Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

A fat prat with floppy eyelids turned round and smirked.

  I half-snapped at Mum, ‘No!’

  (Thank God nobody knows me in Cheltenham. Two years ago Ross Wilcox and Gray Drake saw Floyd Chaceley queuing outside Malvern pictures for Gregory’s Girl with his mum. They’re still ripping the piss out of him.)

  ‘Don’t adopt that tone of voice with me! I told you to go at the shop!’

  Good moods’re as fragile as eggs. ‘But I don’t.’

  A sick bus growled past and made the air taste of pencils.

  ‘If you’re ashamed to be seen with me, just say so.’ (Mum and Julia often hit bull’s-eyes even I hadn’t spotted.) ‘We can save ourselves a lot of bother.’

  ‘No!’ It’s not ‘ashamed’. Well, it is sort of. But not ’cause Mum’s Mum, only ’cause Mum’s a mum. Now I’m ashamed that I’m ashamed. ‘No.’

  Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

  That floppy-eyelidded fat prat in front was loving this.

  Miserably, I took off my jumper and knotted its arms round my waist. The queue shuffled us forward to outside a travel agent’s. A girl Julia’s age sat behind a desk. Lack of sunshine’d made her spotty and pale. So this is what O-levels earn you. A poster Blu-Tack’d on the window roared, WIN THE HOLIDAY OF A LIFETIME WITH E-ZEE TRAVEL! Mum the Delighted, Dad the Smiley Provider, Glamourpuss Big Sister and Tufty Brother. In front of Ayers Rock, the Taj Mahal, Disneyland Florida. ‘Next summer,’ I asked Mum, ‘will we all go on holiday again?’

  ‘Let’s just,’ Mum’s sunglasses hid her eyes, ‘wait and see.’

  Unborn Twin goaded me on. ‘Wait and see what?’

  ‘A year’s a long way off. Julia’s talking about doing a Euro Rail, or whatever they’re called.’

  ‘Interrail.’

  ‘How about your school skiing trip? With your friends?’ (Mum hasn’t noticed I’m not popular any more.) ‘Julia had a lovely time in West Germany on that exchange a few years ago.’

  ‘Ülrike the Shrieker and Hans the Hands didn’t sound lovely to me.’

  ‘Your sister was exaggerating, Jason, I’m sure.’

  ‘Why don’t just you, Dad and me go somewhere? Lyme Regis’s nice.’

  ‘I…’ Mum sighed. ‘…I don’t know if this year’s problems with the time off and whatnot that Dad and I had will be better next year. Let’s just wait and see how things turn out.’

  ‘But Dean Moran’s mum works in an old folks’ home and his dad’s a postman but they always manage to—’

  ‘Bully for Mr and Mrs Moran,’ Mum used the voice that means you’re talking too loud, ‘but not all jobs are as flexible, Jason.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Enough, Jason!’

  The cinema man has appeared. He judges who’ll get in and who’ll be told, ‘You may as well go home.’ The Saved and the Rejects. The cinema man’s lips twitch numbers as he paces down the pavement, slow as a coffin-bearer. His Biro scratches his clipboard. Queuers grin with relief when he passes, peering back to see who he’ll cast off as Rejects. The Saved’re such smug bastards. They’ve got a seat in the colourful kingdom in the dark. Even if it’s where the screen’s too close up, Chariots of Fire’ll run for them. Twenty people’re left between the cinema man and us. Please, let your feet come just a few extra paces along the pavement, just a few more, come on, just a few more…

  Please.

  Maggot

  ‘Jason Taylor,’ Ross Wilcox’s breath smelt like a bag of ham, ‘goes to the pictures with Mummy!’ A moment ago Mark Badbury’d been talking to me about how to win at Pacman. Now, this. I’d already missed my chance to deny it. ‘We seen yer! In Cheltenham! Queuing with yer mummy!’

  Traffic and time in the corridor’d slowed down.

  Stupidly, I tried to downgrade his attack by smiling.

  ‘What’re yer smiling about, yer oily fuckin’ maggot? Touch yer mummy up in the back row, did yer?’ Wilcox gave my tie a vicious yank. Just because. ‘Stick yer tongue in, did yer?’ He pinged my nose. Just because.

  ‘Taylor!’ Gary Drake hunts with his cousin. ‘That’s disgusting!’

  Neal Brose looked at me like you’d look at a dog taken to the vet’s to be put down. Pity, but contempt, too, that it’d allowed itself to get so weak.

  ‘Give Mummy a Frenchie, did yer?’ Ant Little is Wilcox’s new servant.

  Wayne Nashend’s an older one. ‘Slip yer finger in, did yer?’

  Spectators voted with their grins.

  ‘Answer us, then.’ Wilcox has a habit of holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth. (That same tongue that tasted every nook of Dawn Madden.) ‘Or c-c-can’t y-y-yer get the w-w-words out, yer st-st-stuttery bugger?’

  That shot this attack into a new dimension. A hollow pit yawned where my answer should’ve been.

  ‘Ross!’ Darren Croome hissed. ‘Flanagan’s coming!’

  Wilcox ground his foot on my shoe like he was putting out a cigarette. ‘Dicksquirt stammerstuttery mammyshagging arse-maggot.’

  Mr Flanagan the deputy head breezed by, flushing the 3GL kids towards the geography room. Wilcox, Ant Little and Wayne Nashend went but my popularity was left dying in its final spasms. Mark Badbury was going over our maths homework with Colin Pole. I didn’t approach anyone ’cause I knew they wouldn’t talk to me. All I could do was stare out the window till Mr Inkberrow rolled up.

  Mist’s dulling the gold leaves and browning the reds.

  Double maths is ninety minutes of pure boredom on the best of days and today was the worst of the worst. Wished I hadn’t nagged Mum to take me to Chariots of Fire. Wished I’d just gone alone and paid for myself.

  Wilcox would’ve found some reason to put the boot in, mind. He hates me. Dogs hate foxes. Nazis hate Jews. Hate doesn’t need a why. Who or even what is ample. This is what I was thinking when Mr Inkberrow whacked my desk with his metre-rule. I jumped in my seat and cracked my knee-cap on my desk. Obviously I’d zoned out of the lesson again.

  ‘In need of a little focusing, Taylor, hmm?’

  ‘Uh…I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘A quick head-to-head to sharpen your brain, Taylor. You versus Pike.’

  I silently groaned. Head-to-head’s where Kid A solves a sum on the left of the blackboard while Kid B solves the same sum on the right, like a race. Clive Pike’s 3KM’s mathematical brainbox, so I didn’t stand a chance. Which was part of the fun. Even as we wrote down the dictated equation, my chalk snapped.

  Half the class giggled, including some girls.

  Leon Cutler muttered, ‘What a loser.’

  It’s one thing Ross Wilcox giving you a going over in public. Ross Wilcox’s doing that to loads of kids this term. But if a Mr Average like Leon Cutler slags you off and doesn’t even care that you can hear, your credibility is bloody bankrupt.

  ‘Ready,’ called out Mr Inkberrow from the back, ‘set – go!’

  Clive Pike’s chalk went smartly to work.

  I wasn’t going to solve this equation and it knew it. I don’t even know what equations’re for.

  ‘Sir!’ called out Gary Drake. ‘Taylor’s spying on Pike. That’s not very sporting, sir, is it?’

  ‘I d—’ (Hangman put the boot in, too, on ‘didn’t’). ‘Isn’t true, sir.’

  Mr Inkberrow just rubbed his glasses with a handkerchief.

  Tasmin Murrell risked a snickerycockery ‘Naughty naughty, Taylor!’ Tasmin Murrell! A bloody girl.

  ‘Such a sense of fair play, Gary Drake,’ remarked Mr Ink berrow. ‘You should consider law enforcement as a career option, hmm?’

  ‘Thanks, sir. Might just do that.’

  I’d made only a few half-hearted scratches with my chalk. Clive Pike stood back from the blackboard.

  Mr Inkberrow let some moments pass. ‘Excellent, Pike. Sit down.’

  My answer’d died in the second line of xs and ys and squareds.

  Muffled giggles began breaking out.

  ‘Silence, 3KM! I see nothing amusing about spending a
week of my life teaching anyone quadratic equations when the result is this…dog’s dinner. Everyone, page eighteen. Sit down, Taylor. Let us see if your woeful ignorance is shared by the rest of the form.’

  ‘Spazzo,’ hissed Gary Drake, as I stepped over the foot he’d stuck out to trip me. ‘Maggot.’

  Carl Norrest didn’t say a word when I sat back down at our desk. He knows how it feels. But I knew this was just the beginning. I’ve memorized our new Third-year timetable and I knew what was coming up in the third and fourth periods.

  Mr Carver our usual PE teacher’d taken the fifth-year rugby team to Malvern Boys’ College so this student teacher, Mr McNamara, was taking us juniors on his own. This was good news ’cause if Carver scents you’re unpopular, he joins in. Like the showers after winter football when Carver sits on the gym horse calling out, ‘Off with your cacks, Floyd Chaceley, or are we deformed?’ and ‘Backs to the wall, lads, Nicholas Briar’s coming through!’ Of course, most of us laughed like this was the funniest thing on earth.

  The bad news was, my form (3KM) and Ross Wilcox’s form (3GL) do PE together and Mr McNamara can’t discipline a class of boys to save his life. Or mine.

  The changing room stinks of armpits and soil. It’s divided into zones. The hard kids’ zone’s farthest from the door. The lepers’ zone’s nearest the door. Everyone else’s in between. Normally that’s me, but today all the pegs there’d gone. The traditional lepers, Carl Norrest, Floyd Chaceley and Nicholas Briar, acted like I’m one of them now and made space. Gary Drake, Neal Brose and Wilcox’s lot were busy with a bumflick battle so I changed quickly and hurried out into the cold morning. Mr McNamara got us doing warm-up exercises before starting us on laps. I jogged at a careful pace that kept Ross Wilcox’s lot on the far side of the track from me.

  Autumn’s turning miserable, rotting and foggy. The next field along from our sports field was burnt flapjack brown. The field after that was the colour paintbrush water goes. The Malvern Hills were rubbed out by the season. Gilbert Swinyard says our school and the Maze Prison were built by the same architect. The Maze Prison’s in Northern Ireland, where Bobby Sands the IRA hunger striker died last year.

  On days like today, I believe Gilbert Swinyard.

  ‘So you reckon you’ve got what it takes to be centre-forward for Liverpool? For Man U? For England?’ Mr McNamara paced to and fro in his black-and-orange Wolverhampton Wanderers tracksuit. ‘So you reckon you’ve got the guts? The grit?’ Mr McNamara’s Kevin Keegan perm bounced. ‘Clueless! Look at you! Want to know what Loughborough University taught me about sweat and success? Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway! Success in sport – and in life, lads, yeah, in life – equals SWEAT! Sweat and success’ (Darren Croome belted out a loud fart) ‘equals success and sweat! So when you get out there on that pitch today, lads, show me some sweat! I wanna see three hundred per cent sweat! We’re not gonna nancy about choosing teams today! It’s 3KM stick 3GL! Brain versus brawn! Real men can go up front, ponces in midfield, cripples in defence, nutters in goal – only joking, I don’t think! Move it!’ Mr McNamara blasted his whistle. ‘Come on, lads, keep it flowing!’

  Maybe the sabotage’d been planned in advance, or maybe it just happened. Once you’re a leper you’re not let in on things. But pretty soon, I realized 3KM kids and 3GL kids were switching teams at random. Paul White (3GL) banged a long-distance shot at his own goal. Gavin Coley did a spectacular dive, the wrong way. When Ross Wilcox fouled Oswald Wyre (his team) in our penalty area, it was Neal Brose (our team) who took it and scored. Mr McNamara must’ve guessed litres of piss was being taken. Perhaps he didn’t want to turn his first solo lesson into a bollocking parade.

  Then the fouling began.

  Wayne Nashend and Christopher Twyford pogoed on to each of Carl Norrest’s shoulders. Carl Norrest cried out as he buckled under their weight. ‘Sir!’ Wayne Nashend sprang up first. ‘Norrest took my legs from under me! Red card, sir!’

  McNamara looked at trampled, muddy Carl Norrest. ‘Keep it flowing.’

  I spent the game near enough to the ball to not get done for malingering, but far enough away to avoid having to touch it. I heard the feet come thudding up but before I’d time to turn, a rugby tackle knocked me flat. My face was smeared into the mud.

  ‘Eat as much as yer want, Taylor!’ Ross Wilcox, sure enough.

  ‘Maggots love this stuff!’ Gary Drake, sure enough.

  I tried to roll over but they had all their weight on my back.

  ‘Oy!’ McNamara’s whistle blew. ‘You!’

  They got off me. I got to my feet, trembling with victimhood.

  Ross Wilcox prodded his heart. ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘Both of you!’ McNamara pounded up. (Everyone’d abandoned the football to watch this new sport.) ‘What in hell d’you think you’re playing at?’

  ‘Bit of a late tackle, sir.’ Gary Drake smiled. ‘I admit.’

  ‘The ball was up the other end!’

  ‘Honest, sir,’ said Ross Wilcox. ‘I thought he had the ball. Blind as a bat without my glasses.’

  (Wilcox doesn’t wear glasses.)

  ‘So you knocked this boy to the ground with a rugby tackle?’

  ‘I thought rugby’s what we’re playing, sir.’

  (The spectators cackled.)

  ‘Oh, a comedian, are we?’

  ‘No, sir! Now I’ve remembered it’s football. But when I made the tackle, I thought it was rugby.’

  ‘Me too.’ Gary Drake began jogging on the spot like a Sport Billy. ‘Too much competitive spirit, sir. Clean forgot. Sweat equals success.’

  ‘Right! Run to the bridge, the pair of you, to jog your memories!’

  ‘He made us do it, sir.’ Ross Wilcox pointed at Darren Croome. ‘If you don’t punish him too you’re letting the ringleader off scot-free.’

  Bone-thick Darren Croome gooned back.

  ‘All three of you!’ Mr McNamara’s inexperience showed itself again. ‘The bridge and back! Go! And who told the rest of you the game’s over? Keep it flowing!’

  The bridge’s just a footbridge that connects the far end of the school playing field to a country lane that goes down to Upton upon Severn. ‘Run to the bridge!’ is a standard Mr Carver punishment. There’s a clear view so the teacher can check they’ve run all the way. Mr McNamara got back to refereeing so he didn’t see Gary Drake, Ross Wilcox and Darren Croome run to the bridge, then, instead of running back, disappear over it.

  Ace. Skiving off a lesson’s a serious enough offence to be sent to Mr Nixon. If Mr Nixon got involved, they’d forget about me for the day.

  Without Gary Drake and Ross Wilcox organizing the sabotage, the football match turned normal. 3GL scored six goals, 3KM four.

  Only as we were whacking the mud off our boots by the huts where the sports gear’s kept did Mr McNamara remember the three boys he’d sent to the bridge over forty minutes earlier. ‘Where in blazes did those three clowns get to?’

  I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Where in blazes did you three clowns get to?’

  Wilcox, Drake and Croome’d got back, reeking of fags and Polo mints. They looked at Mr McNamara, then each other, in fake confusion. Gary Drake answered, ‘The bridge, sir. Like you told us.’

  ‘You were away for three quarters of an hour!’

  ‘Twenty to get there, sir,’ said Ross Wilcox. ‘Twenty to get back.’

  ‘Do you boys think I’m a complete idiot?’

  ‘Of course not, sir!’ Ross Wilcox looked hurt. ‘You’re a PE teacher.’

  ‘And you went to Loughborough University,’ Gary Drake added. ‘“England’s premier sporting academy bar none”.’

  ‘You boys have no inkling of the trouble you’re in!’ Anger made Mr McNamara’s eyes brighter and his face darker. ‘You can’t leave school premises without permission just because the fancy takes you!’

  ‘But, sir,’ Gary Drake said, puzzled. ‘You told us to.’

  ‘I did no such thing!’

/>   ‘You told us run to the bridge and back. So we ran to the bridge over the River Severn. Down in Upton. That’s what you said.’

  ‘Upton? You ran to the river? At Upton?’ (Mr McNamara was seeing the front page of the Malvern Gazetteer. STUDENT TEACHER SENDS 3 BOYS TO WATERY DEATHS.) ‘The footbridge, I meant, you cretins! By the tennis courts! Why would I send you off to Upton? Unsupervised?’

  Ross Wilcox kept a straight face. ‘Sweat equals success, sir.’

  Mr McNamara’d settled for a draw in return for the last word. ‘You boys have got a lot of problems and the biggest one’s me!’ After he’d retreated into Mr Carver’s cubby-hole, Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake got busy whispering round the hard kids and the in-between kids. A minute later Wilcox called, ‘A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, four,’ and everyone ’cept us lepers began singing to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’:

  Mr McNamara likes to take it up his arse,

  Mr McNamara likes to take it up his arse,

  Mr McNamara likes to take it up his arse,

  And he wants to shove his up yours too – too – too!

  Glory, glory McNamaaara!

  He poked his dong up Mr Caaarver!

  He even poked it up his faaather!

  Now he wants to poke it up yours too – too – too!

  The song had got louder by its third encore. Perhaps kids thought, If I chicken out of this, I’ll be the next Jason Taylor. Or perhaps mass gang-ups just have a will of their own that swallows up resistance. Maybe gang-ups’re as old as hunters in caves. Gang-ups need blood as fuel.

  The changing-room door slammed open.

  The song instantly insisted it’d never existed.

  The door bounced off the rubber door-stop on the wall and hit Mr McNamara in the face.

  Forty-plus boys nervously corking in laughter is still quite loud.

  ‘I’d call you a pack of pigs,’ Mr McNamara shrieked, ‘but that’d be an insult to farmyard animals!’

  ‘Ooooooooo!’ vibrated from the walls.

  Some fury is scary, some fury is ridiculous.