That could mean only one thing. She was holding the fabled medicine ball. The medicine ball lived in the corner of the gym equipment cupboard and had never been used for anything by anyone. It was just too heavy. It might have been filled with depleted uranium or some such. No one even knew what you were supposed to do with it. Fire it from a cannon was the best guess.
But now it was out in the open, held in the burly arms of Big Donna.
I suppose I knew at some level what was going to happen, but I was caught, mesmerized by the spectacle of Donna raising the great ball above her head, drawing it back, taking aim, hurling. It was a prodigious feat of strength and sent the medicine ball not in a gentle arc, but with Euclidean directness straight at me.
Normally I’m the kind of kid who thinks things through. I have opinions on stuff. Opinions. Ideas. Theories. But all I had time to think now was
BAM!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
INTERZONE
I opened my eyes to see a ring of gawping faces arranged above me.
“John, are you OK?”
It was Miss Budbe’s voice, sweet as angel cake.
I tried to say, “No, actually, I’m not OK. Big Donna just tried to kill me with a medicine ball that weighs as much as a baby elephant, and now my face hurts from where the damn thing slapped into me and the back of my head hurts from where I hit the wooden floor of the gym, and I’m caught up in some kind of massive conspiracy involving the Shank, the Lardies and the Queens, and I’m just the tiniest bit concerned that none of this is really happening and that none of you really exist,” but that’s the sort of wacky idea that can pass through your head when you’ve just been knocked out by antique pieces of gym equipment.
What I actually said was more like “Ungth.”
There was blood in my mouth. I turned my head and spat it out. That scattered the gawpers.
“You’d better get to the sick bay,” said Miss Budbe. “Would you like someone to take you?”
I shook my head.
“I’m fine,” I managed to say. “I’ll go on my own.”
I changed out of my gym gear and went out into the rain. It slapped my fat, injured face like it hated me. If it had had any manners, it would have waited in line for its turn.
I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the sick bay. There was a chance that Donna’s hit was meant to be just serious enough to get me sent there, and that meant a reception committee would be waiting. Paranoid? You wouldn’t think that if you’d had the couple of days I’d had.
It was bad news to get caught wandering around inside the school out of lesson time, but then I wasn’t planning on wandering around inside the school.
The Rat had been right about the hit. That meant he knew things. Things I needed to find out. The rodent and I were going to have words. But first I had to do a little prep.
Outside the gym, I headed across the six metres of scruffy grass to the spot where the wire peeled up from the school fence. I scraped myself under and then it was a two-minute stroll to the 7/11.
I grabbed three bags of smoky-bacon-flavoured corn puffs from a rack, and then asked the girl at the checkout for a soft pack of Lucky Strikes. She had yellow hair pulled back from her face and tied into a sort of dense stump on top of her head. She looked tough and bored, but she might have been pretty, once.
“How old are you?” she asked without interest.
“Thirty-nine, tomorrow.”
“Happy birthday. You got ID?”
She was flicking through a magazine as she spoke. She had small hands and tiny red nails.
“Sure,” I said, and showed her the name tag inside the collar of my school blazer.
I went back into school the way I’d come out. The PE lesson hadn’t finished yet, and I tracked along the gym wall, with the bare mud of the playing fields away to my left. Then I looped back around behind the kitchens, hit the next corner, and there, waiting for me, was the black opening of the Interzone. At breaktime the gateway to that Underworld would be busy, but there was no Cerberus on guard now.
I hesitated – you always hesitate before you enter the Interzone, unless you’re crazed or depraved, jabbering for a fix. It was strange: the pull and the push of the place almost exactly cancelled each other out.
Almost, but not quite.
As I passed through I could have stretched out my arms and touched the damp walls on either side. It always felt like you were slipping into a different dimension when you entered the Interzone. No, it was something more organic than that. It felt like you were being swallowed. You had been on the outside of the beast, and now you were on the inside.
It was quiet, but not dead. I sensed movement, heard muffled groans, saw the orange and blue of a Zippo flame flick on and off, on and off, and then the red glow from a lit tab.
At the far end I could see a line of grey light where the passageway ended. That was at the front of the school, and you couldn’t get in or out that way because of the razor wire. The authorities couldn’t – or didn’t want to – totally suppress the Interzone, but they could at least try to keep it from spilling out where the world might see.
The weird thing is that the light at the end of the Interzone never came any closer, no matter how far in you went. In fact, the whole Interzone seemed to expand with you as you moved, as if somehow you were dissolving the matter of the universe, and creating your own space as you went, like some beetle grub burrowing in rotten wood. Or maybe it was the other way round, and the Interzone was inside us, like a black soul, and it was only in this narrow space that the outside world was shut out enough for us to feel it. And just like any soul, the black soul of the Interzone was infinite.
As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that there were maybe half a dozen figures in there, slumped against the walls or huddled together. The smells – acrid, meaty, sweet, cloying – curled around me like a decaying cat.
I stepped over legs, found a spot a few metres from the opening, and leant against the wall. I tore open the Strikes and lit one: not because I wanted to smoke, but because it was a way to make sure nobody wondered why I might be here.
I looked up, the way you do when you lean back against a wall and smoke. The Interzone was open to the sky, but no sky showed. Coiling metallic tubes and unfathomable pieces of machinery protruded from the walls, eating the light before it reached ground level.
The light may not have made it, but the rain did. The obstructions merely gathered it into unnaturally large drops, the size of oranges, or channelled it into evil, brown rivulets.
No one spoke. The human shapes on either side of me were lost in the secret labyrinth of their own misery. They appeared as insubstantial as the smoke from my cigarettes, and they seemed almost to flicker back and forth between dimensions, sometimes here, sometimes not.
When the school bell went, it startled me out of my thoughts, the way an alarm clock jerks you out of a disquieting dream. More groans rose up from those around me, and there was a wet sound, like the easing apart of membranes.
It took maybe four minutes after the bell rang for them to arrive. The first were the Bacon-heads, scurrying like vermin. Then, a few thunderous Lardies. Then, more furtively, other figures. Some attenuated and frail, others moving like shadows over the wall. Hiding among them were the predators and parasites that fed on the desperate and the forlorn, bringing junk for the Bacon-heads and pies for the Lardies.
I hung back against the wall and let them all flow or scurry past, although I had that familiar feeling that if I stepped out they’d pass straight through me, like comedy ghosts on TV.
And there, at last, was Rat Zermatt. He took two, three, four little steps into the Interzone, then he stopped. I heard him sniff the air. His expression changed, and he began to turn. That was when I made my move. I grabbed his collar and threw him against the wall. He clawed at me with his paws, and his little feet kicked out, trying to find a vulnerable spot.
“Who authorized the hit?” I said
, trying to keep my voice even.
I wanted Rat to know that I was thinking clearly and not just in some kind of a red rage. The more rational he thought I was, the less likely he was to bullshit me.
He cringed and shook his head and made a high-pitched, inhuman sound.
“Then tell me who sent the warning.”
Again he emitted that high, chittering, bat-like noise. I felt my flesh crawl. I wanted to punch Rat more than I’d ever wanted to punch anyone or anything in my life, and I pulled my hand back as he cowered and whimpered.
“Give me a name,” I hissed, and my own voice sounded ratlike as well.
Then I felt sick: sick with myself, sick with Rat, sick with the world. I was taking things out on Rat that weren’t his fault.
I could do carrot as well as stick. I let him go. He slumped down and then tried to slither away. The scrunch and rustle of the packet brought him back.
“You like?” I said, holding out the bacon-flavoured corn puffs.
Rat released a sound of inchoate yearning, like an orphaned child might make when he sees his dead mother in a dream. He reached for the puffs, slowly, at first, and then with a lightning dart, so quick you couldn’t see his hand move. But I was ready for it, and I snatched the prize away.
“Play nice now, Rat, and you’ll get what you want.”
He writhed and squirmed some more, like a snake under a boot. There was a battle going on inside him, and both sides were fighting dirty.
I opened the packet.
“Speak, or this goes in the gutter.”
I began to tilt it.
It was too much for him. He still couldn’t speak the words, but he began to scratch something in the filth, using his talons.
I leant over to try to read it – and that’s when Rat made his move. He lunged for the puffs, and this time he was too quick for me. He scampered away to what he thought was a safe distance, shoved his paw into the bag he’d stolen and began to shovel the contents into his mouth. After a few pawfuls, he mashed up the bag, grinding what was left of the contents down to a fine powder. He licked his finger, stuck it into the bag, then rubbed the orange mess into his gums, all the time making an urgent, joyless sound. Then, with just a few grains left, he stopped, and carefully tore the bag fully open, like a pathologist opening up a body for an autopsy. He put it on the floor and knelt next to it. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket – I looked closely and saw it was a pink five-hundred dollar Monopoly note – rolled it tightly, and used it as a tube to snort up what was left in the bag.
I turned back to the message he had scratched on the floor.
The Lardies.
That was all it said. It was enough. So I knew who wanted me out of the way. Now I needed to know why.
I heard a rustle and looked up. Rat Zermatt was gone. But I saw a shape moving in the space between the shadows – a great, brown sewer rat with a tail as thick as a finger. It looked at me, and then re-entered the perpetual murk of the Interzone.
I turned my back on the scene and stalked out of there, my mind full of darkness. Except, that is, for one point of light. The Lardies had authorized the hit, but a girl had sent me a warning, and that girl had to be Zofia. Sure, she owed me, but in this school plenty of debts went unpaid.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FORBIDDEN FLESH
THINGS were slightly clearer. But only in the way that the fog lifts just as night is falling.
Big D.’s attack on me and the animal slayings had to be linked, that much I knew. The Lardies were behind the hit. Did that mean that they were also responsible for the killing of the pets? It was the closest thing I had to a lead, and so I was going to pay my respects at the court of King Lard.
But first I had to make another quick visit to my favourite lavatory cubicle, where something was waiting for me with the infinite patience of the dead.
The low-caste Lardies all refuelled down in the Interzone, but the Lardy King and his acolytes had cosier quarters up in the Domestic Science room. The deal was that the kids who were studying catering had to learn to prepare and serve fancy food. The Lardies had the onerous task of eating it.
I knew the kid on the door. Everyone called him Hobnob. I’d stuck up for him once when a couple of scumbags were giving him a hard time back in Year Seven. He’d put on a lot of weight since then. Not all of it was flab. Now he could stick up for himself. But he’d lost something along the way. He used to grin like a child’s picture of the sun; now his face was as blank as a pork chop.
He nodded.
“I’ve come to see the boss,” I said.
“Boss eating.”
“He’s a smart kid; he can do more than one thing at a time.”
“Sure can: sausage and egg on the same fork.”
“Just tell him I’m here, Hobnob. He’ll see me.”
“I move from this door and I’m toast. And the boss definitely don’t like toast. Not without jam on it.”
“Tell him I’ve got something new.”
“New what?”
“New food.”
“Ain’t no new food. The boss tried it all.”
“I haven’t got time for this, Hobnob,” I said, and began to squeeze past him through the doorway. Big mistake. He didn’t bother trying to hit me. He just eased out his bulk and crushed me against the frame.
One of my rules is never fight a fat guy. There’s nothing in it for you. Either you come out of it looking like a bully, or you get sat on, and that’s your reputation shot for good.
I tried to free my arms, but Hobnob had me pinned. It was like dancing with an elephant in a broom cupboard. He took hold of my face in his fat fingers.
“Shouldn’t have done that, Middleton,” he said.
Hobnob’s bulk engulfed me, like a white blood cell swallowing a bacterium. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to force my knee up into his groin, but it just sank harmlessly into marshmallow.
“Naughty, naughty,” he said, and gave me a couple of slaps. Despite the pain and the whole not-being-able-to-breathe thing, my biggest fear was that someone would see all this happening.
“Let him go.”
The voice was quiet, hardly more than a wet murmur, like some soft-bodied thing slowly turning in a swamp. But it did the trick. Hobnob inhaled, and I was free, leaving an imprint of my body in his. If you’d had a couple of bucketfuls of hot wax you could have filled it up and sent the results off to Madame Tussauds.
“Your lucky break,” I said to the big guy. “I was about to bleed all over your shirt.”
“Sure thing, Middleton,” he said, but he’d already lost interest.
A long table was set up at the far side of the Dom. Sci. room. There was a fine linen cloth, white as an angel’s wing, and the whole table was laid with antique silver, heavy as medieval armour. Six tall, silver candlesticks did a funeral march down the centre. Long-stemmed, white roses were scattered over the cloth like beautiful murder victims. Raised platters overflowed with tumbling bunches of red grapes.
Just one person sat at the table, while others in white jackets fussed around him. Two more heavies stood guard behind. I recognized them as Jethro and Tull.
The “him” was Hercule Paine, the Lardy King.
Hobnob was big, but Paine was bigger. His neat, brown hair sat on top of his head like a tiny plastic hat. Everything beneath it was supersized. His fat face flowed like lava into and beyond his fat neck. Further down, there was a simple, sublime immensity of flesh. He made the two guys behind him look like the testicles on a bulldog.
Which isn’t to say Paine didn’t dress well. He was definitely a dandy. He wore a silk shirt, and his school blazer had been hand-tailored in a brushed velvet as thick and soft as a seal-pup pelt. There were rings on his fingers and, for all I knew, bells on his toes.
“Nice spread,” I said, jerking my thumb at the table.
Hercule Paine looked at me. His eyes were black and unreadable. He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, and s
poke:
“These” – he waved his hand airily; his fingers were surprisingly long and elegant – “people are preparing for an examination, an HND, I believe, in catering. I, and my associates, assist them, insofar as we can.”
I had to strain to catch his words, so faintly did he speak. But, also, I caught a whiff of something foul on his breath; something like rotted meat sweetened with peppermint.
At that moment two white-jacketed flunkies brought in an enormous silver platter. They set it down before the king, and then one of them took off a lid the size of the Millennium Dome. Beneath it was some kind of roast bird. It was so big that, for a second, I thought it might be an ostrich.
Paine exuded an ennui heavy as osmium.
“Swan. Again. Take it away.”
“But, sir,” said one of the flunkies, almost cringing, “please, wait…” Then he cut into the bronzed flesh with a long carving knife that glinted under the strip lights. “Sir, you see, inside the swan, a goose; inside the goose, a duck; inside the duck, a—”
“Boring.”
“But … but…”
The flunky’s hand was resting on the table. Paine, with a speed that belied his bulk, brought his fork fizzing down right between the kid’s fingers, jamming it through the white cloth and into the wood beneath. The kid looked down, his face now matching the colour of his jacket and the tablecloth. The fork had nicked the skin of his middle finger, and a drop of blood welled from the cut.
“Go.”
The kid scuttled away, holding his hand. The other servant reached for the platter, but Paine dismissed him with a tiny movement of his finger. Then he reached into the huge carcass, rummaged around like a gynaecologist, and emerged with a tiny bird between his finger and thumb. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and crunched it, beak, legs and all.
“Lark,” he said, his eyes still closed. Then he belched, softly.
I looked at the mess on the table, and for a moment, the fat glistened on the surface and the swan shimmered and became the sweet wrappers and crisp packets and all the other crap that obese kids eat. My mouth was dry and a cement mixer churned in my head.
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