I wish that I had let him put his knife into me. If he had put his knife into me, I would not have died. But I had learned things from Roth. I had learned the simple trick of moving one way and then another. And I cannot deny that the adrenaline-rushing joy of battle entered me. It is what biology and history have given us. This surge of chemicals that turns us from kind things to cruel.
It is easy. I do what Roth could not do to Goddo. I move and catch Mickey’s arm as he passes me, and twist it behind his back, and take it from him, take the knife. But Mickey is a tough kid, and strong for his size, and I find that I cannot hold him. He wriggles and fights and somehow manages to bite my hand so that I drop the knife, and then we scramble together, rolling in the mud. And I am aware that I am fighting with a Temple Moor kid, and that we are surrounded by other Templars, and I become frightened for my life for the first time. And fear is a strange thing, because it makes you love life, and cling to it. So I gain new strength, and in spite of his writhing and twisting, I finally have him down, and I put the knife to his throat.
Now, you must be clear about this, absolutely clear. This is the most important thing. I wasn’t going to cut him. I wasn’t going to touch him with the knife. I only wanted him to be still.
And he is. Perfectly still at last. His eyes are huge and white. I will climb off him now, and run, run home to my mum and dad.
But then I feel a pull on my arm, and I know that one of the Temple Moor kids has got behind me, and that the end is here. Blindly I spin and lunge, thinking only to scare away the attacker behind me.
But it was not an attacker.
I feel the resistance. The resistance of flesh. Feel the knife first cut, and then meet bone, and then slide off the bone and in, in deep, and I see my hand on the black plastic hilt, and see the white shirt turn red, and then I feel his cheek as he falls against me, and I see his wide staring eye, and in the same instant I know that it is Shane, know not from the sight of him, but from his clean smell, and the aura of goodness.
And at once the others are around us, Billy and Stevie and Maddy and Serena.
“Oh God, what have you done?”
“He was coming to help.”
“Someone … quick—call an ambulance.”
And a bubble of blood forms on his lips and, after a second, pops, the sound as delicate as a raindrop falling on a leaf.
Words, voices, tears, nothing.
TWENTY-NINE
I have visitors. My mother and father come every week. We sit in a bare room, facing each other across a wooden table. On the table there is a vase and in the vase there is a plastic flower. They believe me when I say that I did not mean to hurt Shane. Does that make it easier for them? I think it makes it harder. My father talks about things that are happening in the world. My mother’s eyes fill with fat, unfallen tears. I tell them that one day I will come out, and that I will be good.
But how can I be good? Now I have killed a boy, killed him with a knife, how can I ever be good again?
I hoped that Maddy might come to see me, and the other freaks, Billy, Stevie, Serena. I could have explained to them what happened, got them to forgive me. But they will never come, and they will hate me forever. I think about Maddy, and imagine a life we might have had together. Not even a whole life, but just a few months, a year, two years, going out, normal things.
Never, never, never, never, never.
Shane died before he reached the hospital. Hell, he died straightaway. The knife blade bounced off his rib and up into his heart, and his heart stopped, as hearts will. But they tried. Reviving him, I mean. The ambulance guys tried, the ER people tried, the surgeons tried. They took him to the same hospital he’d walked out of an hour earlier.
He’d left Casualty to come and keep me away from the fight. I heard the story in full later, of course. How he’d called the others, told them to help, said that he’d be there soon. That he saw my fight with Mickey, and came to stop me from doing something stupid.
Of course, I wasn’t allowed to see him, in the hospital, or afterward. What happened just after I stabbed Shane is a bit murky. You’ll probably think that’s because I don’t want to remember it all, and you’re right.
Someone must have told the teachers. The police. The ambulance. All turned up. The police first. A car pulled up on the road next to the field, and two coppers came running. One fell, and there was laughter—don’t know who from. At the first sight of the police, everyone who could run ran. Scattered everywhere. For a while the two policemen tried to grab some of the runners, but it was no use, and anyway they soon realized where the action was. Here, with me and Shane, dying.
People were in my face. Maddy was wailing and crying. I think she hit me. Someone hit me. Perhaps they all hit me. He was trying to help, they were shouting. I wanted to tell them about Kirk, how it was all his fault, but nobody listened to me. Before the police reached us, I pushed my way closer to Shane. His eyes were closed, and his body was trembling, just tiny little movements, like a leaf in a breeze. I think I said, Sorry, sorry, sorry. And then the trembling stopped.
The police arrested me. They found the knife. Both knives, I mean. The one I’d taken off Mickey, and the one concealed in my pocket. That was the knife that led to my conviction. I’d gone armed to the battle. I was a knife killer.
But I’m alive, so how can I talk about the knife that killed me? Because I’m not alive. Because I died back there on the gypsy field, when I took the life of my friend Shane. Died in my heart, died in my spirit, died in my brain. True, my body moves. Moves from my cell (they call it a room, but it is a cell) to the showers, to the dining hall, to the recreation room, to the toilet, and back to the cell. But what moves is a zombie, an animated corpse. I don’t know when I will be set free, but it doesn’t matter. Because the chains and the bars are inside me, and I will never be free of them.
I think about Shane all the time. When you kill someone you love, they will be with you forever. I see his face, smiling at me when we first met. See him smiling at other times, down in his basement or in the streets, just hanging out. I hear his quiet voice. I can’t quite make out his words, but I know they are wise, and without reproach.
I saw his eyes in his mother’s eyes in the court, saw his mouth in his father’s mouth.
But Shane is not the only ghost that haunts me. I could live with the ghost of Shane. The ghost of Shane could be my friend. But there is another ghost.
Let me not call him a ghost but a god.
Because Roth is not dead. The rage of the Templars could not kill him. Saved him, in fact. Because he was hurt, the world saw him as a victim. There was no court case for Roth, no charges to answer.
He was in hospital with Shane. But he lived when Shane died. Because, you see, the cruel gods are stronger than the kind gods, and they will always beat them in the end.
You doubt it? Look at the world, my brother, my sister.
And so the spirit of Roth is here with me also, and battles for my soul.
And I don’t know who will win.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Knife That Killed Me is a story about the excitement, the despair, the joy, and the horror of contemporary teenage life. High school is where things happen: where you find yourself caught up in violence and brutality; where you try to negotiate the labyrinth of power relations; where mistakes can lead to beatings, or worse. But it’s also where friendship and love burn like phosphorus in your head.
The setting, the characters, even much of the plot of The Knife That Killed Me, came straight out of my own experiences at a tough inner-city school in the industrial north of England. The brutality began with the teachers and passed on down through the school psychos and bullies until it bounced up against the flakes and nerds at the bottom.
And yet for me, those really were the best of times, when anxiety and desire made every day feel special, like a movie, like something that mattered.
The impetus for writing this book was a startling a
nd tragic series of deaths involving teenagers and knives that dominated the news in the UK from 2006 to 2008. It seemed that you couldn’t open the newspaper or turn on the TV without staring into the eyes of a kid who’d been stabbed to death, usually by another teenager. It was a new phenomenon in the UK: we suddenly found ourselves in a new place, where the quaintly old-fashioned fist and boot had been replaced by a much more dangerous weapon.
I wanted to write a story that looked beyond the headlines, that strove to see how two young people could find themselves in a situation in which one held the hilt of a knife, and the other folded his guts around the blade.
The Knife That Killed Me is not at all like the other books I’ve written for young adults. Hellbent and Jack Tumor are surreal, gross-out comedies, albeit comedies mottled with darkness. The Knife That Killed Me is dark all the way through. Instead of making the reader laugh, I want to grip him or her by the throat, gradually increasing the tension until it hurts. It’s a harrowing story but, I trust, a compassionate one too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony McGowan was born in Manchester and brought up in Leeds; he lives in London. His previous novels for teenagers are Hellbent and Jack Tumor.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Anthony McGowan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in paperback in Great Britain by Definitions, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of the Random House Group, Ltd., London, in 2008.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGowan, Anthony.
The knife that killed me / Anthony McGowan.—1st. American ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Paul Varderman, a secondary student in an English Catholic School, is a loner
until, just as he is becoming friends with “the freaks,” the school bully encourages Paul to
join his gang and gives him a knife to carry as an incentive.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89392-6
[1. Gangs—Fiction. 2. Bullies—Fiction. 3. Catholic schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—
Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Murder—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M16912Kni 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009011662
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