Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  Say it, nudged Unborn Twin, I dare you to.

  ‘…buggered, miss. Screwed and buggered.’

  That appalled silence was my handiwork. Words made it. Just words.

  Miss Lippetts loves her job, on good days.

  My mind was scratching itself raw over how Mum and Dad’ll react to what I did today, so I got the Christmas tree out of its cupboard as a distraction. The Quality Street tin of decorations too. December 20th’s here and Mum and Dad’ve hardly mentioned Christmas. Mum’s at the gallery seven days a week and Dad keeps going off for interviews that only lead to more interviews. I put the tree together, and strung its fairy lights. When I was a kid Dad’d buy real trees from Gilbert Swinyard’s dad. Mum got this artificial one from Debenham’s in Worcester two years ago. I whinged that it didn’t smell of anything, but she pointed out I wasn’t the one who had to hoover and unpick the needles from the carpet. Which I s’pose’s fair enough. Most of the decorations are older than me. Even the tissue paper they’re wrapped in’s ancient. Frosted baubles Mum and Dad bought for their first (and last) Christmas alone together, without Julia or me. A tin choirboy hitting a high note, his mouth a perfect o. A wooden family of jolly snowmen. (Everything wasn’t made of plastic in those days.) The fattest Father Christmas in Lapland. Precious Angel, from Mum’s mum’s mum. Precious Angel’s made of blown glass – she was a gift to my great-grandmother from a one-eyed Hungarian prince, so the story goes, at a ball, in Vienna, just before the First World War.

  Step on her, said Unborn Twin. She’d crunch like a Crunchie.

  No bloody way, I told Unborn Twin.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  Clunks and grundlings. ‘Jace? Julia. Long time no speak.’

  ‘You sound like you’re in a blizzard.’

  ‘Call me back. I’m out of coins.’

  I dialled the number. The line was better.

  ‘Cheers. No blizzards yet, but it’s freezing up here. Is Mum there?’

  ‘No. She’s still at the gallery.’

  ‘Oh…’

  Joy Division throbbed in the background.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing’ is always something. ‘What, Julia?’

  ‘Nah…nothing. When I got back to halls this morning, there was a message from Mum, that’s all. Did she phone me yesterday evening?’

  ‘Could’ve done. What was the message?’

  ‘Phone home immediately, it said. But our avuncular super-efficient porter – not – didn’t write the time of the call. I phoned the gallery at lunch-time, but Agnes told me Mum’s gone to her solicitor’s. Phoned again, but she hadn’t got back. So I thought I’d phone you. But there’s no need to worry.’

  ‘Solicitors?’

  ‘Just be business stuff. Is Dad in?’

  ‘He’s doing interviews in Oxford.’

  ‘Right. Good. Sure. He’s…y’know, keeping up okay?’

  ‘Oh…okay. He’s not locked himself in his office again, anyway. Last weekend he made a bonfire of Greenland files in the garden. Dean and me helped. Poured petrol on! It was like The Towering Inferno. Then this week Craig Salt’s lawyer told Dad a delivery man was coming that afternoon to collect all the computer gear, and that if Dad didn’t cooperate they’d sue.’

  ‘What did Dad do?’

  ‘When the van pulled up, Dad dropped the hard drive out of my bedroom window.’

  ‘But that’s the first floor.’

  ‘I know, and you should’ve heard the monitor smash! He told the delivery bloke, “Give Craig Salt my compliments!”’

  ‘Jesus! Worm turns, or what?’

  ‘He’s been decorating, too. Your bedroom was first on the hit list.’

  ‘Yeah, Mum said.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Well, no. It’s not like I wanted them to preserve it for ever like a shrine to Julia or anything. Brings it home to you sharpish, though. “Right, you’re eighteen years old, off you go. Drop by the care home in about thirty years, if you’re passing.” Oh, ignore me, Jace, I’m being morbid.’

  ‘You’re still coming home for Christmas, right?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow. Stian’s driving me down. His family own this mansion in darkest Dorset.’

  ‘Stan?’

  ‘No, Stian. He’s Norwegian, PhD in dolphin language? Didn’t I mention him in my last letter?’

  Julia knows exactly what she ‘mentions’ in her letters.

  ‘Wow. So he speaks in dolphin with you?’

  ‘He programs computers that might, one day soon.’

  ‘What happened to Ewan?’

  ‘Ewan’s a dear, but he’s in Durham and I’m up here and…well, I knocked it on the head. In the long run, it’s for the best.’

  ‘Oh.’ But Ewan had a silver MG. ‘I liked Ewan.’

  ‘Cheer up. Stian’s got a Porsche.’

  ‘God, Julia. What sort? A GT?’

  ‘I don’t know! A black one. So what’re we getting for Christmas?’

  ‘Tube of Smarties.’ Dusty family joke. ‘Actually, I haven’t looked.’

  ‘Right! You always go on prezzie hunts.’

  ‘Honest, I haven’t. Record tokens and book tokens, most like. I haven’t asked for anything. ’Cause of…y’know, Dad’s job. And they haven’t asked me. Anyway, who used to play your Christmas LPs in November and make me stand sentry in case they came back from shopping?’

  ‘Remember that time you didn’t? They caught me and Kate dressed in Mum’s old wedding gear dancing to “Knowing Me, Knowing You”. Speaking of which, has the accept-no-imitations Black Swan Green Grand Christmas Village Hall Disco already come and gone?’

  ‘Starts in about an hour.’

  ‘Going with anyone?’

  ‘Dean Moran’s going. A few kids from my class.’

  ‘Oy! I told you about my love-life.’

  Talking about girls with Julia’s still pretty new. ‘That’s ’cause you have a love-life. I did sort of fancy this one girl, but she’s…’ (helping the love of her life learn to walk with a plastic leg) ‘…she’s not interested.’

  ‘Her loss. Poor you.’

  ‘Odd thing is, I saw her at school last week, and, it’s weird, but…’

  ‘Your crush had evaporated?’

  ‘Yeah. Into thin air. How does that happen?’

  ‘Ah, search me, little brother. Search Aristophanes. Search Dante. Search Shakespeare. Search Burt Bacharach.’

  ‘Actually, I might not even go to the disco.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Because I got Ant Little and Wayne Nashend suspended and Neal Brose expelled today and chances are they’ll be there.

  ‘I’m not feeling that Christmassy this year.’

  ‘Nonsense! Go! Shoes, not trainers. Polish them. Those black jeans we bought you in Regent’s Arcade. And that V-neck mustard sweater, if it’s clean. Plain white T-shirt underneath. Logos are naff. Nothing pastel, nothing sporty. Definitely not that yucko piano tie. Tiny bit of Dad’s Givenchy round your gills. Not Brut. Brut’s as sexy as Fairy Liquid. Nick some of Mum’s mousse and stick your fringe up a bit so you don’t look like a cub. Dance your socks off, and may the bluebird of happiness fly up your nose.’

  ‘Okay.’ Brose and Little and Nashend’ll win if I don’t. ‘Bossy.’

  ‘What use is an unbossy lawyer? Look, there’s a queue for the phone. Tell Mum I called. Say I’ll keep checking the message board this evening. Till late.’

  The bruising cold wind shoved me along, every step bringing the class grass nearer to Brose, Nashend and Little. Past Miss Throckmorton’s, the village hall floated in the arctic dark, a lit-up ark. Its windows were stained disco colours. Michael Fish said the area of low pressure moving over the British Isles is coming from the Urals. The Urals’re the USSR’s Colorado Rockies. Intercontinental missile silos and fall-out shelters’re sunk deep in the roots of the mountains. There’re researc
h cities so secret they’ve got no names and don’t appear on maps. Strange to think of a Red Army sentry on a barbed-wire watchtower shivering in this very same icy wind. Oxygen he’d breathed out might be oxygen I breathed in.

  Julia’d spun out that conversation to distract me from something.

  Pluto Noak, Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley stood in the hallway. I’m really not their favourite person since they chucked me out of Spooks the day after they let me in. They don’t pick on me, they just act like I don’t exist. Which is normally fine. But tonight this even older kid was with them. Stubbly, grim, brown leather jacket, All Blacks rugby shirt. Pluto Noak tapped him and pointed at me. A flock of girls behind me blocked off my escape route but the rugby kid’d already ploughed right up to me. ‘This is him?’

  ‘Aye!’ Pluto Noak caught up. ‘That’s him.’

  The hallway went very quiet.

  ‘News for you.’ He gripped my coat so tight seams ripped. He throbbed with loathing. ‘You picked on the wrong kid today,’ his front teeth didn’t part as he spoke, only his lips twitched, ‘you knobless, gobless, gutless, spineless, brainless, arseless, dickless, shitless, witless, pissless, bollockless piece of—’

  ‘Josh,’ Pluto Noak clutched the kid’s arm, ‘Josh! This ain’t Neal Brose. This is Taylor.’

  This kid Josh glared at Pluto Noak. ‘This isn’t Neal Brose?’

  ‘No. Taylor.’

  Leaning against the door of the bogs, Pete Redmarley flicked a Minstrel into the air, and caught it in his mouth.

  ‘This,’ Josh glared at Pete Redmarley, ‘is that Taylor?’

  Pete Redmarley crunched his Minstrel. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You’re the Taylor,’ Josh let go of my coat, ‘who grassed on those little midget Kray twins who were squeezing my brother for money?’

  ‘Who’s,’ my voice cracked, ‘who’s your brother?’

  ‘Floyd Chaceley.’

  Mild Floyd Chaceley has one holy ghost of a big brother.

  ‘Then I’m that Taylor, yeah.’

  ‘Well.’ Josh patted my coat smooth. ‘Well done you, That Taylor. But if any one of you lot,’ everyone in the hallway shrank under his evil eye, ‘knows this Brose or Little or Nashend, tell ’em I’m here. Tell ’em I’m waiting, now. Tell ’em I want words.’

  Inside the village hall proper, a few kids were already dancing to ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. Most of the boys’d drifted to one side, too cool to dance. Most of the girls’d drifted to the other, too cool to dance too. Discos’re tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don’t. Dean was talking to Floyd Chaceley by the hatch where they sell sweets and cans of drink. ‘Just met your brother,’ I told him. ‘Jesus. Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him.’

  ‘Stepbrother.’ Thanks to me, Floyd’d spent the morning in Nixon’s office giving evidence against Neal Brose. For all I knew Floyd hated me. ‘Yeah, he’s all right. Should’ve seen him earlier. Threatening to set Brose’s house on fire.’

  I envied Floyd, having already squared the day with his mum and dad.

  ‘Don’t reckon Nashend or Little’ll be showing up tonight, neither.’ Dean appeared by my side and offered me his Curly-Wurly to bite a bit off of. Floyd bought me a Pepsi. ‘Look at Andrea Bozard!’ Dean pointed at the same girl who used to pretend to be a pony at Miss Throckmorton’s and make nests using acorns as eggs. ‘In that ra-ra skirt.’

  Floyd asked, ‘What about her?’

  ‘Lush?’ Dean did a panting-doggy face. ‘Or what?’

  ‘Frigging In The Rigging’ by the Sex Pistols came on and the Upton Punks pogoed up the front. Oswald Wyre’s older brother Steve head-butted the wall so Philip Phelps’s dad drove him to Worcester Hospital in case he fell into a coma. But it got some of the boys dancing (sort of) so next the DJ put on ‘Prince Charming’ by Adam and the Ants. ‘Prince Charming’ has this special dance that Adam Ant does in the video. You all line up and make an X with your wrists in the air as you pace along to the music. But everyone wanted to be Adam Ant, who does it one step ahead of his pack, so the line got faster and faster up and down the village hall till kids were virtually sprinting. Next was ‘The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)’ by Fun Boy Three. It’s undanceable to, unless you’re Squelch. Maybe Squelch heard a secret rhythm nobody else heard.

  Robin South called out, ‘Squelch, yer spazzer!’

  Squelch didn’t even notice nobody else was dancing.

  Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret that’s using you? S’pose lunatics mould their doctors, more than doctors mould their lunatics?

  In the bogs was Gary Drake.

  Once I’d’ve frozen, but not after a day like today.

  ‘All right?’ Gary Drake said. Once he’d’ve sneered a comment about me not being able to find my dick. But suddenly I’m popular enough for Gary Drake to give an ‘All right?’

  December cold streamed in through the window.

  The boredest tilt of my head told Gary Drake, Yeah.

  Cigarette butts bobbed in the yellow river of steaming piss.

  ‘Do The Locomotion’ got all the girls doing this choo-choo dance in a snaky line. Then there was ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ that’s got a sort of rowing-boat dance to it. It’s not a dance for boys. ‘House Of Fun’ by Madness is, though. ‘House Of Fun’ is about buying condoms but the BBC didn’t ban it soon enough ’cause the BBC only spot secret meanings weeks after the dimmest duh-brain in Duffershire’s got it. Squelch did this electrocuted dance that more kids copied to take the piss at first but actually it worked. (There’s a Squelch hiding in all great inventors.) Then ‘Once In A Lifetime’ by Talking Heads came on. That was the crucial song that made it more bonzoish not to dance than to dance, so now me and Dean and Floyd did. The DJ switched the strobe light on. Only for short bursts, ’cause strobes make your brain blow up. Dancing’s like walking down a busy high street or millions of other things. You’re absolutely fine as long as you don’t think about it. During the strobe storm, through a stormy night forest of necks and arms, I saw Holly Deblin. Holly Deblin’s got a sort of Indian goddess dance, swaying but sort of flicking her hands. Holly Deblin might’ve seen me through her stormy night forest, ’cause she might’ve smiled. (Might isn’t as good as did but it’s miles better than didn’t.) Next was ‘I Feel Love’ by Donna Summer. John Tookey showed off this new New York craze called break-dancing but went spinning out of control into a group of girls who toppled like skittles. He had to be rescued by his mates from stabbing female heels. During Bryan Ferry’s ‘Jealous Guy’ Lee Biggs got off with Angela Bullock. They snogged in the corner and Duncan Priest stood right by them and did his imitation of a cow giving birth. But the laughs were envious too. Angela Bullock wears black bras. Then, during ‘To Cut A Long Story Short’ by Spandau Ballet, Alastair Nurton got off with Tracey Impney, this giant Goth from Brotheridge Green. Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ came on and Colin Pole and Mark Badbury did this glazed-robot dance. ‘This song’s ace!’ Dean yelled in my ear. ‘It’s so futuristic. Gary Numan’s got a friend named “Five”! Is that brill or what?’ Dancing’s a brain the dancers’re only cells of. Dancers think they’re in charge but they’re obeying ancient orders. ‘Three Times A Lady’ by the Commodores cleared the floor ’cept for boyfriends and girlfriends who smooched, enjoying being looked at, and snoggers who just snogged and forgot they were being looked at. Second choices were going for the third choices now. Paul White got off with Lucy Sneads. Next on was ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners. A disco’s a zoo too. Some of the animals’re wilder than they are by day, some funnier, some posier, some shyer, some sexier. Holly Deblin’d obviously gone home.

  ‘I thought you’d gone ho
me.’

  An EXIT sign glowed alien-green in the dark.

  ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

  The disco vibrated the plywood floor. Behind the stage there’s this narrow back room stacked with stacks of chairs. It’s got a sort of big shelf too, ten foot up and as wide as the back room. The table-tennis table-tops’re kept up there and I know where the ladder’s hidden.

  ‘No. I was just dancing with Dean Moran.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Holly Deblin did this funny jealous voice. ‘What’s Dean Moran got that I haven’t? Is he a good kisser?’

  ‘Moran? That’s revolting!’

  ‘Revolting’ was the last word I ever spoke as someone who’d never kissed a girl. I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anemones know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Teacups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe in.

  But your teeth can clunk, something chronic.

  ‘Whoops,’ Holly Deblin drew back, ‘sorry!’

  ‘That’s okay. I can glue them back in.’

  Holly Deblin twizzled my moussed hair. The skin round her neck’s the softest thing I’ve ever stroked. And she let me. That’s the amazing bit. She let me. Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic-Tacs. My cousin Hugo reckons he’s kissed thirty girls (and not only kissed) and he’s probably up to fifty by now, but you can only have one first one.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I nicked some mistletoe. Look.’

  ‘It’s all squashy and—’

  During my second ever kiss Holly Deblin’s tongue visited my mouth, like a shy vole. You’d think that’d be disgustingsville too but it’s wet and secret and mine wanted to visit hers back so I let it. That kiss ended ’cause I’d forgotten to breathe. ‘This song,’ I was actually panting, ‘that’s on right now. Sort of hippyish, but it’s beautiful.’