Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  My Silver Reed’s probably what I’d save if our house ever caught fire, now my granddad’s Omega Seamaster’s busted. The worst thing in a locked house in a bad dream, that was.

  So anyway, my alarm-radio suddenly said 21:15. I had less than twelve hours. Rain drummed on my window. The rhythms of Metro Gnomes’re in rain and poems too, and breathing, not just tocks of clocks.

  Julia’s footsteps crossed my ceiling and went downstairs. She opened the living-room door and asked if she could phone Kate Alfrick about some economics homework. Dad said okay. Our phone’s in the hallway to make it uncomfortable to use, so if I creep over the landing to my surveillance position I can catch just about everything.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I did get your Valentine’s card, and very sweet it is too, but listen, you know why I’m calling! Did you pass?’

  Pause.

  ‘Just tell me, Ewan! Did you pass?’

  Pause. (Who’s Ewan?)

  ‘Excellent! Brilliant! Fantastic! I was going to chuck you if you’d failed, of course. Can’t have a boyfriend who can’t drive.’

  (‘Boyfriend’? ‘Chuck’?) Muffled laughter plus pause.

  ‘No! No! He’s never!’

  Pause.

  Julia did the ohhh! moany noise she does when she’s mega-jealous. ‘God, why can’t I have a filthy-rich uncle who gives me sports cars? Can’t I have one of yours? Go on, you’ve got more than you need…’

  Pause.

  ‘You bet. How about Saturday? Oh, you’ve got classes all morning, I keep forgetting…’

  Saturday morning classes? This Ewan must be a Worcester Cathedral School kid. Posh.

  ‘…Russell and Dorrell’s café, then. One thirty. Kate’ll drive me in.’

  A sly Julia laugh.

  ‘No, I certainly will not be bringing him. Thing spends his Saturdays skulking up trees or hiding down holes.’

  The sound of the Nine o’Clock News filled the hallway as the living-room door opened. Julia switched to her Kate voice. ‘Got that bit, yeah, Kate, but I still can’t get my head round question nine. I’d better check your answers before the test. Okay…okay. Thanks. See you in the morning. G’night.’

  ‘Sort it out?’ Dad called from the kitchen.

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Julia, zipping up her pencil case.

  Julia’s an ace liar. She’s applied to do law at university and she’s got several offers of places already. (Lawyer-liar, liar-lawyer. Never noticed that before.) The idea of any boy snogging my sister makes me grab the vomit bucket but quite a few sixth-formers fancy her. I bet Ewan’s one of these super-confident kids who wears Blue Stratos and winkle-pickers and hair like Nick Heyward from Haircut 100. I bet Ewan speaks in well-drilled sentences that march by perfectly, like my cousin Hugo. Speaking well is the same as commanding.

  God knows what job I’m going to be able to do. Not a lawyer, that’s for sure. You can’t stammer in court. You can’t stammer in a classroom, either. My students’d crucify me. There aren’t many jobs where speaking isn’t a part of it. I can’t be a professional poet, ’cause Miss Lippetts said once nobody buys poetry. I could be a monk, but church is more boring than watching the test card. Mum made us go to Sunday school at St Gabriel’s when we were smaller but it turned every Sunday morning into torture by boredom. Even Mum got bored after a few months. Being trapped in a monastery’d be murder. How about a lighthouse keeper? All those storms, sunsets and Dairylea sandwiches’d make you lonely in the end. But lonely is something I’d better get used to. What girl’d go out with a stammerer? Or even dance with one? The last song at the Black Swan Green village hall disco’d be over before I could spit out D-d-d-you want to d-d-d-d-d-dance. Or what if I stammered at my wedding and couldn’t even say ‘I do’?

  ‘Were you listening in just now?’

  Julia’d appeared, leaning on my door frame.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Were you eavesdropping on my phone call just now?’

  ‘What phone call?’ My reply was too fast and too innocent.

  ‘If you ask me,’ my sister’s glare made my face begin to smoke, ‘a little privacy isn’t too much to ask. If you had any friends to phone, Jason, I wouldn’t listen in on you. People who eavesdrop are such maggots.’

  ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping!’ How whiney I sounded.

  ‘So how come your door was closed three minutes ago, but now it’s wide open?’

  ‘I don’t—’ (Hangman seized ‘know’ so I had to abort the sentence, spazzishly.) ‘What’s it to you? The room felt stuffy.’ (Hangman let ‘stuffy’ go unchallenged.) ‘I went to the bog. A draught opened it.’

  ‘A draught? Sure, there’s a hurricane blowing over the landing. I can hardly stand upright.’

  ‘I wasn’t listening in on you!’

  Julia said nothing for long enough to tell me she knew I was bullshitting. ‘Who said you could borrow Abbey Road?’

  Her LP was by my crappy record player. ‘You hardly listen to it.’

  ‘Even if that were true, it wouldn’t make it your property. You never wear Granddad’s watch. Does that make it my property?’ She entered my room to get her record, stepping over my Adidas bag. Julia glanced at my typewriter. Lurching with shame, I hid my poem with my body. ‘So you agree,’ her real meaning as subtle as nutcrackers, ‘a little privacy isn’t too much to ask? And if this record has a single scratch on it, you’re dead.’

  Through the ceiling’s coming not Abbey Road but ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ by Kate Bush. Julia only plays ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ when she’s hyper-emotional or when she’s got her period. Life must be pretty brill for Julia. She’s eighteen, she’s leaving Black Swan Green in a few months, she’s got a boyfriend with a sports car, she gets twice as much pocket money as me, and she can make other people do whatever she wants with words.

  Just words.

  Julia’s just put on ‘Songbird’ by Fleetwood Mac.

  Dad gets up before it’s light on Wednesdays ’cause he’s got to drive to Oxford for a midweek meeting at Greenland HQ. The garage is below my bedroom, so I hear his Rover 3500 growl into life. If it’s raining like this morning its tyres shssssssh on the puddly drive and the rain shplatterdrangs on the swivelled-up garage door. My radio-alarm glowed 06:35 in numerals of Mekon green; 150 minutes of life left, that was all. I could already see the rows and columns of faces in my class, like a screen of Space Invaders. Guffawing, puzzled, appalled, pitying. Who decides which defects are funny and which ones are tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes.

  If God made each minute last six months I’d be middle aged by breakfast and dead by the time I got on the school bus. I could sleep for ever. I tried to push away what was in store by lying back and imagining the ceiling was the unmapped surface of a G-class planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Nobody was there. I’d never have to say a word.

  ‘Jason! Up time!’ yelled Mum from downstairs. I’d dreamed I’d woken in a gas-blue wood and’d found my granddad’s Omega, in one piece, in fiery crocuses. Then came running feet and the thought it was a Spook running home to St Gabriel’s graveyard. Mum yelled again, ‘Jason!’, and I saw the time: 07:41.

  I mustered a muzzy ‘okay!’ and ordered my legs out of bed so the rest of me’d have to follow. The bathroom mirror, worse luck, showed no signs of leprosy. I thought about pressing a hot flannel to my forehead, drying it and then complaining to Mum of a temperature, but she’s not that easy to fool. My lucky red underpants were in the wash so I settled for my banana-yellow ones. It’s not a PE day so it won’t matter. Downstairs, Mum was watching the new breakfast TV on BBC1 and Julia was slicing a banana into her Alpen.

  ‘Morning,’ I said. ‘What’s that magazine?’

  Julia held up the front cover of Face. ‘If you touch it when I’m gone I’ll strangle you.’

  I should’ve been born, hissed Unborn Twin, not you, you cow.

  ‘Is that expression supposed to mean something?’
Julia hadn’t forgotten last night. ‘You look like you’re wetting yourself.’

  I could’ve retaliated by asking Julia if she’d strangle Ewan if he touched her Face, but that’d’ve been admitting I was an eavesdropping maggot. My Weetabix tasted like balsa-wood. After I’d finished, I cleaned my teeth, put today’s books in my Adidas bag and Bic biros in my pencil case. Julia’d already gone. She goes to the sixth-form site of our school with Kate Alfrick, who’s already passed her driving test.

  Mum was on the phone telling Aunt Alice about the new bathroom. ‘Hang on, Alice.’ Mum cupped the phone. ‘Have you got your lunch money?’

  I nodded. I decided to tell her about the form assembly. ‘Mum, there’s—’

  Hangman was blocking ‘something’.

  ‘Hurry up, Jason! You’ll miss the bus!’

  Outside was blowy and wet, like a rain machine was aimed over Black Swan Green. Kingfisher Meadows was all rain-stained walls, dripping bird tables, wet gnomes, swilling ponds and shiny rockeries. A moon-grey cat watched me from Mr Castle’s dry porch. Wished there was some way a boy could turn into a cat. I passed the bridleway stile. If I was Grant Burch or Ross Wilcox or any of the council house kids from down Wellington End, I’d just skive off and hop over that stile and follow the bridleway to wherever it went. Even see if it leads to the lost tunnel under the Malvern Hills. But kids like me just can’t. Mr Kempsey’d notice straight off that I was absent on my dreaded form-assembly day. Mum’d be phoned by morning break. Mr Nixon’d get involved. Dad’d be called out of his Wednesday meeting. Truant officers and their sniffer dogs’d be put on my trail. I’d get captured, interrogated, skinned alive, and Mr Kempsey’d still make me read a passage from Plain Prayers for a Complicated World.

  Once you think about the consequences, you’ve had it.

  By the Black Swan girls were clustered under umbrellas. Boys can’t use umbrellas ’cause they’re gay. (’Cept for Grant Burch, that is, who stays dry by getting his servant Philip Phelps to bring a big golfing umbrella.) My duffel coat keeps my top half dryish but at the corner of the main road a Vauxhall Chevette’d splashed a big puddle and soaked my shins. My socks were gritty and damp. Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard and Nick Yew and Ross Wilcox and that lot were having a puddle fight, but just as I got there the Noddy-eyed school bus pulled up. Norman Bates looked at us from behind his steering wheel like a sleepless slaughterman at a sty of ripe pigs. We got on board and the door hissed shut. My Casio said 8.35.

  On rainy mornings the school bus stinks of boys, burps and ashtrays. The front rows get taken by girls who get on at Guarlford and Blackmore End and who just talk about homework. The hardest kids go straight to the back, but even kids like Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard behave themselves when Norman Bates’s driving. Norman Bates is one of those cracked stone men you shouldn’t mess with. One time, Pluto Noak opened the emergency exit for a doss. Norman Bates went to the back, grabbed him, dragged him to the front, and literally chucked him off the bus. Pluto Noak cried up from his ditch, ‘I’m taking you to court, I am! You bust me flamin’ arm!’

  Norman Bates’s reply was to remove the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, lean down the steps of his bus, stick out his tongue like a Maori, and stub out the still-glowing cigarette, slow and deliberate, actually on his tongue. We heard the hiss. The man flicked the stub at the boy in the ditch.

  Then Norman Bates sat down and drove off.

  Nobody’s touched the fire door on his bus since that day.

  Dean Moran got on at the Drugger’s End stop, just at the edge of the village. ‘Hey, Dean,’ I said, ‘sit here if you want.’ Moran was so pleased I’d used his real name in front of everyone he grinned and plomped right down. ‘Jesus,’ said Moran. ‘If it keeps pissing it down like this the Severn’ll burst its banks down at Upton by home time. And Worcester. And Tewkesbury.’

  ‘Definitely.’ I was being friendly for my benefit as much as his. On the bus home tonight I’d be lucky if the Invisible Man’d want to sit by J-j-j-ason T-t-taylor the s-sss-s-ssschool s-sss-s-ssstutterboy. Moran and me played Connect 4 on the steamed-up windows. Moran’d won one game before we even got to Welland Cross. Moran’s in Miss Wyche’s form at school, 2W. 2W’s the next-to-bottom class. But Moran’s no duffer, not really. It’s just that everyone’d give him a hard time if his marks were too good.

  A black horse stood in a marshy field looking miserable. But not as miserable as I was going to be in twenty-one minutes and counting.

  The heater under our seat’d melted my school trousers on to my shins and someone dropped an eggy fart. Gilbert Swinyard roared, ‘Squelch’s dropped a gas bomb!’ Squelch grinned his brown grin, blew his nose on a Monster Munch packet and chucked it. Crisp bags don’t fly far and it just landed on Robin South in the row behind.

  Before I knew it, the bus swung into our school and we all piled off. On wet days we wait for the bell in the main hall instead of the playground. School was all skiddy floors this morning, damp steaming anoraks, teachers telling kids off for screaming and first-years playing illegal tag in the corridors and third-year girls trawling the corridors with linked arms singing a song by the Pretenders. The clock by the tunnel to the staffroom where kids are made to stand as a punishment through their lunch-times told me I had eight minutes to live.

  ‘Ah, Taylor, splendid.’ Mr Kempsey pinched my earlobe. ‘The very pupil whom I seek. Follow. I wish to deposit words into your auditory organ.’ My form teacher led me down the gloomy passageway leading to the staffroom. The staffroom’s like God. You can’t see it and live. It was ahead, ajar, and cigarette smoke billowed out like fog in Jack the Ripper’s London. But we turned off and stepped into the stationery storeroom. The stationery storeroom’s sort of a holding cell for kids in the shit. I was wondering what I’d done. ‘Five minutes ago,’ Mr Kempsey said, ‘a telephone call was channelled to myself. This telephone call was regarding Jason Taylor. From a well-wisher.’

  You just have to wait with Mr Kempsey.

  ‘Petitioning me to grant a last-minute act of clemency.’

  Mr Nixon the headmaster dashed past the doorway, emitting fumes of anger and tweed.

  ‘Sir?’

  Mr Kempsey grimaced at my dim-wittedness. ‘Am I to understand that you anticipate this morning’s form assembly with a level of trepidation one might describe as “debilitating dread”?’

  I sensed Mrs de Roo’s white magic but didn’t dare hope it might save me. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, Taylor. It seems your dedicated speech therapist holds the opinion that a postponement of this morning’s trial-by-ordeal may be conducive to a longer-term level of self-confidence vis-à-vis the Arts of Rhetoric and Public Speaking. Do you second this motion, Taylor?’

  I knew what he’d said but he was expecting me to act confused. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do you or don’t you wish to be excused this morning’s reading?’

  I said, ‘Very much, sir, yes.’

  Mr Kempsey squished his mouth. People always think that not stammering is about jumping in at deep ends, about baptisms of fire. People see stammerers on TV who’re forced, one magic day, to go on stage in front of a thousand people and lo and behold a perfect voice flows out. See, everyone smiles, he had it in him all along! All he needed was a friendly push! Now he’s cured. But that’s such utter bollocks. If it ever actually happens it’s just Hangman obeying the First Commandment. Just go back and check up on that ‘cured’ stammerer one week later. You’ll see. The truth is, deep ends cause drowning. Baptisms of fire cause third-degree burns. ‘You can’t turn tail at the prospect of public speaking your whole life through, Taylor.’

  Maggot said, Want to bet?

  ‘I know, sir. That’s why I’m doing my best to master it. With Mrs de Roo’s help.’

  Mr Kempsey didn’t give in right away, but I sensed I was in the clear. ‘Very well. But I had you down as having more pluck than this, Taylor. I can only conclude that I had you down wrongly.’


  I watched him go.

  If I was the pope I’d’ve made Mrs de Roo a saint. On the spot.

  Mr Kempsey’s reading from Plain Prayers for a Complicated World was about how in life it can rain for forty days and forty nights but God made a promise to humanity that one day a rainbow will appear. (Julia says it’s absurd how in 1982 Bible stories’re still being taught like they’re historical fact.) Then we sang the hymn that goes All good gifts around us are sent from Heaven above, so thank the Lord, O thank the Lord, for a-a-all His love. I thought that was that, but after Mr Kempsey’d read the notices and orders from Mr Nixon, Gary Drake put up his hand. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I thought it was Jason Taylor’s turn to read the assembly today. I was really looking forward to hearing him. Is he going to be doing it next week instead?’

  Every neck in our classroom swivelled its head my way.

  Sweat sprang out in fifty places, all over me. I just stared at the chalk nebulae on the blackboard.

  After a few seconds that felt like a few hours Mr Kempsey said, ‘Your spirited defence of established protocol is commendable, Drake, and, no doubt, altruistic. However, I possess reliable intelligence that Taylor’s vocal apparati are in an unseaworthy condition. Thus, your classmate is excused on quasi-medical grounds.’

  ‘So will he be doing it next week instead, sir?’

  ‘The alphabet marches on regardless of human frailties, Drake. Next week is T-for-Michelle Tirley, and Ours Is Not to Wonder Why.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem very fair, sir, does it?’

  What’ve I ever done to Gary Drake?

  ‘Life is regularly unfair, Drake,’ Mr Kempsey locked the piano, ‘despite our best endeavours, and we must face its challenges as they arise. The sooner you learn that,’ our teacher shot a stare not at Gary Drake but straight at me, ‘the better.’

  Wednesday kicks off with double maths with Mr Inkberrow. Double maths is just about the worst lesson of the week. Normally I sit next to Alastair Nurton in maths but this morning Alastair Nurton was sitting next to David Ockeridge. The only free seat was next to Carl Norrest, right in front of Mr Inkberrow’s desk, so I had to sit there. It was raining so hard the farms and fields outside were dissolving in whites. Mr Inkberrow frisbeed us back our exercise books from last week and started the lesson by asking a few dead easy questions to ‘engage the brain’.