The Knife That Killed Me

by Anthony McGowan

  When I started school, I just got put into a class with the thick kids, and so I was one. Or at least no one ever told me I wasn’t. I think things would have been different if they’d just said, Here, go in this class, and it was a good class. Because I wanted to learn things, not just about war. But once you’re in a place you just can’t get to another place.

  And then I reached the part of the school with the staff room and the offices. It goes like this. You turn right at the end of the corridor, then the staff room is on your left, and the general office is opposite, on the right. Ahead there are some double doors. You go through there and you get to Mr. Mordred’s room and, beyond that, the headmaster’s office.

  I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been in the headmaster’s office. The headmaster was called Mr. O’Tool. We don’t often see Mr. O’Tool. Sometimes he walks around the school, taking a sort of black cloud of doom with him. He usually says something at the weekly assembly, but even when he’s reading out the sports results and we’ve won at rounders or football, he’ll sound like he’s reading the casualty lists from the Battle of the Somme. Everyone thought that Mr. Mordred was after his job, and Mr. O’Tool looked like he thought there was nothing he could do about it.

  There were two comfy chairs outside Mr. O’Tool’s office, but only a row of hard chairs outside Mordred’s door. Two boys and a girl were already sitting there. The girl looked like she’d been crying, and there were leaves and bits of twig in the back of her hair. I didn’t know her name, but I’d seen her around. I thought she might have been caught, you know, in the bushes. But not with either of the ones sitting here. They were little Year Eight scruffs, spiky-haired, cheeky, but frightened. They’d probably gone too far in some prank, and now they were staring vacantly into space, the way you do when you’re waiting to be punished.

  I felt a bit calmer now I’d got that filth out of my hair, and the rage and the disgust and the humiliation of the whole thing had eased up, the way a toothache sometimes goes away after a while. But, as I waited, other feelings floated to the surface. The unfairness of everything, of me being here, while Roth and his lot got away with it. And the fear of what Mordred was going to do. And what if I did get permanently expelled? Dad would kill me for definite. Except you can only die once, and that pleasure would wait for me at Temple Moor High School. Because the only place that would take you if you got expelled from our school was Temple Moor, and Temple Moor kids hated us because of the war that had been going on for years. And any of our kids who washed up at the Temple would get massacred. Every day.

  The bell went for the end of the lesson. It meant break was beginning, which meant that Mordred would be here to tear our heads off.

  I heard a clomping sound coming down the corridor. For a second I thought it was Mordred, but then I remembered that Mordred had little feet and took little steps and made a tippy-tap sound when he walked. I looked up and saw Mr. Boyle. His glasses were even more skewed than usual. I thought he’d come to tell Mordred all about how bad I’d been. But he sort of loomed over me, breathing heavily, and then he took me by the shoulder and stood me up and pushed me in front of him back down the corridor.

  “Let’s have a talk,” he said. “In my room.”

  Back in the classroom he sat me down in front of him. Close up, his face, even in the place where his beard was supposed to be, seemed to have more skin than hair. He smelled a bit cheesy. Not terrible—you wouldn’t say he stank—but just not very fresh. I didn’t know if he was married, but I doubted it. He had the look of someone who lived alone and didn’t have anyone to tell them that they looked stupid or didn’t smell too fresh.

  “So, what was that all about?” he said. I was surprised by his tone—he sounded sad rather than angry.

  “What, sir?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, so don’t play the idiot. Look, Paul, you’re not the kind of kid who usually starts fights. And you’re not stupid—I know you’re not.”

  So there was a first time for everything.

  “I’m not brainy, sir.”

  “How do you know? As far as I can see you’ve never really tried.”

  I didn’t know what to say then, so I just looked down.

  “I’ve noticed you, Paul,” continued Mr. Boyle, “just sitting there. I don’t know how much you take in, but … what’s happened to your hair?”

  “Nothing, sir. I don’t know, sir.”

  “Is it mixed up with why you were shouting in class?”

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Don’t know much, do you, Paul?”

  “I told you I wasn’t brainy, sir.”

  Then I looked at Mr. Boyle, thinking he might be smiling. But he wasn’t. He still looked quite sad.

  “Can you play chess, Paul?” he said finally.

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Why not come to chess club to find out?”

  Mr. Boyle ran the chess club. It was full of geeks. The kind of kids who brought in thermos flasks of hot soup for their lunch.

  I looked up at his face, his wonky glasses, his sparse beard.

  “Yes, sir, I might, sir.”

  There was another pause.

  “Maybe see you there then?”

  “Yes, sir—just got to get something first.”

  FIVE

  So I went outside and sat by myself on one of the concrete benches. A cold wet wind blew straight off the gypsy field, slapping my face with its clammy hands. It was called the gypsy field because gypsies sometimes camped there, but they hadn’t been around for ages, maybe two years. Perhaps there weren’t any gypsies left. Just the cold wind, blowing over the grass and picking up the stink from the brown water of the beck.

  I wished I’d gone to fetch my parka from the cloakroom. But I didn’t want to bump into Boyle. So I pulled up the collar on my school blazer and tried to sit on the tail of it. But it wasn’t quite big enough and so the bench was doing a good job of freezing my arse solid. I would have moved to keep warm, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. The boys I usually hung around with were playing football, but I didn’t feel like it. And, anyway, nobody had asked me to play.

  For a second I thought about joining the kids at the chess club, just to keep warm. And maybe it would have been nice to have someone to talk to. Except they’d all be nerds, talking about nerd stuff. Oh-and-did-you-see-that-really-good-yeah-yeah-documentary-yeah-about-volcanoes-yeah-I-have-the-latest-copy-yeah-of-what-sort-of-hard-drive-do-you-I-wish-I-yeah-what-kind-of-soup. And I didn’t really know how to play chess. I mean, I knew how the pieces moved, but I’d never actually played a game, so I didn’t know how to string it all together, how to make sure you didn’t get mated in two moves, that sort of thing.

  I tried listening to the kids playing, to see if I could single out voices from the general background noise. There were loud shouts of “Pass, pass” from the footballers. And I could hear the high screams from the Year Seven kids, who looked small, even to me. I don’t even know what game they were playing. Some kind of tag. Stupid. The girls were all standing about in little groups, and I couldn’t hear any noise from them at all, but I could see that some were happy and some were sad and some had a look of fury on their faces, as if they’d just found out that someone had been calling them sluts or something behind their backs.

  The only group where boys and girls were together was the freaks. Maybe six of them. They were on the other side of the playground. Some were standing, some were sitting on a bench. Even though everyone was supposed to wear a uniform, they still looked different, as if they were standing in the shadows, while we were all in harsh sunlight.

  And somehow you could sense the bad feelings being beamed at them. Mostly it was just that: feelings, a sense that all the other kids in the playground would rather they weren’t there. And sometimes it was more than that, like now, when one of the kids playing football deliberately blasted the ball at the group, hitting a girl in the face.

  Why does every
one hate the freaks? Well, not everyone. The freaks don’t hate the freaks. Actually, even that might not be true. One of the things about them is that they hate themselves. But they don’t hate all the freaks, just the individual freak that happens to be them.

  I know I shouldn’t just call them the freaks, although everyone does. There are other names. You could call them emo. You might even call them indie, or alternative, or scene. But indie and alternative and scene make them sound too cool, too in. They weren’t on the inside of anything, except maybe themselves. So emo is probably closer than scene or indie, but freak seems to fit them best of all.

  Just being hated by everyone would probably be OK for the freaks. In fact that might be their first choice. But they weren’t just hated. Not in our school, anyway. Our school was the kind of school where being hated was only the beginning of things, like with that football blasted into the face of the girl.

  The kids who aren’t freaks—the freak haters, if you like—come in different flavors. There are some punks, some chavs, some straights, some death metal kids, some glue sniffers, some nerds, and then some who you don’t know what they are. And any of them might have a go at a freak. The worst are probably the chavs, who seemed to take the quiet, looking-down way that the freaks had as a direct insult.

  No, what am I saying? The chavs aren’t the worst. The worst are the droogs, the kids who live to hurt you and take your money. And to them, the freaks are like cattle, to be milked and then slaughtered.

  The girl who got hit by the ball, I knew her name. Maddy Bray. She was the only one of them who was in any of my classes. She was standing on the outside of the group of outsiders. It was funny, but when the ball hit her, she didn’t move closer to her friends, but farther away, as if she knew that it was somehow her fault, or at least that it was embarrassing. And it was exactly what I’d have done, moving away, trying to disappear.

  I watched them for a while, then I saw one of the boys who’d been sitting down stand up and go over to talk to her. I knew his name too. His name was Shane, and I knew it because he was the sort of leader of the freaks. Leader doesn’t really get it right, because he didn’t tell them what to do or anything. It was more that he was the best at being a freak; he was what they were all aiming at. And even if you hated them and all they stood for, you still had to admit that there was something special about Shane, something cool.

  So maybe I should call the freaks Shane’s gang, because that’s what they were.

  Shane smiled and he must have said something funny as well, because Maddy Bray smiled back and nearly laughed, and then she edged a bit closer to the rest of them.

  But she stayed on the outside, a watcher, like me.

  The beck is at my back. I hear its running water. Except the water in the beck does not run. It limps and staggers, stinking over the scum that oozes at its bottom. But moving. I hear it move. That is bad. Nothing here must be allowed to move. I command the waters to stop.

  And they stop.

  SIX

  And because I was watching, looking over there, right the way across the playground, and not just looking there, but thinking there too, I didn’t see them coming until they were on top of me.

  “Look, it’s Billy No-mates.”

  I blinked and made my eyes focus on the pack. Five of them this time—Roth, of course, Bates, Miller, two others.

  It wasn’t Roth who’d spoken, but Miller, and so he followed it with his hyena laugh.

  “Nice haircut,” said Roth.

  It was the first thing he’d ever said to me directly. He’d probably never even noticed my existence before the stuff in the classroom—the chewing gum, the shout, the chair.

  “Yeah,” said Bates, “nice haircut. Bit messy, though. Shall I put a bit more gel in it?” And then he began to hawk up a greeny, making a big deal out of it, snorting back from his nose and up from his chest, getting a really big mouthful together.

  What happened then was a bit weird. I had my hand in my pocket, and I suppose I’d been playing with them, rubbing my fingers on the metal without thinking about it, without ever knowing with the front bit of my brain that they were there. But the next thing I knew I had them, the scissors. The scissors I’d used to hack the chewing gum out of my hair, and I was holding them out, open so I was gripping the handle and one of the blades, with the other pointing straight at Bates.

  I was mad. Mad because of the chewing gum. Mad because I thought he was going to spit on me, spit a thick foul greeny.

  They should have laughed at me. It was only scissors. Useless school scissors.

  They should have laughed, but they didn’t. Bates’s eyes went wide and he choked on the phlegm he was getting ready for me, and it sort of dribbled down his chin and onto the front of his school jumper, and then more of it went in a big line, right to the floor, without breaking. I didn’t know what to do next. I was feeling stupid, really stupid, standing there holding the scissors, while Bates choked on his slime.

  It was Roth who saved me, in a way. Saved me from having to decide what to do next, I mean. He stepped forward, grabbed my wrist and just took the scissors off me, as easily as if I was a baby. His hand was enormous, like a man’s.

  I thought for sure then that he was going to hit me. Maybe there’s something worse that can happen to you than being hit by Roth, but I don’t know what it is.

  I once saw him have a fight with a Year Eleven kid when he was in Year Nine. Even though the other kid was two years older than him, they were about the same size, Roth being such a monster. And the other kid was cock of his year, not just some nobody. His name was … Compson, yeah, Compson. Most kids thought Compson was all right. He wasn’t really a bully at all, just hard.

  I don’t know why he had the fight with Roth. Probably thought he had to put him down, because he’d been mouthing off. But as soon as the circle formed in the social club car park, with the two of them in the middle, you could see the fear in his eyes, see that he knew that Roth was too much for him. And I suppose there’s a kind of bravery in that, going on with a fight, I mean, even though you know you’re going to get your head kicked in.

  And he did.

  School fights come in different shapes. Sometimes the fighters think they’re in a boxing match and dance around each other, with the spectators usually jeering at them and telling them to get stuck in, but they never do, because they’re afraid of getting hurt and they’re really there to dance, not fight. Or the two will rush straight at each other and grapple together, each one trying to land a punch or a kick, and as long as they stay locked close, then again usually no one gets hurt, because you can’t get any power behind a punch when you’re together like that, hugging each other.

  The worst kind of fights—or the best kind, if watching pain is your idea of fun—are the ones where the two kids hate each other and stand there punching, not caring if they get hit so long as they land a few as well. There aren’t many fights like that, and they don’t last long, because of the fury of it.

  This fight began like that. There was a good crowd around them, the way there always was for a fight, and I think most kids were hoping to see Roth get a spanking, because everyone was scared of him and he always did whatever he wanted.

  There was that usual time of intense silence before they started, with Roth staring straight at Compson, and Compson trying to stare back, except you could see he wasn’t really focused on Roth, but somewhere behind him. And then there must have been some kind of signal, and they came straight together, and Compson hit Roth twice, quite hard, somewhere up around the forehead. But it was like hitting a truck with a newspaper. Roth didn’t even flinch. Hardly even put up his hands.

  And when those two punches had no effect, whatever fight there had been in Compson left him, and he ran away, or rather he tried to run away, but the wall of kids bounced him back, with hard laughter. As soon as it was obvious that Compson was no match for Roth, they’d all changed sides. Nobody likes to back a loser, especi
ally an embarrassing one. He ran round the circle, skittering off the edge of it, looking back over his shoulder at Roth. Roth didn’t chase Compson, but just waited awhile, a couple of circuits maybe, and then simply cut him off.

  It only took one great scything punch from Roth to lay Compson out flat. The sound was horrible. A sickening soft sound—I mean, the sound of something soft hitting something hard. Almost a squelch, you’d have said. A squelch or a splat. I was standing out of the circle, and so I couldn’t see that well, but it was enough, and I heard the sound, and I thought that Roth might have killed Compson with that one big punch, killed him dead.

  Roth then did something really bad. Something that had never been seen in our school before.

  It took us to a new place. Like the way that the invention of the machine gun took war to a new place.

  Compson was on the floor, not even moving. I could just see him through the shifting cage of legs. The punch had got him right in the teeth, and the front of his face had collapsed like a wet bag. He was making a soft slurping noise, so I knew he wasn’t dead.

  The crowd had gone completely silent and Roth looked slowly around at the kids there, eyeing each one in turn, and no one could stand that black stare and so they would look down or away or shuffle back as though even his look was dangerous.

  And when he’d stared everyone out in that slow methodical way, almost like it was a boring job he had to do, he looked down at the kid lying on the floor, and he sort of shuffled around inside his trousers—Roth, I mean, not Compson, who still hadn’t moved, and you really would have thought him dead except for that wet sound coming from his ruined mouth. And Roth took out his thing—you know, his thing—and he grunted with it in his hands, and his face became vacant and far away, and then a thick yellow stream of piss came out and splashed down into the face of Compson.

  Well, that made him move. He spluttered and rolled, and then got up onto all fours and looked at Roth, a look with murder in it, as well as defeat, but Roth stared blandly back at him, the way you’d look at something reasonably interesting but not really to do with you, and then gave a little half-smile. Compson couldn’t hold the look any more than the watchers in the circle could, and he rolled into a ball and whimpered, as if to say, Please don’t hit me again.