The Knife That Killed Me

by Anthony McGowan

  I think I know what he was getting at, what he was worried about. I’m pretty sure my dad was worried that I might be gay, and my face was something to do with that. I really hated him thinking I was gay. It made my insides churn. My dad still thought that there was something dirty about being gay, and that if I was gay then I was dirty. And the thing is, he was so frightened about it that he could never ask me. All he could do was make remarks.

  I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I didn’t want the rest of my sandwich.

  “I’m off to bed,” I said. I felt sick and angry inside, but also so tired I could hardly get my mouth to work.

  “But I’ve made you some tea. Two sugars.”

  I thought that maybe I should storm off and slam the door. It was what any decent teenager would have done. But, like I said, my dad wasn’t so bad. It was just that he had no idea. It was just that everything had been easy for him. And I was too tired for storming anywhere.

  “OK, Dad,” I said, my face a mask, “I’ll take it up with me.”

  “Don’t spill it on the stairs, son. That carpet’s—”

  I think he was going to say “new,” but then he must have remembered that it was ten years old if it was a day.

  FOURTEEN

  I’m good at not thinking about things. I feel them rising up in me and then I push them down, the way you do with rubbish in the bin. Some people might say that not thinking about things is a bad idea. But what’s the point? What am I supposed to do about someone like Roth, or Goddo, or any of them?

  On the way to school I wasn’t thinking about anything, except the scrunched Coke can I was kicking. I knew there’d be a gang of kids at the school gates, but I always just walked through them and I hardly ever got bothered. All you have to do is keep looking down, making sure you don’t catch an eye.

  So I was doing that, my attention on the ground. It’s amazing how interesting tarmac can be. Then I felt a hand on my chest.

  “Should watch where you’re going. Might bump into something. Might do yourself some damage.”

  Bates.

  Then a deeper voice.

  “Paul, come here.”

  Roth.

  I looked up. Roth was leaning against the open school gate. Miller cringed and capered beside him. I felt a rush of hatred for him—Miller, I mean; even more than for Roth. I suppose it’s because you always hate the one right above you in the order of things, not the one at the top.

  “What do you want?” I said, meaning to look Roth in the eye. But it was impossible. My eyes slid off his face like a greasy fried egg sliding off a plate. But still, even if I couldn’t meet his black eyes, it wasn’t the kind of thing you said to Roth. What you said to Roth was “Yes.”

  Miller’s laugh cut the cold morning air, high and mocking. Except it didn’t have the brains in it to mock. Just a noise. Did Roth’s blank expression change? I don’t know, maybe just a flicker of something. A smile, perhaps, or a sneer, or a grimace.

  He beckoned to me and repeated, “Come here.” There was no obvious threat in his voice. There didn’t have to be. Without even meaning to, I acted on his words. Before I reached him, Roth sprang forward from the gate. I flinched, expecting a punch or worse. But all I felt was his arm around my shoulders again, heavy as a corpse. He shunted me away from the gates and the mob of kids there, down toward the beck. Miller and Bates followed.

  “You deliver my little surprise then?” he whispered, deafeningly, into my ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “To Goddo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Goddo himself, not one of his mates?”

  “Yeah.”

  Roth waited, his face expectant. I didn’t say anything.

  “And …?”

  “And what?”

  Roth had taken his arm from around me. Now he looked me full in the face. For the first time ever there was something juvenile, unsure, about him.

  “Listen, Varderman, I’ve gone easy on you. Stuff you’ve done, stuff you said, well, it could have got you in trouble. But I always thought you had something. Thought you and me could have been mates. Thought we understood each other. But if you’re messing with me …”

  “You could have got me killed. They had a knife.”

  My voice cracked when I said “knife.” Miller laughed. Roth flicked out sideways with his hand and caught him full in the mouth. Miller went down, holding his face.

  “Shut it!” said Roth, not even looking at Miller. “Varderman’s right. He did us a job. Went behind enemy lines. More. Went into the den of the beast. And he came back. Gets some respect for that. All right?”

  The movement had been minimal, but getting hit by Roth was never a joke, and Miller was on his knees, rocking and weeping silently.

  “I said all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry, sorry.”

  I stopped hating Miller. For a while.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I did what you said. I found Goddo in the sports ground. Gave him the box. He was with his mates. They opened it.”

  “Yeah? Yeah?”

  Roth was so excited he was almost drooling. He was watching me the way a drunk looks at a bottle.

  “When they found it …”

  “What? Go on.”

  I replayed the scene in my head. Goddo’s horror, the near insanity of his reaction. I could have told Roth that, but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure.

  “He thought it was funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “Yeah. He said he’d been trying to get rid of the dog.”

  Roth turned to Bates. “You told me he loved that dog. You said he lived for it.”

  “Yeah, Roth, he did. Everyone knew that. Loved it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “He didn’t seem that bothered to me,” I said.

  “Well, how come you said you could have been killed then? You said they had a knife.”

  “Just because Goddo wasn’t bothered about his dog doesn’t mean he didn’t know what you were trying to do.”

  Roth thought for a while. “You did all right. Thought you’d have run before they got you. Didn’t mean them to hurt you.” He touched the plaster on my cheek. “What’s under there?”

  Then I told him what Goddard did with the dog’s head. I kept it straight, didn’t bother adding anything about the stink of it or anything like that. I think it reached him. I think he felt something. I don’t mean sorry about what he’d caused, or sympathy for me. What he felt was that this was an affront to him. They’d put a dead dog’s jaws around my face, and that meant they’d done it to him.

  “You did all right,” he said yet again, nodding.

  I felt that something had changed. Somehow I’d come over. I was with him. I mean, that’s what he thought.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he said.

  Miller was off the floor by now, and he and Bates were close beside us. Roth reached into his jacket. I felt excited. I didn’t want to, but that’s how it was.

  What was really weird was that this was the only time I’d ever even tried to stand up to Roth—I mean, by telling him the lie about Goddo—and yet I’d somehow found myself closer to him. It was like the bad dream where there’s a monster chasing you, and you feel its breath on your neck, but then suddenly you find that it’s standing right in front of you, and rather than running from it you’ve run to it.

  “Put your hand out.”

  I opened my palm.

  And then it was there on my hand.

  Heavy, solid, slick, perfect.

  It was twenty centimeters long. The handle was dark wood, with a polished brass guard where the grip joined the blade. And what a blade. The underside curved smoothly to a drawn-out tip, the line of it leaf-soft, like a living thing. The top of the blade echoed the underside at its tip, but then lost that gentle curving form to become a row of violent sharp teeth. The teeth drew my thumb, and I caressed the line of serrations the way you’d tease and ru
ffle the fur on a cat’s neck.

  I knew what they were for. You could catch another blade in those teeth and hold or break it. And if you sank the blade into a soft belly, then the teeth would multiply the harm, turn a cut into a vacant ragged mouth, spewing out its life in a red fountain.

  For a few seconds nothing existed in the world except for the knife and me. No, narrower than that. The knife, the hand that held it, the eye that drank in its beauty. Nothing else was left of me.

  “Nice, eh?”

  I stirred myself. Nice?

  “Yeah.”

  “Now, you put that away. You don’t talk about it, you don’t show it. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Something else.” Roth came close to me again, intimate, confiding. His huge face filled the world, the way the moon sometimes seems to take up the whole sky. “Something you’ll understand. Not something for these … apes here, these baboons. You have this, and there’s nothing, no one you ever need to be afraid of. You get it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “That’s not all I’m saying. You see, because you’re not afraid, you don’t need to hate. That’s the beautiful thing about it.” A smile spread across his face like a tear in the universe. It was one of the most terrible things I’d ever seen, that smile, those small white teeth, each one separate. “And if you don’t hate, then you’re happy. You get it? Yeah? You with me?” And his eyes were moist, shining with the joy and beauty of what he was saying.

  Roth was so close to me now I could feel his breath. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but that was more because I was still living in the knife. But I nodded, longing to get away from him, longing to be alone with the knife. It was only later that I realized that Roth was insane.

  “Here, and put it in this,” he said, holding out a black leather sheath. “So you don’t stab yourself in the nuts.”

  Harsh laughter from Bates and Miller, the Apes of Roth.

  FIFTEEN

  That was a strange morning. No one knew about the knife except for Roth and Bates and Miller and me, and yet I felt as though the whole school was treating me differently. Suddenly I had respect. People held doors open for me rather than letting them slam in my face. Nobody barged into me in the corridors or hit the back of my head so my face clanged against the wall above the urinal. When I said things in class, the teacher listened. I even felt taller, as if the figures around me were stooped and cringing.

  It was all because of the knife. I could feel its weight in my inside pocket. I kept putting my hand in to caress it. Or I’d deliberately flap my blazer so I could feel its solid mass clunk against my chest, beating against the beating of my heart.

  I was still in a dream at morning break. Without thinking about it, I wandered over and joined the freaks in the playground. It was cold and gray, and they were shoulder to shoulder against the world.

  “Hey, Paul.”

  It was Billy, the fat one. His eyes completely disappeared when he smiled.

  “Hi, Billy.”

  I saw that Shane and Maddy Bray weren’t there, but Kirk (the Shane-alike, the Shane-lite) and the purple-lipped Serena were, and Stevie the silent one, like a wand of black bamboo.

  From his body language I guessed that Kirk had been in the middle of some routine, and he wasn’t exactly delighted to see me. He tried carrying on with whatever he’d been saying: “… and you can download it for nothing, literally nothing, if you go Bit Torrent …,” something like that. But he’d lost their interest, assuming he ever had it. So then he said to me, “Saw you talking to Roth earlier on. Thought you’d learned your lesson.”

  The others looked at me sharply. How could I have gone back to Roth after the horror of the night before?

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have much choice.”

  “Still, you ought to stay away from him. Unless you like getting snogged by a dead dog.”

  He snorted out a quick laugh at his own joke, but stopped when he saw that the others weren’t taking it up.

  “He knows that,” said Billy, cutting in. Then he added hopefully, “Don’t you, Paul?”

  I nodded. And then I said, looking at Kirk, “But he doesn’t bother you much, does he?”

  It was something I’d noticed. True, everyone hated the freaks, but Roth himself never seemed to give them any of his special attention. It was as if they didn’t quite register with him. Once or twice I’d seen him gazing in a vague way to where they stood, his eyes unfocused, maybe thinking he ought to do something about them, put in some personal, hands-on persecution, rather than letting the lightweights and no-marks do the job. But then he’d give his head a little shake and move on to some other project.

  You could spin that a couple of ways. Either the freaks were so insignificant he didn’t have to bother with them, or he felt threatened by their strangeness, worried that maybe his weapons wouldn’t work against them. I suppose there was a third option—he just hadn’t got around to them yet.

  I can’t say precisely why, but I knew that saying that, about Roth not bothering them, would get to Kirk. It undermined the freaks’ role as victims, made them less like a gang of Jesuses, more like a bunch of nerds.

  “We’re not exactly best mates, though,” he said, his eyes wandering along the horizon, like he was searching for something way off. Trying to look deep.

  And just at that moment I saw a ball flying toward us, kicked by one of the mob of Year Eight kids who were playing a cross between football and the Second World War. They’d probably seen it happen the day before and thought how clever it was, belting the ball at the losers. The ball was one of those half-sized ones of silvered leather, and quite heavy. Hurt if they get you in the face. If it had been heading toward Kirk, I’d probably have let it fly on. But it wasn’t. It would have hit Serena. And so I caught it. The other freaks had seen it at the last second, and they were all flinching, some throwing their hands up, others cowering down. For some reason the image froze in my head, as if I’d taken a photo of it. They were like a great black spider, legs and arms at crazy angles. Or like the victims of an explosion.

  But I caught the ball, and it must have looked quite cool. There was a disappointed sigh from the Year Eights. One of them, not the one who’d kicked it, came up and demanded that I give him his ball back. Yesterday I would have done.

  “Nice ball,” I said, and began to hand it to him. But then I whipped it away and gave it a massive punt, out over the school fence, over the beck and into the gypsy field beyond, where it bounced a couple of times in the furrows and rucks of the rough grass, and then bobbled out of sight.

  The Year Eight kid looked at me, his mouth open. He had close-cropped hair and his ears were scabby and septic from a piercing that had gone tragically wrong.

  “What was that for?”

  “I felt like it. Next time it’s your head.”

  You could see the confusion in his eyes. These were the freaks, he was thinking, you can kick your ball at them and that’ll be funny, and all they’ll do is tut at you and then move further away. They don’t kick your ball into the gypsy field. They don’t talk to you like they’re not scared.

  And then he trudged off on the long walk out of school, following the road over the beck and round to the gypsy field. It was a good job he was only a scabby Year Eight midget.

  “That was awesome,” said Billy, in the space after the kid had gone.

  “I thought it was a bit mean.”

  That was Shane. He’d appeared unnoticed in all the action. Maddy was with him.

  “But they kicked the ball at us,” I said, annoyed that he hadn’t appreciated what I’d done. “You always let them, and so they keep on doing it. It’s like Hitler.”

  Everyone laughed at that. I suppose it was a bit of an exaggeration. But that made me want to carry on with it.

  “No, I mean it. Like when they didn’t stand up to him in the nineteen thirties and so he just carried on getting worse.”

  “A
ppeasement,” said Kirk, to show he knew the word.

  Well, I knew the word as well. It was war. It was my subject.

  “So why didn’t you thump him then?” said Shane. “You’re bigger than him, the kid who wanted his ball back. You should have really taught him a lesson.”

  It took me a second to realize that he was being sarcastic. Normally when people are being sarcastic you can tell, because they use a special sarcastic voice and even wear a special sarcastic face. But Shane just said it in his normal voice, and his face was his normal face.

  It was my turn to be confused now, and I felt just like the Year Eight kid had looked.

  “I didn’t want to hit him. I just wanted him to … I don’t know … be more careful.”

  I felt terrible. And I also felt that I shouldn’t be feeling terrible. What I’d done wasn’t that bad. I’d kicked the ball, not the kid. That made me annoyed with Shane. Who did he think he was to act as my conscience? I began to turn away, my shoulders hunching up around my ears. Then I felt Shane’s hand on my arm.

  “How’s that face of yours?”

  And that was it, all trace of criticism was gone, and I was grateful he’d even remembered that I’d been hurt.

  Sucker.

  I sat at their table for lunch. Serena had brought in a salad made of seeds and bits of weird-shaped lettuce, and Stevie Stick Boy just drank a Coke. But the others had normal food. When I asked Stevie if that was all he was having—the Coke, I mean—he said that he could only eat when it was dark. And then Kirk said it was because he was a vampire, and Shane said not to be a dick because vampires didn’t drink Coke and anyway it was the middle of the day right now, so if Stevie was a vampire he’d be burning, wouldn’t he? Then they got on to talking about vampires in general, which was a big thing with them. Shane said it was funny how vampires, meaning Dracula in particular, came to be seen as aristocrats, counts and stuff, because originally they’d just been shambling peasants, and he said it was all down to Byron, or rather his doctor, whose name I can’t remember, who wrote a story about a posh vampire, which was really meant to be Byron. I was a bit lost in all this, and I think Shane knew it, because then he explained that two hundred years ago Byron was not only the most famous poet, but the most famous human being in England, and that he had a clubfoot and he got off with everyone, including choirboys and his own sister. And his wife divorced him because he tried to do something to her so filthy that she could never even talk about it. So it meant that his doctor’s story—the one about the vampire—became really famous really quickly, and that’s how the idea of the posh vampire took hold.