Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  The noise of a knife on a chopping board.

  I peered round the dresser.

  ‘If I’d known I’d end up with this mess,’ the dark American woman purred at me, ‘I’d have gotten the freakin’ cherries.’ (She was sort of beautiful but too off another planet to be fanciable.) In her sticky hands dripped a greeny-red fruit the shape of a strange egg. ‘Cherries are the fruit. Pop ’em in, slide out the stone, masticate, swallow, finito. None of this…spatter and gore.’

  My first words to a real live American were, ‘What fruit’s that?’

  ‘Know what a mango is?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘Why apologize? You’re English! You don’t know real food from freakin’ polystyrene. Try some?’

  You can’t take sweets from pervy men in parks, but exotic fruit from antique shopkeepers is probably okay. ‘Okay.’

  The woman shaved off a fat sliver into a glass bowl. She stuck a tiny silver fork into it. ‘Rest your feet a moment.’

  I sat on a wicker stool and lifted the bowl to my mouth.

  The slippery fruit slid on to my tongue.

  God, mango’s gorgeous…perfumed peaches, bruised roses.

  ‘So what’s the verdict?’

  ‘It’s absolutely—’

  The cricket commentary suddenly went crazy. ‘—entire audience here at the Oval is on its feet, as Botham notches up another superb century! Geoffrey Boycott is running over to congratulate—’

  ‘Botham?’ The woman went to red alert. ‘That’s Ian Botham, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Shaggy like Chewbacca? Broken Roman nose? Barbarian eyes? Masculinity wrapped in cricket whites?’

  ‘That’s probably him.’

  ‘Oh.’ She crossed her hands over her bosomless chest like the Virgin Mary. ‘I would walk on burning embers.’ We listened to more radio applause as we finished the mango. ‘So.’ She carefully wiped her fingers on a damp flannel and switched the radio off. ‘Can I sell you a Jacobean four-poster bed? Or do the tax inspectors keep getting younger?’

  ‘Uh…have you got an Omega Seamaster please?’

  ‘An “Ohmeega Seamaster”? That’s a boat?’

  ‘No, it’s a watch. They stopped making them in 1958. It has to be a model called a “de Ville”.’

  ‘Alas, Giles doesn’t do watches, honey. He doesn’t want people bringing them back if they don’t run.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was it. Nowhere else in Cheltenham.

  The American woman studied me. ‘I may know a specialist dealer…’

  ‘A watch dealer? Here in Cheltenham?’

  ‘No, he operates out of South Kensington. Want me to call him?’

  ‘Would you? I’ve got £28.75.’

  ‘Keep your cards closer to your chest than that, honey. Let me see if I can find his number in this bordello Giles calls his office…’

  ‘Hi, Jock? Rosamund. Uh-huh. No…no, I’m playing shop. Giles is out vulturing somewhere. Some duchess with a big country house has died. Or a countess. Or a largesse. I don’t know, we don’t do queens where I come from, Jock, well, not queens who dress like they’re serving life in fashion prison…What’s that? Oh, Giles did tell me, it was someplace quaint, in the Cotswolds, English-sounding…Brideshead – no, that was the TV series, right? It’s on the tip of my tongue – Codpiece-under-Water…No, Jock, I’d tell you if…What’s that?…Uh-huh, I know there are no secrets between…Uh-huh, Giles loves you like a brother, too. But listen up, Jock. I have a young man here in the shop…Oh, hilarious, Jock, no wonder you’re such a pin-up with the London arthritic…This young man is after an Ohmeega Seamaster’ (she checked with me and I mouthed ‘de Ville’ at her) ‘“de Ville”…Uh-huh. You’re familiar with that model?’

  The pause was somehow promising.

  ‘Oh, you are?’

  The moment before you win you know you’ve won.

  ‘In front of you? Well, how fortunate I called! Uh-huh…Mint condition? Oh, Jock, this is getting better…so serendipitous…Listen, Jock, about the shekels…we have a budgetary situation here that…Uh-huh…Yes, Jock, if they stopped making them in the fifties they must be hard to come by, I see that…I know you’re not a registered charity…’ (She mimed me a yapping yapbird with her hand.) ‘If you didn’t breed like a buck-rabbit with every she-bunny who raises her fluffy tail your way, Jock, you wouldn’t have so many children on the brink of starvation. Just give me your best price?…Uh-huh…Well, I think it might…Uh-huh. If he does, I’ll call you back.’

  The phone pinged in its cradle.

  ‘He had one? An Omega Seamaster?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Rosamund looked sorry. ‘If you can stretch to £850, he’ll courier it to your house once your cheque has cleared.’

  Eight hundred and fifty pounds?

  ‘More mango, honey?’

  ‘So let me get this straight, Jason. You broke this freakin’ watch of your grandfather’s – quite by accident – in January?’ (I nodded.) ‘And you’ve spent the last eight months scurrying around for a replacement?’ (I nodded.) ‘On the resources of a thirteen-year-old?’ (I nodded.) ‘By bicycle?’ (I nodded.) ‘Wouldn’t it be a whole load easier just to confess? Take your punishment like a man, then get on with your life?’

  ‘My parents’d murder me. Literally.’

  ‘What’s that? They’d murder you? Literally?’ Rosamund sealed in a mock scream with her hands. ‘Kill their own offspring? For breaking a freakin’ watch? How did they dispose of your siblings when they broke things? Flush them down the john, joint by joint? Doesn’t the plumber find their bones when he unblocks the pipes?’

  ‘Okay, not literally murder me, but they’d go mental. It’s like…my greatest fear.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And how long will they stay “mental”? The term of your natural life? Twenty years? No possibility of parole?’

  ‘Not that long, obviously, but—’

  ‘Uh-huh. Eight months?’

  ‘Several days, definitely.’

  ‘What’s that? Several days? Holy shit, Jason.’

  ‘More than that. A week, most like. And they’d never let me forget it.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And how many weeks can you expect to remain in your mortal coil?’

  ‘I’m—’ (Hangman blocked my ‘sorry?’) ‘I don’t quite get you.’

  ‘Well, how many weeks are there in a year?’

  ‘Fifty-two.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And how many years are you alive for?’

  ‘It depends. Seventy.’

  ‘Seventy-five years, unless you worry yourself to death first. Okay. Fifty-two multiplied by seventy-five equals…’ She tapped the sum into a calculator. ‘Three thousand, nine hundred weeks. So. You tell me your greatest fear is that Ma and Pa’ll be mad at you for one of these almost four-thousand weeks. Or two. Or three.’ Rosamund puffed out her cheeks, then huffed out the air. ‘Can I swap your greatest fear for any one of mine? Take two of them. No, ten. Help yourself to a barrow-load. Please?’

  A low-flying Tornado rattled all Cheltenham’s windows.

  ‘It’s a watch you broke! Not a future. Not a life. Not a backbone.’

  ‘You don’t know my parents.’ I sounded sulky.

  ‘The question here is, “Do you?”’

  ‘Of course I do. We live in the same house.’

  ‘You break my heart, Jason. Oh, you break my freakin’ heart.’

  Outside Hythloday Mews I realized I’d left my map on Rosamund’s table, so I went back to get it. The blue door behind the desk’d swung open, showing a tiny bog. Rosamund was taking a thundering piss, booming ‘Row Row Row the Boat Gently Down the Stream’ in a foreign language. Women had to sit down to pee, I’d always believed, but Rosamund pissed standing with her skirt hoiked up to her bum. My cousin Hugo Lamb says in America they’ve got these rubber willies for Women’s Lib women. Maybe Rosamund had one. Her legs were hairier than Dad’s, mind, which is pretty unusual for women, I thought. I was dead embarrassed, so I just
took my map, quietly left and walked back towards Mum’s gallery. In an unfriendly baker’s I bought a sausage roll and sat down in a triangle of park. The sycamores’re tatty now August’s almost over. BACK TO SCHOOL posters’re in the shops. These last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic-Tacs.

  Till today I thought replacing my granddad’s Omega’d just be a matter of tracking one down. But now the problem’s about getting hold of hundreds of pounds. I chewed my sausage roll, wondering how I could (a) lie to explain the watch’s disappearance and (b) make it not my fault and (c) make the lie invulnerable to questioning.

  It can’t be done.

  Sausage rolls start off tasting lovely but by the time you finish them they taste of peppery pig bollock. According to Julia that’s exactly what sausage rolls’re made of.

  Mum’s friend Yasmin Morton-Bagot owns La Boîte aux Mille Surprises, but Mum manages it with an assistant called Agnes. (Dad calls it ‘La Bot’ as in ‘bottom’ for a joke, but ‘boîte’ means ‘box.’) La Boîte aux Mille Surprises is half-shop, half-gallery. The shop part sells stuff you can’t buy outside London. Fountain pens from Paris, chess sets from Iceland, atomic clocks from Austria, jewellery from Yugoslavia, masks from Burma. The back room’s the gallery. Customers come from all over England ’cause Yasmin Morton-Bagot knows artists all over the world. The most expensive painting at the moment’s by Volker Oldenburg. Volker Oldenburg paints modern art in a potato cellar in West Berlin. I’m not sure what Tunnel #9 is a picture of but it costs £1,950.

  Thirteen years of pocket money is £1,950.

  ‘We’re celebrating, Jason.’ Agnes’s got a slidey Welsh accent so I don’t always know if I’ve heard her right. ‘Your mum sold a painting just now.’

  ‘Great. One of the expensive ones?’

  ‘One of the very, very expensive ones.’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Mum appeared from the gallery. ‘Nice morning?’

  ‘Uh’ (Hangman stopped the ‘not’ of ‘not bad’) ‘fine. Agnes says you just’ (Hangman blocked ‘sold’) ‘a customer bought a picture.’

  ‘Oh, he was in the mood for a bit of a plunge.’

  ‘Helena,’ Agnes went stern, ‘you had him eating out of your hand. That bit about cars losing value but art always gaining. You could have sold him Gloucestershire.’

  Then I saw this lush girl.

  All three of them were sixteen, I’d say, and rich. One sidekick had a stoaty meanness and acne not even ornate make-up could cover. The other sidekick’d been turned from a fish into a wide-eyed fat-lipped girl by a third-rate wizard. The leader, however, who’d come into La Boîte aux Mille Surprises first, she could’ve been off a shampoo advert. Pixie ears, pixie eyes, swelling cream T-shirt, liquorice miniskirt, leggings that looked sprayed on to her perfect legs and toffee hair I’d’ve given my soul to bury myself in. (Girls’ curves never used to yank me hard like this.) Even Pixie’s furry sunflower bag was from a world where nothing ugly’s allowed. Not gawping at her was impossible, so I went and sat in the tiny office. Mum came in a minute later to phone Yasmin Morton-Bagot, leaving Agnes on the till. A pipeline of vision went through the door crack, between two giant candles from Palermo and under an amber lampshade from Poland. By chance, Pixie’s angelic bum hovered at the end of this pipeline. It stayed there while Acne and Codgirl got Agnes to get a Chinese scroll off the wall. Their voices were posh and horsey. I was still stroking Pixie’s curves with my eyes. That’s why I saw her fingers flicker behind the glass display, snatch the opal earrings and slip them into her sunflower bag.

  Trouble, shouts, threats, police, whimpered Maggot. Stammering in court when you’re called to give evidence. And are you sure you just saw what you thought you saw?

  I hissed, ‘Mum!’

  Mum asked me just the once. ‘Are you sure?’ I nodded. Mum told Yasmin Morton-Bagot she’d call her back, hung up and got out a Polaroid Instamatic. ‘Can you shoot them when I say so?’ I nodded. ‘Good lad.’

  Mum walked to the front of the shop and quietly locked the door. Agnes noticed and the atmosphere in the shop went tense and dark, like before a scrap at school. Pixie gave a sign to her sidekicks it was time to leave.

  Pixie’s voice was brassy. ‘The door’s locked!’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware the door is locked. I just locked it.’

  ‘Well, you can unlock it again, can’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ Mum jangled her keys, ‘it’s like this. A thief has just put a pair of rather valuable Australian opals in her bag. Obviously, I need to protect my stock. The thief wants to escape with her stolen goods. So we have an impasse. What would you do, if you were in my position?’

  Acne and Codgirl were already on the verge of tears.

  ‘What I wouldn’t do,’ Pixie sounded dangerous now, ‘if I were a shop assistant, is throw around totally pathetic accusations.’

  ‘So you won’t mind proving my accusations are totally pathetic by emptying your bag. Imagine how stupid this shop assistant will look when there are no earrings in it!’

  For one awful second I thought Pixie’d somehow put the jewellery back.

  ‘I’m not going to let you or anyone rifle through my bag.’

  Pixie was tough. This battle could still go either way.

  ‘Do your parents know you’re thieves?’ Mum turned on Acne and Codgirl. ‘How are they going to react when the police call?’

  Acne and Codgirl even smelt guilty.

  ‘We were going to pay.’ Pixie made her first mistake.

  ‘Pay for what?’ Mum smiled, sort of creepily.

  ‘Unless you catch us walking out of your shop, you can’t do a thing! My father has an excellent solicitor.’

  ‘Does he? So do I,’ Mum replied, brightly. ‘I have two witnesses who saw you trying to leave.’

  Pixie marched up to Mum and I thought she was going to hit her. ‘GIVE ME THE KEY OR YOU’LL REGRET IT!’

  ‘Haven’t you realized by now’ (I had no idea Mum could be so bulletproof) ‘you’re not intimidating me in the least?’

  ‘Please,’ tears shone in Acne’s face, ‘please – I—’

  ‘In that case,’ Pixie snapped, ‘suppose I just pick up one of your crappy statues and smash my way out of this—’

  Mum nodded at me, Now.

  The flash made all three girls jump.

  The photo grundled out of the Polaroid. I waved it by its corner to dry it for a second or two. Then I took another photo for good measure.

  ‘What,’ Pixie was beginning to crumble, ‘does he think he’s doing?’

  ‘Next week,’ Mum said, ‘I shall visit every school in town – with a police officer, and these photographs – starting with Cheltenham Girls’ College.’ Codgirl let out a flutter of despair. ‘Headmistresses are always so cooperative. They’d rather expel a bad apple or two than risk their school getting into the newspapers for the wrong reasons. Who can blame them?’

  ‘Ophelia.’ Acne’s voice was as quiet as a kitten’s. ‘Let’s just—’

  ‘“Ophelia”!’ Mum was enjoying this. ‘You don’t get many Ophelias to the pound.’

  Pixie-Ophelia’s options were closing in.

  ‘Or,’ Mum jangled her keys, ‘turn out your bags and pockets and return my stock. Tell me your names, your schools, your addresses and your telephone numbers. Yes, you will be in trouble. Yes, I will contact your schools. But no, I won’t press charges or involve the police.’

  The three girls stared at the floor.

  ‘But you have to choose now.’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘As you wish. Agnes, telephone PC Morton, please. Tell him to make space in his cells for three shoplifters.’

  Acne put a Tibetan amulet on the counter and tears streamed down her pitted, powdery cheeks. ‘I’ve never done this before…’

  ‘Choose better friends.’ Mum looked at Codgirl.

  Codgirl’s hand trembled as she produced a Danish paperweight.

  ‘Didn’t Shakespeare
’s Ophelia,’ Mum turned to the real one, ‘come to a mad, bad end?’

  ‘Wow,’ me and Mum hurried along Regent’s Arcade so we’d get to the cinema before Chariots of Fire began, ‘you handled those girls amazingly.’

  ‘Fancy.’ Mum’s shoes smacked the shiny marble. Take that! Take That! Take that! ‘An old dear like me being able to handle three spoilt Pollyannas “amazingly”.’ (Mum was dead chuffed, really.) ‘You spotted them in the first place, Jason. Old Eagle-eyes. If I was a sheriff, I’d pay you a reward.’

  ‘Popcorn and 7-Up please.’

  ‘Oh, I think we can manage that.’

  People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this. Specially in arcades, shops’re deafening. I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! But walking down Regent’s Arcade, I noticed a new need that’s normally so close up you never know it’s there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like.

  ‘This,’ Mum sighed and fished out her sunglasses, ‘is wonderful.’

  The queue for Chariots of Fire snaked down the cinema steps and along the street for eight or ten shops. The film started in thirteen minutes. Ninety or a hundred people were ahead of us. Kids, mostly, in twos, threes and fours. A few old-age pensioners too. A few couples. The only boy queuing with his mother was me. Wished it wasn’t so obvious I was with her.

  ‘Jason, don’t tell me you need the loo after all?’