Different Class

by Joanne Harris

  ‘I had to do it,’ I told him. ‘He needed to be put down.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ he hissed. There was a pause. I could hear him breathing; fast, as if he had been running. ‘Listen, I’m coming over,’ he said. ‘We need to sort this out, right now.’

  I made a pot of green tea as I waited for him to arrive. I thought it better not to offer him a beer. I rather mistrust alcohol. Alcohol’s a killer. That was what killed Poodle, you know. Alcohol and stubbornness.

  Johnny knocked on my front door ten minutes or so afterwards. It’s only a short walk through the park, but he was already out of breath. I suppose it’s the sedentary lifestyle, but at his age he ought to be careful. Heavy drinking can cut your life expectancy by twenty years – that’s even more than smoking. He’s thirty-eight. That would give him ten or twelve years. Not that that would bother me. I’m going to live forever.

  I opened the door. Johnny came in. He didn’t look too bad, actually, and I felt some disappointment. When he dies, his lovely wife will be a wealthy widow. And she is very lovely, Mousey. Some women improve as they mature.

  ‘How nice to see you,’ I told him. ‘How’s Liz? Give her my love.’

  Johnny gave me a look, as if I’d said something ridiculous. His status has made him arrogant; I would never have been that rude.

  ‘Would you like a cup of green tea? I’ve already poured one,’ I told him. ‘Tea’s very healthy, you know. Filled with antioxidants.’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Johnny.

  I shrugged and sat on the sofa. I sometimes forget that others are not as mindful of their health as I. Johnny paced up and down for a while, then turned back to look at me. He was still a little flushed. Probably high blood pressure.

  ‘Was it really you?’ he said. ‘Did you really do it?’

  He ran his hand through his hair, and I wondered if he’d had transplants. He’s always been rather vain, you know, even when he was a boy. That perfectly straight, dark-blond hair. Mine was thinning, even then. I was not an attractive boy.

  ‘They’re saying he was drunk,’ he said. ‘That he fell into the canal.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, yes. That would make sense. He was depressed. He had problems. He was addicted to drink and drugs. He had no reason to stay alive.’

  ‘Did he die alone?’ he said.

  Stupid question. ‘We all die alone.’

  ‘Dammit! Were you with him?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I pushed him.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He started to pace again. ‘Sweet Jesus, David. You pushed him.’

  ‘He pushed that boy in the clay pits,’ I said.

  Johnny looked even more agitated. ‘You said you’d never mention that. Oh, God. What am I going to do?’

  I drank more tea and watched him pace. He really did seem quite upset. I wondered what would happen if he had a heart attack, right there. It would probably serve him right, after everything he’s done.

  ‘No one will find out,’ I said. ‘No one saw. If anyone comes round, I’ll tell them we had a couple of drinks, that he seemed depressed, that he talked of ending it all, but that I thought he was just being maudlin. I left him to walk home through the park, and that’s the last I saw of him.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Johnny said. ‘Oh, Jesus, David.’

  ‘What? What’s going to happen?’ I said. He was starting to annoy me now. ‘Has anyone suggested that there might have been foul play?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. Are you sure you don’t want tea?’

  Johnny ignored me. ‘I shouldn’t have come. Don’t try to contact me again. If anyone asks where I was tonight, I’ll say I was with Becky. She’ll back me up. You know she will.’

  ‘Will she?’

  I thought probably she would. Maybe I was wrong about her sleeping with the boss. Not that I would have told anyone about Johnny’s visit. Why would I? Still, his suspicion was hurtful. You don’t behave like that with your friends.

  Johnny left soon after that, without even touching his tea. I guessed I wouldn’t see him again, at least not for a while. I was washing the cups and the teapot (green tea turns poisonous when it ferments, and it’s never good to leave it too long), when I heard a knock at the back door. Johnny hadn’t been gone for more than a couple of minutes, and I wondered if he’d had second thoughts; if he’d come back to talk to me.

  But when I opened the door and looked out, it wasn’t Johnny standing there. It was a ghost. A ghost from the past. And not just any ghost, either. Mousey, you’ll never believe who it was, standing there as if nothing had changed for over twenty years—

  It was you.

  8

  November 2005

  Well, of course, it wasn’t you. I know you’ve been dead for years. But he looks so like you, Mousey. Same hair; same eyes; even the same kind of clothes. He might be a few years older than me, but now he looks much younger. And he’s lost a lot of weight since we were boys, which is why for a moment I was confused. But then I recognized the man in the dark-blue parka – you know, the one I saw the night that Poodle fell from the bridge. It was your brother – Piggy, as was – standing in the doorway, looking at me with your eyes. He was holding something under his arm. It looked like a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

  He smiled at me. ‘Can I come in?’

  For a moment I just stared.

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s been a long time.’ From the album sleeve he pulled out a Xerox copy of an old School photograph. I’d seen it before, lots of times. It came out at Harry’s trial. Harry and Johnny, at Sports Day, with me in the background.

  I nodded again. ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘I’ll make a pot of green tea.’

  I think that, even then, I must have been contemplating murder. That album under his arm was the clue; the sleeve now spotted with age and neglect. He must have retrieved it very soon after I buried my time capsule. Maybe he watched me hide it there, from behind a burnt-out car. My treasures; the Christmas card to Harry; the list of albums I’d meant to buy; and the pages torn from my diary that I couldn’t bear to burn.

  ‘My brother liked the clay pits,’ he said. ‘There was always lots to do. Catching mice. Killing them. We used to look for comics, too. Things that people had finished with.’ He followed me into the living room; sat down on the sofa. ‘We liked to watch in secret, too. You wouldn’t believe what sometimes went on.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ Even then I was wondering whether I could take him. He didn’t look like a fighter, but then, neither am I, Mousey. A blow to the back of the head? No. Poison? I doubted he’d fall for that. Besides, I’m a pusher, not a poisoner.

  ‘You’d be amazed at the number of times I got to watch people having sex. They did it in abandoned cars, or out in the open, on mattresses. I didn’t like watching my brother kill mice, but watching people have sex was OK. I used to have a couple of dens I’d built from wooden pallets. Like the kind bird-watchers use, with little slatted windows. A couple of times, I saw a boy from St Oswald’s, with his girl. Not like the girls at Sunnybank Park. Bright red hair, and gorgeous.’

  I took a couple of beers from the fridge. Handed one to the visitor. I could see where he was leading, and I, for one, needed a drink.

  ‘That’s where I was hiding the day I saw you bury the box,’ he said. ‘Right up by the big rock between two of the flooded pits. At first I thought it was money, so I waited till you’d gone away. Then I dug where the earth was loose, and I found this.’

  He took the album from under his arm and put it on the coffee-table. Then he drank his beer while I looked for the pages torn from my diary. Of course, they weren’t there, Mousey.

  Your brother looked at me and smiled. ‘Of course, I had no idea what it was. I had no idea who you were. At the time Harry Clarke was arrested, I didn’t make the connection. I thought what I had was a story, written by a sick little shit
who’d buried it in the clay pits for fear that his parents might read it. But I’ve been making enquiries, and now I think it’s something else. I think it’s my pension fund. What do you think, David?’

  It was blackmail, pure and simple. Simple, because what he wanted was simple enough for me to provide. He wanted money, that was all; a one-off payment of ten thousand pounds from each of the people concerned. That would ensure delivery of the missing pages; after which your brother would vanish from Malbry forever.

  ‘I don’t care about what you may or may not have done back when you were a kid,’ he said. ‘All that’s ancient history now. I don’t see the point of dredging it up. Ten thousand pounds isn’t a lot. I know you can afford it.’

  I looked at him in disbelief. ‘How stupid do you think I am? Why should I accept your word that you won’t take the money and keep coming back?’

  ‘Because I want to live,’ he said. ‘And both of us know what happens to anyone who gets in your way. Trust me, Dave, I’ll be out of your hair as soon as you deliver the cash.’

  I wanted to believe him, you know. But Mousey, he was dangerous. Besides, with everything he knew, ten thousand pounds just wasn’t enough. ‘What can you buy with ten thousand pounds?’

  Your brother gave a little smile. ‘A ticket to Hawaii,’ he said.

  9

  November 2005

  You’d think that taking a life would have weight. Death should be something heavy. It ought to matter, like turning eighteen, or losing your virginity. But after that day at the clay pits, I woke up just the same as before. That’s how it was with Ratboy. That’s how it was with Poodle.

  Poor Poodle. I never told him what really happened on that day. I even tore the pages out of my St Oswald’s diary. I wanted him to feel miserable. I wanted him to feel guilty. After all, I thought to myself, why should he be allowed to forget? Why should Charlie Nutter have something that I never would?

  He left me by the Pit Shaft the day we did for Ratboy. He was pretty upset, and I guess he didn’t want to stick around. I was still on a high, though. The fire in the burnt-out car was still warm, and so I sat there awhile, enjoying the glow. But then I heard a funny sound coming from the Pit Shaft; a kind of croaking, slithery sound. Ratboy, climbing out of the pit, all dead and fishy and covered with mud, to take revenge on his killers. Or so my mind kept telling me, even though I didn’t believe in ghosts, or retribution, or even, really, God. So I went to look. And when I got there, I found that I was half right. But Ratboy wasn’t a vengeful ghost. Mousey – he was still alive.

  He must have been tougher than he looked. That muddy water was freezing. And even though he could hardly swim, he’d managed to paddle across the pit to the side where the bank made a bit of a slope – not much, but just enough to pull himself out of the water and make a grab for a dead tree root that was sticking out of the frozen bank.

  When he saw me, his mouth worked. I think he was trying to call for help. But nothing came out but a kind of squeak, as if he really were a rat.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  I wasn’t scared. But really, Mousey, I had no choice. I could hardly help him out. He would have told his parents, and Poodle and I would have been caught. I had to finish him off before he somehow managed to climb out of the pit – and he was making a decent try, in spite of those wet and slippery sides.

  Ratboy must have guessed as much. He started to claw at the sides of the pit with his greasy, shaking hands.

  ‘Shit,’ I said again. At this rate, Ratboy would be out in no time. I looked around for something to use. There was an old shopping trolley nearby. It was missing its wheels, but it was still good. I started to drag it towards the pit. It was pretty heavy. I’d almost got where I wanted to be, when I heard the sound of footsteps. It was Goldie, looking alarmed, as if he’d expected to see someone else.

  ‘Ziggy, what are you doing?’ he said.

  For a moment I wanted to push him into the water, too. Then I had a better idea.

  I said: ‘He wanted to do things. Charlie pushed him, then he ran.’

  Goldie’s eyes widened. ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Sexual things, you moron,’ I said. ‘The kind of things that perverts do.’

  Some kids are scared of Satanists. Some are afraid of their teachers. Some live in fear of bullies, the Bomb, or of getting cancer. With Goldie, it was perverts. To be fair, his dad was always warning us in Church about perverts hanging around the clay pits, trying to pick up little boys. And to be fair, Goldie’s dad was half right. Except that the problem was never the clay pits, but somewhere much, much closer to home.

  I said: ‘I think we might have found the reason for Charlie’s Condition.’

  Goldie’s eyes widened still further. ‘You mean – you think he knew him?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure they were meeting here. That’s why Charlie kept coming round. But recently, he’s been trying to change, and I think that’s when things got nasty.’

  In a few words I painted the scene. It actually all made sense. And finally, when Goldie looked over the side of the Pit Shaft and saw who Charlie’s abuser was – a boy from the estates, no less, a dirty Sunnybanker—

  Ratboy had managed to haul himself almost out of the water by then. But the clay bank of the pit was steep, and he was too heavy with water to climb. The sticking-out tree root had broken off, and now he was trying to use his hands to dig himself a place to stand. You had to hand it to Ratboy. He was pretty tough all right.

  Goldie and I looked down at him – covered in mud from head to foot, only his eyes looking out at us from behind a mask of yellow clay. If he’d said a word – just one – I don’t think we would have done it. But behind that mask of clay he didn’t even look human, and the sounds that were coming from his mouth – wheezing, chattering, choking sounds – didn’t sound human, either.

  Goldie was watching him, mesmerized. I think he was playing it in his head, counting the possibilities. There were only two. One: we let Ratboy go, or—

  ‘We can’t let him go. He’s seen us,’ I said.

  For a while, Goldie didn’t say anything. He was thinking hard, I could tell. But this wasn’t a piece of algebra or a Latin translation. He was out of his depth, and besides, I think he was scared of me.

  I looked at the shopping trolley again. Then I looked back at Goldie.

  He shook his head. ‘We can’t,’ he said.

  Below us, Ratboy was climbing the pit; digging, first a hand, then a foot, into the hard and greasy clay walls. His breath came out in jagged plumes. His fingers were crabby and blue with cold.

  ‘We could just leave him,’ Goldie said.

  ‘What, after this? Don’t be a dope.’ I took his hand and placed it on one side of the trolley. The thing was heavy; heavy enough to solve all of our problems. ‘No one will ever know,’ I said. ‘Charlie thinks he did it himself. Besides, what’s one pervert more or less?’

  I let that sink in for a moment. Slowly, Goldie looked at me. And then, Mousey, we counted to three, and sent the trolley down the bank, and Ratboy’s eyes went wide, just once, before he hit the water—

  We waited for him to resurface. But this time, he stayed under.

  After that, I just went home. Watched TV, did my homework; wrote in my St Oswald’s diary. But Mousey, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t feeling as good as I thought. It was stupid. I know it was. But unlike the rabbits, with Ratboy it didn’t feel as if my fear had found another home. Instead it had found another voice. Not a very loud one, but with that twang my parents hate. And that new voice stayed with me for seven whole years, Mousey, never saying very much, except the occasional All right? and sniffing cold air through its nose like a little animal.

  But it was always in my thoughts, counting down the seconds. Like the still, small voice of God – if God was a Sunnybanker.

  10

  November 3rd, 2005

  I’ll have to kill your brother now. I hope you don’t hold that against me
. But I’m afraid he’s dangerous. He has the torn-out pages. We must get those back, Mousey. We don’t want anyone reading them. But it may be a good thing after all. I’ve been thinking of ending it, and this may give me the chance I need. Goldie’s no use to me any more. Look how he was over Poodle. Look how loyal he was to me. He’s always been weak. And now look – the first hint of trouble, and here he is, giving in to blackmail. And from whom? A cleaner, no less. A dirty Sunnybanker.

  It doesn’t take much to kill a man. A quick push over a bridge. A blow to the back of the head. You’d think it would be like riding a bike; something you can never unlearn. And yet, getting rid of your brother is proving harder than I thought. Who could have imagined that he would be so difficult? That boy I once called Piggy, who used to cry when we drowned the rats? Of course, he isn’t fat any more. And he was never stupid. Careful, but not stupid, which is why he’s still alive.

  I paid the ten thousand pounds, of course. Goldie did, too, which rankled, given how reluctantly he always pays my salary. As if it were some kind of charity, instead of what he owes me. But I got my pages back, and burnt them in the fireplace, which means my mind should be at rest – except for your brother, Mousey, who knows what happened to Ratboy, and, remembering the clay pits and the games you and I used to play there, must have a pretty good inkling of what happened to Poodle.

  A month has passed since he sought me out. Since then, I’ve been making enquiries. I’ve found out quite a lot, actually. His name is B. B. Winter. I’ve seen him in the Village. He lives in White City – I know the address – with his elderly mother. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t seem to have any friends. A loner. He should have been easy. But, after our first meeting, he never met me alone again. He arranged to receive the cash in the coffee shop at our local supermarket, inside a bag of groceries. Ten thousand pounds doesn’t take too much space. And inside a jumbo carrier bag, under a loaf of bread, some eggs and a carton of milk, it all looked perfectly innocent. I ordered a pot of tea and some toast, and he handed me the pages from my diary inside what looked like a birthday card. No one would have guessed the truth, not even if they’d been sitting right next to us.