by Jan Mark
‘Whatever for?’ said Andrew. ‘Don’t you get tired of it?’
Victor shook his head and his hair.
‘That’s only once a year. I did that two times at the junior school and now I’m doing that again,’ he said. ‘I do fish, every time. Fish are easy. They’re all the same shape.’
‘No, they’re not,’ said Andrew.
‘They are when I do them,’ said Victor. He spun his book round, with one finger, to show Andrew the drawings. His fish were not only all the same shape, they were all the same shape as slugs. Underneath each drawing was a printed heading: BRAEM; TENSH; CARP; STIKLBAK; SHARK. It was the only way of telling them apart. The shark and the bream were identical, except that the shark had a row of teeth like tank traps.
‘Isn’t there a “c” in stickleback?’ said Andrew. Victor looked at his work.
‘You’re right.’ He crossed out both ‘k’s, substituted ‘c’s and pushed the book away, the better to study it. ‘I got that wrong last year.’
Andrew flipped over a few pages. There were more slugs: PLACE; COD; SAWFISH; and a stringy thing with a frill round its neck: EEL.
‘Don’t you have to write anything?’ asked Andrew.
‘Yes, look. I wrote a bit back here. About every four pages will do,’ said Victor. ‘Miss Beale, she keep saying I ought to write more but she’s glad when I don’t. She’s got to read it. Nobody can read my writing.’
Andrew was not surprised. Victor’s writing was a sort of code to deceive the enemy, with punctuation marks in unlikely places to confuse anyone who came too close to cracking the code. He watched Andrew counting the full stops in one sentence and said, ‘I put those in while I think about the next word. I like doing question marks better.’ He pointed out two or three specimens, independent question marks, without questions. They looked like curled feathers out of a pillow. One had a face.
‘Do you put a question mark in every sentence?’ said Andrew.
‘Oh, yes. I know you don’t actually need them,’ said Victor, ‘but they’re nice to do.’
Andrew turned to the last page of the book. There was a drawing of a whale.
‘Whales aren’t fish,’ said Andrew.
‘Aren’t they?’ said Victor. ‘Are you sure? I always put a whale in.’
‘Whales are mammals.’
‘What’s a mammal?’ said Victor. He wrote ‘This.is.not.a.fish?’ under his whale and closed the book. ‘Come and see the others.’
‘Mammals don’t lay eggs,’ said Andrew, as they set off round the room.
‘That’s a pity,’ said Victor. ‘I’d like to see a whale’s egg. Big as a bath, wouldn’t that be?’ He stopped by the boy in the pink shirt. ‘Let’s have a look at your project, Tim.’
Andrew thought he had seen most of Tim’s project before. It featured a man in a tree, knotty with muscles and wearing a leopard skin.
‘Tarzan,’ said Tim.
‘Why do a project about Tarzan?’ said Andrew.
‘Tarzan’s easy,’ said Tim. ‘You just cut him out and stick him in.’
‘Fish are easier,’ said Victor.
‘Why not do worms then?’ said Andrew. ‘Nothing could be easier than worms. Wiggle-wiggle-wiggle: all over in a second. Page one, worms are long and thin. Page two, worms are round.’
Victor began to grin but Tim sat down to give the idea serious consideration.
Victor’s grin became wider, revealing teeth like Stonehenge.
‘I reckon you’re catching on,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you do worms?’
‘I want to do something interesting,’ said Andrew.
‘Ho,’ said Victor. ‘You’ll come to a bad end, you will.’
They went on round the room. Andrew noticed that nearly all the boys were doing a project on fish or fishing. The girls tended to specialize in horses except for Jeannette Butler, who wouldn’t let them see hers.
‘Why don’t you go and stand in the road and catch cars?’ said Jeannette, giving them a hefty shove when they tried to look.
‘Give us a kiss,’ said Victor and got a poke in the chest instead.
‘I think I’ll do motor racing,’ said Andrew when they got back to Victor’s desk. ‘I know a bit about that, already. Me and my dad used to go to Brand’s Hatch a lot, when we lived in Kent.’
‘Where’s Kent?’ said Victor. ‘Down at the bottom somewhere, isn’t it?’
‘Some of it is,’ said Andrew. ‘We were further up, near London.’ Andrew fetched a piece of drawing paper and sat down to draw a Formula One racing car. Victor drew some scales on his whale and broadcast punctuation marks throughout the book, letting them fall wherever he fancied.
At the end of the lesson the group split up again. Andrew thought he had seen the last of Victor who elbowed his way out of the room and was lost from sight in the roaring mob that boiled towards the canteen. Andrew followed on his own, consumed with disappointment. During the lesson it had seemed as though he might have found a friend. He wondered if he had offended Victor, by telling him how to spell stickleback, and that whales weren’t fish. He would have done better to keep his information to himself. If Victor had told him that his racing car had oval wheels he felt sure that he would have been offended, even though it was true.
All through the lunch hour he kept a look-out, hoping to catch sight of Victor’s grin in the distance, but as usual he ended up walking round the playground by himself.
When school was over he began to walk home alone. Once out of town there was no pavement on the Pallingham road so he climbed the bank and teetered dangerously along the top of it, his feet on a level with the roofs of passing cars. After a few minutes he felt someone punch his foot, and looking down he saw Victor drawing alongside on a bicycle with handlebars that rose so high in the air that Victor seemed to be dangling from them. Andrew slithered down the bank to the road and Victor scooted along beside him.
‘Do you live out this way then?’ said Victor.
‘In Pallingham, yes,’ said Andrew. ‘We moved in last week.’
‘You don’t live in the Newmans’ old place, do you?’ asked Victor. ‘Tiler’s Cottage, back of the church?’
‘That’s it,’ said Andrew.
‘Well then, you’re our next door neighbours, almost. We live down the loke.’
‘Down the what?’
‘Down the loke.’
‘What’s a loke?’
Victor looked puzzled. ‘A loke’s a loke. Don’t you have lokes in Kent?’
‘No, we don’t. What is it, a hole?’
‘How can that be a hole?’ asked Victor.
‘You said you lived down one,’ said Andrew. Victor pointed across the road at a gap between two houses. ‘That’s a loke.’ Andrew looked.
‘It’s a lane.’
‘That’s not. Lanes go somewhere, lokes stop halfway. I’ll show you our loke when we get home. Fancy us being neighbours. What did you want to move up here for and come to our rotten old school?’
‘What’s rotten about it?’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘I hate school,’ said Victor. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t hate that. I just wish that was different.’
‘You wouldn’t wish it was like my last school,’ said Andrew. ‘I hated that. There was too many of us. I met our house master in the street one day and he didn’t recognize me and that was after a whole term.’
‘Everyone recognize me,’ said Victor. ‘Haven’t you heard them? “Is that you at the back, Skelton? Stop talking, Skelton. Come you out of that toilet, Skelton.”’
‘Who’s Skelton?’
‘Me,’ said Victor.
‘At my other school half the teachers never knew our names,’ said Andrew. ‘I got caught down the boiler room one day and I was so scared I gave a false name. This teacher said “What’s your name, lad?” and I said Graham Hill. It was the first name I could think of. I’d seen him the night before, on the television.’
‘Did that teacher find
out?’
‘No; but there was another Graham Hill in the second year. He found out,’ said Andrew, remembering what the other Graham Hill had done about it.
‘I bet he was pleased,’ said Victor. ‘I bet he was. What were you doing in the boiler room?’
‘It was better than going on the playground,’ said Andrew. ‘Everybody was in a gang. I wasn’t in a gang. They said I talked stuck-up.’
‘They must have talked horrible if you sounded stuck-up,’ said Victor, frankly.
‘I didn’t realize then,’ said Andrew, ‘that you have to talk different at school than you do at home.’
‘I don’t,’ said Victor. ‘I swear a bit more at school than I do at home, but I reckon I sound the same, doing it.’
‘Then I started talking at home like I did at school. I didn’t notice but my mum did. She didn’t think much of it, I can tell you. I think that’s one of the reasons we moved.’
‘You never moved because of the way you were talking,’ said Victor.
‘It wasn’t only that. Just after my brother was born Mum held him up and said, “He looks like a teeny weeny soccer hooligan already. It must be in the air, let’s move.” So we did.’
‘Is he a soccer hooligan?’ asked Victor, with interest. ‘Boots and that?’
‘Of course he isn’t, he’s only eight months old,’ said Andrew. ‘Mum never says what she means. She says something different and you have to guess. We’ve moved seven times since I was born. I went to three junior schools and two secondary schools. This is the second.’
‘Do you think you’ll stop, this time?’ said Victor.
‘We might,’ said Andrew. ‘Mum and Dad like it here. I expect I shall, in the end.’
‘I’ve always lived here,’ said Victor. ‘I wish I could go to a different school every term. I wouldn’t get bored then.’
‘You’d never learn anything.’
‘I never learn anything anyway,’ said Victor. ‘Everybody read better than me. Everybody write better than me. I’d like to join the Air Force when I leave school, but I don’t reckon they’d have me. Maybe I’ll drive a tractor, like my dad. What do your dad do?’
‘I don’t know, quite,’ said Andrew. ‘He works with computers. We’ve got all this paper tape at home, full of holes. It looks as though you ought to be able to do something with it but I can never think of anything. Mum made paper chains out of it, last Christmas.’
‘Do your mum work?’
‘She used to,’ said Andrew. ‘She stopped when she had my brother: now she says she’d like to go back, just for the rest. She worked in a library.’
‘Books and that? Is she clever then?’ asked Victor, suggesting both admiration and disgust.
‘Books? You should see our house,’ said Andrew. ‘We’ve got thousands, all over the place. I’ll tell you, when we move, the first thing that gets unpacked is the books. Then Mum starts reading them and nothing else gets unpacked. We came here a week ago and we haven’t even got the curtains up yet. All the books are out though, all over the floor. You can’t move.’
‘We’ve got some books,’ said Victor. ‘Three or four. Do you like reading?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Andrew. ‘Technical manuals and magazines. I don’t like reading books unless they’re funny.’
‘I read so slow I can’t tell what’s funny and what isn’t,’ said Victor.
When they reached the church Victor stopped.
‘There’s a short cut here, round the back. I don’t usually use that when I’ve got the bike but if you give me a hand over the wall we’ll go that way.’
They went through the churchyard the way Andrew had done on his first morning, but instead of using the gate on the far side, Victor led the way round behind the yew trees to a place where the graves were so old and mossy they were sinking back into the ground. Victor sat himself astride the wall.
‘There’s a big drop on the other side,’ he said. ‘I’ll go over first and you lower the bike down to me.’ He dropped out of sight and Andrew, looking over the wall, saw him land, eight feet below, knee-deep in what looked like pea plants. He lifted Victor’s bicycle and heaved it over the wall. When Victor stretched up and took hold of it from beneath, Andrew followed it. The drop looked much more than eight feet while he was hanging by his hands from the top of the wall, and he felt like going back until he noticed that although his head was eight feet above the ground his shoes were five feet lower, so he let go and dropped, landing beside Victor.
‘They are peas,’ he said, as he picked himself up. ‘Aren’t they funny? I’ve never seen them so small. I thought they always grew up sticks.’
‘Those go for freezing,’ said Victor, wheeling the bicycle away under the shadow of the wall. They were walking on a little, greasy mud path and the pea plants trailed across it. The pods went off like detonators under their shoes. ‘They aren’t picked by hand. They have to be small for the machines to pick them.’
When they came to the end of the wall, Victor struck out across the pea field, and there was a perfect salvo of exploding pods.
‘Shouldn’t we stay on the path?’ said Andrew, looking round, warily.
‘This is the path,’ said Victor. ‘That have to be ploughed in, every year and they set the crop over it. We can still use that. I think I’m the only person who do use it, that’s why that don’t show up.’
At that moment there was a terrific explosion, just behind them.
‘We’re being shot at,’ cried Andrew, convinced that they were trespassing after all. He looked round for the gunman.
‘That’s the old bird-scarer,’ said Victor, pointing to a machine that squatted among the pea plants a few yards away.
‘It looks like a little cannon,’ said Andrew, still twitching.
‘Well, that is, really,’ said Victor. ‘That work off bottled gas. There’s another one, down there. Don’t worry, that won’t go off again for a bit. Haven’t you heard them before?’
‘Yes, but I thought it was a gun. There’s a man goes past our house, every night. He’s got a gun.’
‘That’ll be my dad, out after pigeons,’ said Victor. ‘We have them for supper.’
‘You eat pigeons?’ said Andrew. Pigeons were pets: it was almost as bad as eating guinea pigs.
‘This is the loke,’ said Victor as they came out of the pea field and through a gap in the hedge. ‘That’s our house, half way down. I’d ask you in but my mum like to know if we’ve got anybody coming.’ He turned in at the gate. ‘I’ll probably see you on Monday,’ he said, as he scooted up the path. Andrew saw a cross face looking out of the window and hurried on, round the corner, into his own lane.
Towards Tiler’s Cottage he overtook Mum, pushing Edward in the pram. Edward, with a gentle smile on his face, was strangling a banana.
‘Where did you spring from?’ said Mum. ‘I thought you’d be home already.’
‘I walked home with a friend,’ said Andrew. ‘He lives down the loke.’
‘What’s a loke?’ said Mum, pleased that he had a friend, but not saying so.
‘Half a lane,’ said Andrew.
5. Victor Ludorum
He didn’t see Victor again during the weekend, but it felt friendly just knowing that it was Victor’s chimney that he could see from the landing window and that the gunman was Victor’s father, even though he was going to shoot pigeons and looked as if he would like to be shooting people.
‘Pigeons are vermin,’ said Dad, when he mentioned it. ‘They destroy thousands of pounds’ worth of crops. I don’t think you’d be very popular if you kept them as pets round here.’
‘I shouldn’t fancy cooking them so you needn’t go and shoot any,’ said Mum. ‘Feather pie and claw pudding. There can’t be much meat on them.’
‘Oh yes, there is,’ said Dad, who had lived in the country as a boy. ‘Not surprising, really, when you consider what they stuff themselves on all the year round. Perhaps I’ll get a gun as well.’
/> ‘You’ll shoot your toes off,’ said Mum. ‘I won’t cook them, that’s for sure.’
‘Can I ask Victor here sometimes?’ asked Andrew, afraid that he would be squeezed out of the conversation as he so often was when both his parents joined in.
‘Whenever you like,’ said Mum. ‘He sounds interesting.’
‘He sounds like The Archers,’ said Andrew. ‘Sort of. But real instead of pretending.’
‘Oh,’ said Dad. ‘A local man, is he? Perhaps he can show us around. I got lost coming back from the garage today when I went for petrol.’
‘I got lost going out,’ said Mum. Andrew saw that he was going to lose the conversation again and gave up. He went out to see the guinea pigs.
On Monday and Tuesday he walked home with Victor, but they rarely met in school. On Wednesday Victor said, ‘Tomorrow is Sports Day. Are you in anything?’
‘Not me,’ said Andrew. ‘I haven’t been here long enough. Anyway, I’m no good at games. I never got into any teams at my last school. I put my name down for the Under Thirteen Cricket but nobody else did, so there was no team to get into. One boy stuck a javelin through his foot, just before I left. I think he was going to stick it in someone else but they moved.’
‘I’m going in for everything,’ said Victor. ‘I’m no good either, but that’s a laugh. You shout for me, won’t you, when I break my neck in the high-jump?’
Andrew found himself alone for Sports Day. He sat in the spectators’ enclosure, being trampled on every time a new event was called. There was a certain amount of confusion because a strong wind was blowing and it was difficult to hear what was being said over the public address system, which whined and hooted every time it was used. Important announcements were drowned by the noise of passing aircraft, which kept up a steady reconnaissance all afternoon.
People stood in front of him, fell over his legs and walked on his coat. He kept an eye on the scoreboard to see how his house was doing, but it was always at the bottom. There were four houses: Browne, Nelson, Paston and Crome, all named after famous Norfolk people. At least he supposed they were famous. He had never heard of any of them except Nelson but from reading an old school magazine in the library he had gathered that Browne was a doctor, Crome was a painter and Paston wrote letters. Letter-writing seemed a chancy way of becoming famous. Nelson was famous all over the country, so he was glad to be in that house although it was losing. Also, Nelson’s house colour was red, which was a good colour to wear. Paston were yellow; it had always struck him as a feeble sort of colour, but Paston were winning.
