Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  ‘Attaboy…breathe in…through your mouth, not your nose…’

  The mouthful of gassy dirt left my mouth.

  Hugo was stern. ‘You didn’t suck it into your lungs, did you, Jace?’

  I shook my head, wanting to spit.

  ‘You have to inhale, Jace. Into your lungs. Otherwise it’s like sex without an orgasm.’

  ‘Okay.’ (I don’t actually know what an orgasm is, apart from what you call someone who’s done something stupid.) ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m just going to pinch your nose,’ said Hugo, ‘to stop you cheating.’ His fingers closed off my nostrils. ‘Deep breath – not too deep – and let the smoke go down with the air.’ Then his other hand sealed my mouth shut. The air was cold but his hands were warm. ‘One, two…three!’

  In came the hot gassy dirt. My lungs flooded with it.

  ‘Hold it there,’ urged Hugo. ‘One, two, three, four, five, and—’ he released my lips, ‘—out.’

  The smoke leaked out, a genie from its bottle.

  The wind atomized the genie.

  ‘And that,’ said Hugo, ‘is all there is to it.’

  Vile. ‘Nice.’

  ‘It’ll grow on you. Finish the cigarette.’ Hugo perched himself on the back of the bench and relit his own Lambert & Butler. ‘As aquatic spectacles go, I am a trifle underwhelmed by your lake. Is this where the swans are?’

  ‘There aren’t any actual swans in Black Swan Green.’ My second drag was as revolting as my first. ‘It’s a sort of village joke. The lake was classic in January, mind. It froze over. We played British Bulldogs actually on the ice. Though I found out afterwards there’s about twenty kids who’ve drowned in this lake, down the years.’

  ‘Who could blame them?’ Hugo did a weary sigh. ‘Black Swan Green might not be the arsehole of the world, but it’s got a damn good view of it. You’ve gone a bit pale, Jace.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  The first torrent of vomit kicked a GUUURRRRRR noise out of me and poured on to the muddy grass. In the hot slurry were shreds of prawn and carrot. Some’d got on my splayed fingers. It was as warm as warm rice pudding. More was coming. Inside my eyelids was a Lambert & Butler cigarette sticking out of its box, like in an advert. The second torrent was a mustardier yellow. I guppered for fresh oxygen like a man in an airlock. Prayed that was the last of it. Then came three short, boiling sub-slurries, slicker and sweeter. Must have been the Baked Alaska.

  Oh, Jesus.

  I washed my puke-stained hand in the lake, then wiped away the tears from my puke-teared eyes. I’m so ashamed. Hugo’s trying to teach me how to be a kid like him, but I can’t even smoke a single cigarette.

  ‘I’m really,’ I wipe my mouth, ‘really sorry.’

  But Hugo’s not even looking at me.

  Hugo’s squirmed out on the bench, facing the churned-up sky.

  My cousin’s sobbing with laughter.

  Bridlepath

  My eye spidered over my poster of black angelfish turning into white swans, across my map of Middle Earth, around my door frame, into my curtains, lit fiery mauve by my spring sun, and fell down the well of dazzle.

  Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless.

  But a lie-in’s less satisfying if other people aren’t up and about, so I jumped out of bed. The landing curtains were still drawn ’cause Mum and Julia’d left for London when it was dark. Dad’s away on another weekend conference in Newcastle under Lyme or Newcastle on Tyne. Today, the house is all mine.

  First I pissed, leaving the bathroom door wide open. Next, in Julia’s bedroom, I put on her Roxy Music LP. Julia’d go ape. I turned up the volume, dead loud. Dad’d go so mental his head’d blow up. I sprawled on Julia’s stripey sofa, listening to this kazookering song called ‘Virginia Plain’. With my big toe, I flicked the shell-disc wind chime Kate Alfrick’d given her a couple of birthdays ago. Just ’cause I could. Then I went through my sister’s chest-of-drawers looking for a secret diary. But when I found a box of tampons I felt ashamed and stopped.

  In Dad’s chilly office I opened his filing cabinets and breathed in their metal-flavoured air. (A duty-free pack of Benson & Hedges has appeared since Uncle Brian’s last visit.) Then I twizzled on Dad’s Millennium Falcon office chair, remembered it was April Fools’ Day, picked up Dad’s untouchable telephone and said, ‘Hello? Craig Salt? Jason Taylor here. Listen, Salt, you’re sacked. What do you mean, why? ’Cause you’re a fat orgasm, that’s why. Put me through to Ross Wilcox this instant! Ah, Wilcox? Jason Taylor. Listen, the vet’ll be around later to put you out of our misery. Bye-bye, Scumbag. Been nasty knowing you.’

  In my parents’ creamy bedroom I sat at Mum’s dressing table, spiked my hair with L’Oréal hair mousse, daubed an Adam Ant stripe across my face, and held her opal brooch over one eye. I looked through it at the sun for secret colours nobody’s ever named.

  Downstairs, a wafer of light from where the kitchen curtains didn’t quite meet sliced through a gold Yale key and this note:

  Wow. My very own door key. Mum must’ve decided to leave it for me at the last minute this morning. Normally we hide a spare in a welly in the garage. I dashed upstairs and chose a keyring Uncle Brian gave me one time, of a rabbit in a black bow tie. I hung it on my belt-loop and slid down the banister. For breakfast I ate McVitie’s Jamaican Ginger Cake and a cocktail of milk, Coke and Ovaltine. Not bad. Oh, better than not bad! Every single hour of today is a Black Magic chocolate, waiting in its box for me. I returned the kitchen radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1. That fab song with the dusty flute in it by Men At Work was on. Three Marks & Spencer’s French Fancies, I ate, straight out of the packet. Vs of long-distance birds crossed the sky. Mermaid clouds drifted over the glebe, over the cockerel tree, over the Malvern Hills. God, I ached to follow them.

  What was stopping me?

  Mr Castle stood in a pair of green wellies, washing his Vauxhall Viva with a garden hose. His front door was open, but the hallway was dead dark. Mrs Castle could’ve been in that dark, watching me. You hardly ever see Mrs Castle. Mum calls her ‘that poor woman’ and says she suffers from Nerves. Is Nerves infectious? I didn’t want to dent the morning’s shine by stammering, so I tried to slip by Mr Castle without being seen.

  ‘Morning, young fella!’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Castle,’ I answered.

  ‘Off anywhere special?’

  I shook my head. Mr Castle somehow makes me nervous. Once I heard Dad telling Uncle Brian he’s a freemason, which is something to do with witchcraft and pentangles. ‘It’s just it’s a’ (Hangman blocked nice) ‘a…pleasant morning, so…’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it just. Isn’t it just!’

  Liquid sunshine streamed down the car windscreen.

  ‘So how old are you now, Jason?’ Mr Castle asked this like he’d been discussing it with a panel of experts for days.

  ‘Thirteen,’ I said, guessing he thought I was still twelve.

  ‘Thirteen, are you? That a fact?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Thirteen.’ Mr Castle looked through me. ‘Ancient.’

  The stile at the mouth of Kingfisher Meadows is the source of the bridlepath. A green sign saying PUBLIC BRIDLEPATH with a picture of a horse proves it. Where the bridlepath officially ends is miles less clear. Mr Broadwas says it fizzles out in Red Earl Wood. Pete Redmarley and Nick Yew said they went rabbiting with their ferrets up the bridlepath one time, and that it’s blocked by a new estate in Malvern Wells. But best is the rumour that the bridlepath leads you to the foot of Pinnacle Hill, where, if you pick your way through toothy brambles and dark ivy and vicious stingers, you’ll find the mouth of an old tunnel. Go through that tunnel, and you come out in Herefordshire. Near the obelisk. The tunnel’s been lost since olden times, so its discoverer’d make the front page of the Malvern Gazetteer. How cool’d that be?

  I would track the bridlepath to its mysterious end, wherever it might be.

  The very first stretch of the bridlepat
h is no mystery at all. Every kid in the village’s been down that neck a million times. It just leads past some back gardens to the footy field. The footy field’s actually a scrap of ground behind the village hall that belongs to Gilbert Swinyard’s dad. When Mr Swinyard’s sheep aren’t on it, we’re allowed to play footy there. We use coats for goals and don’t bother with throw-ins. The scores climb as high as rugby scores, and one game can last hours, until the last-but-one kid goes home. Sometimes all the Welland and Castlemorton lot come over on their bikes and then the games are more like battles.

  Not a soul was on the footy field this morning, only me. Later on, chances were, a game’d start up. None of the players’d know Jason Taylor’d already been there before them. I’d be fields and fields away by then. Maybe deep under the Malvern Hills.

  Oily flies fed on curry-coloured cowpats.

  New leaves oozed from twigs in the hedges.

  Seeds thickened the air, like sweet gravy.

  In the copse, the bridlepath joined up with a moon-cratered track. Trees knitted overhead, so only knots and loops of sky showed. Dark and cool, it was, and I wondered if I should’ve brought my coat. Down a hollow, round the bend, I came across a thatched cottage made of sooty bricks and crooked timber. Martins were busy under its eaves. PRIVATE, said a sign, hung on the slatted gate, where the name should go. Newborn flowers in the garden were Liquorice Allsorts blue, pink and yellow. Maybe I heard scissors. Maybe I heard a poem, seeping from its cracks. So I stood and listened, just for a minute, like a hungry robin listening for worms.

  Or two minutes, or three.

  Dogs hurled themselves at me.

  I hurled myself back, across the track, clean on to my arse.

  The gate shrieked but, thank God, stayed shut.

  Two, no, three, Dobermanns jostled and slammed, standing on their back legs, barking insanely. Even when I got up they were still as tall as me. I should’ve just gone while I had the chance, but the dogs had prehistoric fangs and rabies eyes, gammon tongues and steel chains round their necks. Their brown-polish-on-black suede skins wrapped not just dogs’ bodies, but something else too, something that needed to kill.

  I was scared but I still had to look at the dogs.

  Then I got a savage poke in that bone that’s the stump of a tail.

  ‘You’re goadin’ my boys on!’

  I whirled round. The man’s lip was gnarled and his sooty hair had a streak of white like combed-in bird crap. In his hand was a walking stick strong enough to stave in a skull. ‘You’re goadin’ my boys!’

  I swallowed. Laws down the bridlepath are different to main-road laws.

  ‘I don’t appreciate that.’ He glanced at the Dobermanns. ‘SHUT IT!’

  The dogs fell quiet and got down from the gate.

  ‘Oh, a whole yard o’guts you’ve got,’ the man studied me some more, ‘goadin’ my boys from this side o’ the gate.’

  ‘They’re…beautiful animals.’

  ‘Oh, aye? My boys’d turn you into mincemeat if I gave ’em the nod. Still call ’em beautiful animals then, would you?’

  ‘I s’pose not.’

  ‘I s’pose not. Live down them fancy new houses, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Knew it. Locals have more respect for my boys than some townie. You come here, come traipsin’ about, leavin’ gates open, puttin’ up your little toy mansions on land we’ve been workin’ for generations. Makes me sick. Just lookin’ at you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean any harm. Honest.’

  He twizzled his stick. ‘You can bugger off now.’

  I began walking, fast, just looking over my shoulder once.

  The man hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

  Faster, warned Unborn Twin. Run!

  I froze, watching the man open the gate. His wave was almost friendly. ‘GET THE BUGGER, BOYS!’

  The three black Dobermanns were galloping straight at me.

  I ran full pelt but I knew thirteen-year-old boys can’t outrun three snarling Dobermanns. A snatch of turfy drumming, then I went flying over a ruck and the ground booted the air out of me and I got a glimpse of a leaping dog’s flank. I screamed like a girl and scrunched up into a ball and waited for the fangs to sink into my side and ankles and slaver and rip and tear and pluck and for the snarling bag-snatchers to run off with my scrote and liver and heart and kidneys.

  A cuckoo’d started up, very near. Surely a minute’d already passed?

  I opened my eyes and raised my head.

  No sign of the dogs or their master.

  A butterfly not from England fanned open and shut, inches away. Cautiously, I got up.

  I’d have a couple of glorious bruises, and my pulse was still fast and broken. But otherwise I was okay.

  Okay, but poisoned. The dog man despised me for not being born here. He despised me for living down Kingfisher Meadows. That’s a hate you can’t argue with. No more than you can argue with mad Dobermanns.

  I carried on up the bridlepath, out of the copse.

  Dewy cobwebs snap-twanged across my face.

  The big field was full of wary ewes and spanking-new lambs. The lambs tiggered up close, bleeping like those crap Fiat Noddy cars, idiotically pleased to see me. The poison of the Dobermanns and their master began to thin, a little. A couple of the mother sheep edged closer. They didn’t quite trust me. Just as well for sheep they can’t work out why the farmer’s being so nice to them. (Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It’s never reasonless and its reason’s not usually nice.)

  So anyway, I was halfway over the field when I spotted three kids up on the old railway embankment. Up on the Hollow Log, by the brick bridge. They’d already seen me, and if I changed course they’d know I was chickening out of meeting them. So I set a course straight for them. I chewed a stick of Juicy Fruit I found in my pocket. Here and there I penalty-shot a poking-up thistle, just to look a bit hard.

  Lucky I did. The three kids were Grant Burch, his servant Philip Phelps, and Ant Little, passing round a fag. From inside the log crawled out Darren Croome, Dean Moran and Squelch.

  Grant Burch called down from the log, ‘All right, Taylor?’

  Phelps said, ‘Come to see the scrap?’

  From the foot of the embankment I called up, ‘What scrap?’

  ‘Me,’ Grant Burch squished one nostril and torpedoed a bolt of hot snot out of the other, ‘stick Ross Wankstain Wilcox the Third.’

  Good news. ‘What’s the scrap about?’

  ‘Me and Swinyard were playin’ Asteroids at the Black Swan yesterday evenin’, right. Wilcox comes in, actin’ like King Hard Knock, sayin’ nothin’, then he goes an’ drops his fag in my shandy. Couldn’t fuckin’ believe it! I says, “D’you do that on purpose?” Wilcox says, “What d’you reckon?” I says, “You’re gonna fuckin’ regret that, Piss Flaps.”’

  ‘Classic!’ Philip Phelps grinned. ‘“Piss Flaps”!’

  ‘Phelps,’ Grant Burch frowned, ‘don’t interrupt me when I’m talking.’

  ‘Sorry, Grant.’

  ‘So anyway, I says, “Yer gonna fuckin’ regret that, Piss Flaps.” Wilcox says, “Make me.” I says, “Wanna step outside, then?” Wilcox says, “Trust you to pick a place Isaac Pye can come and pull me off yer.” I says, “Okay, Prick Cheese, you say where.” Wilcox says, “T’morrer mornin’. The Hollow Log. Nine thirty.” I says, “Better order an ambulance, Turd Burglar. I’ll be there.” Wilcox just says “Good” and walks out.’

  Ant Little said, ‘Wilcox’s crazy. You’re gonna cream him, Grant.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Darren Croome. ‘’Course you are.’

  Great news. Ross Wilcox’s building up a sort of gang at school and he’s made it pretty clear he’s got it in for me. Grant Burch is one of the hardest kids in the third year. Wilcox getting his face kicked in’d label him as a loser and a leper.

  ‘What’s the time now, Phelps?’

  Phelps checked his watch. ‘Quarter to ten, G
rant.’

  Ant Little said, ‘Chickened out, I reckon.’

  Grant Burch flobbed again. ‘We’ll stay till ten. Then we’re off down Wellington Gardens to invite Wilcox out to play. Nobody gets away with being that arsey to me.’

  Phelps said, ‘What about his dad, Grant?’

  ‘What about his dad, Phelps?’

  ‘Didn’t he put Wilcox’s mum in hospital?’

  ‘I ain’t scared of a bent mechanic. Give us another fag.’

  Phelps mumbled, ‘Only Woodbines left, Grant, sorry.’

  ‘Woodbines?’

  ‘They’re all my mum had in her handbag. Sorry.’

  ‘What about your old man’s Number Sixes?’

  ‘’Fraid there weren’t any. Soz.’

  ‘God! All right. Gi’ us the Woodbines. Taylor, want a smoke?’

  Ant Little said, ‘“Given up”,’ sneerily, ‘ain’t yer, Taylor?’

  ‘Started up again,’ I told Grant Burch, scrambling up the embankment.

  Dean Moran helped me over the muddy lip. ‘All right?’

  I told Moran, ‘All right,’ back.

  ‘Yee-HAAAAAAR!’ Squelch straddled the Hollow Log like a horse and whipped his own bum with a whippy stick. ‘Gonna kick dat boy’s ass to da middle o’next week!’ He must’ve got it off some film.

  A middle-ranking kid like me shouldn’t refuse an invitation from an older kid like Grant Burch. I held the Woodbine like my cousin’d shown me, and pretended to take a deep drag. (Actually I kept the smoke in my mouth.) Ant Little was hoping I’d cough my guts up. But I just breathed out the smoke like I’d done it a million times before, and passed the cigarette to Darren Croome. (Why does something as forbidden as smoking taste so foul?) I glanced at Grant Burch to see how impressed he was but he was looking towards the kissing gate over by St Gabriel’s. ‘Look who it flamin’ isn’t.’

  The fighters sized each other up in front of the Hollow Log. Grant Burch’s got an inch or two over Ross Wilcox, but Ross Wilcox is knucklier. Gary Drake and Wayne Nashend’d come as his lieutenants. Wayne Nashend used to be one of the Upton Punks, briefly became an Upton New Romantic, but now he’s firmly an Upton Mod. He’s an utter thicko. Gary Drake’s no thicko, though. He’s in my form at school. But Gary Drake’s Ross Wilcox’s cousin so they’re always dossing about together.