“Hey!” he yelled. “Careful!”
“Piss off home,” I said. And the kid, without saying thanks, ran scampering away, tripping and falling a couple of times in the rough grass. And then, when he felt safe, he turned, screamed a curse, and threw up his fingers at me in a frenzy of Vs.
I suppose I should have been offended or angry or something, but I found myself smiling at first and then laughing so much I almost fell over on my way back across the beck.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The other kids all looked at me like I was mad when I came out of the beck. Understandable, really, as I was draped in pondweed and coated with green scum, laughing, dripping, stinking from the mud and filth. But they were also afraid. I looked beyond them and saw why. The Templars were now only about five hundred meters away. They’d come off the road and were on the gypsy field. I couldn’t see their faces properly, but I could sense their pumped-up frenzy, and their unity, and their battle joy.
Some of them had taken off their ties and wrapped them, bandana-like, around their heads. It sounds stupid now, but it had an effect on us. It was creepy and savage, and it made me think that maybe Roth was right about them being barbarians.
“Take it easy, boys,” I said, feeling the fear and the nervousness of the kids around me. “Just stay together and we’ll be OK. Keep to your lines. You big lads in front, the little ones behind. Keep tight. It’s fine—they’ll never reach us. Remember, Roth’s just over there. He’s watching. He can see them. He’ll be here.”
I was babbling, but I thought words would help.
And now we heard them for the first time, a ragged shouting, not yet the single voice of the mob, but individuals yelling insults.
How many?
So many.
At least fifty of them. And it wasn’t like our lot. Our lot might amount to almost fifty, but over half were waifs and strays. The kids in the Temple Moor mob looked huge, not like boys at all, but men.
Closer now, and I could see Goddo leading them. I felt the boys on either side of me bunch closer. Roth said that they would charge straight across the gypsy field as soon as they saw us, but they didn’t do that. They came quite slowly. Perhaps Goddo suspected something. Perhaps he was just enjoying it so much he wanted it to last.
A hundred meters away, they stop. Goddo is talking to his mob. He raises his arms as if he’s trying to calm them down. And he walks ahead of the others, toward us.
He’s close enough now for me to see his eyes. And for him to see mine. There is the moment of recognition, and then he smiles, the smile huge, open, almost friendly.
“Hey, it’s the messenger boy!”
The others who were with him back in the park begin to laugh and point. Then Goddo becomes serious.
“Who are these … children you’re with, messenger boy?”
And so I’m going to have to speak. No one told me that I would have to speak. It isn’t why I’m here.
But I speak.
“Why don’t you go back, Goddo? You don’t belong down here. If you go now, there won’t be any trouble.”
“Good words, messenger boy. But you know why I’m here. And it isn’t for you and these beck rats. Where is he?”
Where indeed? The Temple Moor kids aren’t close enough for the trap to close. Roth is waiting, waiting, still dangling us, the bait, before the jaws.
“We’re not here to fight you,” I say.
“I can see that,” laughs Goddo. “You won’t be doing any fighting. You might do some hurting, but not fighting. Where’s the man? Tell me the truth.”
I don’t know what makes me turn round then. I must have heard something, but I can’t remember it now. But I turn and see, of all people, Kirk, my enemy, standing on the far side of the beck. He looks back at me and smiles. There is something in his hand. Beyond him I can see other figures coming, a tall one, a fat one, but then I focus on Kirk again. The thing in his hand: half a brick. He looks at me, an enigmatic smile on his lips. And then he draws back his hand and throws the brick. I flinch, thinking he’s throwing the brick at me. But it sails high over my head.
I spin back to the Temple Moor kids. The brick descends. It’s a good shot. It hits the boy next to Goddo in the head. He falls, his hands to his face, red blood flowing between his fingers.
What happens next is sometimes fast and sometimes slow and sometimes both at the same time. There is a roar. The whole mass of them now swell and surge and boil toward us, like the billowing hot ash and gas from a volcano. There is a sort of frightened scream from the children around me, and I feel them cringe toward me, as if I can save them. I glance quickly behind me, and see Kirk running, safe on his side of the stream. And then I look over to the hidden Roth and his battalions. And yes, at last, they are coming too, jumping up now from their hiding place.
But it is late.
It is too late.
And something else I notice. They are not all coming. Some have hung back, others have moved only slowly toward us, as if waiting to see what will happen, ready to turn and run if running looks like the thing to do.
But there is nowhere for us to run. The beck encloses us on three sides, the enraged Templars are on the fourth. I put out my hands, trying to reassure the children near me by touch. But I understand now that I have done a terrible thing, that I allowed my own anger and despair to blind me to the damage I might do.
“Paul!”
I turn round. Billy and Stevie are already in the beck, Serena and Maddy behind them on the far bank.
“Send them across. The kids.”
It’s Stevie talking, looking more alive than I’ve ever seen him, his spiky elbows and knees working. I start to throw the youngest kids into the water. Billy and Stevie shunt, carry, shove them on to Maddy and Serena. Six, eight, ten, splashing across, some laughing, most terrified. But there’s no time.
Goddo’s mob are here.
And Roth also. It’s a three-way collision. Us, the Templars, Roth and his handful of close mates.
Roth hits them from the side. Goddo hasn’t seen him, so the impact is dramatic. Suddenly limbs are flailing everywhere. Fists moving, punching air, punching faces, punching air again.
A Templar kid, taller than me, wider than me, puts his hand on my face and pushes me back, back toward the brown flowing water. But my face is still slippery from the slime and the pondweed, and the hand slides off, and he falls forward, carried by his momentum, and it is easy to shove him into the beck, his hands flapping at the water.
Then a punch hits the side of my head. I am conscious of the weight of it but I don’t register the pain. I fall to my knees and I look up, and the boy, his mouth a lipless line of hate, is going to punch me again. But then a savage creature leaps at him, feet, knees, arms, hands all frantically beating. It is the Year Eight urchin, Skinner. He is fierce, but the Templar kid is too strong for him and throws him down. He raises his foot to stamp on Skinner’s face, and so I charge at him, and my head hits his stomach and steals his air, and he makes a sound, half groan, half gasp.
I take a second to look around me. This is the terrible equation, impossible to understand. Everywhere there are individual scraps, kids clawing and punching at each other. Gouging, scratching, slapping. Nothing glorious here, no beauty or grace in it, just humans brought to the level of animals. But I see a space and pull Skinner with me. We have somehow escaped from the circle of hell. Skinner’s face has blood on it, but I don’t think it’s his.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, and I feel behind my ear, and there is blood on my hand, which makes me laugh.
“Run home now,” I shout at Skinner, but not using those words, using bad words, and this time he does exactly what I tell him. I meant to thank him, but there was no time, and now I never will.
And then I look for the other small kids, the ones who had been in my care, the ones I should have protected. Most have escaped back across the beck, and I don’t even think about them. A couple are cowering down, hunkering i
nto the grass like leverets, but they also seem safe, for now.
But everywhere there is the horror. Weapons have come out: blunt clubs, rocks, wood, chains. But not yet knives.
That is when I see Bates entwined with Mickey, Goddo’s spiky-haired lieutenant. And in another place, another time, it might look as though they were lovers, not fighters, because they hold each other so close, and their gazes are fixed so intently on each other, and each has his hands on the other’s face, feeling for its tender parts. And now I watch with horror as Bates opens his mouth and bites Mickey’s cheek, scraping and gnawing at it like a cannibal, and I would have stopped it if I could.
But then I see Roth, and once I see him, it is impossible to look anywhere else.
His face is transformed, and shines with a cool silvery metallic radiance, like moonlight or mercury. Oh, but he is suddenly beautiful—beautiful like Lucifer was said to be beautiful. His arms enclose his enemies and he crushes them, and two fall before his feet. A tall red-haired boy holding a thick plank of wood rushes toward him, spittle and noise coming from his mouth. There is a long nail in the end of the wood. Roth’s movement is so perfect it seems more like music than solid form, and the wood and the nail go into the place where he was, which is now simple space, and the wood plows the ground and Roth’s foot breaks the wood, and his knee smashes up into the face of the boy. Two more punches, each slashing high to low, and two more Temple Moor kids are down, and one is holding his face and crying and the other one does not even move.
But then I see a change come over Roth’s face, and the change makes me shudder. Roth’s brilliance has blinded me to something else. But now he sees it, and I see it too.
There are so few of us.
He sees that he is with Bates, who has somehow untangled himself from his lover, his meal, and Miller, and two, three, four other kids from our school. But there are still so many Templars. And now Roth’s face loses that evil beauty and becomes grim and ugly, because perhaps at some level he has realized that what lies in store for him is defeat, and then the dreadful things that come with defeat. And maybe you can be noble in defeat, but you can’t be beautiful.
But still, a kick this time, straight out and into the groin of a boy, and another backhanded, lip-bursting slap. And only Bates and Miller now are with him and, strangely, me.
How did I come to be here?
Or was it that he came to me?
“You’ve got it,” he says to me—not a question. “Because now is the time.”
I cannot help putting my hand to my pocket, where the knife waits for me. It would be easy, then, to take out the knife, to answer his call, to answer its call. But I close my ears and I shake my head, and his mouth goes hard with frustration and anger. He is panting, and a film of sweat covers his face. I have let him down.
But before he can say anything else, a voice rises above the clamor.
“ROTH!”
Goddo.
And Roth smiles again, as if this is what he has been waiting for. And the world stops and watches.
The two of them are alone now, three meters apart, close enough to spit, if you have the wind. A sort of ragged circle has formed. More than thirty Templars on one side, me, Miller, Bates on the other, with more broken kids on the ground, silent or weeping.
“You killed my little girl,” says Goddo. “You killed my baby. You’re gonna be sorry.”
I don’t know what to make of Goddo. In some ways he’s an impressive guy. He has grace and power and he seems more human than Roth. But maybe that is also his failing, because he showed his weakness when he talked like that about his dog, talking like he wanted to cry about it. And I feel no sympathy for Goddo, because of what he did to me with the jaws of that dog.
Then Roth says some things that I can barely bring myself to tell you. Some of the things he says are about what he did to the dog, and some of the things are about Goddo. And then he calls Goddo the thing you can’t call a person, not now.
“Nigger,” he says.
And I know why he says it, and maybe even Goddo knows why he says it, but that doesn’t make any difference, because now he does just what Roth wants.
He charges.
And I know what Roth will do next. A tiny, almost imperceptible feint one way, and then a swerve to the other. Goddo will flail at space and Roth will put him down.
But that isn’t happening. Goddo is fast. As fast as Roth. That has never been the case before. Not fast enough so that Roth’s move fails completely, but fast enough so that his fist catches Roth just on the point of the chin. Another centimeter and it would have missed. But the chin. The chin. Roth’s head is so massy, so solid, that almost anywhere else and he would have laughed at the punch. But no one laughs at a punch on the point of their chin. In a street fight you don’t want to punch a kid on the chin, because it means you’ll break your fingers like dry sticks. And maybe Goddo’s fingers are broken, but it doesn’t matter. Roth stops. Stops like a clock when you take out the battery. His eyes look troubled for a moment, and then cloud, and then he falls to one knee.
The Templars scream with joy, their tension and fear suddenly released, like pigeons exploding out of a loft.
For a second Goddo looks like he doesn’t realize what’s happened. He stands back, suspecting a trick, a trap. And then, when Roth keeps his head low, staring at the ground as if he’s lost something vital there, Goddo moves closer to him, his head high, a sneer on his lips.
“Call me that again,” he whispered, meaning what Roth said before, the terrible thing.
And now Roth looks up at him, and even though the light is dim in his eyes, the Templars all take a step back. Except Goddo. Goddo takes a step forward.
Mistake.
Roth, still unsteady, lunges, hurling himself at Goddo’s legs. The two are down together. Goddo hammers away at the back of Roth’s head, but Roth worms his way higher, his big hands reaching, clawing for Goddo’s neck. Goddo is a tough kid. No one else could keep Roth this busy for this long. But Roth is Roth, and no one can beat him. He’s on top now, and a sigh comes from the Templars. It doesn’t matter that the battle up till now has been theirs: all that counts is this fight between the champions.
And Goddo must lose now.
Roth has his knee on Goddo’s chest. A hand is at his throat, and Goddo can only wave and flap his arms like a dying bird. It is over. I can see the light die in the eyes of the Templars. They want no more of this fight. They will go home now, dragging their injured and their humiliated with them.
Except that Roth is not satisfied. He is feeling with his free hand inside his jacket. And I remember now that wide shape beneath the black handle. With a shout he pulls it from his pocket. It is a fat-bladed meat cleaver, its edge ground razor-sharp. He flourishes it above his head. He is going to kill Goddo with it.
I realize then that I have to move, have to stop this atrocity. But Roth changes his grip, and I hesitate. Now he holds out one of Goddo’s hands against the soil. He scrabbles and twists until a finger is isolated. And then up goes the cleaver again. For a second it pauses, bright against the mackerel sky. And then it falls, and I have done nothing to stop it.
Except that it doesn’t fall, or rather its fall is caught.
Roth looks round, looks up, and his face is filled with mystery, disbelief, utter bafflement. This was something he had never expected.
Miller.
Neatly, Miller takes the cleaver from Roth’s hand and hurls it toward the beck. As it turns slowly in the air, I half believe that a hand will burst from the water to catch it, but it enters uncaught and soundless.
“Shouldn’t have called him that,” said Miller, his face expressionless. And then he just walks away.
Why did Miller betray Roth like that? Is it really a betrayal when what you are betraying is evil? Maybe he’d been waiting for this moment for years. Maybe it was just a whim. But I think there comes a time when the corrosive burning works down to the part that won’t burn, that
won’t corrode, and Miller had reached that part, his core. And when he reached it, he found that there was still something noble there, even if it expressed itself in an act of treachery.
Now I turn back to the fight. Roth is lost, his arm still stuck up in the air as if he is answering a question in class. Ridiculous. He looks ridiculous. Who could have thought such a thing? And Goddo rises up from under him, and all the Templars, freed now from the enchantment of defeat, close upon him, and all I can see is the ripple of arms and legs working, like a soft machine.
But there is no time to understand the soft machine, no chance to explore how it works, because a shape is rushing toward me. Bates, in a blind panic, runs like a rat toward the beck. He pushes me and I fall back. I get up to see that not all the Templars are gathered around Roth.
Mickey, his face covered in blood, a flap of skin hanging loose from his cheek, is alone. No, not quite. Didn’t Roth once say to me that when you’ve got a knife, you’re never alone? And in his hand is not that penknife of his, but a cheap, long-bladed kitchen knife.
I don’t know if in some way his mind has mixed up Bates and me, or if he just wants to hurt someone, and I am easier to reach than Bates, who has fled across the brown beck, or Roth, who is still caught in the workings of the soft machine, the Templars on him the way vultures cover a carcass.
Whatever the reason, Mickey fixes his eyes on me and begins to run, holding the knife. For a second I think about taking out my knife, the beautiful killing blade that Roth gave me. But I have already made that decision. And anyway, there is no time.
This is it now, this is really it. I cannot keep him there any longer, cannot even slow him. He pours toward me like water, and now I can hear the sound he makes, a high wailing sound, more like misery than rage.
The Knife That Killed Me Page 13