First published in 2013 in Great Britain by
Barrington Stoke Ltd
18 Walker Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7LP
This ebook edition first published in 2019
www.barringtonstoke.co.uk
Text © 2013 Anthony McGowan
The moral right of Anthony McGowan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in any part in any form without the written permission of the publisher
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library upon request
ISBN: 978-1-78112-884-8
To Mark Cass, Geoff Gnaggs, and the other friends of my youth in Sherburn in Elmet, in the West Riding of Yorkshire
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgements
One
The old male shifted uneasily in his sleep. He was dreaming of the ancient battles, back in the days when his teeth were still sharp. Those teeth were worn down to brown stumps now, but once every living creature in the woods and the fields feared them.
He remembered the big fox he had mauled in a clash over earthworms. Then there was the mink, a cruel and slender killer. It had crept down in search of his young. That was a fight he would not forget – he still carried the scars in his throat to help him remember.
But before then, back when he was still a squirming kit, there was the time when men had come with spades and dogs, and they had killed and killed and killed again. Of the whole loose family of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, only he escaped, carried away in the mouth of his mother. She concealed him under a pile of leaves and went back for the rest of her litter. But she had never returned, and so he had been left alone in the dark world.
Somehow, he had survived, with slugs and fallen fruit for food. The first winter was hard, and he had frozen and he had starved. But he had endured. He carved out a new kingdom, made a family, protected them.
And now here he was. The old king, asleep in his sett. Strong still, but fading.
His memories scurried back to the men and the dogs, and his senses came awake.
The scent was strong. And now so were the sounds. He felt the fear run through the tunnels and sleeping chambers, and he knew that the time had come.
He stretched himself.
Yes, there was still one last fight in those old bones.
Two
“Wake up, Nicky, wake up!”
I didn’t want to wake up. I wanted to stay asleep. And even more than that, I wanted to stay in my bed where it was warm. Ever since the boiler bust, the mornings had been hell. In the night your breath would freeze on the inside of the window so you could write your name in it with your fingernail.
“Wake up, Nicky, wake up. You’ve gotta come.”
It was Kenny, of course. Kenny’s my brother. People say he’s simple, and he is. I know you’re not meant to say “simple-minded” any more, but it seems to me that it’s the exact right word for Kenny. He hasn’t got all the stuff going on that messes up other people’s heads. He isn’t always trying to work out the angles, or how to stitch you up. He thinks other people are as kind as he is, and he only has one idea at a time.
His brain was starved of oxygen when he was getting born, so now he has what they call learning difficulties. But, like I say, I think “simple” is better and kinder and truer than talking about “difficulties” or “disabilities”.
Sometimes I wish I was simple, and happy, like Kenny.
“C’mon, Nicky,” Kenny pleaded.
I half opened an eye and checked the window. It was still as black as death outside.
That half-open eye was my first mistake.
“Ha!” said Kenny, and his voice crackled with joy. “I saw you. You’re awake. C’mon, we’ve got to go.”
“Get lost, Kenny,” I said. “It’s too early, and it’s flipping freezing.”
But it was no good. He yanked me out of bed, and before I knew what was happening I was pulling my kecks on.
“What the heck is this all about, Kenny?” I said. I was trying not to sound angry. You can’t sound angry with Kenny or he gets upset.
“Just come on,” he said. “It’s good.”
Three
“This better had be good,” I said to Kenny when we were half way down Moorgate, the main street in the village. It was so cold outside it made your teeth ache, so you had to shut your mouth and breathe through your nose.
Calling Moorgate the main street makes it sound a bit too grand. There was a Spar and two pubs – The Oddfellows Arms, where my dad goes, and The Red Bear, where he doesn’t, cos he’s barred. Then there’s a hairdresser’s and the closed-down social club, and that’s about it.
At the traffic lights we went down Kirk Lane, which has the fish-and-chip shop on it and another pub called The Foresters and, at the end, the church.
It was light enough now to be able to see the top of the church against the sky. The church was really old and always looked spooky, but somehow morning spooky wasn’t as bad as evening spooky. It was as if you knew that all the ghosts and vampires and that sort of thing had already gone back to their graves and coffins or whatever.
If it had been later, me and Kenny would have been trying to scare each other by going woooooooooo! but now we just walked along thinking about how cold it was.
I was wearing my parka, but I was still shivering like a junkie. Kenny was wearing his red bobble hat, but apart from that he just had his stupid Doctor Who sweatshirt on and his jeans, and I could see that his hands were blue.
I felt bad about that, and not just because the sweatshirt was the uncoolest item of clothing ever created. I should have made him put his coat on top, but my head had been all foggy. Kenny never felt the cold at all until he was frozen solid, and then he’d howl and wail until you got him home by the gas fire.
Anyway, by now we were heading down the lane that goes between the fields, and I began to have an idea where we were going to end up.
Four
Most of the land around here is dead flat. Because it’s so flat, almost every inch is planted over with fields of wheat and other stuff – I don’t know, maybe beetroot or whatever. My dad tells me that there used to be hedges in between all the fields, and that you used to get skylarks and lapwings and loads of other birds. But now all the hedges have been dug up, and it’s just the flat fields and the only birds are fat pigeons and scrawny rooks.
Like I said, it’s almost all dead flat, but there’s one place where the ground sort of folds in to make a “V” shape, like a kind of mini valley. Tractors and ploughs can’t get in it, so they haven’t bothered to chop down the scrubby little patch of trees that grow there. It’s only about a hundred metres long and maybe ten metres wide, but it was the nearest thing we had to a spot of wilderness. Everyone called it the Copse, but I think it had some other name, a proper name, but nobody could remember it.
You
’d sometimes hear an owl hooting in the dark depths of the Copse, and I once heard the drumming of a woodpecker. I never saw it, which is a shame, because I’d really like to see a woodpecker. I’ve always been into birds and animals. I had a notebook where I’d written all the birds I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t that many because, like I say, round here it’s not that great for birds.
I wish I still had that notebook. Our mum gave it to me before she went off. But Kenny scribbled all over it and then my dad threw it away.
Me and Kenny once built a den in the Copse. That was when we had bikes, so it didn’t take so long to get there. But my bike got nicked, and Kenny tried to customise his. He took it all to bits and then, like Humpty Dumpty, he couldn’t put it back together again.
My dad would have mended it, but … well, he had his troubles.
Without bikes it took just a bit too long to get to the Copse, so we abandoned the den, but that didn’t matter because it was a shit den anyway. Just some branches propped up against a fallen-down tree, and it was full of earwigs and black beetles.
“Are we off to the den, Kenny?” I asked. I thought he’d maybe decided that we should fix it up again.
“Yeah … No,” he said back, which wasn’t a lot of use.
And then I heard a dog bark. It’s funny how you can tell the size of a dog from its bark. Well, maybe not that funny. It would be more funny, I suppose, if you heard a little yap and it came from some big bugger the size of a pony. Or if there was a massive deep bark like a lion and then you saw it had come out of a little mutt the size of a crusty snot.
But anyway, you could tell from this bark that it was a big dog. And I knew which big dog. And then another dog joined in, and another, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock bloody Holmes to know what dogs they were and who we were going to meet.
I grabbed Kenny by the arm and made him face me.
“Kenny, what is this?” I demanded. “Tell me now.”
But Kenny twisted away and started to lope off towards the Copse and the sound of barking. His long arms and legs flapped and flailed about like clothes on a washing line when the wind blows.
“We gotta be there before it starts,” he yelled back at me, and then he fell over his feet. If I’d reached him before he got up, I’d have dragged him home, but I didn’t. I only caught up with him when he was already in the trees and then it was too late.
“Look who’s here,” said Jezbo. “It’s Mental Kenny and Nicky the Poof.”
Five
There were three of them there. Well, six, really, if you counted the dogs. Rich and Rob Bishop were twins. They had long yellow hair and they looked a bit like angels, but it would be a big mistake to think they were angels, because they weren’t.
Rich was mean. Even at junior school he used to punch kids and take their pocket money. And he was a dirty footballer. If you went past him or skilled him up, he’d just hack you down, even if a teacher was watching.
Rob wasn’t mean. He was something else. He was a psycho. He’d seem all friendly and normal, and then something would set him off and he’d smash stuff up. “Stuff” could mean you, if you were around. He once bit a kid and the kid had to go to hospital to get a shot for tetanus and probably rabies as well. Rob was on Ritalin, but it didn’t make any difference.
In a way it was easy to get by with Rich, because at least you always knew what he was going to do. But Rob was like a firework that you think has gone out, and then you go back to it and it blows your head off.
The third kid was Jez Bowen, who everyone called Jezbo. Jezbo was 17 years old, which made him the leader of the rest. He was massive, and pretty thick. Two of the dogs were his, and one belonged to Rich.
Me and Kenny didn’t have a dog because my dad said we couldn’t afford it.
Jezbo’s dogs were like Jezbo, but maybe a bit less thick. One was a pitbull crossed with something bigger than a pitbull. Maybe a Rotty, or one of them other dogs with slavering mouths and flabby jowls. I hate dogs that drool on you while they bite you, because I think that’s taking the piss.
That dog was called Satan. Kenny once called him Santa by mistake, and so sometimes the other kids would call him that too, but not when Jezbo was around.
Jezbo’s other dog was just a normal pitbull, a bitch he called Slag.
Satan and Slag.
That told you all you needed to know about Jezbo.
Rich and Rob’s dog was a Jack Russell terrier called Tina. It was an evil little scamp, but not that scary because it couldn’t reach your arse to bite it even if it jumped.
Six
It took me a few seconds to work out what was happening.
The whole lot of them were standing around the base of a tree. I’m good on birds and animals, but I don’t know much about trees so I can’t tell you what kind, but it was big and old. It was growing out of the slope on the edge of the Copse. You could see its roots going in and out of the soil, like dolphins going in and out of the water.
There was a hole there in the earth between the roots. It was nearly big enough to get your head into.
That was the sort of thing Kenny would do – stick his head into holes and get it stuck.
Rich and Rob had spades. Jezbo had a hammer, for some reason. The dogs were going mad, running around and sniffing and barking.
“What’s going on, Jezbo?” I asked, but I already had a sick feeling about it. I thought maybe they had a fox trapped in the hole.
“Badger sett,” Jezbo said. “Gonna play with the badgers, isn’t that right, Kenny?”
“Yeah!” Kenny said. He was grinning from ear to ear.
So that was what this was about. Jezbo had sent Kenny to get me to join in the fun. Well, I didn’t want anything to do with this.
“You don’t need us here,” I said. I didn’t quite look Jezbo in the face. I was thinking about the hammer.
Jezbo had a smirk on his face you wanted to wipe off with a brick. “Kenny, you want to play with the badgers, don’t you?” he said.
“Yeah!” said Kenny. “That’s why I come. And I brung me brother, so he could play too, like you said.”
“We have to go home, Kenny,” I said, and I put my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go and get some breakfast. There’s some Frosties in the cupboard.”
Kenny jerked away from my hand like it was a hot iron.
“You always stop me playing,” he whined. “I’m not going home. I’m not hungry. I don’t like Frosties.”
“Course you do,” I said back in a soft voice. “It’s Weetabix you don’t like. And scrambled eggs.”
“You’re both staying,” said Jezbo.
“I’m not,” I said. “This is wrong. It’s against the law.”
I knew it was a mistake as I said it. Rich and Rob copied my voice. “Against the law,” they said in a sarky way that made me sound like a big ponce, and they all whooped and jeered at me.
“Shame your dad never thought about that when he had all them knock-off DVDs in your shed,” said Rich. Rob laughed and they both looked over at Jezbo. His smirk got even bigger, like a fat slug on his face.
Seven
I better explain about the DVDs, and why they all found it so funny.
My dad was on bail because the police found some DVDs in our shed. Jezbo’s dad, Mick Bowen, had told my dad that they were pirate copies. He said that even if they got done for it, it was only copyright infringement, and no one got banged up for that. He offered my dad £200 to keep them for him, and my dad said yes. He didn’t have much choice because Mick Bowen sort of ran our village, and you couldn’t really say no to him without getting your windows smashed in and, maybe, your kids beaten up.
The trouble is that the DVDs weren’t pirate copies at all. They were real ones, thieved from a warehouse down in Birmingham. So my dad was getting done for handling stolen goods, and he was lo
oking at doing time inside. The police told him that if he grassed up the people who had dumped the DVDs on him, then he’d get off with community service. But my dad wasn’t a grass.
Before all that happened, my dad was OK. He was never totally right after our mum left, but he kept trying. There was always food on the table, and we had OK clothes. He ran a fishing tackle shop for a couple of years. Then he sold crap – dish cloths and stuff like that – at the market in Pontefract. Then he delivered flyers and other junk mail round the village. He even had a paper round, for a while, but he stopped that when he heard that me and Kenny were getting teased for it by the other kids.
But after the thing with the DVDs, Dad stopped fighting. He spent all day watching telly and then drank cheap supermarket lager in the night. He didn’t do anything bad. He didn’t do anything at all, really. I think he was just waiting to find out what would happen. If he got jailed, then we’d end up in care. I think he was so scared about that that he could only cope with it by blanking it out.
Anyway, that’s what they were all sniggering about in the Copse, and it’s another reason I had to hate Jezbo and his dad.
So Jezbo came over to me and put his massive arm around my shoulders. The dogs came over, too. Jezbo’s dogs, I mean. Tina the Jack Russell was straining at her leash, trying to get down the hole.
“I’m not gonna make you stay,” Jezbo said. “Free country and all that shit. But then poor old Kenny will be all on his own, without his little bwover to pwotect him. And them badgers can be savage …”
We both knew that Jezbo wasn’t really talking about the badgers.
I shrugged. “I’ll stay,” I said. “But I don’t want ’owt to do with this. It’s not right.”
“Please yourself, mummy’s boy,” Jezbo jeered. “Oh, I forgot. You haven’t got a mummy, have you?”
Rich and Rob laughed at that, and as usual when anyone else laughed, Kenny laughed too.
Then Jezbo ignored me, and they got down to work while I stood and watched like a dummy.
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