Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  ‘Postage stamps?’

  ‘One strip of five second-class postage stamps. They was the straw what broke the camel’s back. Honest to God, Jason, Gordon Wilcox beat that woman so black and blue, the hospital had to feed her through a tube for a week.’

  ‘Why didn’t,’ a black hole just got bigger, ‘he get sent to prison?’

  ‘No witnesses, a crafty lawyer who said she’d chucked herself downstairs over and over, plus his wife conveniently going mental. “Unsound mind”, the judge in Worcester decided.’

  ‘So if he’d do that,’ Debby Crombie clutched her rugby ball, ‘over a strip of stamps, imagine what he’ll do over hundreds of pounds! Sure, Ross Wilcox is a nasty piece of work, but you wouldn’t wish a maulin’ off of Gordon Wilcox on your worst enemy.’

  Dean’d gone yahoooooooooooooooing down Ali Baba’s Helter Skelter ahead of me. Just as I got my mat ready fireworks erupted in the sky over towards Welland. Guy Fawkes’ Night’s not till tomorrow, but they can’t wait in Welland. Stalks climbed, then pop-blossomed into slow-slow-slow…motion Michaelmas daisies. Raining-silvers, purples, phoenix golds. Crunkly booms arrived a second late…boom…boom…Firework petals fell away and faded to ash. Only five or six big ones went off, but what beauts they were.

  No footsteps were clomping up the stairs of the tower.

  Still perched on the lip of the slide, I got out Wilcox’s wallet to count Wilcox’s money. My money. The notes weren’t fivers, nor tenners, they were all twenty-pound notes. I’ve never even touched a twenty. Five of them, I counted, ten of them, fifteen of them…

  Thirty Queen Elizabeths. Starlight pale.

  SIX – I screamed – HUNDRED – silently – POUNDS.

  If anyone found out, anyone, things’d get grimmer than I dared imagine. I’d wrap the notes in polythene, put them in a sandwich box and stash them away. Somewhere in the wood’d be safest. And it’d be safest to wang the wallet into the Severn. Shame. All I have in the way of a wallet is a zippy pouch thing. I sniffed Wilcox’s wallet so atoms from his wallet’ll turn into me. If only I could breathe in Dawn Madden atoms.

  The Goose Fair’s literally magic, I thought, sitting there. It turns my weakness into power. It turns our village green into this underwater kingdom. ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials bubbled up from the Magic Mountain, ‘Waterloo’ by Abba from the Flying Teacups, the Pink Panther music from the Chair-o-Plane. The Black Swan was so full its innards were spilling out. Farther off, villages floated on empty spaces, where wide fields were. Hanley Castle, Blackmore End, Brotheridge Green. Worcester was a galaxy squashed flat.

  Best of all? I’d be pounding Wilcox into a pulp. Me. Via his dad. Why should I feel bad about that? After what Wilcox’s done to me. Neither of them’d ever know it. It’s the perfect revenge. Besides, Kelly exaggerates. No father’d beat up his own son that badly.

  Footsteps came up the tower. I hastily stuffed my fortune into my pocket, repositioned myself on the scratchy mat and a wonderful thought slid into my head as I slid off the lip. Six hundred pounds could buy an Omega Seamaster.

  Grand Master of the Helter Skelter, tonight I leant into the curves.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dean, as the crowds swept us by Fryer Tuck’s Chip Emporium, ‘that’s never yer dad, is it?’

  Can’t be, I thought, but it was. Still in his Columbo overcoat and suit from the office. He had this ironed-in frown and I thought how he needed a very long holiday. Dad was eating chips with a wooden fork from a cone of newspaper. There’re dreams where the right people appear in wrong places and this was like that. Dad spotted us before I could work out why I wanted to dodge off. ‘Hullo, you two.’

  ‘Evening,’ Dean sounded nervous, ‘Mr Taylor.’ They haven’t met since the Mr Blake affair back in June.

  ‘Good to see you, Dean. How’s your arm?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Dean wiggled his arm. ‘Right as rain.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to hear it.’

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ I don’t know why I was nervous too. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Didn’t know I needed your permission to come, Jason.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that…’

  Dad tried to smile but he just looked pained. ‘I know, I know. What am I doing here?’ Dad forked a chip and blew on it. ‘Well, I was driving home. Saw all the hullaballoo.’ Dad’s voice was somehow different. Softer. ‘Couldn’t very well miss the Goose Fair, could I? I’ll have a little wander, I thought. Smelt these.’ Dad waggled his cone. ‘Y’know, after eleven years in Black Swan Green this is my first time at the Goose Fair. I kept meaning to bring you and Julia when you were little. But something important always got in the way. So important, I’ve got no idea what it was.’

  ‘Oh. Mum phoned, from Cheltenham. To tell me to tell you there’s a cold quiche in the fridge. I left you a note on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you. Thanks.’ Dad gazed inside his cone as if answers might be written there. ‘Hey, have you eaten? Dean? Fancy anything from Fryer Tuck’s Chip Emporium?’

  ‘I ate a sandwich and a black-cherry yogurt.’ I didn’t mention the toffee apple in case it counted as throwing money away. ‘Before I came.’

  ‘I had three o’ Fryer Tuck’s All-American Taste-Tastic Hot Dogs.’ Dean patted his stomach. ‘Recommend ’em highly, I do.’

  ‘Good,’ Dad squeezed his head like he had a headache, ‘good. Oh. Let me give you a little, uh…’ Dad slipped two new pound coins into my hand. (One hour before, two pounds’d’ve been loads. Now it’s less than 1/300th of my entire estate.)

  ‘Thanks, Dad. Would you like to…uh…?’

  ‘I’d love to, but I have paperwork coming out of my paperwork. Plans to plan. Hotties to put in beds. No rest for the wicked. Good seeing you, Dean. Jason’s got a telly in his room, doubtless he hasn’t shut up about it. Come over and watch it! No point it just…y’know…sitting there…’

  ‘Thanks very much, Mr Taylor.’

  Dad dropped the cone into an oil drum full of rubbish and walked off.

  Suppose, prompted Unborn Twin, you never see him again?

  ‘Dad!’

  I ran up to him and looked him square in the eye. Suddenly, I’m nearly as tall as he is. ‘I want to be a forester when I’m older.’ I hadn’t meant to tell him. Dad always finds problems with plans.

  ‘A forester?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I nodded, ‘someone who looks after forests.’

  ‘Mmm.’ That was the closest he came to smiling. ‘There’s kind of a big clue in the word, Jason.’

  ‘Well. Yeah. One of those. In France. Maybe.’

  ‘You’ll have to study hard.’ Dad made a could do worse face. ‘You’ll need the sciences.’

  ‘Then I’ll get the sciences.’

  ‘I know.’

  I’ll always remember meeting Dad tonight. I know I will. Will Dad? Or will, for Dad, tonight’s Goose Fair just be one more of the trillion things you even forget forgetting?

  ‘What’s all this,’ asked Moran, ‘about a portable TV?’

  ‘It only works if you hold its aerial, which means you’re too close to watch it. Wait here a mo, will you? Just off to the wood for a waz.’

  As I jogged over the village green, the Goose Fair slid off and fell away. Six hundred pounds: 6,000 Mars Bars, 110 LPs, 1,200 paperbacks, 5 Raleigh Grifters, 1 4 of a Mini, 3 Atari Home Entertainment consoles. Clothes that’ll make Dawn Madden dance with me at the Christmas village hall disco. Docs and denim jackets. Thin leather ties with pianos on them. Salmon-pink shirts. An Omega Seamaster de Ville made by snowy-haired Swiss craftsmen in 1950.

  The old bus shack was just a box of black.

  I told you, said Maggot. He’s not here. Go back now. You tried.

  The black smelt of fresh cigarettes. ‘Wilcox?’

  ‘Fuck off.’ Wilcox struck a match and his face hovered there for one flickery second. The marks under his nose might’ve been cleaned-up blood.

  ‘Just found someth
ing.’

  ‘And why d’yer s’pose,’ Wilcox didn’t get it, ‘I give a flying fuck?’

  ‘’Cause it’s yours.’

  His voice lurched like a dog on its lead. ‘What?’

  I dug out his wallet and held it towards him.

  Wilcox leapt up and snatched it off me. ‘Where?’

  ‘Dodgems.’

  Wilcox thought about ripping my throat out. ‘When?’

  ‘Few minutes ago. Sort of wedged down the edge of the rink.’

  ‘If yer’ve taken any of this money, Taylor,’ Wilcox’s fingers trembled as he took out the wodge of £20 notes, ‘yer fuckin’ dead!’

  ‘No, really, don’t mention it, Ross. No, honest, you’d’ve done the same for me, I know you would.’ Ross Wilcox was too busy counting to really listen. ‘Look, if I was going to steal any of it, I’d hardly be here giving it back to you, would I?’

  Wilcox got to thirty. He took a deep breath, then remembered me, witnessing his utter relief. ‘So now I’m s’posed to kiss yer arse, am I?’ His face snarled up. ‘Tell yer how grateful I am?’

  As usual, I didn’t know how to reply to him.

  The poor kid.

  The fairground man on the Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups locked the padded bars that’d stop me, Dean, Floyd Chaceley and Clive Pike being flung halfway to Orion. ‘So are you,’ Dean asked him, a bit sarkily, ‘the Great Silvestro?’

  ‘Nah. Silvestro died last month. His other ride, Flying Saucers, went and collapsed on him. Made all newspapers up in Derby, where it happened. Nine lads about your age, plus Silvestro – crushed, mangled, pitted, juiced.’ The fairground man shook his head, wincing. ‘The only way the police could sort out who was what was by calling in a team of dentists. Dentists with ladles and buckets. Guess why the ride collapsed. You’ll never guess. One single bolt hadn’t been tightened proper. One bolt. Casual labour, see. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Right. That’s the last of you done.’

  He waved at an assistant, who pulled a big lever. A song that went ‘Hey! (HEY!) You! (YOU!) Get Off Of My Cloud!’ blasted out and hydraulic tentacles lifted our giant teacups higher than houses. Floyd Chacely, Clive Pike and Dean Moran and me did a rising oooooohhhhh!

  My hand touched my flat pocket. Apart from £28 in my TSB account, all the money I had left in the world was the two pounds Dad’d given me. Perhaps giving Wilcox back his wallet had been idiotic, but at least now I could stop worrying about whether I should or not.

  The Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups swung into motion and an orchestra of screams tuned up. My memories’re all sloshed out of order. The Goose Fair was sluiced from a bowl of starry dark. Clive Pike, to my left, eyes beetling bigger than humanly possible, G-force ribbling his face. (‘HEY! HEY!’) Starry dark, sluiced from a bowl of the Goose Fair. Floyd Chaceley, who never smiles, on my right, laughing like Lord Satan in a mushroom cloud. Screams chasing their tails as fast as the melting tigers in Little Black Sambo. (‘YOU! YOU!’) Goose Fair and November night propellering one into another. Courage is being scared shitless but doing it anyway. Dean Moran, opposite, eyes clenched, lips valving open as a cobra slithers out, a shiny cobra of half-digested toffee apple, candy floss and three of Fryer Tuck’s All-American Taste-Tastic Hot Dogs, highly recommended, writhing longer. (‘GET OFF OF MY CLOUD!’) That such a volume of food could still be uncoiling from Dean’s stomach is supernaturally peculiar, missing my face by inches, climbing higher, till it lunges and turns into a billion globs of puke, bulleting passengers of the late Great Silvestro’s Flying Teacups (now they’ve really got something to scream about) and a thousand and one innocent civilians milling at the wrong time in the wrong part of the Goose Fair.

  The giant machine groaned like the Iron Man as our teacup sank earthwards. Our heads slowed more slowly. People were still screaming, even half the village green away, which seemed to me a bit much.

  ‘Gonads,’ stated the fairground man, seeing the state of our teacup. ‘Shrivelled, syphilitic gonads. Ern!’ he yelled at his assistant. ‘Ern! Bring the mop! We’ve got a puker!’

  It took a few seconds to realize the screams weren’t coming from near by, but from farther off. By the crossroads, over by Mr Rhydd’s.

  Ross Wilcox must’ve marched back to the Goose Fair to find Dawn Madden right after I’d left him. (Dean’s sister Kelly filled in these missing pieces. She heard this bit from Andrea Bozard, who’d nearly got mown down by Wilcox as he passed by.) Ross Wilcox must’ve felt as saved as he’d just felt damned, I s’pose. Like Jesus, rolling the stone from his tomb when everyone’d thought he was a goner. ‘Sure, Dad,’ he’d be able to say, ‘here’s yer money. I kept it on me in case the pigs raided our house, like.’ First he’d find Dawn Madden, agree he’d been a dick-head, seal his apology with a fondling snog, and his world’d be the right way up again. Round the time me and Dean were being fastened into Silvestro’s teacup, Wilcox asked Lucy Sneads if she’d seen Dawn Madden. Lucy Sneads, who can be a nasty piece of work if the mood takes her, and who has some portion of responsibility for what happened next, helpfully told him. ‘Over there. In that Land Rover. Under the oak.’ Only two people’d’ve seen Ross Wilcox’s face, lit bright by Mary Poppins’ Merry-Go-Round, when he unpopped the flap on the back. One was Dawn Madden herself, her legs wrapped round the other witness. Grant Burch. Ross Wilcox, I imagine, gawped at the couple like a seal gawping at a seal-clubber. Ruth Redmarley told Kelly she saw Wilcox slam the Land Rover flap shut, howling ‘BITCH!’ over and over and banging the Land Rover with his fist. It must’ve hurt. Ruth Redmarley watched him then jump on Grant Burch’s brother’s Suzuki (the same scrambler that used to be Tom Yew’s), turn the keys, keys which Grant Burch’d left in the ignition ’cause it was right by the jeep (nobody’d steal it from under his nose, right?), and kick it into life. If Ross Wilcox hadn’t grown up around motorbikes ’cause of his dad and brother, it probably wouldn’t’ve occurred to him to nick the Suzuki. If it hadn’t started first time, even on a cold November night, Grant Burch might’ve managed to get his trousers on in time to stop what happened. Robin South reckons he saw Tom Yew on the back of the Suzuki as Wilcox fraped it over the village green, but Robin South’s so full of crap it’s untrue. Avril Bredon says she saw the Suzuki hit the muddy bit by the main road at about fifty miles per hour, and you can believe Avril Bredon. The police believed her. The bike slid round so the back faced front, clipped the Boer war memorial, and Ross Wilcox got cartwheeled over the crossroads. Two girls from the Chase comprehensive were phoning their dads from the phone box by Mr Rhydd’s. We won’t know their names till next week’s Malvern Gazetteer’s out. But the last person to see Ross Wilcox was Arthur Evesham’s widow, on her way home from bingo at the village hall. Ross Wilcox came bowling by and missed her by inches. She’s the one who knelt down by Ross Wilcox to see if he was dead or alive, the one who heard him grunt, ‘I think I lost a trainer,’ sputter out a bagful of blood and teeth, and garble, ‘Make sure no one nicks my trainer.’ Arthur Evesham’s widow’s the one who first saw Wilcox’s right leg stopped at his knee, looked back, and saw gobby smears streaking the road. She’s being helped into the second ambulance right now. See her face? Stony hollow in the flashing blue light?

  Disco

  Rule One is Blank out the consequences. Ignore this rule and you’ll hesitate, botch it and be caught like Steve McQueen on barbed wire in The Great Escape. That’s why, in metalwork this morning, I focused on Mr Murcot’s birthmarks like my life depended on it. He’s got two long ones on his throat in the shape of New Zealand. ‘Top of the morning, boys!’ Our teacher crashed his cymbals. ‘God save the Queen!’

  ‘The top of the morning, Mr Murcot,’ we chanted, turning towards Buckingham Palace and saluting, ‘and God save the Queen!’

  Neal Brose, standing by the vice he shares with Gary Drake, stared back at me. Don’t think I’ve forgotten, his eyes told me, Maggot.

  ‘Projectwards, boys.’ Half the class’re girls but Mr Murcot alw
ays calls us ‘boys’ unless he’s bollocking us. Then we’re all ‘girls’. ‘Today’s the final class of 1982. Fail to finish your projects today, and it’s transportation to the colonies for the terms of your natural lives.’ Our project this term was to design and make some sort of a scraper. Mine’s to clean between the studs on my football boots.

  I let about ten minutes go by, till Neal Brose was busy on the drill.

  My heart pumped fast, but I’d made up my mind.

  From Neal Brose’s black Slazenger bag I took out his Casio College Solar-powered Mathematical Calculator. It’s the most expensive calculator in WH Smith. A dark suction pulled me on, almost reassuringly, like a canoeist paddling straight at Niagara Falls instead of trying to fight the current. I took the prized calculator out of its special case.

  Holly Deblin’d noticed me. She was tying back her hair to stop it getting caught in the lathe. (Mr Murcot enjoys going over the hideous face-first deaths he’s witnessed over the years.) I think she likes us, whispered Unborn Twin. Blow her a kiss.

  I put Neal Brose’s calculator into the vice. Leon Cutler’d noticed too but just stared, not believing it. Blank out the consequences. I gave the rod-handle thing a strong turn. Tiny pleas snapped in the calculator’s casing. Then I put all my weight on the rod thing. Gary Drake’s skeleton, Neal Brose’s skull, Wayne Nashend’s backbone, their futures, their souls. Harder. The casing shattered, circuitry crunched, shrapnel tittered on the floor as the ten-millimetre-thick calculator turned into a three-millimetre-thick calculator. There. Powderized. Shouting’d broken out all over the metalwork room.

  Rule Two is Do it until it’s undoable.

  Those’re the only two rules you need to remember.

  Giddy glorious waterfalls, down I went.

  ‘Mr Kempsey informs me,’ Mr Nixon laced his fingers into a mace, ‘that your father recently lost his job.’

  ‘Lost’. Like a job’s a wallet you’ll lose if you’re careless. I hadn’t breathed a word at school. But yes, it’s true. Dad’d got to his office in Oxford at 8.55 a.m., and by 9.15 a.m. a security guard was escorting him off the premises. ‘We must tighten our belts,’ says Margaret Thatcher, though she isn’t, not personally. ‘There is no alternative.’ Greenland Supermarkets sacked Dad ’cause an expense account was £20 short. After eleven years. This way, Mum’d told Aunt Alice on the phone, they don’t have to pay Dad a penny in redundancy money. Danny Lawlor’d helped Craig Salt to stitch him up, she added. The Danny Lawlor I met last August was dead nice. But niceness isn’t goodness, I ’spose. Now he’s driving Dad’s company Rover 3500.