Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Can you believe it?’ the boy said. ‘That man was Grade A! Cowering in the tall grass like a woman, to avoid handing over a bowl. A bowl for heaven’s sake.’

  Rose pushed her shoulder against his. ‘So, you think you’re going to be Grade A? Grade B maybe? What d’you think, boy?’

  He shrugged. He knew what he was hoping for. All he could be certain about was that this was the last time anybody would call him ‘boy’.

  The one with the bottle stood a foot or so forward from his two friends. He reached over his shoulder for the lit cigarette that he knew would be there, took three quick drags and handed it back. ‘What team do you support anyway?’

  ‘Fucking Man U, I bet.’

  For a moment, Vincent thought about lying. Giving them their own team’s name. He knew that he’d be caught out in a second. ‘I don’t follow a team.’

  ‘Right. Not an English team.’

  ‘Not any team,’ Vincent said.

  ‘Some African team, yeah? Kicking a fucking coconut around.’

  ‘Bongo Bongo United FC!’

  ‘ “Kicking a coconut”, that’s classic.’

  ‘Headers must be a nightmare, yeah?’

  The skinny one and the one with the shaved head began to laugh. They pursed their lips and stuck out their bum-fluffy chins. They pretended to scratch their armpits.

  ‘You know what FC stands for don’t you? Fucking coon.’

  Vincent looked away from them. He heard the monkey noises begin softly, then start to get louder.

  ‘Look at him,’ the one in the cap said. ‘He’s shitting himself.’ He said something else after that, but Vincent didn’t hear it.

  Dawn, at the river, on the final morning.

  Dotted for a mile or more along the flat, brown riverbank were the other groups. Some were smaller than his own, while others must have numbered a hundred, but at the centre of each stood one of the boy’s age-mates. Each ready to connect with the past, to embrace the future. Each asking for the strength to endure what lay ahead of him.

  The boy was called forward by an elder. As he took his first steps, he glanced sideways, saw his age-mates along the riverbank moving in a line together towards the water.

  This was the preparation.

  In the seconds he spent held beneath the water, he wondered whether a cry would be heard if he were to let one out. He imagined it rising up to the surface, the bubbles bursting in a series of tiny screams, each costing him grades.

  He emerged from the river purified and ready to be painted with death.

  The sun was just up but already fierce, and the white mud was baked hard within a minute or two of being smeared across his face and chest and belly. The mist was being burned away and looking along the bank, the boy saw a row of pale statues. A long line of ghosts in the buttery sunlight.

  He watched an old man approach each figure, as one now approached him. The elder took a mouthful of beer from a pumpkin gourd and spat, spraying it across the boy’s chest. The beer ran in rivulets down the shell of dried mud, as prayers were said and his uncles stepped towards him.

  The group that had been nearest to him jogged past, already finished, and he looked at his age-mate, caked in white mud as he was. The boy had known him, as he’d known most of them, for all of their sixteen years, but his friend was suddenly unrecognisable. It was not the mask of mud. It was the eyes that stared out from behind it. It was the eyes that were suddenly different.

  The boy was nudged forward, was handed his knife, and the group began loping away in the same direction as his friend. Drumming again now, and singing, heading for the marketplace. All of them, all the ghost-boys, moving towards the moment when they would die and come back to life.

  ‘Shut up!’ Vincent shouted.

  After a moment or two, the skinny one and the one with the shaved head stopped making their monkey noises, but only after a half-glance in their direction from the one in the cap.

  ‘Turn your pockets out,’ he said.

  Vincent’s hands were pressed hard against his legs to keep them still. He slowly brought each of them up to his pockets, slipped them inside.

  ‘Maybe we’ll let you pay to go home. Let me see what you’ve got.’

  Vincent’s left hand came out empty. His right emerged clutching the change from his train ticket. He opened his hand and the one in the cap leaned forward to take a look.

  ‘Fuck that, mate. Where’s the notes?’

  Vincent shook his head. ‘This is all I’ve got.’

  ‘You’re a liar. Where’s your wallet?’

  Vincent said nothing. He closed his hand around the coins and thrust his fist back into his trouser pocket.

  The one in the cap took a step towards him. He was no more than a couple of feet away. ‘Don’t piss me about. I don’t like it, yeah?’

  He could easily turn and go round…

  ‘Where’s his phone?’ the skinny one said.

  ‘Get his fucking phone, man. They always have wicked phones.’

  The one in the cap held out his hand. ‘Let’s have it.’

  It suddenly seemed to Vincent that the phone might be the way out of it, his way past them. Handing it over, giving them something and then trying to get past was probably a good idea.

  The mobile was snatched from his grasp the second he’d produced it. The one in the cap turned and swaggered back towards his friends. They cheered as he held it up for them to look at.

  The three gathered around to examine the booty and Vincent saw a gap open up between the far right bollard and the wall. He thought about making a run for it. If he could stay ahead of them for just a minute, half a minute maybe, he would be virtually home. He reckoned he could outrun the two bigger ones anyway. Perhaps his mother or father, one of his brothers might see him coming.

  He took a tentative step forward.

  The one in the cap wheeled round suddenly, clutching the phone. ‘Piece of cheap shit.’ His arm snapped back, then forward and Vincent watched the phone explode against the wall, shattering into pieces of multi-coloured plastic.

  The crack of the phone against the bricks changed something.

  By the time Vincent looked again the gap had been filled. The three stood square on to him, their bodies stiff with energy despite their efforts to appear relaxed.

  The space between them all was suddenly charged.

  Vincent had no idea how he looked to them, what his face said about how he felt at that moment. He looked at their faces and saw hatred and excitement and expectation. He also saw fear.

  ‘Last chance,’ the one in the cap said.

  The boy was stunned by the size of the crowd, though it was nothing unusual. He could remember, when he’d been one of the onlookers himself as a child, thinking that there couldn’t possibly be this many people in the whole world. Today, as at the same moment every year, those that could not get a clear view were standing on tables and other makeshift platforms. They were perched on roofs and clustered together in the treetops.

  He and his age-mates were paraded together, one final time, carried aloft like kings. His eyes locked for a few seconds with a friend as they passed each other.

  Their Adam’s apples were like wild things in their throats.

  While the boy moved on shoulders above the teeming mass of bodies, the dancing and the drumming grew more frenzied. Exhausted, he summoned the strength to sing one final time, while below him the basket was passed around and each relative given a last chance to hand over more money or pledge another gift.

  Now, it was only the fizzing in the boy’s blood that was keeping him upright. There were moments – a sickening wave of exhaustion, a clouding of his vision as he reached for a high note – when he was sure he was about to pass out, to topple down and be lost or trampled to death. He was tempted to close his eyes and let it happen.

  At the moment when the noise and the heat and the passion of the crowd was at its height, the boy suddenly found himself alone with Joseph a
nd Francis at the edge of the marketplace. There was space around him as he was led along a track towards a row of undecorated huts.

  ‘Are you a woman?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘No,’ the boy said.

  The boy wondered if thinking about his mother and father made him one. He knew that they would be waiting, huddled together among the coffee plants, listening for the signal that it was over. Did wishing that he was with them, even for the few moments it would take to shake his father’s hand and smell his mother’s neck, make him less than Grade A?

  ‘Are you a woman?’ Francis repeated.

  ‘No!’ the boy shouted.

  His uncles stepped in front of him and pushed open a door to one of the peat latrines.

  ‘This will be your last chance,’ Joseph said.

  The boy moved inside quickly, dropped his shorts and squatted above the hole formed by the square of logs. He looked up at the grass roof, then across at his uncles who had followed him inside. He knew that they had sworn to stay with him until the final moment, but honestly, what did they think he was going to do? Did they think he would try to kill himself by diving head first into the latrine?

  Did they think he would try to run?

  Joseph and Francis smiled as the shit ran out of him like water.

  ‘Better now than later,’ Francis said.

  The boy knew that his uncle was right.

  He stood and wiped himself off. He felt no shame, no embarrassment at being watched. He was no more or less than a slave to it now.

  A slave to the ritual.

  The beercan hit him first, bouncing off his shoulder. It was almost empty, and Vincent was far more concerned by the beer that had sprayed onto his cheek and down his shirt. The can was still clattering at his feet when the cigarette fizzed into his chest. He took a step back, smacking away the sparks, listening to the skinny one and the one with the shaved head jabbering.

  ‘I don’t believe it, he’s still fucking here.’

  ‘Is he? It’s getting dark, I can’t see him if he isn’t smiling.’

  ‘He said he wasn’t looking for trouble.’

  ‘Well he’s going to get a fucking slap.’

  ‘He’s just taking the piss now.’

  ‘We gave him every chance.’

  ‘They’re all taking the piss.’

  ‘He’s the one that’s up for it, if you ask me. It’s him who’s kicking off, don’t you reckon? He could have walked away and he just fucking stood there like he’s in a trance. He’s trying to face us down, the twat. Yeah? Don’t you reckon?’

  ‘Come on then.’

  ‘Let’s fucking well. Have. It.’

  Vincent became aware that he was shifting his weight slowly from one foot to the other, that his fists were clenched, that there was a tremor running through his gut.

  A hundred yards away, on the far side of the estate, he saw a figure beneath a lamppost. He watched it move inside the cone of dirty orange light. Vincent wondered if whoever it was would come if he shouted.

  His eyes darted back to the boy in the cap, and to the boy’s hand, which tilted slowly as he emptied out what drink there was left in his bottle.

  The noise in the marketplace died as each one stepped forward, then erupted again a minute or two later when the ritual had been completed.

  It was the boy’s turn.

  The crowd had moved back to form a tunnel down which he walked, trancelike, his uncles slightly behind. He tried to focus on the two red splodges at the far end of the tunnel and when his vision cleared he saw the faces of the cutters for the first time. Their red robes marked them out as professionals – men who travelled from village to village, doing their jobs and moving on. They were highly skilled, and had to be. There were stories, though the boy had never seen such a thing happen, of cutters being set upon by a crowd and killed if a hand was less than steady; if a boy were to die because of one of them.

  The boy stopped at the stone, turned to the first cutter and handed over his knife. He had sharpened it every day on the soft bark of a rubber tree. He had confidence in the blade.

  In three swift strokes, the knife had sliced away the fabric of the boy’s shorts. All he could feel was the wind whispering at the top of his legs. All he could hear was the roaring of the blood, loud as the river, inside his head.

  He was offered a stick to clutch, to brace against the back of his neck and cling onto. This was the first test, and with a small shake of the head it was refused. No Grade A man would accept this offer.

  He was hard as stone.

  His hands were taken, pressed into a position of prayer and placed against his right cheek. His eyes widened, and watered, fixed on the highest point of a tree at the far end of the marketplace.

  Repeating it to himself above the roaring of the river. Hard as stone.

  The boy knew that this was the moment when he would be judged. This was everything – when the crowd, when his family would be watching for a sign of fear. For blinking, for shaking, for shitting …

  He felt the fingers taking the foreskin, stretching it.

  Focused on the tree … chalk-white ghost-boy … stiff and still as any statue.

  He felt the weight of the blade, cold and quick. Heavy, then heavier and he heard the knife pass through the skin. A boom and then a rush…

  This was when a Grade A man might prove himself, jumping and rubbing at his bloody manhood. The crowd would count the jumps, clap and cheer as those very special ones asked for alcohol to be poured into the wound.

  The boy was happy to settle for Grade B. His eyes flicked to his uncle Joseph, who signalled for the second cutter to come forward. The knife was handed across and with three further cuts the membrane, the ‘second skin’ was removed.

  A whistle was blown and the boy started slightly at the explosion of noise from the crowd. It was all over in less than a minute.

  Everything took on a speed – underwater slow or blink-quick – a dreamlike quality of its own as the pain began.

  A cloth was wrapped around the boy’s shoulders.

  He was gently pushed back on to a stool.

  He lowered his eyes and watched his blood drip onto the stone at his feet.

  There was a burning then, and a growing numbness as ground herbs were applied, and the boy sat waiting for the bleeding to stop. He felt elated. He stared down the tunnel towards the far side of the marketplace, towards what lay ahead.

  He saw himself lying on a bed of dried banana leaves, enjoying the pain. Only a man, he knew, would feel that pain. Only a man would wake, sweating in the night, crying out in agony after a certain sort of dream had sent blood to where it was not wanted.

  He saw himself healed, walking around the marketplace with other men. They were laughing and talking about the different grades that their friends had reached. They were looking at women and enjoying the looks that they got back.

  The boy looked down the tunnel and saw, clearer than anything else, the baby that he’d been handed the day before. He watched it again, happily pissing all over him.

  He saw its fat, perfect face as it stared up at him, kicking its legs.

  The skinny one and the one with the shaved head were drifting towards him.

  Vincent knew that if he turned and ran they would give chase, and if they caught him they would not stop until they’d done him a lot of damage. He felt instinctively that he had a chance of coming off better than that if he stood his ground. Besides, he didn’t want to run.

  ‘I bet he’s fucking carrying something,’ the skinny one said.

  The one with the shaved head reached into his jacket pocket, produced a small, plastic craft-knife. ‘Blacks always carry blades.’

  Vincent saw the one with the cap push himself away from the bollard he was leaning against. He watched him take a breath, and drop his arm, and break the bottle against the bollard with a flick of his wrist.

  Vincent took a step away, turned and backed up until he felt the wall of the block b
ehind him.

  Hard as stone …

  ‘Stupid fucker.’

  ‘He can’t run. His arse has gone.’

  ‘I bet he’s filling his pants.’

  Vincent showed them nothing. As little as his father had shown when the blade sang against his skin. He tensed his body but kept his face blank.

  ‘Three points in the bag, lads,’ the one with the broken bottle said. ‘Easy home win.’

  Vincent had learned a lot about what you gave away and what you kept hidden. They could have his phone and whatever money they could find. He would give them a little blood and a piece of his flesh if it came to it, and he would try his hardest to take some of theirs.

  Vincent looked down the tunnel and saw them coming. He would not show them that he was afraid though. He would not give them that satisfaction.

  He was Grade A.

  STROKE OF LUCK

  So many things that could have been different.

  An almost infinite number of them: the flight of the ball; the angle of the bat; the movement of his feet as he skipped down the pitch. The weather, the time, the day of the week, the whatever.

  The smallest variance in any one of these things, or in the way that each connected to the other at the crucial moment, and nothing would have happened as it did. An inch another way, or a second, or a step and it would have been a very different story.

  Of course, it’s always a different story; but it isn’t always a story with bodies.

  He wasn’t even a good batsman – a tail-ender for heaven’s sake – but this once, he got everything right. The footwork and the swing were spot on. The ball flew from the meat of the bat, high above the heads of the fielders into the long grass at the edge of the woodland that fringed the pitch on two sides.

  Alan and another player had been looking for a minute or so, using hands and feet to move aside the long grass at the base of an oak tree, when she stepped from behind it as if she’d been waiting for them.