The Knife That Killed Me

by Anthony McGowan

  I thought that was all quite interesting, even if none of them could tell me exactly what a clubfoot was, which is something I wanted to know. What was strange is how it didn’t seem strange, all that talk. It wasn’t as if I normally spent my meal times talking about vampires and dead poets, and so it should have freaked me out. But it didn’t.

  The other thing was that I forgot about the knife.

  Then, at the end, I was stretching to get my bag from under the table, and I touched Maddy’s hand by accident. I said sorry, and she smiled at me again. Number five. Then I stretched further, trying to reach my bag, and something fell out of my blazer pocket. Like I said, I’d completely forgotten about the knife, and it took me a second to realize what had happened. It clunked on the tiles, still in its leather sheath. Maddy picked it up for me, not thinking.

  And then she saw properly what it was, and she held it out on her palm, her eyes wide.

  “What the hell …?” said Kirk.

  I snatched the knife and looked around at my new friends. They all appeared stunned. And something else. Impressed, maybe? Amused, slightly? I don’t know.

  Except Shane. He looked utterly blank. I couldn’t face him.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, to no one in particular, and then I bolted.

  Although my eyes are on the knife and the hand that holds the knife, I become aware of something behind me. A shadow. A presence. But it is soft and blunt and it cannot hurt me. So I dismiss it. Everything must reach forward, all my mind must be focused on the knife, on the boy.

  SIXTEEN

  A few days later I saw it happen.

  Those days had been good. I’d been hanging out with Shane and his gang. For the first time since going to that school I felt like part of something. I wasn’t really a full member of their gang, and I hadn’t turned freak, not really. But I had changed. I looked a bit different, and I was thinking about things I hadn’t thought about before. About the world and what was wrong with it—not just the tiny bit of it that I was in, but the whole world. When I walked, I didn’t always keep my head down. I hadn’t got up the courage to talk to Maddy much, but she didn’t seem to mind if I stood near her in the playground or sat next to her at lunch.

  It wasn’t all good. Kirk didn’t like me, and quite often he’d make sure the talk went in a direction I couldn’t follow. But Kirk was only one kid. And I knew from experience that getting snubbed was a hell of a lot better than getting punched.

  Anyway, the next Wednesday afternoon I was in the science lab on the third floor. The sinks there overlook the back of the school. Out that way you first have a small square of playground, then the big rectangle of the all-weather field, then the fence and the school gates, and then a building that used to be a social club but is now a nothing, a shell like a rotten tooth. There’s always graffiti on the walls of the club. Body parts, names, swearwords—all that. I once thought that I should do it too—make my mark on the wall, I mean. I bought a can of white spray paint and sneaked out late. But then, when I reached the club and stood in front of the wall, I couldn’t think of anything to write. I shook the can so it made that rattling noise, but nothing else. I didn’t have a nickname I could spray, and there wasn’t a girl I fancied, not then. I didn’t want to write the name of a crappy football team, and I didn’t want to copy the other things scrawled there, the f-words and the c-words and the ugly pictures. I was as empty as the social club. So I threw the can into the gypsy field and went home again.

  But now, looking out over the back of the school, I saw that some kid was doing what I hadn’t been able to do. I couldn’t make out what he was spraying, but there was no mistaking that combination of sweeping arm movements and quick little steps.

  Words.

  I watched him for as long as it took me to wash out my test tube, not thinking much about who he was or what he was writing. I didn’t even point it out to the kids on either side of me.

  I’d forgotten about it by going-home time. But then I saw the crowd. I remember in junior school, we had some tadpoles. Someone had found a jellied mass of spawn in the beck, which was a miracle, because nothing was supposed to live in there except rats and thick green scummy weed. We fed them with a little piece of meat tied to some string. It took the tadpoles a while to realize that it was dinnertime, but then they’d all swim over to the meat. What happened then wasn’t really what you’d expect. They wouldn’t go mad, like sharks having a feeding frenzy. No, they’d all gather round the meat, shoulder to shoulder, nudging closer but hardly moving. Sometimes one would wriggle for a few seconds, but then go back to the patient nudging and crowding. You couldn’t really see them eat because their mouths were too small.

  The kids gathered around the wall were like that, all pressing forward, some wriggling, but mainly just this concentrated, passive attention.

  I was with a kid called Emmery. He wasn’t really a friend of mine, but we sometimes walked home together because he lived in the same street. Emmery was a bit gormless, but all right apart from that. He had to get another kid to do his tie after PE, and he wore slip-on shoes to get around the problem of laces.

  “Something going on,” he said.

  “Looks like it. I think I saw someone spraying on the wall earlier.”

  “A kid?”

  “Yeah, but not one of ours, I don’t think.”

  “Was it another thingy?”

  Emmery laughed, a moist, slightly mental laugh. He was talking about last year, when a really big dirty picture appeared on the wall. It was famous for a while.

  “Dunno.”

  We joined the back of the crowd.

  “What does it say?”

  Emmery could read, just, but the writing was too scraggy for him.

  It was about Roth.

  It was really bad.

  It said things about him—about what he liked to do, about what he liked having done to him. I wanted to laugh. I wasn’t the only one. The crowd of kids thrummed with a sort of suppressed glee. But no one was going to show it, not with Roth himself standing there in front of the wall.

  He was looking at the writing. I could see half of his face, and his jaw was clamping and loosening, clamping and loosening. Other than that it showed nothing. Miller and Bates were with him. They looked nervous, glancing from Roth to the wall to the kids in the crowd. I had no idea how it was going to end. In a way I didn’t want it to. It was the best thing that had happened since I came to this crappy school.

  Then a little kid pushed to the front of the crowd, elbowing his way through and raising a protesting cloud of tuts around him. It was the same squirt who’d come to get the ball from me that day. He read the writing on the wall to himself, his lips moving silently. Then he began to smirk. Then smile. Then his whole face lit up into a huge grin. And finally the laughter poured out of him in a frothing, bubbling waterfall.

  Either he hadn’t seen Roth, or he didn’t know who he was. Roth didn’t bother much with the younger kids, same as he didn’t bother with the freaks, so it was possible the kid just didn’t make a connection between the name on the wall and the brooding monster next to him.

  Big mistake.

  The next thing that happened was pretty obvious. That first laugh was enough to set the whole crowd off. Someone spluttered, then in a great rush we were all laughing and screaming like a load of baboons. It was a real moment of freedom and release. I don’t know how well I’ve got across to you how our school wasn’t a happy place. It was a place where you always felt like there was a belt around your chest, tightening, squeezing, and another weight on your head, keeping you bowed down, eyes to the ground. But in a second those two weights—the one around the chest, the one on the head—were gone, and our souls soared up on those clouds of laughter. I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming from my eyes. I know it’s one of those things you say, I laughed till I cried, but I really did, wiping away the tears with the rolled-back cuffs of my jumper. And for once we were united together, and
it felt good and strong, and Roth seemed smaller compared to us, no longer a creature out of our nightmares, but just a bully and, like all bullies, helpless when his victims stood together.

  It couldn’t last.

  Roth was slow to act, but when he moved, he was like a predatory beast. He spun and grabbed the kid, lifted him up. Had one hand on his throat, the other on the scruff of his neck. So the kid was choked at the front, yanked at the back. His laughter stopped, and his face took on a look of bemusement, followed by the agony of the grip, and then, as the reality of his situation dawned, the terror of what would follow. And our laughter stopped too, as if we’d been turned off with a switch, and we were no longer together, but alone.

  “Funny, eh? Yeah, funny.”

  Roth spoke quietly, but everyone could hear him. The kid made a gurgling sound. It was the sound that comes with death in bad films.

  “Trouble is, it’s a bit of a mess. Doesn’t look good. Ought to clean it up, really. Give us a hand, eh? Yeah?”

  Then he did something grotesque—I mean, even by his standards. He made the kid’s head nod, the way you sometimes see children make their dolls or teddies nod when they talk to them. The kid’s face was rigid and waxy with horror.

  “Good boy. That’s it.”

  And then Roth lifted up the face of the kid and put it to the rough brick of the wall.

  “Let’s give it a clean, yeah, eh?”

  The kid made a wailing sound, maybe the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard. His legs, like the legs of a hanged man, began to thrash in the air. I wanted to do something, but like the rest of the crowd I was paralyzed by the evil before us. Not just the fear of it, but the spectacle itself. Evil as a circus.

  “That won’t work.”

  Shane.

  Doing his trick of appearing from nowhere.

  Roth, still holding the kid, slowly turned his black gaze on Shane. “What?”

  How much hatred can you get into an innocent word? No, not hatred. Some place beyond hatred, because hatred can burn off or burn out or lose itself in the passage of time. This was something ancient, immortal. This was the mouth that comes up from the deep to eat you, the mouth that has been eating you for a hundred million years, the mouth that will never stop eating you.

  “It’ll still be there. Worse than that. All you’ll do is draw attention to it. People will point to it, say that’s where you mashed that kid into the wall.”

  The voice was cool, light; serious, but amused. Each word formed and perfect. I wished it was my voice. My voice slurred and stumbled and got muddled. Shane’s words were like pebbles he’d found on the beach, beautiful and shiny, and all he had to do was hold them out in his hand.

  Then there was a movement and Shane lurched forward, slapping against the wall. It was Bates. He’d flung himself into Shane’s back. Miller made his whooping laugh, but it lacked mirth, lacked conviction. Everything about it was crap—the cowardice, the timing.

  “Yeah, very brave,” said Shane, a little smile on his face. I noticed then that there was something in his hand. “Doesn’t help you much, though, does it?” he said to Roth.

  Roth stared back at him, the kid still hanging like a rabbit in his hands.

  “But me, I can fix it.”

  “What?”

  That was a different “what.” Puzzled now, interested.

  “Shall I?” said Shane, holding up what was in his hand.

  It was a spray-paint can.

  Roth grunted.

  Then Shane stepped up to the wall, to the writing. The letters were crude and spaced.

  He sprayed.

  Roth grunted again.

  Someone in the crowd laughed. A new laugh, this one. Not the release of hysteria we’d heard before. This was a laugh of satisfaction, of us against them. And the them was the teachers. The laughter became general.

  Shane had done something simple. He had turned Roth into Rothman. Rothman taught history. Nobody cared much about Mr. Rothman. His voice was high and quavery, and he threatened a lot, but he never delivered. If you had to put a word to what most people thought about Rothman, you’d probably hit on “contempt.” And now his name was up there instead of Roth’s. It was Mr. Rothman, schoolteacher, who was said to do those things, to like having those things done to him.

  And Shane had done a good job. The scrawl exactly matched the original. It didn’t matter that we all knew it was meant to be Roth. It now said Rothman, so Rothman was what it meant.

  Roth dropped the kid. He scuttled away on all fours, too frightened to stand up straight. All the time Roth’s eyes never left Shane. Now he nodded. Shane met his eyes. He nodded back.

  People drifted away, reluctantly at first, worried in case they should miss something, but soon there was just Shane and me and the kid, who was squatting on his haunches against the wall. I don’t know where the rest of the freak gang were.

  “You OK?” Shane took the kid by the hand, pulled him up gently. “What’s your name?”

  “Skinner.”

  “I don’t mean your surname. What’s your first name?”

  “Kevin.”

  “Well, Kevin, you’re a lucky kid.”

  The boy looked up at Shane. His eyes were glistening. His lips formed words, but I didn’t hear, and I don’t know if it was some kind of thanks or a mumbled curse, because sometimes you hate the people who help you. Either way, the kid was up and running and lost in the streets of redbrick houses.

  SEVENTEEN

  Afterward Shane looked dead, like some creature washed up on the shore.

  “You want to come back to mine?” he said, his voice sounding like it was coming from another room in a big house.

  And the two of us walked there, hardly speaking, but our shoulders touched and our feet were in step. At the end of his road Shane stopped, and I stopped with him.

  “That knife …”

  No one had mentioned the knife since I’d dropped it. I’d thought of all kinds of excuses, all sorts of reasons. But I wasn’t going to lie now.

  “Roth … he made me take it.”

  “You know, you can’t hang out with us if you’ve got a knife. It’s just not cool.”

  “I know. I didn’t want it. I’ll chuck it.”

  That was it. That was all. I needed someone to tell me what to do, and Shane had.

  At his house we went straight down to the basement. Stevie was there. I was disappointed for a moment.

  “Hey,” he said. Then, “What’s up?”

  I looked at Shane, thinking he would tell the story. But he just sat down, saying nothing. So I told it. The words poured out of me. I’ve never been a good talker, but now it was as if I’d been waiting all my life for this. I told about the graffiti, and the crowd, and Roth champing away like he was eating souls, and the kid and the laughter, and the horror of Roth treating him first like a puppet and then like a dish rag, and about Shane saving his life. I know that was an exaggeration, but it seemed right. I imagined the kid’s head worn to a bloody stump after scouring the brick.

  All the way through Shane looked down at his trainers, moving his head sometimes, as if he was going to disagree with something, but he never said a word. At the end there was silence. I was worn out with the telling, and Stevie was stunned.

  “You want to play a game or something?” Shane said into the void, meaning his Xbox. We shook our heads. Another pause.

  “Spliff?”

  Stevie nodded. “Yeah, maybe—if there was ever a time, I mean, it’s now.”

  I felt a little surge of excitement. I’d never taken anything. Mainly because of that kid who died after he sniffed a can of lighter fluid. I know it’s not the same, but it sort of put me off.

  Shane reached under the old settee and came out with a tin. The tin had two cigarettes in it, a packet of rolling papers and a plastic wrap of brown resin.

  Shane looked at me. Maybe my face was letting on that this was new, that this was something I didn’t know how to deal w
ith.

  “It’s not skunk or anything,” he said.

  “Doesn’t your mum … you know?”

  “She’s OK. As long as it’s just this.”

  He rolled the joint as he spoke, breaking up one of the cigarettes for the tobacco. His fingers trembled slightly.

  “Want me to do it?” said Stevie, looming over, tall even when he was sitting down.

  “What?” Shane’s voice was sharp and aggressive. Not Shane’s voice at all.

  “Just thought …”

  “Well, don’t think.”

  Stevie looked down. His face was red.

  Shane finished the joint, lit it with a disposable lighter, inhaled deeply and sank back into the settee. Three big hits later he passed it to Stevie, along with a look that said sorry for the harsh words. He could do a lot with a look.

  The smell from the joint was heavy and sweet and sickly, and I felt a quick spasm of nausea. Stevie took a couple of drags and held it out to me. I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t want to smoke the joint, but I wanted to be part of it, part of them.

  “Have you not …?” said Stevie, sensing my reluctance. “It’s cool, you know. I don’t mean doing it, I mean not doing it. Don’t do stuff you don’t want to do. That’s the rule.”

  That was the longest speech I’d heard him make. If he’d pushed it harder, I’d probably have pushed back. But now he’d made it seem like I had a choice, which meant I had to give it a go. I took the joint. I’d never even smoked a cigarette, so I had no idea what to do with my breath. I sucked, and the sticky smoke filled my mouth. It didn’t get any further. I exploded into a cough, my eyes watering, my head spinning.