“And you’re…”
“John. Not so cute.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” she said, and now we were both smiling.
“You’re new,” I said, in a harmless kind of way.
She gave me a slow, quizzical stare. She really was absurdly beautiful. There was no need for it. She could have shaved the top third off her beauty and still qualified as a goddess.
“There’s nothing new under the sun,” she said at last. “Don’t you realize we’ve all been here before?”
“We have?”
“The eternal recurrence.”
“The what?”
“Eternal recurrence. The universe is big enough and old enough for everything that happens to happen again. And again. And again. Death and rebirth. We’re all old news.”
Normally that was about the time I’d be laughing or at least walking away, shaking my head.
Except… Recurrence, doubling, rebirth… Somehow it chimed with that feeling I’d had about the two worlds, the one made of light, the other of … whatever it was. As if the recurrence were folded back on itself. Wait, there was a word I remembered, half-remembered … palimpsest. Yeah, that was it. Back in the days when they used to write on parchment made from animal skins, they would sometimes scrape off the top layer of writing and start again. But the first layer would never be completely erased and would show through, and so you’d get the two texts almost blending together. Was that why those green eyes haunted me? Had they burned their way through from an older stratum?
Who was I kidding? The reason I didn’t walk away was that she was as pretty as a hummingbird chasing a butterfly around a rose.
I tried to think of something witty to say. It was no good; I had nothing in the tank. So I settled for raising an eyebrow, which had gotten me out of plenty of scrapes in the past. She took up the slack.
“But, yeah, new.”
“Where were you before?”
“Belmonte.”
“Nice school.”
Belmonte was an all-girl-private joint. Run by nuns.
“They expelled me.”
Well, if she looked like this when she was there, I wasn’t surprised that the good sisters kicked her out. But then I remembered something else.
“Wait … that was you?”
“They lied. It was all lies.”
“I believe you.”
The story had been all over the town. It even made the local paper. A girl, who couldn’t be named for legal reasons, had been expelled for practising black magic. It was absurd, of course. There were no details, just gruesome rumours. And now I thought about it, hadn’t there been something to do with animals…? Animals being … sacrificed? I felt a twinge of pressure behind my eye. But then I looked again at that lovely face and knew that she was incapable of anything cruel.
“They didn’t understand what I was… No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
It felt as though we’d been standing in a bubble, but suddenly I remembered that there was a real world out there and two dead guinea pigs under our noses.
“Maybe we’d better go and report this,” I said, waving my hand at her locker.
“No!” she said in a voice that suddenly burned hot as phosphorous. “They’ll say it was me. They’ll say it’s happening again, they’ll say it’s because I’m a…”
“You’re no witch. Any more than I’m a psycho. OK, then, we need some time to think this over. Lock the door. We can—”
And then I heard something that I should have been expecting, given the way things were going.
“LOCKER INSPECTION!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
AN ACT OF GALLANTRY
A couple of times a term the Shank would prowl down the locker corridor, looking for trouble. He had a master key to all the lockers, but he liked to pick on some poor, furtive, sweating kid, and get him or her to open their own locker. The Shank would almost look disappointed if he didn’t find something nasty in there. And if he did find some contraband – a dirty book, maybe, or some of the unhealthy snacks he’d banned from the school – then the victim would get the full blast of his wrath. There was a story that the Shank had once made a kid lick his locker clean when he found it grimed with football-field mud and mouldy cake crumbs.
The Shank was still at the far end of the corridor. Kids quailed and melted before him, avoiding eye contact, lest he pick on them. He walked on, ignoring them all, his tread heavy and ominous. There were three prefects with him – Funt and Bosola, of course, plus a creepy, lanky kid called Spode. They smacked heads and kicked butts behind the Shank’s back.
Then he saw me, and the hard lines of a frown burnt themselves into his forehead. I knew there was more to his presence here than mere coincidence.
“Shut your locker and get behind me,” I said to Zofia, hardly moving my lips. Her hands fumbled with the key. She was a tough cookie, but the Shank ate souls. I took the key from her, and she slipped back between me and the lockers, brushing my body and filling my head with her scent.
On marched the Shank. I made myself meet his eye. It was like staring at the sun.
Suddenly, about ten lockers away, he stopped, and turned upon a bird-like creature who was cowering against the yellow metal doors.
“You, girl! Open up.”
There was something odd about this. There was no relish or anticipation in the Shank’s manner. He was just going through the motions. The girl opened the locker and stood back, but the Shank hardly looked inside.
“Tidy that up,” he said with a wave, and on he came.
Behind him, Bosola added a little wave of his own – a backhand slap that knocked the girl against the wall. Spode grinned his creepy grin. When he smiled all you could see was wet gum.
This was no random check. It was obvious that the Shank had been tipped off. It was equally obvious that it was me he was after. Even though I was clean, and there was nothing in my locker, I felt the panic rise in my gorge, like a bad curry. Innocence wasn’t always a defence against the Shank.
Then I thought of Zofia. Maybe this wasn’t about me. It could be that she had enemies of her own. The Shank hated the goths and the emos. He wasn’t the only one. She needed a friend. I had to protect her.
I put my back against the lockers, not even glancing at Zofia, and I believe I may well have started to whistle. I was trying to look like someone who was trying to look innocent. Meaning someone who had something to hide. My thinking was to draw the Shank to my locker and away from Zofia’s.
It worked. The Shank walked right up to me. Then he ran his eyes over a printed sheet in his hands. It was a list of names and numbers. He had that grim little executioner’s smile on his face. For the first time I noticed that he was a couple of inches shorter than me.
“You,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Life’s full of them.”
“Open up.”
“There’s n–nothing in there,” I said, trying to sound scared.
Funt and Bosola bared their teeth like jackals. They were expecting meat. Spode showed his gums.
“You open that locker this instant, sonny,” said the Shank, excitement and rage sizzling on his tongue.
I opened the locker. I made my fingers tremble. I heard Bosola smile, like a snake sliding over a rock.
I stood back and the Shank stooped and rummaged. While he rummaged, Funt and Bosola eyeballed me. Bosola drew his finger silently across his throat. I made an appropriate gesture back.
The Shank stood up. He looked puzzled. He checked his sheet again, and grunted. He didn’t even have a go about the mess in my locker.
He backed off a step, and rechecked his sheet. His master key was in his hand. Another locker door swung open.
The Shank made a noise, a sort of a rasp. It might have been a growl. I glanced down obliquely.
I was expecting to see the spot of blood.
What I saw was a photo cut out of some magazine and tacked to the inside of
the door. I did a double take, straight out of a cartoon. It wasn’t Zofia’s locker he had opened, but number 525.
The Shank knelt and reached into the locker. He pulled out a worn feather boa, a fluffy mohair cardigan, a pair of tap shoes and a big bottle of perfume with a stopper shaped like pouting lips. He held each item up suspiciously, then handed them back to Funt, Bosola and Spode.
Once again he looked perplexed. Whatever he was after – whatever he thought he was going to get – wasn’t happening.
“What are you smirking at?” he demanded of me.
“You say smirk; I say smile.”
“So what are you smiling about?”
“It’s a whole new day, sir, so what’s not to smile about?”
The Shank’s eye twitched. He moved closer and breathed in my ear.
“Be careful, boy. Be very careful.”
Although he said it as a threat, I couldn’t help but think that there was also something of a warning in it. A genuine warning.
For the last time, he checked his sheet of paper. I thought he was going to stump off. But then, almost as an afterthought, he hesitated, bent, and stuck his key into another lock. It was number 524.
Zofia’s.
I heard – or maybe just felt – her hiss of breath, a sound more of despair than shock. The door swung open and I saw the small red dot with an almost supernatural precision. But the Shank wasn’t looking at the door. He barely even looked in the locker. He quickly moved his hand around the inside, like a cheap magician showing there’s nothing in the hat. Then he looked at me again with withering contempt and was gone.
Bosola tried to repeat his slapping trick, but I swayed and his palm smacked into the metal locker.
I turned to smile at Zofia, expecting to see a look of astonishment (not to mention gratitude) on her face, but she was gone too, almost as if she’d never been there. She hadn’t even thanked me for saving her life.
All that was left was the smell of violets.
Oh, and the two dead guinea pigs in the pockets of my blazer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE HIT
SO I headed off to my first lesson – PE – with two stiff guinea pigs filling my pockets, and a buzzing crowd of questions in my head. You didn’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that the Shank was expecting to find something in my locker. Whichever doofus planted the bodies messed up and put them in 524 instead of 526. But that didn’t change the fact that someone was out to frame me. But why? Sure, I wasn’t winning any popularity contests, but I couldn’t see why I was important enough to merit this level of intrigue, even if the execution had been slapdash. Was this all down to the Shank himself? Or were there other forces moving behind the scenes?
First things first.
I walked around the corridors for a while to make sure no one was trailing me and then dived into the toilets. In good old cubicle three, I crammed the stiffs into my sandwich box, stood on the seat and hid the plastic coffin under the lid in the high cistern. Then I checked my hair in the mirror and made for the gym.
There are worse things than PE, but most kids don’t get the opportunity to be buried up to the neck in the desert, their face smeared with honey while ants slowly eat their eyeballs out. It’s not even that I don’t like sports. It’s just that standing in a muddy field while the mentally unstable, and genuinely terrifying, PE teacher Mr Pick screams at you, and a wind like a samurai sword slices into your bare legs, hardly counts as a sport, unless you also reckon that bear-baiting, cockfighting and Russian roulette should be in the Olympics.
But today we had some good news. The steady drizzle had turned into hard rain. That meant indoor games.
As we all filed into the gym, I noticed straight away that Pick wasn’t there. You could tell by the eerie absence of screaming. The “we”, by the way, was my form class, plus one other. So, 68 kids altogether. That could be a handful. Not a handful for Pick, with whom you messed at your peril. But certainly for Miss Budbe.
Miss Budbe was Pick’s second in command, and she was as sweet and sane as he was sour and mad. It was her job to teach the girls about netball, intimate hygiene and socially transmitted diseases. She wasn’t like the other teachers. Most of them looked like members of some completely different species of mammal altogether, you know, Homo educatus. You looked at the kids, then looked at them, and you just couldn’t see how you could make the transition from one to the other.
But with Miss Budbe the connection was there. I’m not saying you’d mistake her for a teenager, but at least she looked like she might actually have been one, and not very long ago. She was as pretty as magnolia flowers before they go brown and turn to sludge on the pavement. One day Miss Budbe would wilt, but for now she was still fresh and pink and fragrant.
Fragrance she had, but not really much in the way of natural authority, by which I mean the ability that some teachers have to make you do what they want by scaring the living merde out of you. The couple of times that Miss B. had taken a gym class all on her own, things had pretty quickly descended into chaos.
We sat down on the benches and she started talking. I don’t know what she was talking about, because everyone else had begun to talk as well.
Then I heard a voice in my ear:
“Don’t turn round.”
Of course, someone saying to you, “Don’t turn round”, is roughly equivalent to them saying, “Turn round or I’ll kill you.”
So I turned round and looked into the furtive face of Rat Zermatt.
Rat was one of the Bacon-heads. He paid for his dope by thieving, lying, smuggling and snitching. He was forever picking at the scabs around his nose, and like the other ’heads, he was followed wherever he went by a cloud smelling of dead pig and sulphur, like the devil’s own barbeque.
“I said don’t turn round,” he hissed, blowing the smell of old meat into my face. “They’ll see me talking to you.”
I turned to the front again. I didn’t want to spend any more time looking at Rat than I had to.
“Go soak your scabs, Rat.”
“I’m trying to do you a favour, schmuck.”
“Brushing your teeth is the best favour you could do me. Follow it up with a bath and I’ll take you bowling.”
Rat made a frustrated chittering sort of a noise, like something mean caught in a cage. “Fine, he doesn’t want to know. The Lady said to tell him, but he won’t listen. Rat did his job. Rat get paid.”
“Stop speaking like Gollum, Rat. Just say what you’ve got to say.” This time I didn’t turn round. I’d sooner have picked fleas out of a tramp’s vest than look at that face again.
“Now he wants to know. But maybe Rat don’t want to say. Or maybe he gives Rat a little something as well…”
I looked down. I could see one of Rat’s bare, pasty feet. He’d sold his gym shoes for a bag of junk. There was a clump of black hairs on his big toe. I gripped those hairs between my finger and thumb, and yanked. Rat made a gulping screech.
“Talk.”
“Please, no… Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Talk.”
“The Lady, she give me a message. She said there’s a hit. A hit on—”
But that was it. I never got any more. The class was moving. Miss Budbe was shouting, although she had that quality of voice that gets harder to listen to the louder it becomes. I heard “Beanbags” and “Hoops”.
I looked at my hand and flicked away the tuft of wiry toe-hairs. Rat was gone, and it seemed that we were about to begin the dreaded indoor games.
The girls were dressed in tight black leotards and unforgiving yellow gym skirts. The boys were wearing purple tops and black shorts. For the next twenty minutes we ran around more or less randomly, sometimes with beanbags on our heads, sometimes without. The hoops made a brief appearance, though I’m not sure to what end, as my mind was occupied with what Rat had said. The questions came at me like the quick-fire round on a game show.
A hit.
On me?
Who was the Lady?
What had she told Rat?
When I resurfaced, things had moved on. It was time for dodge ball. Dodge ball had been imported into the school by Mr Pick, who liked seeing kids get smashed in the face by fast-moving circular objects.
Miss Budbe split us up into two mixed packs of boys and girls, all resplendent in black and purple and gold. I didn’t care much for the game, so I took up my position at the end of the line, and got ready to fall in front of some gently arcing ball so I could sit out of the mayhem and dream my dreams.
Then I noticed who was standing opposite me.
Big Donna had the build of a sumo wrestler and the short black hair and small black eyes to go with it. She didn’t say much to anyone, but there was a rumour that she had taken part in Gypsy knife-fighting tournaments, and it was a definite fact that she had killed with her bare hands the Rottweiler that ate her Barbie. Personally, I’d always thought that maybe there was a delicate soul inside all that muscle, yearning for a fleeting moment of human contact. But as for actually making that contact, I was happy to leave that up to some other chump.
Now I thought there was something unhealthy in the way that Donna was looking at me. She wasn’t a person you could read easily, but I sensed that there were seismic events stirring beneath the heavy tectonic plates of her unlovely visage. Like what? Lust? Rage? Irritation?
Miss Budbe blew her whistle and balls started to fly. Tough kids threw hard, aiming to hurt. The face was supposed to be off-limits, but once the dodge ball beast was unleashed, the rules were ignored like a fat girl at the disco. The air was filled first with hurtling projectiles, and then with the cries of the wounded and winded.
Next to me a kid caught one in the crotch and went down like he’d been tasered. I was about to take one safely on the shoulder, when again I caught sight of Donna. There was something odd about the ball she was holding. It was far larger than the typical dodge ball. It wasn’t made of orange rubber. It was the dull brown of aged leather. In fact, the leather was so old and worn it almost looked like suede. But that wasn’t all. I could tell from the strain on Donna’s face that this thing was heavy. She looked like she was carrying a piano.
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