Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  Thinking about Carl Bridgewater made me a bit scared. A bit. A murderer might dump a body in a wood but it’d be an idiotic place to wait for victims. Black Swan Green Wood isn’t Sherwood Forest or Vietnam. All I had to do to get home was backtrack, or keep going till I reached fields.

  Yeah, without my Adidas school bag.

  Twice I saw a patch of white and thought, The dog!

  One time it was just a silver birch. The second time, a placky bag.

  This was hopeless.

  The lip of the old quarry reared up. I’d forgotten it since the war games stopped. Not a big drop, but you wouldn’t want to tumble down it. The bottom was a sort of three-sided basin with a track going out that led to Hakes Lane. Or is it Pig Lane? I was surprised to see there were lights and voices on the quarry floor. Five or six caravans, I counted, plus motor homes and a truck, a horsebox, a Hillman van and a motorbike and sidecar. A generator was chugging. Gypsies, I thought, has to be. At the foot of the scree below my overhang about seven or eight figures sat round a dirty fire. Dogs, too.

  No sign of the wolf who’d robbed me, and no sign of my Adidas bag. But surely, it was likelier my bag’d be here than anywhere else in the wood. Problem was, how does a kid from a four-bedroom house down Kingfisher Meadows with Everest double glazing go up to gypsies and accuse their dogs of nicking stuff?

  I had to.

  How could I? I went to that Village Camp Crisis Committee meeting. But my bag. At the very least, I figured, I should come into their camp by the main track, so they didn’t think I was spying on them.

  ‘Gonna stay spyin’ on us all evenin’, are yer?’

  If Dean Moran’s dad’d put five shits up me, this rammed home ten. A broken-nosed face appeared in the clotted dark behind me. Fierce. ‘No,’ I might’ve begun pleading, ‘I just thought—’ But I didn’t finish ’cause I’d taken a step back.

  Empty air.

  Stones, soil sliding, me sliding with it, down and round and (You’ll be lucky if you only break a leg, said Unborn Twin) round and down and (‘Feck!’ and ‘Mind it!’ and ‘MIND IT!’ shouted real humans) and down and round and (dice in a tumbler) round and down and (caravans campfire collarbones) breath whacked out of my lungs as I came to a dead stop.

  Dogs were going wild, inches away.

  ‘GERROUT O’HERE, YER GERT DAFT BUGGERS!’

  Streams of pebbles and dirt caught up with me.

  ‘Well,’ the voice rasped, ‘where in bugger did he drop from?’

  It was like when someone on TV wakes in hospital and faces swim up, but spookier ’cause of the dark. My body ached in twenty places. Scraper pain, not axed pain, so I reckoned I’d be able to walk. My vision spun like a washing machine at the end of its cycle. ‘A kid’s skidded down the quarry!’ rang out voices. ‘A kid’s skidded down the quarry!’ More people appeared in the firelight. Suspicious if not hostile.

  An old man spoke in a foreign language.

  ‘Don’t have to bury him yet! T’ain’t a cliff he dropped!’

  ‘It’s okay,’ grit clogged my mouth, ‘I’m okay.’

  A near one asked, ‘Can yer stand up, boy?’

  I tried but the ground hadn’t stopped tumbling yet.

  ‘Wobbly on his trotters,’ the raspy voice decided. ‘Park yer arse a mo, mush, round the fire. Help us, one of yer…’

  Two arms supported me the few steps to the fire. An aproned mother and daughter stepped from a caravan where Midlands Today was on. Both women looked hard as hammers. One held a baby. Kids jostled to get a better look. Wilder and way harder than any kid in my year, even Ross Wilcox. Rain, colds, scraps, bullies, handing in homework on time, such things didn’t worry these kids.

  One teenager was whittling at a lump and not paying me the blindest bit of notice. Firelight flashed off his sure knife. A mop of hair hid half his face.

  The raspy man turned into the knife grinder. This reassured me, but only a bit. Him on my doorstep was one thing, but me crashing down here wasn’t the same. ‘Sorry to…thanks, but I’d best be off.’

  ‘I caught him, Bax!’ Bust-nosed Boy came bum-skiing down the scree. ‘But the divvy fell off himself! I never pushed him! But I should of! Spyin’, he was, the spyin’ bugger!’

  Knife Grinder looked at me. ‘You ain’t ready to leave yet, chavvo.’

  ‘This’ll, er’ (Hangman blocked ‘sound’) ‘appear weird, but I was in the woods over by St Gabriel’s – the church – and I’d just’ (Hangman blocked ‘sat’) ‘I’d just rested when this dog’ (God, this sounded so pathetic) ‘this massive dog came up and grabbed my bag and ran off with it.’ (Not one flicker of sympathy on not one face.) ‘It’s got all my exercise books and textbooks in.’ Hangman was making me duck words like a liar does. ‘Then I followed the dog, well, I tried to, but it got dark, and the path, well, kind of path, just led me to…’ I pointed up behind me. ‘Up there. I saw you down here but I wasn’t spying on you.’ (Even the baby looked dubious.) ‘Honest, I just wanted my bag back.’

  The whittler still whittled.

  A woman asked, ‘Why was yer in the wood in the first place?’

  ‘Hiding.’ Only the unpretty truth’d do.

  ‘Hiding?’ her daughter demanded. ‘Who from?’

  ‘A bunch of kids. Village kids.’

  ‘What yer do to ’em?’ asked Bust-nosed Boy.

  ‘Nothing. They just don’t like me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘’Course yer know!’

  Of course I do. ‘I’m not one of them. That’s it. That’s enough.’

  Warmth slimed my palm and a fangy lurcher looked back up. A man with greased-back hair and sideburns snorted at an older one. ‘Should o’ seen yer face, Bax! When the boy came tumbling down out of nowhere!’

  ‘Frit as sin, I was!’ The old man chucked a beer can into the fire. ‘An’ I don’t mind ownin’ it, Clem Ostler. Thought he was a mulo up from the graveyard. Or gorgios chuckin’ stoves or fridges down like that time up Pershore way. Nah, I never got a good feelin’ about this atchin-sen.’ (Either gypsies bend words out of shape, or they have new words for things.) ‘This ’un’ (I got a suspicious nod) ‘a-creepin’ up on us jus’ proves it.’

  ‘Ain’t it more polite,’ Knife Grinder turned to me, ‘just to ask’ bout yer bag, if yer thought we had it?’

  ‘Reckon we’d skewer yer an’ roast yer alive, didn’t yer?’ The woman’s folded forearms were thick as cables. ‘Everyone knows us gypsies’re all partial for a bit o’ gorgio in the pot, ain’t that right?’

  I shrugged, miserable. The whittler still whittled. Wood smoke and oil fumes, bodies and cigarettes, bangers and beans, sweet and sour manure. These people’s lives’re freer than mine, but mine’s ten times more comfortable and I’ll probably be alive longer.

  ‘S’pose, now,’ a short man spoke from a throne of stacked-up tyres, ‘we help yer look for this bag o’ yours? What’d yer give us back?’

  ‘Have you got my bag?’

  Bust-nosed Boy shot back, ‘What you accusin’ my uncle of?’

  ‘Steady, Al.’ Knife Grinder yawned. ‘He ain’t harmed us so far as I can see. But how he might earn a bit o’ goodwill is tellin’ us if that carry-on at the village hall Wednesday last was over that “perm’nent site” the council’re after building down Hakes Lane. Half the bones o’ Black Swan Green was sardined in there. Never seen the like.’

  Honesty and confessing’re so often the same. ‘It was.’

  Knife Grinder leant back pleased, as if he’d won a bet.

  ‘You went along, did yer?’ asked the one called Clem Ostler.

  I’d already hesitated too long. ‘My dad took me. But the meeting was interrupted halfway because—’

  ‘Find out everything about us,’ demanded the daughter, ‘did yer?’

  ‘Not a lot’ was the safest thing to say.

  ‘Gorgios,’ Clem Ostler’s eyes were slits, ‘don’t know one fat rat squeak
about us. Yer “experts” know even less.’

  Bax the old man nodded. ‘Mercy Watts’s family got moved on to one o’ them “official sites” down Sevenoaks way. Rents, queues, lists, wardens. Council houses on wheels, they are.’

  ‘That’s the dumbfool joke of it!’ Knife Grinder poked the fire. ‘We don’t want ’em built any more’n yer locals. That new law, that’s what this whole blue-arsed carry-on’s about.’

  Bust-nosed Boy said, ‘What new law’s that then, Uncle?’

  ‘Goes like this. If the council ain’t built their quota o’ perm’nent sites, the law says we can atch wherever we please. But a council what has got the quota can get the gavvas to move us on if we’re atchin’ anywhere what ain’t a perm’nent site. This is what this place down Hakes Lane’s about. Ain’t ’bout kindness.’

  ‘Learn that at yer meetin’,’ the mother scowled at me, ‘did yer?’

  ‘Once they get us tied down,’ Clem Ostler didn’t let me reply, ‘then they’ll be crammin’ our chavvies into their schools, turnin’ us all into Yessirs, Nossirs, Three Bags Full, Sirs. Turn us into a bunch o’ didicois an’ kennicks, stuffed up in brick houses. Wipe us off the Earth, like Adolf Hitler tried to. Oh, more gradual like, much gentler, but get rid of us all the same.’

  ‘“Assimilation”.’ Bust-nosed Boy glared my way. ‘That’s what social workers call it, ain’t it?’

  ‘I’ – I shrugged – ‘don’t know.’

  ‘S’prised a gyppo knows a big word like that? Yer don’t know who I am, do yer? Oh, I remember you all right. These yots don’t forgets a face. We was both at the littl’uns school in the village. Frogmartin, Figmortin, the teacher’s name was, summat like that. Yer was stuttery then, too, wasn’t yer? We was playin’ that game, that Hangman game.’

  My memory passed me the gypsy kid’s name. ‘Alan Wall.’

  ‘That’s my name, Stuttery, don’t wear it out.’

  ‘Stuttery’ was an improvement on ‘Spy’.

  ‘What,’ the mother lit a cigarette, ‘gets my goat about gorgios is how they call us dirty when they have toilets in the same room they wash in! And all use the same spoons and cups and bath water and don’t throw their rubbish for the wind an’ rain to sort out natural, no, they keep their muck to go rotten in boxes!’ She shuddered. ‘Inside their houses!’

  ‘Sleepin’ with their pets an’ all.’ Clem Ostler poked the fire. ‘Dogs’re mucky enough, but cats. Fleas, dirt, fur, all in the same bed. Ain’t that right? Oy, Stuttery!’

  I’d been thinking how gypsies wanted the rest of us to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what they are. ‘Some people let their pets sleep on their bed, sure, but—’

  ‘’Nother thing.’ Bax spat into the fire. ‘Gorgios don’t just marry one girl and stick with her, not nowadays. They’ll get divorced quick as changin’ cars, despite their fancy weddin’ vows.’ (Tuts and nods all round the fire, ’cept for the whittler. By now I’d guessed he was deaf or dumb.) ‘Like that butcher in Worcester who divorced Becky Smith when she got too saggy.’

  ‘Gorgios’ll rut anythin’, married or no, livin’ or no,’ Clem Ostler went on. ‘Dogs on heat. Anywhere, any time, in cars, down alleys, in skips, anywhere. And they call us “anti-social”.’

  Everyone chose the same moment to look at me.

  ‘Please,’ I had nothing to lose, ‘has anyone seen my school bag?’

  ‘“A school bag”, is it now?’ Tyre Man sort of teased. ‘“A school bag”?’

  ‘Oh, put the boy out of his misery,’ muttered Knife Grinder.

  Tyre Man lifted up my Adidas bag. ‘A bag like this?’ (I choked down an Oh of relief.) ‘Yer welcome to it, Stuttery! Books never taught a man to mong or ducker.’ A circle of hands passed the bag to me.

  Thanks, blurted out Maggot. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Fritz ain’t too picky ’bout what he brings back.’ Tyre Man whistled. The wolf who’d robbed me lolloped out of the dark. ‘My brother’s juk, ain’t yer, Fritz? Stayin’ with me till he’s let out of his lodgings in Kiddyminster. Greyhound legs, collie brains, ain’t yer, Fritz? I’ll miss yer. Drop Fritz over a gate an’ he’ll get yer a fat old pheasant or a hare without you settin’ foot past that farmer’s “No Trespassin’” sign. Won’t yer, Fritz, eh?’

  The whittling kid stood up. Everyone round the fire watched.

  He tossed me a heavy lump. I caught it.

  The lump was rubber, once part of a tractor tyre, maybe. He’d carved it into a head the size of a grapefruit. Sort of voodooish, but amazing. A gallery like my mum’s would snap it up, I reckon. Its eyes’re spacey and sockety. Its mouth’s this gaping scar. Its nostrils’re flared, like a terrified horse’s. If fear was a thing and not a feeling, it’d be this head.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Alan Wall studied it, ‘yer best ever.’

  Jimmy the Whittler made a pleased noise.

  ‘Quite an honour,’ the woman told me. ‘Jimmy don’t make them for every gorgio who falls into our camp, yer know.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I told Jimmy. ‘I’ll keep it.’

  Jimmy hid behind his mop of hair.

  ‘Is it him, Jimmy?’ Clem Ostler meant me. ‘When he came a-tumblin’ down? This is what he looked like when he fell?’

  But Jimmy’d walked off behind the trailer.

  I looked at Knife Grinder. ‘Can I go?’

  Knife Grinder held up his palms. ‘Y’ain’t a prisoner.’

  ‘But you just tell them,’ Alan Wall pointed towards the village, ‘we ain’t all the thieves an’ that they say we are.’

  ‘The boy could preach till he’s purple,’ the daughter told him. ‘They’d not believe him. They’d not want to believe him.’

  The gypsies turn to me, as if Jason Taylor is the ambassador of the land of brick houses and mesh fences and estate agents. ‘They’re scared of you. They don’t understand you, you’re right. If they could just…Or…It’d be a start if they could just sit here. Get warm, round your fire, and just listen to you. That’d be a start.’

  The fire spat fat sparks up at pines lining the quarry, up at the moon.

  ‘Know what fire is?’ Knife Grinder’s cough’s a dying man’s cough. ‘Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.’

  Goose Fair

  That ace song ‘Olive’s Salami’ by Elvis Costello and the Attractions drowned out whatever Dean yelled at me, so I yelled back, ‘What was that?’ Dean yelled back, ‘Can’t hear a word yer sayin’!’ but then the fairground man tapped him on his shoulder for his 10p. That’s when I saw a matt square on the scratched rink, right by my dodgem.

  The matt square was a wallet. I’d’ve handed it in to the fairground man but it flipped open to show a photo of Ross Wilcox and Dawn Madden. Posed like John Travolta and Olivia Neutron-Bomb on the Grease poster. (Instead of sunny America, mind, it was a cloudy back garden down Wellington Gardens.)

  Ross Wilcox’s wallet was stuffed with notes. There had to be fifty quid in there. This was serious. More money than I’ve ever had. Putting the wallet between my knees, I looked round to check nobody’d seen. Dean was yelling whatever it was at Floyd Chaceley now. None of the kids in the queue was paying me any attention.

  The prosecution (a) pointed out it wasn’t my money and (b) considered the panic Ross Wilcox’d feel when he discovers he’s lost all this money. The defence produced (a) the dissected mouse head in my pencil case, (b) the drawings of me eating my dick on blackboards and (c) the never-ending Hey, Maggot? How’s the s-s-s-ssssssspeech therapy going, Maggot?

  The judge arrived at his verdict in seconds. I stuffed Ross Wilcox’s wallet in my pocket. I’d count my new fortune later.

  The dodgem man waved at his slave in a booth, who pulled a lever, and every kid in the bumper rink went At last! Sparks blossomed off the tops of the poles as the dodgem cars wheezed into electric life and Elvis Costello turned into Spandau Ballet and dazzling oranges, lemons and limes lit up. Moran banged me a beaut from the side,
howling like the Green Goblin decking Spiderman. I twisted my wheel to get him back, but I bumped Clive Pike instead. Clive Pike tried to get me back and it went on like that, swerving, eddying and ramming for five minutes of heaven. Just as the power died and every kid in the bumper rink went Not already! a Wonderwoman dodgem bashed into me. ‘Oops.’ Holly Deblin, at its wheel, laughed. ‘I’ll get you back for that,’ I called to her. ‘Oh,’ Holly Deblin shouted back, ‘poor me.’ Wilcox’s wallet was snug against my thigh. Bumper cars’re ace, just ace.

  ‘Yer know why yer barred!’ By the out-gate, the fairground man was snarling at Ross Wilcox by the in-gate. With him was Dawn Madden in lizard jeans and a furry neck thing. She crumpled a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint into her bitter-cherry mouth. ‘So drop the “What’ve I done?” bollocks!’

  ‘It’s got to be on the rink!’ Ross Wilcox in despair was a glorious sight. ‘It’s got to be!’

  ‘If yer jump from car to car stuff’s gonna fall out! Not that I give a toss if yer ’lectricute yerself but I do give a toss about my licence!’

  ‘Just let us look!’ Dawn Madden tried. ‘His dad’ll murder him!’

  ‘Oh, and I care, do I?’

  ‘Thirty seconds!’ Wilcox was hysterical. ‘That’s all I’m askin’!’

  ‘An’ I’m tellin’ yer I ain’t fannyin’ about fer the likes o’ you when I got a business to run!’

  The fairground man’s slave’d counted in another bunch of kids by now. His master clanged the gate shut, missing Wilcox’s fingers by a tenth of a second. ‘Whoops!’ Black Swan Green’s hardest third-year looked round for allies in his hour of need. There was nobody he knew. The Goose Fair brings people from Tewkesbury and Malvern and Pershore, from miles around.