Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  Wished to hell it was.

  ‘Our Sally!’ The black-haired chinless girl came up and I hated her till the end of time. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve started your fishing trip already?’ (The straw girl giggled from her stool in the booth and I hated her too.) ‘You’re only one hour off the coach. What’s this one called then?’

  I had to answer. ‘Jason.’

  ‘“Jason”!’ She did this toffee-nosed accent. ‘I say! Sebastian’s playing polo with Jason on the croquet lawn! Rath-er! I say! Jason’s sucking a Zoom too, just like Sally! How Mr and Mrs! So have you got your rubber johnnies, Jason, ’cause at the rate Our Sally’s going you’ll need ’em in the next thirty minutes.’

  I floundered for a killer put-down line without any stammer words in it. And floundered, and floundered.

  ‘Or don’t they teach you biology at schools like yours?’

  ‘Stick your fat gob into everything,’ Sally snapped, ‘don’t you?’

  ‘Untwist your knickers, Our Sal! Only asking your new boyfriend if he knows the facts of life, like. Or is his thing bending over in the showers for prefects after a jolly good game of rugger?’

  All the girls watched me to see how the boy’d defend himself.

  My Zoom was dribbling down my wrist.

  ‘Why Tim put up with your fat nasty dirty trap,’ Sally folded her arms and jutted her hips out, ‘for so long before dumping you I’ll never know.’

  I was turning invisible and there was nothing I could do.

  ‘I dumped him, for your information. And at least my boyfriend didn’t go munching up Wendy Lench the day after splitting up with me!’

  ‘That’s a lie, Melanie Pickett, and you know it!’

  ‘Under the coats,’ Melanie Pickett almost sang, ‘at Shirley Poolbrook’s party! Ask anyone who was there!’

  The photo machine buzzed.

  The straw one giggled. ‘I think the photos are done…’

  A battalion of old ladies marched by from the bingo enclosure. I jumped into their ranks before the three girls noticed, and hurried back to the Hotel Excalibur. Boys are bastards, but they’re predictable bastards. You never know what girls’re thinking. Girls’re from another planet.

  The beehive receptionist gave me the message than Dad’s seminar was overrunning so he’d be a bit late. Greenland trainees were in the lobby, joking and comparing notes. I felt like a teacher’s kid in a staffroom, so I went up to our room. It smells of net curtains, toast and toilet cleaner. The wallpaper’s got eggy daffodils and the carpet’s all melted flowers. The only things on TV were cricket where nobody scored and a Western where nobody shot anyone.

  I read 2000 AD on my bed.

  But I kept thinking about the three girls. Girls and girlfriends’re worrying. Sex education’s only about how to make babies and how not to make babies. What I need to know is what you do to turn ordinary girls like Sally from Blackburn into girlfriends you can snog and be seen snogging. I’m not sure if I really want to have sexual intercourse and I definitely don’t want babies. Babies just poo and bawl. But not having a girlfriend means you’re a homo or a total loser or both.

  Melanie Pickett was half right. I don’t know whether or not I know the facts of life. You can’t ask adults ’cause you can’t ask adults. You can’t ask kids ’cause it’d be all round school by first break. So either everybody knows everything but nobody’s saying anything, or else nobody knows anything and girlfriends just sort of…happen.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Jason,’ this young guy had a metallicky suit and a Paisley tie, ‘right?’

  ‘Right.’

  He did a comedy finger-point at his GREENLAND SUPERMARKETS badge and a James Bond voice. ‘The name’s Lawlor…Danny Lawlor. Mike – your da…my boss, did I forget to mention? – sent me up to say he’s really sorry but he’s still being detained. The Emperor’s dropped by, unannounced.’

  ‘The Emperor?’

  ‘Emperor Craig Salt of Greenland. Best not say I called him that. Your da’s boss is Craig Salt. So all the managers are having to look after him in the manner to which he has become accustomed. So, Mike’s suggesting how’s about you and me go in search of the ultimate fish and chip shop?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Unless you’ve got a hot dinner date?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Grand altogether. We’ll get you back in time for Chariots of Fire. Ah yes, my informants tell me everything. One mo, just let me unpin this absurd name badge…I’m a man, me, not a self-adhesive strip of letters embossed on a Dymo label printer…’

  ‘Don’t lean too far out!’ Danny and I watched the jellyfish below our feet dangling off the end of the sea wall. ‘If Michael Taylor’s sole male heir winds up in the drink, my career prospects will most surely join him.’

  Sunlight on waves is drowsy tinsel.

  ‘You’d be okay if you fell in on the harbour side.’ I sculpted my Mr Whippy with my tongue. ‘You could scramble on to one of the fishing boats. But if you fell on the sea side, you might get sucked under.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ Danny rolled up his shirtsleeves, ‘put your theory to the test.’

  ‘The ice cream’s great, thanks. I’ve never had one with two Flakes in it. Did you pay extra?’

  ‘No. Your man on the stall’s a fellow Corkonian. We look after our own. Ah, but isn’t this the life, now, eh? Downright sadistic of Greenland to be holding their training conferences in a spot like this.’

  ‘What does “sadistic” mean?’

  ‘Unnecessarily cruel.’

  ‘Why’ (I’d noticed Danny likes questions) ‘is this sea wall called the “Cobb”? Is it just in Lyme Regis?’

  ‘Even my omniscience has its blind spots, young Jason.’

  (If Dad doesn’t know the answer to a question, he spends ten sentences persuading himself that he does know.)

  On the beach, well-behaved waves zipped and unzipped themselves. Mums rinsed off kids’ feet with buckets. Dads folded deckchairs and issued instructions.

  ‘Danny, do you know anyone in the IRA?’

  ‘You ask that just because I’m Irish?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, Jason, no. Sorry to disappoint you. The Provos are busier up in Northern Ireland, the top bit. But back in Cork I do live in a turf hut with a leprechaun called Mick in my potato plot.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

  Danny held up a peaceful palm. ‘Accuracy on matters Irish is not the forte of the English. Truth is, we’re the friendliest people you’d wish to meet. Even north of the border. We just gun each other down occasionally, that’s all.’

  Ice-cream drips snailed down the cone.

  I don’t even know what I don’t know.

  ‘Will you look at those kites now! We didn’t have them when I was a kid!’ Danny was gazing at a couple of stunt kites with snaky ribbony tails. ‘Aren’t they something?’

  We had to squint ’cause of the sun.

  The tails doodlelooped red on blue, erasing themselves as they flew.

  ‘They,’ I agreed, ‘are epic.’

  ‘What’s Dad like to work for?’

  The waitress at Cap’n Scallywag’s Fish’n’Chip Emporium arrived with our food. Danny leant back to let the tray land. ‘Michael Taylor, let me see. Well regarded…fair, thorough…doesn’t suffer fools gladly…he’s put in a good word or two for me at timely moments, for which I’m eternally grateful…that do you?’

  ‘Sure.’ I doused my fish with ketchup from a tomato-shaped squirter. Funny to hear Dad discussed as Michael Taylor. Along the promenade, strings of boiled-fruit lights lit up.

  ‘Looks like you’re enjoying that.’

  ‘I love fish and chips. Thanks.’

  ‘Your da’s paying.’ Danny’d ordered scampi, bread and a side salad to build a sandwich. ‘Remember to thank him.’ He turned to the first waitress and asked for a can of 7-Up. A second waitress hurried over with it and asked if the food was okay.
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br />   ‘Oh,’ said Danny, ‘glorious.’

  She sort of leaned at Danny, like he was a log fire. ‘Would your brother like anything to drink too?’

  Danny winked at me.

  ‘Tango’ (pleasure from being mistaken for Danny’s brother wasn’t quite wrecked by Hangman not letting me say the ‘seven’ in 7-Up). ‘Please.’

  The first waitress fetched me one. ‘Here on holiday?’

  ‘Business.’ Danny breathed mystery into this dull word. ‘Business.’

  More customers came in and the waitresses went.

  Danny did this funny look. ‘We should make a double act.’

  Happy frying noises spat in Cap’n Scallywag’s kitchen.

  ‘One Step Beyond’ by Madness came on.

  ‘Have you got’ (I chickened out of saying ‘a girlfriend’) ‘any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘That depends,’ Danny never hurries his mouthfuls, ‘on your mode of accountancy. I grew up in an orphanage.’

  God. ‘Like Dr Barnardo’s?’

  ‘A Catholic equivalent, with more Jesus in the diet. Not enough to cause any lasting damage.’

  I chewed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Danny’d handled this a billion times. ‘I’m not embarrassed about it. Why should you be?’

  ‘So’ – Julia or Mum’d’ve politely changed the subject – ‘did something bad happen to your mum and dad?’

  ‘Only each other. Pass us the ketchup. They’re still alive and rocking – not together – as far as I know, but, well, hey. A few experiments with foster parents did not end happily. I was what’s known as a “feisty child”. In the end the state agreed I was best off with the Jesuit Brothers.’

  ‘Who’re they?’

  ‘The Jesuits? A venerable religious order. Monks.’

  ‘Monks?’

  ‘Real live monks. They ran the orphanage. Oh, you had your usual quota of humourless bigots, but a fair share of fierce good educators. Lots of us got through university on scholarships alone. We were fed, clothed, cared for. Santy visited, come Christmas. Parties every birthday. Clover compared to growing up in a shanty town in Bangladesh or Mombasa or Lima or five hundred other locations I could name. We learned how to improvise, how to look out for ourselves, what not to take for granted. All handy business skills. Why mope around going, like, “Woe is me!”?’

  ‘Don’t you ever want to meet your real parents?’

  ‘Not a lad to beat around the bush, are you?’ Danny folded his arms behind his head. ‘Parents. Irish law’s a little murky on this one, but my biological mother’s people live up in Sligo. They own a posh hotel or some such. One time, I’d’ve been around your age, I took it into my head to run off to find her. I got as far as Limerick bus station.’

  ‘What happened there?’

  ‘Thunder, lightning, hailstones, fireballs. Biggest storm in years. My connecting bus was held up by a collapsed bridge. When the sun came out again, so did my sense of reality. So I scuttled back to the Jesuits.’

  ‘Did you get into trouble?’

  ‘The Jesuits ran an orphanage, not a prison camp.’

  ‘So…that was that?’

  ‘Yup. For now.’ Danny balanced his fork on his thumb. ‘What we – orphans, I mean – miss, or lack, or want, or need, are photographs of people who look like you. That never goes away. One fine day, I’ll make it up to Sligo to see if I can take some. With a telephoto lens, if my nerve gives out. But these great big life…“issues”…won’t be hurried. Ripeness, young Jason, is all. Scampi butty?’

  ‘No thanks.’ While Danny’d been talking, a decision’d made itself. ‘Will you help me buy one of those stunt kites?’

  Greenland trainees’d colonized the whole lounge of the Hotel Excalibur. They’d changed out of their suits into herring-bone trousers and baggy shirts. As Danny and I walked in, they smirked our way. I knew why. Looking after their boss’s son was a creep’s job. One called out, ‘Daniel the Spaniel!’ and grinned the exact grin Ross Wilcox’s got. ‘Coming to inspect the nocturnal birds of Dorset?’

  ‘Wiggsy,’ Danny lobbed back, ‘you’re a drunken sot and a reprobate and you cheat at squash. Why would anyone want to be seen dead in public with yourself?’

  The guy looked delighted.

  ‘Want to say hello,’ Danny turned to me, ‘to the Young Greenlanders?’

  That’d be hell. ‘Is it okay if I just go upstairs and wait for Dad there?’

  ‘Don’t blame you in the least. I’ll tell him where you are.’ Then Danny shook hands with me, like I was a colleague. ‘Thanks for your company. See you in the morning?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Enjoy your film.’

  I got the key and bounded upstairs instead of waiting for the lift. In my head I listened to the Vangelis music for Chariots of Fire to flush away Wiggsy and the Greenlanders. Not Danny, though. Danny’s ace.

  The alarm radio said 7:15 but no sign of Dad yet. Chariots of Fire began at 7:30, said the poster. I’d memorized the route to the cinema to impress Dad. Seven twenty-five came. Dad doesn’t forget appointments. He’d be coming. We’d miss the adverts and Coming Soons, but a lady with a torch’d show us our seats for the film. Seven twenty-eight. Should I go downstairs and remind him? I decided not to, in case we missed each other. Then it’d all be my fault for not sticking to the plan. Seven thirty. We’d have to spend some time working out who was who but the film’d still be watchable. At 7:35 Dad’s footsteps came thumping down the corridor outside. ‘Right!’ he’d burst in. ‘Off we go!’

  The footsteps thumped past our door. They didn’t come back.

  The eggy daffodils on the wallpaper’d fossilized to slag-heap grey as the day ended. I hadn’t turned on the light. Witchy laughter leaked into the room and music welled up from pubs all around Lyme Regis. TV’d’ve been pretty good ’cause it was Saturday night but Dad’d’ve felt guiltier if he’d found me in silence. I wondered what Sally from the amusement arcade’d be doing now. Being kissed. A boy’d be stroking those soft bare inches between her jeans and her top. Someone like Gary Drake or Neal Brose or Duncan Priest. My memory was vague so to pass the time I made her up. I sculpted Sally’s breasts like Debby Crombie’s. I gave her Kate Alfrick’s hair, silking round her naked throat. I gave her a face transplant from Dawn Madden, not forgetting Dawn Madden’s sadistic eyes. Mademoiselle Crommelynck’s slightly upturned nose. Debbie Harry’s raspberry-cream lips.

  Sally, the lost Pick’n’Mix girl.

  If Dad guessed I was trying to make him feel guilty, that’d give him the excuse to not let me. So after nine o’clock, I switched on the reading lamp and read Watership Down. Up to the bit where Bigwig faces up to General Woundwort. Moths kept tapping on the window. Insects crawled over the glass like skaters on ice. A key turned in the lock and Dad tripped into the room. ‘Ah, Jason, here you are.’

  Where else’d I be? I dared myself to not reply to Dad.

  He didn’t notice I was sulking. ‘Chariots of Speed’ll have to take a rain-check.’ Dad’s voice was far too loud for the room. ‘Craig Salt turned up halfway through my seminar.’

  ‘Danny Lawlor told me,’ I said.

  ‘Craig Salt’s yacht’s over in Poole so he drove over to address the troops. Couldn’t just swan off to the local flea-pit with you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, in Mum’s flattest voice.

  ‘Danny and you had dinner, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The world of work’s about these kinds of sacrifices. Craig Salt’s taking us managers out to some place somewhere near Charmouth, so you’ll probably be asleep by the time I—’ Dad saw my kite, propped up against the radiator. ‘What’s this you’ve been spending your money on?’

  Dad always picks fault with what I buy. If it isn’t tat from Taiwan, I paid far too much for something I’ll only use twice. If he can’t see a problem he’ll make one up, like that time I bought BMX transfers for my bike and he made a massive drama ou
t of getting out insurance forms and altering the ‘Description’ box. It’s so unfair. I don’t criticize how he spends his money.

  ‘A kite.’

  ‘So I see…’Dad’d already slid my kite out of its wrapper. ‘What a beaut! Did Danny help you choose it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t want to be pleased he was pleased. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Fancy you buying yourself a kite.’ Dad peered down its spine. ‘Hey, let’s get up at the crack of dawn. We’ll try it out down on the beach! Just you and me, right? Before all the little tourists stake out every square inch, right?’

  ‘Right, Dad.’

  ‘Crack of dawn!’

  I cleaned my teeth without mercy.

  Mum and Dad can be as ratty or sarcastic or angry as they want to me, but if I ever show a flicker of being pissed off then they act like I’ve murdered babies. I hate them for that. But I hate my guts for never standing up to Dad like Julia does. So I hate their guts for making me hate my guts. Kids can never complain about unfairness ’cause everyone knows kids always complain about that. ‘Life isn’t fair, Jason, and the sooner you learn that, the better.’ So there. That’s that sorted. It’s fine for Mum and Dad to scrunch up any promise they make to me and flush it down the bog, and why?

  Because life isn’t fair, Jason.

  My eyes fell on Dad’s electric shaver box.

  I got the shaver out, just because. Snug as an unswitched-on light sabre.

  Plug it in, whispered Unborn Twin from the corners of the bathroom. Dare you.

  It came to life and buzzed my entire skeleton.

  Dad’d kill me for doing this. It’s so obvious that I mustn’t touch his shaver, he’s never even told me not to. But Dad hadn’t even bothered telling me to go to Chariots of Fire on my own. His shaver came closer to the bumfluff on my upper lip…closer…

  It bit me!

  I unplugged it.

  Oh God. Now my bumfluff had a ridiculous patch missing.

  Maggot whimpered, What have you done?

  In the morning Dad’d see and it’d be all too obvious what I’d done. My one hope was to shave the whole fuzz off. Surely Dad’d notice that, too?