the pork scratchings might, love, but that don’t change—’

  ‘Jackie?’ The young dad called out from the French windows. ‘Jacks!’

  I squeezed between the trellis and the wall.

  ‘What is it, Ben? We’re up here! On the bench.’

  Roses, thorny as orcs, sank their teeth into my chest and face.

  ‘Is Wendy with yer? Merv got too excited again. Had one of his little accidents…’

  ‘A whole ten minutes,’ mumbled Squelch’s mum. ‘Must be a record. All right, Ben!’ She got to her feet. ‘I’m comin’!’

  When Squelch’s mum and his pregnant sister were halfway to the house, St Gabriel bonged the first chime of nine o’clock. I dashed to the wall and bounded on to the compost heap. Instead of springboarding up, I sank into the rotting mush right up to my middle. There’s a type of nightmare where the ground’s your enemy.

  The second chime bonged.

  I struggled out of the compost heap and over the last wall, dangled in limbo as the third chime bonged, then dropped on to the drive that runs down the side of Mr Rhydd’s shop. Then, in my soggy compost-covered jeans, I legged it over the crossroads and qualified for Spooks with not two minutes to spare but two chimes.

  As I knelt at the feet of the oak, my breathing grated like a rusty saw. I couldn’t even pick the thorns from my socks. But right there, right then, I felt happier than I could remember being. Ever.

  ‘You, my son,’ Gilbert Swinyard slapped my back, ‘are one boney fider Spook!’

  ‘No one ever cut it that fine, mind!’ Grant Burch did a goblin cackle. ‘Three seconds to spare!’

  Pete Redmarley sat cross-legged, smoking. ‘Thought you’d bottled out.’ Pete Redmarley is never shocked and he’s already got a half-decent moustache. He’s never told me he thinks I’m a gay snob but I know that’s what he thinks.

  ‘You was wrong, then,’ stated Gilbert Swinyard. (Being stuck up for by a kid like Gilbert Swinyard’s exactly the point of being in Spooks.) ‘Christ, Taylor! What happened to yer trousers?’

  ‘Stepped into…’ I gasped, still desperate for oxygen. ‘…Arthur Evesham’s bastard pond…’

  Even Pete Redmarley smirked at that.

  ‘Then…’ I began laughing too. ‘…fell into Squelch’s compost heap…’

  Pluto Noak jogged up. ‘Did he do it?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gilbert Swinyard, ‘by the skin of his teeth.’

  ‘Just moments left, he had,’ said Grant Burch.

  ‘There were—’ I just stopped myself saluting Pluto Noak. ‘There was loads of people still around in their gardens.’

  ‘’Course there are. It ain’t dark yet. Knew you’d do it, though.’ Pluto Noak slapped my shoulder. (Dad did that when I learnt to dive, just the once.) ‘Knew it. A celebration is in order.’ Pluto Noak stuck his arse out, like he was sitting on a phantom motorbike. His right foot kicked it into life. As Pluto Noak’s hand revved up, this stunning Harley-Davidson fart roared out of his arse. Fraping up through four gears for three, five, ten seconds.

  Us Spooks pissed ourselves.

  The noise of a fence collapsing and a kid falling through glass carries a long way at twilight. Gilbert Swinyard’s joke about a baby in a microwave died on his lips. The other Spooks looked at me as if I’d know what the noise meant, which I did. ‘Blake’s greenhouse.’

  ‘Moran?’ Grant Burch sniggered. ‘He’s broken it?’

  ‘Fallen through it.’ (Burch’s snigger died.) ‘Ten, twelve foot.’

  The bell-ringers now came swaying out of the Black Swan singing about a cat who crept into a crypt and crapped and crept out again.

  ‘Moron Moran,’ rhymed Pluto Noak. ‘Hide up yer warren.’

  ‘That dozy fuck-up,’ said Pete Redmarley. ‘I knew he was a mistake.’ He scowled at the other Spooks. ‘We didn’t need any new Spooks.’ (That meant me, too.) ‘Might as well invite Squelch in, next.’

  ‘Better be off, any road.’ Gilbert Swinyard got up. ‘All of us.’

  A fact sunk a hook into me. If I’d fallen through Mr Blake’s greenhouse and not Moran, Moran wouldn’t be abandoning me to that psycho. He just wouldn’t.

  Keep your fat trap shut, ordered Maggot.

  ‘Ploot?’

  Pluto Noak and the Spooks turned round.

  ‘Isn’t anyone going to…’ (saying this was miles more difficult than running across people’s back gardens) ‘…make sure Moran’s’ (Hangman jammed ‘not hurt’) ‘I mean, what if he’s bust a leg or…cut to bits on glass?’

  ‘Blake’ll call an ambulance,’ said Grant Burch.

  ‘But shouldn’t we…y’know…’

  ‘No, Taylor.’ Pluto Noak looked thuggish now. ‘I do not know.’

  ‘That dildo knew our rules.’ Pete Redmarley spat. ‘Yer gets caught, yer on yer own. You go knockin’ on Blake’s door after this, Jason Taylor, and it’ll be what and why and who and the third fuckin’ degree and Spooks’ll get named and we ain’t havin’ that. We was here long before you ever set foot in this village.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to—’

  ‘Good.’ Cause Black Swan Green ain’t London or Richmond or wherever the fuck. Black Swan Green ain’t got space for secrets. You go knockin’ on Roger Blake’s door, we’ll know about it.’

  The wind riffled the ten thousand pages of the oak tree.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I protested, ‘I just—’

  ‘You ain’t clapped eyes on Moran tonight.’ Pluto Noak jabbed a stubby finger at me. ‘You ain’t seen us. You ain’t heard of Spooks.’

  ‘Taylor,’ Grant Burch gave me my last warning, ‘go home, okay?’

  So here I am, two doubled-back minutes later, eye to eye with Mr Blake’s door knocker, cacking myself. Mr Blake is shouting inside the house. He’s not bollocking Moran. He’s on the phone, shouting about an ambulance. As soon as Mr Blake hangs up the phone I’m going to bang this knocker till he lets me in. This is just the beginning. I realize something about all the suicides traipsing north, north, north to a nowhere place where the highlands melt into the sea.

  It’s not a curse, or a punishment.

  It’s what they want.

  Solarium

  ‘OPEN UP! OPEN UP!’ holler door knockers. ‘OR I’LL BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN!’ Bells’re shyer. Bells’re ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ The vicarage had a knocker and a bell and I’d tried both, but still nobody answered. I waited. Perhaps the vicar was putting his quill in his inkpot, huffing, ‘Gracious, three o’clock already?’ I pressed my ear to the door but the big old house gave nothing away. Sunshine flooded the thirsty lawn, flowers blazed, trees drowsed in the breeze. A dusty Volvo estate sat in the garage needing a wash and wax. (Volvos’re the only famous Swedish thing ’cept for ABBA. Volvos’ve got roll-bars so you don’t get Garibaldi-biscuited if a juggernaut slams you down a motorway embankment.)

  I was half hoping nobody’d answer. The vicarage’s a serious place, the opposite of where kids should be. But when I’d crept here under cover of darkness last week, an envelope’d been Sellotaped over the letter box. FOR THE ATTENTION OF ELIOT BOLIVAR, POET. Inside was a short letter written in lilac ink on slate-grey paper. It invited me to come to the vicarage to discuss my work at three o’clock on Sunday. ‘Work’. Nobody’s ever called Eliot Bolivar’s poems ‘work’.

  I kicked a pebble down the drive.

  A bolt slid like a rifle and an old man opened up. His skin was as blotched as a dying banana. He wore a collarless shirt and braces. ‘Good afternoon?’

  ‘Hi, uh, hello.’ (I meant to say ‘Good afternoon’ but Hangman’s keen on G-words lately.) ‘Are you the vicar?’

  The man glanced round the garden, as if I might be a decoy. ‘I am certainly not a vicar. Why?’ A foreign accent, sourer than French. ‘Are you?’

  I shook my head. (Hangman wouldn’t even let me say ‘No’.) ‘But the vicar invited me.’ I showed him the envelope. ‘Only, he didn’t sign his’ (I couldn’t even say �
��name’) ‘he didn’t sign it.’

  ‘Yah, aha.’ The non-vicar hasn’t been surprised by anything for years. ‘Come to the solarium. You may remove your shoes.’

  Inside smelt of liver and soil. A velvet staircase sliced sunlight across the hall. A blue guitar rested on a sort of Turkish chair. A bare lady in a punt drifted on a lake of water lilies in a gold frame. The ‘solarium’ sounded ace. A planetarium for the sun instead of stars? Maybe the vicar was an astronomer in his spare time.

  The old man offered me a shoehorn. I’m not sure how to use them, so I said, ‘No thanks,’ and prised my trainers off the usual way. ‘Are you a butler?’

  ‘Butler. Yah, aha. A good description of my role in this house, I think. Follow me, please.’

  I thought only archbishops and popes were posh enough for butlers, but vicars can obviously have them too. The worn floorboards ribbled the soles of my feet through my socks. The hallway wound past a boring lounge and a clean kitchen. The high ceilings had cobwebby chandeliers.

  I nearly bumped into the butler’s back.

  He’d stopped, and spoke around a narrow door. ‘A visitor.’

  This solarium didn’t have any scientific apparatus in it, though its skylights were big enough for telescopes. The huge window framed a wild garden of foxgloves and red-hot pokers. Bookcases lined the walls. Midget trees stood in mossy pots round the unused fireplace. Cigarette smoke hazed everything like in a TV flashback.

  On a cane throne sat an old toady lady.

  Old but grand, like she’d stepped out of a portrait, with silver hair and a royal purple shawl. I guessed she was the vicar’s mother. Her jewels were big as Cola Cubes and Sherbert Lemons. Maybe she was sixty, maybe seventy. With old people and little kids you can’t be sure. I turned to look at the butler but the butler’d gone.

  The old lady’s rivery eyeballs chased the words across the pages of her book.

  Should I cough? That’d be stupid. She knew I was there.

  Smoke streamed upwards from her cigarette.

  I sat down on an armless sofa till she was ready to talk. Her book was called Le Grand Meaulnes. I wondered what Meaulnes meant and wished I was as good at French as Avril Bredon.

  The clock on the mantelpiece shaved minutes into seconds.

  Her knuckles were as ridged as Toblerone. Every now and then her bony fingers swept ash off the page.

  ‘My name is Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck.’ If a peacock had a human voice, that’d be hers. ‘You may address me as Madame Crommelynck.’ I guessed her accent was French without being sure. ‘My English friends, an endangered species in these days, they say to me, “Eva, in Great Britain your ‘Madame’ is too onions-and-beret. Why not simply ‘Mrs’ Crommelynck?” And I say, “Go to the hell! What is wrong with onions-and-berets? I am Madame and my “e” is strongly attached!” Allons donc. It is three o’clock, a little after, so you are Eliot Bolivar the poet, I presume?’

  ‘Yes.’ (‘Poet’!) ‘Very pleased to meet you…Madame Crommylenk?’

  ‘Crom-mel-ynck.’

  ‘Crommelynck.’

  ‘Bad, but better. You are younger than I estimated. Fourteen? Fifteen?’

  It’s ace being mistaken for an older kid. ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Ackkk, a wonderful, miserable age. Not a boy, not a teenager. Impatience but timidity too. Emotional incontinence.’

  ‘Is the vicar going to get here soon?’

  ‘Pardon me?’ She leant forwards. ‘Who’ (it came out as ‘oo’) ‘is this “vicar”?’

  ‘This is the vicarage, right?’ I showed her my invitation, uneasy now. ‘It says so on your gatepost. On the main road.’

  ‘Ah.’ Madame Crommelynck nodded. ‘Vicar, vicarage. You miscomprehend a thing. A vicar lived here once upon a time, doubtless – before him two vicars, three vicars, many vicars’ – her scrawny hand mimed a poof of smoke – ‘but no more. The Anglican Church becomes bankrupter and bankrupter, year by year, like British Leyland cars. My father said, Catholics know how to run the business of religion. Catholics and Mormons. Propagate customers, they tell their congregation, or is the inferno for you! But your Church of England, no. Consequences is, these enchantible rectory houses are sold or rented, and vicars must move to little houses. Only the name “vicarage” is remaining.’

  ‘But,’ I swallowed, ‘I’ve been posting my poems through your letter box since January. How come they’re printed in the parish magazine every month?’

  ‘This,’ Madame Crommelynck took such a mighty drag on her cigarette I could see it shrink, ‘should be no mystery to an agile brain. I deliver your poems to the real vicar in his real vicarage. An ugly bungalow near Hanley Castle. I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis. Is a fine exercise for my not-agile bones. But in payment, I read your poems first.’

  ‘Oh. Does the real vicar know?’

  ‘I too make my deliveries in darkness, anonymous, so I am not apprehended by the vicar’s wife – oh, she is an hundred times worst than he is. An harpy of tattle-tittle. She asked to use my garden for her St Gabriel’s Summer Fête! “It is tradition,” says Mrs Vicar. “We need space for the human bridge. For the stalls.” I tell her, “Go to the hell! I pay you rent, do I not? Who has need of a divine creator who must sell inferior marmalade?”’ Madame Crommelynck smacked her leathery lips. ‘But at least, her husband publishes your poems in his funny magazine. Perhaps he is redeemable.’ She gestured at a bottle of wine stood on a pearly table. ‘You will drink a little?’

  A whole glass, said Unborn Twin.

  I could hear Dad saying, You drank what? ‘No thanks.’

  Your loss, Madame Crommelynck shrugged.

  Inky blood filled her glass.

  Satisfied, she rapped on a small pile of Black Swan Green parish magazines by her side. ‘To business.’

  ‘A young man needs to learn when a woman wishes her cigarette to be lit.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  An emerald dragon wraps Madame Crommelynck’s lighter. I was worried the smell of cigarette smoke’d stick to my clothes and I’d have to make up a story for Mum and Dad about where I’d been. While she smoked, she murmured my poem ‘Rocks’ from May’s magazine.

  I felt giddy with importance that my words’d captured the attention of this exotic woman. Fear, too. If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’

  Madame Crommelynck did a tiny growl. ‘You imagine blank verse is a liberation, but no. Discard rhyme, you discard a parachute…Sentimentality you mistake for emotion…You love words, yes’ (a pride-bubble swelled up in me) ‘but your words are still the master of you, you are not yet master of them…’ (The bubble popped.) She studied my reaction. ‘But, at least, your poem is robust enough to be criticized. Most so-called poems disintegrate at one touch. Your imagery is here, there, fresh, I am not ashamed to call it so. Now I wish to know a thing.’

  ‘Sure. Anything.’

  ‘The domesticity in this poem, these kitchens, gardens, ponds…is not a metaphor for the ludicrous war in the South Atlantic in this year?’

  ‘The Falklands was on while I was writing the poem,’ I answered. ‘The war just sort of seeped in.’

  ‘So these demons who do war in the garden, they symbolise General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher. I am right?’

  ‘Sort of, yes.’

  ‘But they are also your father and your mother, however. I am right?’

  Hesitations’re yeses or nos if the questioner already knows the answer. It’s one thing writing about your parents. Admitting it’s another matter.

  Madame Crommelynck did a tobaccoey croon to show her delight. ‘You are a polite thirteen year boy who is too timid to cut his umbilical cords! Except,’ she gave the page a nasty poke, ‘here. Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do,’ she jabbed at the window, ‘here. In reality. To express what is here.’ She jabbed my heart. It hurt.

  X-rays make me
queasy.

  Once a poem’s left home it doesn’t care about you.

  ‘“Back Gardens”.’ Madame Crommelynck held up the June edition.

  I was sure she thought the title was a killer.

  ‘But why is this title so atrocious?’

  ‘Uh…it wasn’t my first choice.’

  ‘So why you christen your creation with an inferior name?’

  ‘I was going to call it “Spooks”. But there’s this actual gang who’re called that. They go nightcreeping round the village. If I called the poem that they might suspect who’d written it and sort of…get me.’

  Madame Crommelynck sniffed, under-impressed. Her mouth chanted my lines at quarter-volume. I hoped at least she’d say something about the poem’s descriptions of dusk and moonlight and darkness.

  ‘There are many beautiful words in here…’

  ‘Thanks,’ I agreed.

  ‘Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Your “sort of” is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. “Sort of” is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. “Sort of” says, “I am ashamed by clarity and precision.” So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. Idiots labour in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. Here—’ She read from the fifth verse. ‘“Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon”. The poem has a terminal deflation. Ffffffffft! Dead tyre. Automobile accident. It says, “Am I not a pretty pretty?” I answer, “Go to the hell!” If you have a magnolia in a courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No. You do not.’