2007 - A tale etched in blood and hard black pencel

by Christopher Brookmyre

  When it thawed, the pitch became its current quagmire, so the game of choice up on the concrete was pinkies, or bar-the-door, or British bulldog as some folk called it. It’s a great game for this time of year because all the running keeps you warm when it’s so chilly and windy outside. Or rather, it was a great game until Jamesy broke his arm and Harris banned it on pain of the belt.

  Tig was a wee bit lacking in scope for occupying thirty-odd eleven-year-olds, but they had their resources and thus managed at least temporarily to spice things up. Frisbee-tig: instead of just touching you with his hand, the guy who is ‘Het’ has to hit you with a frisbee. Current status: banned (burst nose, Gary Hawkins). Ball-tig: the guy who is ‘Het’ has to hit you with a tennis ball. Current status: banned (see snowballs re potential eye-loss). Two-man hunt: a large-scale game of tig meets hide-and-seek. Current status: banned (burst nose, James Doon, ran into wall while looking backwards at pursuer).

  Which had left the old standby, fitba, until Stephen learnt the downside of a highly polished finish to his shiny new Docs. The pitch will dry out some day soon, but for the time being wet playtime is arguably preferable to plain old dry playtime, because at least you get a seat inside away from the cold.

  Martin is scribbling on a piece of scrap paper. He watches Harris depart, guessing she’d prefer to stay and use playtime for some more compulsory hymns. He used to think that leading these practices was part of her duty as deputy head, but this week he’s realised that it’s her obsession. O’Connor is off sick and they’ve got Harris as a stand-in until she comes back.

  Most classes get a different teacher every year as they move up through the school. Some, occasionally, get the same one for two. They have somehow ended up with Soorpuss O’Connor from Primary Five right through to the bitter end, and it says a lot for just how horrible O’Connor is that Harris seems an easier shift. She’s distracted, for one thing, always with her head in some folder or other, while O’Connor misses nothing, eyes like a hawk and the screech to match. A change is as good as a rest in as much as it’s a rest from O’Connor, but it’s not without its price, the greater part of which is that the woman can’t go between two school bells without getting everyone to their feet for an enforced rendition of some dirge or other.

  Everybody’s gone quiet, like they did the last time she came in to warn them, but it will start to build up again. Martin saw something on telly last night about things called palindromes, which is where a word or phrase is the same backwards, like ‘A Toyota’ or ‘Sit on a potato pan, Otis’. He writes down the phrases he can remember to see if it is true, and is delighted to find it so, especially in the case of the one about Napoleon: ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’. The man on the telly explained that ‘ere’ meant before, though he didn’t explain why Napoleon would be speaking English.

  He then tries writing down some classsmates’ names backwards, to see whether they come up as anything interesting. Martin writes his own name first, which comes out as Nitram Noskcaj. He is pleased that it is something pronounceable, though is immediately aware of the slagging potential posed by ‘nit’ and ‘caj’. He’s never had nits and he never goes cadging for sweets off people, but facts don’t always matter much when it comes to abusive labels. He scribbles a few more, mostly running into consonant congestion. Kevin Duffy gives him Yffud Nivek, which makes Martin smile as he sounds it in his head: ‘I-Fud’. He keeps that to himself, partly because he doesn’t want to throw Kevin to the wolves like that and partly so he’s got something up his sleeve the next time Kevin decides to slag him. He tries Jamesy’s, which comes out Nood Semaj. This makes him smile over the ‘nood’ part. He leans over to Jamesy, who is at a table nearby.

  “Hey, Jamesy, do you know your name backwards is Nood Semaj?”

  “It’s whit?” Jamesy asks, smiling.

  “Nood Semaj.”

  “Noodsy Maj,” Jamesy says. “That’s magic. Noodsy Magic! What’s your name backwards?” he asks Gary, who is sitting beside him.

  “I’m Renrut Eibbor,” says Robbie while Gary is still working his out.

  They all start giving it a go now, though Martin knows most of them will be Welsh- or Gaelic-sounding gibberish. Richie comes up with a decent one. “I am Nayr Drahcir,” he announces in a Dracula voice. “I come from Transylvania.” Scot mentions that Zoe is Noswal Eoz. “No swally—maybe she’s got a sair throat.”

  Nobody asks Martin his, and he doesn’t volunteer it.

  Jamesy seems delighted, which is a relief. He repeats the name, aware it may have been missed and forgotten by the others in the clamour.

  “I’m Nood Semaj. Noodsy Magic.”

  “Noodsy,” Richie acknowledges, nodding. “Aye, that’s your new name: Noodsy. Everybody, Jamesy’s Noodsy now. Noodsy Magic.”

  Martin has noticed that Kevin didn’t proffer his reverse name, and once he hears Jamesy officially rechristened, Kevin begins making determined and soon successful attempts to change the subject.

  Stephen Rennie comes back in the room, having been out to the toilets.

  “Heh, Stevie,” Robbie greets him. “Jamesy’s new name is Noodsy.”

  “Noodsy?”

  “Aye. Richie came up wi it. His name backwards is Nood Semaj. Noodsy Magic.”

  “Good yin.”

  “Aye, it’s a pure classic,” Robbie adds.

  Jamesy looks across at Martin. Jamesy came up with ‘Noodsy Magic’, and the whole backwards-name thing was Martin’s idea, but they both know how the revisionism works, the hierarchy that’s taking an increasingly rigid shape. No point trying to correct them. Richie came up with it, that’s now official.

  The class is changing. It used to be only a couple of folk you’d have trouble with, and everybody else got on, more or less. Now Martin senses they are all jostling for position on the verge of a divide. On one side of it there will be the folk it is cool to be pals with, and on the other those it will be mandatory to slag off. No neutral ground. People aren’t quite there yet, but Martin sees it coming. He knows where he’s likely to end up, and that’s something he can live with, as he doesn’t particularly want to be ‘in’ with many of the guys who will secure places on the other side of the line. But what is more saddening is that he can see people he thought of as friends starting to align themselves away from him because they can see what is up ahead, too.

  In this respect, the change to the big school is less to be feared than welcomed, as it will offer the chance of a clean slate. There are two other primaries forming the intake, meaning he’ll be split up from many of his old classmates and thrown in with a majority of new ones, who will be able to judge him only on what they find rather than deciding they already know all they need to know about him.

  Karen watches the anaesthetist through a window in the corridor outside the intensive therapy unit. The anaesthetist and a nurse are standing by Robbie’s bed, the nurse nodding as the doctor talks, occasionally gesturing to indicate one of the many monitors sited around the station. Also sited around the station are two Dibbles on guard duty. Robbie isn’t going anywhere, but there remains the possibility that someone might wish to finish what they started in case he survives to give his version of events. The Dibbles try to keep out of the way, but as is often the case with handless wee shavers, the harder they try, the less they succeed.

  Karen just waits. The anaesthetist will come out in her own good time, and will be more amenable to discussion if she doesn’t feel anyone breathing down her neck.

  Poor Robbie. He was never the most likeable of individuals, but she can’t help feeling pity for anyone so helpless as to be linked up to all that kit. She remembers feeling sorry for him once before, also because he was unconscious in another ITU. She didn’t see him that time, but just hearing about it seemed very sad. School was a battleground, but the prospect of one of them actually dying had been too truly enormous to comprehend.

  “Some state,” says Tom Fisher, the DI from Braeside nick she’s roped in for up-
to-date local knowledge.

  “Aye,” she agrees.

  “You knew him, from school, somebody said?” he asks.

  “Yeah. Both suspects and one of the victims. But best we file what I know under ‘Inadmissible’.”

  “I think there’s a statute of limitations on having your pigtails pulled anyway.”

  “I never had pigtails. That’s a slur.”

  “But if you did, which one of them would have pulled your pigtails?”

  “I said ‘Inadmissible’.”

  “Humour me.”

  “I don’t have to. I outrank you. But for what it’s worth…Hmm, a boy called Kevin Duffy would have pulled my pigtails. Colin Temple would have been trying to see up my skirt as I ran away. Robbie would have sneered at me for crying about it. And Noodsy…” She laughs quietly, sadly, and shakes her head.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s the one who would have ended up getting the blame from the teacher.”

  “A recurring theme?”

  “Don’t go there. Like I said, Inadmissible. He’s learnt to be a lot cuter since.”

  “Aye. Not quite learnt how to avoid the blame for his own shite, though. I’ve huckled him umpteen times myself. Penny-ante stuff, mainly, but we’re not talkin miscarriages of justice here, either.”

  “And what about Robbie?”

  “Him too, yeah. But the weird thing is, oot the two ay them, I’d have said Robbie was the wan that tried occasionally tae go straight. My impression is that when they’ve done stuff together, it’s Noodsy who’s been the driving force. Though obviously I couldnae say either was the brains of the outfit.”

  Karen laughs but has to recompose her game face as the anaesthetist finally exits the unit. She knows why they’re there and comes across to the chairs to greet them. Sometimes they’re so scunnered with the polis hanging around that they act like you’re invisible and make out they’re, off to attend to something else. This is to make it incumbent upon the cops to get their attention and thus underline how much you’re interrupting their jobs, and there’s usually a large sigh-to-information ratio in the subsequent conversations. This one shouldn’t be too bad, however.

  “I’m Detective Superintendent Gillespie. This is Detective Inspector Fisher.”

  “Kate Lanimer. I’m the ITU consultant on duty.”

  Karen specifically doesn’t ask, “How is he?” They hate that, like they weren’t going to get on to the subject if you didn’t ask.

  “Critical but stable?” Karen says instead, eliciting a knowing nod from the doctor. That’s what they always tell the press. It’s utterly meaningless.

  “He survived the surgery,” Dr Lanimer says. “That’s as much as we could have hoped for at this stage, to be honest. He’d lost a lot of blood from the abdominal wound, but obviously it was the head that was the biggest issue. The knife went through his eye and got deflected downwards when it hit the rear of the socket. If it had gone upwards, you’d be talking to a pathologist just now.”

  “But the surgeons got it out all right?”

  “They got it out, but it’s too early to tell regarding the all-right part. Your people took the knife away, though I doubt you’ll get any fingerprints off it now, apart from Angus Cooper’s.”

  “Who’s he?” asks Tom.

  “Surgeon,” Karen informs him. “Okay. Thank you, Doctor. Oh, one other thing, has he had any visitors?”

  “What, with your boys babysitting him?”

  “Sure, I just mean, anyone try to visit, anyone asking at reception, that kind of thing.”

  “I wouldn’t know. But I’ll ask around, okay?”

  “I’d very much appreciate it.”

  “Anybody specific you’ve got in mind?” Tom asks as the anaesthetist walks briskly away down the corridor.

  “No, just interested in case it throws anything up. You know, who cares, who doesn’t.”

  “Relatives, you mean?”

  “For instance, yeah. It would give us an insight into the Turner family dynamic.”

  Tom glances briefly to the heavens, suggesting it wasn’t exactly the Little House on the Prairie.

  “Not many left,” he says. “The mother’s deid, Joe’s inside and the sister lives in…Canada, I’m sure, though she’s liable to be back, under the circumstances.”

  “I was thinking more about Boma,” Karen says. “But if he did come calling, would it be out of concern that his wee brother might die, or concern that he might live?”

  “Fair question. He was away fishing up in Sutherland, according to his bidey-in partner, when we came round to break the news about his dad and Robbie.”

  “I’ll bet he’s been away fishing a few times when other folk were receiving bad news.”

  “And landed nothing but an alibi, sure.”

  “Worth having somebody keep an eye on him until we know some more.”

  “You got it. Are we done here?”

  “Yeah. They’ve got my number if anything changes.”

  They give the Dibbles a wave goodbye and head for the exit.

  Making a Stand

  “Noodsy Magic. I cannae get over that. That’s a pure classic, Richie.”

  Aye, gaun yersel Robbie, thinks Scot.

  Fud.

  Scot has to laugh. The wee shite that was never done calling people sooks has now found his true purpose: he’s Chief Bum-Licker to big Richie Ryan, the undisputed title-holder of Best Fighter in Primary Seven (and therefore Best Fighter at St Lizzie’s). It’s the next-best thing to having mates.

  No, maybe shouldn’t be so harsh on him. At least Robbie’s been making the effort of late to find a more sociable role for himself instead of just skulking about looking for new ways to upset people.

  Jamesy looks pleased, at least. The only other nickname Jamesy has ever had is Faw, due to his surname and chronic tendency to injure himself. The sharper observer will have also noted its appropriateness in reflecting Jamesy’s unfailing ability to be the one guy who gets caught if he ever steps out of line.

  He’s done well to append the Magic bit on to Noodsy, even if he’s getting no credit for coming up with it, but mainly he’ll be pleased with the thumbs-up it confers to be given a handle by one of the big men. Arise, Sir Noodsy.

  Poor Martin, though. He’s going to get fuckin eaten alive at St Grace’s if he’s not careful. He’s quiet, he’s trusting, he’s good-natured and, worst of all, he’s clever, which will unavoidably single him out. At least he doesn’t talk as politely as he once did—that would really paint a target on him, like that poor bastard Timothy Halleran in Heather’s year.

  Scot will be all right, he reckons. He already knows a lot of the real bampots who are coming from St Gregory’s, Braeside’s other Catholic primary, due to the catchment areas blurring somewhere around Muirlaw Avenue. This puts him on nodding terms with some, which is an obvious advantage, but not as much as the knowledge to steer clear of certain others. The kids from the bought houses up on the Carnock Brae or across in the even newer Sunnylea estate will mostly be walking in blind. He’ll try to give Martin some tips, but information can only go so far. Once the wolves start circling, they have an instinct for who is vulnerable. You can see it already, the way some of them are acting towards him. Colin’s getting it too, though he’ll probably be in with a better chance up the hill. Colin’s fairly quiet and he lives in a bought house as well, so he’ll get the snob bit, but he won’t draw attention to himself as much as Martin.

  Scot looks across at the lassies, wonders if it’s going to be easier for them. Probably not. Less chance of a doing, obviously, but they’re just as feral and merciless in other ways. Certainly doesn’t sound like all peace and harmony when Heather’s talking about it. They’re all a bit quiet and subdued just now, the lassies. That’s because they got their rubella jag first thing this morning. It’s just the lassies that get it, because it’s something to do with getting German measles when they’re pregnant. A few of them came back weepin
g a wee bit, but Fat Joanne was howling and Geraldine was near screaming. Scot felt sorry for Geraldine, seeing they must have needed the hypodermic equivalent of a pneumatic drill to get anything into her veins, but lapped up every tear and moan of Joanne’s distress. The lassies always went first to Nitty Nora the Heid Explorer and that stupid cow always came back rubbing her arm and telling the boys it was a jag. Well, guess what? This time it really was, Chubby-Cheeks! And the boys aren’t getting it!

  The bell rings and soon enough Harris is back at the blackboard; sooner than usual, in fact, because there are no lines to bring in. Scot doesn’t mind so much because it’s always maths in the morning, and though it’s not the kind of thing you let on in company, he quite enjoys it, and not like folk enjoy art because it’s easy. He enjoys it because it’s hard, or rather enjoys it most when it’s hard. He’s a ‘Late Developer’, it said on his Primary Six report card, which is probably why the others haven’t noticed; that and the fact that Helen Dunn always comes top in tests, and that’s what they tend to pick up on. Plus, it’s all right to be good at something. It’s being good at bloody everything that makes folk think you’re a sook.

  Karen is sent round to dish out plastic set squares to everybody, which is good news because Scot likes geometry, especially all the stuff about angles. It’s also good news that it’s Karen, because he knows she’ll make sure he gets a decent one and not one of the half-chewed efforts. It’s teetering on slagging territory on both sides for the boys and girls to be caught talking to each other, so nobody really does, but you still know which ones like you.