Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  I knocked a rhythm on the vicarage knocker and finished off with the doorbell. Worm casts pitted the bubbling lawn like squeezed blackheads and slugs were climbing up walls. The porch roof was dripping. My parka hood was dripping. Mum’s gone to Cheltenham today to speak with builders, so I’d told Dad I’d probably (‘probably’s a word with an emergency ejector seat.) go and play electronic Battleships at Alastair Nurton’s. Dean Moran’s considered a bad influence since the Mr Blake affair. I’d come on my bike ’cause if anyone’d been out I could’ve just said ‘All right?’ and cycled on. If you’re caught on foot you might face an interrogation. But today everyone was watching Jimmy Connors versus John McEnroe on TV. (It’s wet here but it’s sunny in Wimbledon.) Le Grand Meaulnes was wrapped inside two Marks & Spencer placky bags stuffed inside my shirt, with my translation. I spent hours on it. Every other word I’d had to look up in the dictionary. Even Julia noticed. She said yesterday, ‘Things slacken off towards the end of term, I thought.’ I answered that I wanted to get my summer homework over and done with. The weird thing is, doing the translation didn’t feel like hours, not once I got going. Bags more interesting than Youpla boum! Le franµais pour tous (French Method) Book 2 about Manuel, Claudette, Marie-France, Monsieur et Madame Berri. I’d’ve liked to’ve asked Miss Wyche our French teacher to check my translation. But getting creep-stained as a model student in a subject as girly as French’d sink what’s left of my middle-ranking status.

  Translating’s half-poem and half-crossword and no doddle. Loads of words aren’t actual words you can look up, but screws of grammar that hold the sentence together. It takes yonks to find out what they mean, though once you know them you know them. Le Grand Meaulnes is about this kid Augustin Meaulnes. Augustin Meaulnes’s got an aura, like Nick Yew, that just has an effect on people. He comes to live with a schoolmaster’s son called Franµois as a boarder. Franµois tells the story. We hear Meaulnes’s footsteps, in the room above, before we even see him. It’s brilliant. I’d decided to ask Madame Crommelynck to teach me French. Proper French, not French at school. I’d even started daydreaming about going to France, after my O-levels or A-levels. French kissing’s where you touch with your tongues.

  The butler was taking for ever. Even longer than last week.

  Impatient for my new future to come, I pressed the doorbell again.

  Immediately, a pinky man in black opened up. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  The rain turned up a notch or two.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you the new butler?’

  ‘Butler?’ The pinky man laughed. ‘Gracious, no! That’s a first! I’m Francis Bendincks. Vicar of St Gabriel’s.’ Only now did I see his dog-collar. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Oh. I’ve come to see Madame Crommelynck…’

  ‘Francis!’ Footsteps cronk cronk cronked down the wooden stairs. (Outdoor shoes, not slippers.) A woman’s voice snipped at high speed. ‘If that’s the television licence people, tell them I’ve looked high and low but I think they must’ve carted the thing off—’ She saw me.

  ‘This young chap’s come to visit Eva, apparently.’

  ‘Well, this young chap had better step inside, hadn’t he? Till the rain lets up, at least.’

  Today the hallway had a behind-a-waterfall gloominess. The guitar’s blue paint’d flaked off like a skin disease. In her yellow frame a dying woman in a boat trailed her fingers in the water.

  ‘Thanks,’ I managed to say. ‘Madame Crommelynck’s expecting me.’

  ‘Why that would be, I wonder?’ The vicar’s wife poked her questions rather than asked them. ‘Oh! Are you Marjorie Bishampton’s youngest, here for the sponsored spelling bee?’

  ‘No,’ I said, unwilling to tell her my name.

  ‘So?’ Her smile looked grafted on. ‘You are?’

  ‘Er, Jason.’

  ‘Jason…?’

  ‘Taylor.’

  ‘That rings a bell…Kingfisher Meadows! Helena Taylor’s youngest. Poor Mrs Castle’s neighbours. Father a big cheese at Greenland Supermarkets, right? Sister off to Edinburgh this autumn. I met your mother at the art exhibition last year, in the village hall. She was taken with an oil painting of Eastnor Castle, though I’m sorry to say she never came back. Half the profits went to Christian Aid.’

  She wasn’t getting a ‘Sorry’ from me.

  ‘Well, Jason,’ said the vicar. ‘Mrs Crommelynck has been called away. Rather unexpectedly.’

  Oh. ‘Will she be back any time—’ (The wife brought on my stammer like an allergy. I was stuck on ‘soon’.)

  ‘“Soon?”’ The wife gave me a can’t pull the wool over my eyes smile that mortified me. ‘Hardly! They’re gone as in Gone! It happened—’

  ‘Gwendolin.’ The vicar raised his hand like a shy kid in class. (I recognized the name ‘Gwendolin Bendincks’ from the parish magazine. She writes half of it.) ‘I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to be—’

  ‘Nonsense! It’ll be all round the village by teatime. Truth will out. We have some perfectly dreadful news, Jason.’ Gwendolin Bendincks eyes’d lit up like fairy lights. ‘The Crommelyncks have been extradited!’

  I wasn’t too sure what that meant. ‘Under arrest?’

  ‘I’ll jolly well say so! Goose-stepped back to Bonn by the West German police! Their lawyer contacted us this morning. He refused to tell me why they’d been extradited, but, putting two and two together – the husband retired from the Bundesbank six months ago – it’s some sort of financial scam. Embezzlement. Bribery. Lots of that goes on in Germany.’

  ‘Gwendolin,’ the vicar had a wheezy smile, ‘perhaps it’s premature to—’

  ‘Mind you, she once mentioned a few years spent in Berlin. Suppose she was spying for the Warsaw Pact? I told you, Francis, I always felt they kept themselves to themselves more than was natural.’

  ‘But perhaps they’re—’ (Hangman choked the ‘not’ of ‘not guilty’.)

  ‘“Not guilty”?’ Gwendolin Bendincks’s lips twitched. ‘The Home Secretary wouldn’t let Interpol whisk them away if he wasn’t jolly well sure of his facts, would he? But it’s an ill wind, I always say. Now we can use the lawn for our fête, after all.’

  ‘What,’ I asked, ‘about their butler?’

  For two whole seconds Gwendolin Bendincks was stopped in her tracks. ‘Butler? Francis! What’s this about a butler?’

  ‘Grigoire and Eva,’ said the vicar, ‘didn’t have a butler. I assure you.’

  I saw it. What a dildo I am.

  The butler was the husband.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ I said, sheepishly. ‘I’d better go now.’

  ‘Not yet!’ Gwendolin Bendincks hadn’t finished. ‘You’ll get soaked to your skin! So tell us, what was your connection with Eva Crommelynck?’

  ‘She was sort of teaching me.’

  ‘Is that a fact? And what might she have been teaching you about?’

  ‘Er…’ I couldn’t admit to poetry. ‘French.’

  ‘How cosy! I remember my first summer in France. Nineteen, I would have been. Or twenty. My aunt took me to Avignon, you know, where there’s the song about dancing on the bridges. The English mademoiselle caused quite a stir among the local bees…’

  The Crommelyncks will be in German police cells, right now. A stammering thirteen-year-old kid in deathliest England’ll be the last thing on Mrs Crommelynck’s mind. The solarium’s gone. My poems are crap. How could they not be? I’m thirteen. What do I know about Beauty and Truth? Better bury Eliot Bolivar than let him carry on churning out shite. Me? Learn French? What was I thinking? God, Gwendolin Bendincks talks like fifty TVs all on at once. The mass and density of her words are bending space and time. A brick of loneliness is reaching terminal velocity inside me. I’d like a can of Tizer and a Toblerone, but Mr Rhydd’s shop’s shut on Saturday afternoons.

  Black Swan Green’s shut on Saturday afternoons.

  All pissing England’s shut.

  Souvenir
s

  ‘So while I’m slaving away,’ Dad pulled a face to shave round his lips, ‘in a sweaty conference room, covering in-store promotions with this year’s crop of’ – Dad jutted out his chin to shave a tricky bit – ‘Einsteins, you get to swan round Lyme Regis in the sun. All right for some, eh?’ He unplugged his shaver.

  ‘Guess so.’

  Our room looked over roofs down to where this funny quay crooks into the sea. Gulls dived and screamed like Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Over the English Channel the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.

  ‘Ah, you’ll have a whale of a time!’ Dad hummed a bendy version of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. (The bathroom door’d opened by itself, so I could see Dad’s chest reflected in the mirror as he put on a string vest and the shirt he’d just ironed. Dad’s chest’s as hairy as a cress experiment.) ‘Wish I could be thirteen again.’

  Then, I thought, you’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like.

  Dad opened up his wallet and took out three pound notes. He hesitated and took out two more. He leant through the doorway and put then on the chest of drawers. ‘A little spending money.’

  Five quid! ‘Thanks, Dad!’

  ‘Don’t spend it on fruit machines, though.’

  ‘’Course not,’ I answered before the ban spread to arcade games. ‘They’re a total waste of money.’

  ‘Glad to hear you say so. Gambling’s for mugs. Right, it’s now’ – Dad looked at his Rolex – ‘twenty to two?’

  I checked my Casio. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never wear your granddad’s Omega, I’ve noticed.’

  ‘I, er,’ my secret bit my conscience for the millionth time, ‘don’t want to accidentally damage it.’

  ‘Quite right. But if you never wear it, Granddad might as well’ve donated it to the Oxfam shop. Anyway, my session winds up at five, so I’ll meet you back here then. We’ll have dinner somewhere nice, and then, if the girl in Reception isn’t mistaken, Chariots of Fire is showing at the local flea-pit. Perhaps you can track the cinema down this afternoon? Lyme’s smaller than Malvern. If you get lost, just ask for the Hotel Excalibur. As in King Arthur. Jason? Are you listening to me?’

  Lyme Regis was a casserole of tourists. Everywhere smelt of suntan oil, hamburgers and burnt sugar. My jean pockets corked with a crusty hanky to foil the pickpockets, I waded along the high street. I looked at the posters in Boots and bought the summer edition of 2000 AD in WH Smith for 40p. I rolled it up and stuck it in my back pocket. I sucked Mint Imperials in case I met a suntanned girl who’d take me upstairs to one of those saggy houses with seagulls screaming on the ridges, and draw her curtains and lie me on her bed and teach me how to kiss. Mint Imperials’re hard as pebbles at first but they distintegrate into sugary mush. I looked in jewellers for an Omega Seamaster but as usual there weren’t any. A man in the last one told me I should be looking in antique shops. I spent ages in a stationery shop in a trance conjured up by all the perfect pads. I bought a packet of Letraset and a TDK C-60 cassette to tape the best songs in the Top 40 off Radio 1 on Sunday. Nearer the harbour were clumps of Mods, bags of Rockers, a chain of Punks and even a few Teds. Teds’re extinct in most towns, but Lyme Regis’s famous for fossils ’cause of the shale cliffs. The Fossil Shop’s fab. It sells conch shells with titchy red bulbs inside, but they were £4.75 and blowing all my money on one souvenir’d’ve been daft. (Instead I bought a series of thirteen dinosaur postcards. Each one’s got a different dinosaur, but if you put them end to end in order, the background landscape joins up and forms a frieze. Moran’ll be pretty jealous.) The trinkety shops’re full of inflatable octopuses, stunt kites, buckets and spades. There were these pens. If you tilted them, a strip of colour slid away to reveal a naked lady whose bosoms’re two sawn-off missiles. The strip’d slid down to her belly button when a voice said, ‘You gonna buy that or what, sonny?’

  I was concentrating on what the strip’d show next.

  ‘Oy! You gonna buy that?’ The shopkeeper meant me. I could see his blob of gum rolling round his mouth as his jaws opened and shut. His T-shirt had a picture of a giant dick with legs chasing something that looked like a hairy oyster on legs and the slogan, IT’S JUST ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER. (I still don’t get that.) ‘Or just stand there getting turned on?’

  I fumblingly jabbed the pen back in its hole and scooted out, deep-frying in embarrassment.

  The shopkeeper tossed, ‘Mucky little bugger!’ after me. ‘Buy yourself a dirty mag!’

  LYME REGIS WILDEST DREAMS AMUSEMENT ARCADE’s sort of built into the hillside park, on the sea front. Pudgy grim smoking men played this horse-racing game where you bet real money on plastic horses that move round a track. The track’s under a glass shield to stop you nobbling the horses. Pudgy grim smoking women played bingo in a closed-off bit where a spangle-jacketed man calls out numbers and smiles like a bee. The arcade game part was darker so the screens glow brighter and Jean Michel Jarre music was on. I watched kids playing Pacman, Scrambler, Frogger and Grand Prix Racer. The Asteroids was out of order. There’s a new game where you fight the giant robot horses from The Empire Strikes Back, but that was 50p a go. I changed a £1 note into 10p coins from a grebo in the booth reading KE-RRRANG!

  The coins in my caged fist rattled like magic bullets.

  Space Invaders first. The Taylor Method’s to zap out a duct through my shelter and kill the aliens from a position of safety. It worked for a while but then an alien torpedoed me through my own duct. That’s never happened before. My strategy collapsed and I didn’t even clear the first screen.

  Next I had a go on a kung fu game. I was MegaThor. But MegaThor just danced around like an electrocuted spazzo while Rex Rockster kicked the shit out of him. Kung fu games’ll never catch on. I hurt my thumbnail more than I’d hurt Rex Rockster.

  I wanted a go on air hockey where a plastic disc floats on a cushion of air. American kids’re always playing it on TV. But you need another human. So I figured I’d get the money I’d wasted on MegaThor back from Eldorado Cascade. Eldorado Cascade’s a sort of console where you roll 10p coins on to mirrored ledges. Moving walls push the coins teetering on the ledges on to the next ledge down; 10p coins falling off that ledge fall into your scoop. Loads of coins were ready to avalanche into my scoop.

  Those teetering coins’re glued on, I reckon. I lost 50p!

  Then I saw this lush girl.

  Three girls spilled out of the photo booth after the fourth nuclear flash. From Eldorado Cascade I’d been watching their six legs and thirty painted toes. Like Charlie’s Angels, one was dark (but chinless), one was straw blonde (extra chin) and one was coppery-freckly. The dark one and the blonde one had a dribbly Cornetto each. (There was an ice-cream stall right by the photo booth.) They pressed their mouths against the slot where the photos come out and yelled unfunny orders into the machine, like, ‘Get a move on!’ When they got bored of that they ducked back into the booth, shared the earphones of a Sony Walkman and sang to ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ by Duran Duran. But the copper one licked a sharp Zoom ice lolly and studied the ice-cream chart. Her top showed her belly button.

  She wasn’t as lush as Dawn Madden but I drifted over to study the ice-cream chart too. Magnets don’t need to understand magnetism. She smelt of warm sand. Just standing near her made the tiny hairs on my arms riffle.

  I untucked my shirt to let it drape over my accelerating boner.

  ‘Is that a Zoom?’ God. I’d apparently spoken to the girl.

  She looked at me. ‘Yeah.’ I fell a thousand feet up. ‘Zooms’re the best thing they’ve got here.’ Her accent was like off Coronation Street in Manchester. ‘Unless you’re, like, into choc ices.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  I bought a Zoom off a person I remember absolutely nothing about.

  ‘You on holiday too,’ she spoke to me, ‘or d’you live here, like?’

  ‘Holiday.’

  ‘We’re from Blackburn.’ She nodde
d at the other two, who hadn’t noticed me yet. ‘Where’re you from?’

  ‘Uh…Black Swan Green.’ I was so nervous that even Hangman’d run off to hide somewhere. It makes no sense but it happens.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It’s a village. In Worcestershire.’

  ‘Worcestershire? Is that in the middle somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s the most boring county, so no one ever knows where it is. Blackburn’s up north, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. So, is Black Swan Green famous for black swans or green swans or something?’

  ‘No.’ What could I say that’d really impress her? ‘There aren’t even any white swans there.’

  ‘So there’re no swans in Black Swan Green?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s sort of a local joke.’

  ‘Oh. That’s pretty funny, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Sweat pinpricked out from fifty places on my body.

  ‘Dead nice here, in’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I wondered what to say next. ‘Dead nice.’

  ‘You going to eat that lolly, or what?’

  The icy Zoom’d stuck to my fingertips. I tried to peel the paper wrapper off but it just shredded dead crappily.

  ‘You need a bit of technique, like.’ Her ruby fingertips took my Zoom and tore the end off the wrapper. She placed the torn end in her mouth and blew. The wrapper ballooned up, then just slid off. My hidden boner was about to explode, killing everyone in Wildest Dreams Amusements. She let the wrapper drop to the floor and handed me back my Zoom. ‘Is that Smash Hits?’ She meant the 2000 AD summer special, still rolled up in my pocket.