In four moves I was checkmated.
He put his hand out to shake. I swept the pieces onto the floor with my arm and then stormed out. I saw Boyle’s face as I left, puzzled, disappointed.
I wandered through the corridors for a few minutes, until the deputy head, Mr. Mordred, saw me.
“Outside, boy,” he bellowed. He liked his school to be as free of kids as possible. If he’d had his way, we wouldn’t be allowed in at all.
Outside I saw Shane and the freaks. It was easy to see them, because the playground was weirdly empty. Maddy was there, gazing out over the gypsy field. The wind moved her hair and she looked beautiful, and I hated her.
Billy caught my eye and waved, an idiot smile on his round stupid face. Shane glanced at me over his shoulder. Then Kirk spoke into his ear, and they laughed at something. I turned away and followed the line of the school building round a corner.
I knew who I was going to meet there. But it wasn’t just Roth, Bates and Miller. It was all the nutters and hard kids and a crowd of insignificant hangers-on. They were talking, joking, messing with each other. No one paid much attention when I joined them. But then Roth pushed his way through to me.
“Good lad, good lad,” he said, and cupped his palm around the back of my neck, drawing me in.
“I’ve got it,” I said, the words falling out of me.
“You didn’t need to tell me that,” said Roth, close, close. “I could see straightaway. Anyone could. You look like a man, you look like a … like a warrior.”
And because Roth treated me like his friend, I was everyone’s friend, suddenly a part of this seething mass of fist and muscle and sinew. It felt good. Before, thinking about Maddy and Shane had made me weak, but now I was strong. I felt like we could do anything.
Roth was talking.
“What we don’t want is for them to run for it. We want them all. We want them to learn. Every one of them. If they scatter, they’ll say it was nothing. They’ll say we didn’t win. We’ve got to take away that option.”
“But you can’t stop ’em from running,” said someone.
“We can.”
“Not if we’re on the gyppo field. They’ll see us and shit themselves and leg it.”
“Yeah, if we were all there. Course they would. That’s them all over. But what if we’re not all there? What if only some of us are there? At the beginning.”
“You got a plan, Rothie? You have, haven’t you!”
“They’ll come from up there.” Roth pointed across the gypsy field and up the hill. “They’ll cross the road and come over the field.”
“How do you know? What if they come the other way, along the road and round to the front?”
“Because they’ll see something.”
“What’ll they see?”
“Bait.”
Laughter then. The bright ones got it. The thick ones laughed because everyone else did.
“Bait, yeah, for the big fish. And how do you catch the big fish?”
“With a little fish.”
“Come on then, Rothie, spit it out.”
“OK, what we do is we get some kids to stand around in the field. All nice and smart in their blazers. That’ll lead ’em on. They’ll smell blood. They’ll just come charging straight over. They’ll think it’s Christmas. But they won’t see the rest of us, because we’ll be down by the beck. When they get past us, then up we jump. We’ll be behind them then, and there’s nowhere for them to run.”
He smashed his fist into his open palm. Hammer and anvil.
I could see that it was a good plan. The beck ran below the level of the field for most of the way, carving out a natural trench. Yeah, you could hide down there, waiting for the moment.
“But who’s gonna be the bait? Because, like, bait gets eaten, dunnit?”
Roth smiled, and his black eyes glittered.
“Heroes. Volunteers. None of the big lads. We need some kids with nerves. They’ve got to stand there while the Templars charge them.” Then he looked around at us, seeming to pause so that each kid felt his presence focused directly on him. “So we need some of you. There’ll be more coming for the fight, but we need some of you to steady them.”
Every kid there had imagined himself as part of the mob rearing up from the hidden beck, imagined the thrill of the charge, relished the shock and fear on the faces of their foes. But this was different. Waiting there while the Templars rushed upon them, praying that the others would come, but knowing that even if they did, then it might be too late.
Yes, bait gets eaten.
They shuffled and they looked at their feet.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Some cheers. Relief, I think.
“That’s it, that’s the way. Good lad.”
Roth held my shoulders and shook me. Part of me felt elated, proud. But another part, perhaps the coward part, perhaps the good part, my soul, recoiled. But Roth did not see that part, even though he had the ability to sniff out souls the way a pig sniffs out truffles.
“More, come on, more.”
And a few others said they would. Dumb, fierce little kids who weren’t afraid, or said they weren’t afraid. Our job was to stand with the sheep, the ordinary kids who would come along to the fight to enjoy the spectacle. The kind of kids who might join in if we looked like winning.
“OK,” said Roth, “let’s see who else wants to play.”
Then the crowd of us came from round the corner into the weak sunshine of the playground. Every face turned to meet us. Roth led the way, moving from one little group to the next, cajoling, enticing, persuading, threatening—whatever it took. And some kids joined in enthusiastically, glad to be called. And some were sullen, and some were afraid. But none were afraid of the future fight as much as they were afraid of the present Roth.
And then, at last, we came to Shane and the freaks. I’d seen them looking at us nervously as we made our way across the playground. Not Shane, of course. That little half-smile of his never left his lips. But Kirk looked like he had somewhere else he really needed to be, and fat Billy looked like he wanted to cry. I felt embarrassed that I’d ever wanted to be like them.
Roth stood in front of them. I was by his side.
“Any of these poofs up for it, you reckon?” said Roth.
“Nah,” said Bates. “They’ll be putting on their makeup. Then they might all have a little cry together.”
“Shut up.”
Of all people it was Serena who spoke up.
“Make me, you slut.”
Then Serena stepped forward as if she was going to do just that, and she looked pretty awesome, with her purple lips and black hair, like something out of a vampire movie, and Bates shrank back from her. But not Roth. He put his hand almost gently on her arm and moved her out of the way. Almost gently, I said, but she still ended up on the floor.
Then things happened fast. Shane, not smiling now, not smiling at all, ran at Roth. For a second my heart leaped with joy, even though I was with Roth now. Shane was going to diminish Roth, he was going to do some trick. He knew tae kwon do or jujitsu or some such shit. That was where he got that amazing inner calm from.
But it was what Roth wanted; wanted above all else. Because of course he had always hated Shane, hated his indifference and detachment, his aloofness. What he hated most of all was that Shane presented us with an alternative, a different way of being. Roth wanted us to believe that all there was in the world was the fist, and the face into which it smashed. You could be on the side of the fist and do the hurting, or on the side of the face, and be crushed. The hurter or the hurt: there was no third way. Shane had floated free from that world. But that had to stop. He had to be tethered. So yes, Roth been waiting for this moment, the moment to hurt.
And there was a grace in the way Roth did it, because, I suppose, to be what Roth was, to achieve what he had achieved, you need that ability to make your body do just what you want it to do, to move in ways that conform to you
r ideas of harmony and beauty.
His hand, his right hand, moved from somewhere close to his left knee in a sweeping backhand slap, except that “slap” doesn’t do justice to the meat and bone of it, and the flourish of the blow took his arm up and elegantly over his right shoulder. In memory, the blow must always follow its arc in slow motion, like the beating of a swan’s wing in a documentary. But back here in the real world it was all speed, the whip and zip of it humming in the air. And there must have been a crack as it landed, a sound like something precious breaking, but I can’t remember anything but that humming, and then the sight of Shane on his back, blood all over his face so you couldn’t even see which part of him was bleeding.
And I heard someone calling my name, and I looked down and it was Maddy, and tears were streaming down her face, and she was saying something to me, asking for help or something, and part of me was glad that she was being made to suffer, and then the shadow of Bates fell over her and he spat thickly in her hair.
I told Bates not to do that, but the voice was only in my head. And then I saw Roth’s face, its odd, satisfied vacancy as he stood over Shane, and then he began to fuss with the front of his trousers, and I remembered the Compson kid, and I knew what Roth was going to do. He was going to piss on Shane’s face, the way he’d pissed on Compson’s face.
Kirk and Stevie and Billy didn’t know what to do—whether to try to help Shane, or attack us, or run away in case they were next, and so they stood there, lost, watching, desolate, their hands making ineffectual movements, as if they were bothered by summer flies.
That’s when I found myself again, and I stepped forward, and I said, “No,” and put my hand on Roth’s arm. And Roth turned on me, his face losing that pleasant vacancy, beginning its transition through irritation to rage, because couldn’t I see that he was in the middle of something important here, part of the world’s education? And deep in my heart I quailed.
But I had a reason.
“Boyle,” I said, and nodded over his shoulder. The other kids all looked then, the Roth gang and the freaks. But not Shane.
Mr. Boyle was loping in our direction, his face red, his sparse beard bristling, the dirty tweed jacket flapping behind him like the wings of a hairy bat. The crowd scattered before him, kids flying in all directions. I didn’t see Roth run, but he too disappeared. I was left with Shane and the others. Serena and Maddy were bending over him, and the boys were still standing aimlessly, not knowing what to do.
“What’s …? Who …? What happened here?” Boyle looked around wildly, trying to understand what was going on.
“Don’t know, sir.”
I’m not sure who said it—one of the boys. It was the rule—the one rule nobody would break: you don’t talk.
Boyle knelt by Shane’s side, and took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his mouth. Shane’s eyes were open, and he looked beyond Boyle to me.
“Who did this?”
“I fell, sir,” said Shane, his voice wet and soft.
“Don’t be stupid, boy. I saw something was going on. But there were too many of them in the way. Come on, who hit you? We need to stop this. It only takes one person to speak out.”
But I knew Shane wouldn’t say who had done it, because not even the saints like Shane would break the rule. It wasn’t a rule like not chewing gum in class, but a law, a law of nature, like evolution or water boiling at 100 degrees. You don’t break those kinds of laws. They’re what we’re made of.
“I fell, sir.”
And Boyle looked away in despair. “You, Varderman, I’m asking you: what do you know about this?”
“I didn’t see anything, sir.”
I thought Boyle was going to burst. He uttered a series of spluttering noises, and then walked away, and then came back again and began helping Shane to get up.
“You’re as much to blame as the others,” he said to no one in particular. And then, in a softer tone, he added, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up. Then I’ll drive you to the emergency room and we’ll see if you need any stitches.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“No you’re not.”
And then the two of them went away across the playground, heading for the stinking sick bay with its bucket of sand and its broken dummy they used to teach mouth-to-mouth, and the first aid kit with its empty box of Band-Aids.
TWENTY-FOUR
Silence, then.
I looked at the group. Stevie hunched over, shriveled, like a dying sunflower; Billy, his eyes wet with unspilled tears, hopeless without anything to smile about; Kirk, his mouth tight, his jaw clenched; Serena looking like a little girl; Maddy.
Maddy, so filled up with hate that she seemed radiant with it, like the electric glowing wire in a bulb, and to look on her burned that hate into you, the way the image of the red wire writes itself on you so you can see it even on the inside of your eyelids.
And she walked calmly up to me, and I closed my eyes, but still her burning image was there, and she said a word, and then she spat in my face—not the thick phlegm of Bates, but the spraying spittle of someone who had never spat like that before—spitting as a message, I mean. And when I opened my eyes, they were gone and I was alone in the playground and the word echoed in my head.
Traitor.
Traitor.
Traitor.
The shadow over my shoulder is growing. I shouldn’t be worried about it, not with the hot tongue of metal flickering in front of me. The shadow is blunt. The shadow is soft. Blunt and soft cannot hurt. Blunt and soft cannot go into you. But the metal tongue goes into you as if you wanted it, as if that was what you’d always wanted, the tongue of it inside you. So why is the shadow making me afraid? Why is it pulling me away from the danger in front? And if my concentration slips, then the knife slips, closer. Oh God, closer.
TWENTY-FIVE
Billy found me in the library at lunchtime.
It took me a while to realize he was there. I’d been thinking about a time when I was small. Maybe six or seven, something like that. My parents had some friends who had kids the same age as me. We were having a picnic all together down in the gypsy field, which sounds mad, but on a sunny day it could be quite nice. There were a few places where the fold of the ground meant you couldn’t see any houses, and with the sound of the beck running in the background it almost felt like you were in the real countryside. We had ham sandwiches and sausage rolls and jam fritters, which were actually just jam sandwiches deep-fried in batter, but I loved them. I played in the beck with the other children. We had on jelly-shoes to guard against the broken glass and rusty wire, and we waded in the brown water while our parents drank beer and wine and got red faces in the sun.
There was a girl called Bethany who had the curliest hair you ever saw, and I remember holding her hand while she balanced on an old fridge that was thrown away in the beck, and the other children made fun of us for holding hands, but I didn’t mind because I liked Bethany and her curly hair.
And I think I was reaching out my hand to touch Bethany’s curly hair when Billy sat himself down heavily opposite me, filling the space I wanted to gaze into.
“I was looking for you,” he said in a heavy whisper, although there was no one else in the library.
“You found me.”
It was hard being unfriendly to Billy. But hard is what I’d become.
“Kirk told me.”
“Told you what?” I made my voice as empty as I could, and my eyes avoided his.
“What he did.”
“What makes you think I care what Kirk did?”
“Not just did—what he did to you.”
“Kirk didn’t do anything to me.”
“You think?”
“Kirk’s nothing to me. None of you are.”
“You don’t fool me. I saw what happened at break. You tried to hide it, but I saw.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Out there. I saw you stop Roth. He
was going to do something terrible, and you stopped him.”
“I just warned him that Boyle was coming.”
“No. That wasn’t it. I was watching. You stopped him first, then you saw Boyle. Boyle was just an excuse.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why should I care if Roth pissed on Shane, or any of you?”
“Will you listen to me? I know you’re not like this. We were together just now in the dining hall. We were all a bit shocked, you know, because of Shane. And Kirk was talking, the way he does. He said he saw you at the Odeon, waiting for Maddy. He said it was why you’d gone over to that lot, to the thugs.”
“I’m not listening to this.”
“You are listening. You’ve got to listen. He was taking the piss, saying what a loser you are. He said that’s why you turned against us, that’s why you became one of them, one of the shits, just because Maddy stood you up. He said that you’d shown what you were really like. Said we should never have let you in. And all the time Maddy had this look on her face, like What are you talking about? Then she said she’d never stood you up, that she couldn’t have, because she didn’t even realize you had a date.”
“I’m not saying we did.”
“But that’s what you thought, isn’t it? That’s why you were waiting around at the Odeon?”
I said nothing, but I couldn’t stop the shame from showing.
“Well, she hadn’t understood—whatever, I don’t know. But I’m telling you, she wasn’t faking. She didn’t stand you up. It was news to her that you two had a date. So then Kirk said you were a psycho and had imagined the whole thing, and that anyway Maddy was out of your league.”
“Yeah, well, thanks, Billy, that’s really cheered me up. Is that why you came here? Mission accomplished. Now get lost.”
“I haven’t finished yet. Because then that little Year Nine girl of his—Lucy, I think her name is—showed up with a plate of plain boiled rice ’cos that’s all she eats. And she sort of blurted out what Kirk had said, about Shane and Maddy screwing, and Kirk tried to shut her up. Then they had a row, and she said he was always going on about Maddy, and if she was so wonderful, why didn’t he go out with her? And he said, yeah, why not, so she stormed off, leaving her rice behind. But we’d twigged by then. It was all Kirk. He’d said it all out of spite.”
The Knife That Killed Me Page 11