‘You’re coming with me, Gobface,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ Billy didn’t move. He could still feel the heat from the cigarette on his face, or thought he could, as if he had really been burnt. ‘I told you to come with me,’ said Sharples, his voice low, menacing. ‘Don’t you start messing me about.’ His tone changed, wheedling now. ‘Come on. I won’t hurt you. I just want to show you something, honest.’ He pushed his hands into the front of his shorts, and for a moment Billy wondered what he meant. ‘Don’t I?’ he said to the Lees twins, who grinned and nodded, then hauled Billy out from the ditch. His shoes were soaked, his heel was smarting where the skin had been rubbed away. He was on the point of crying.
Together, they passed through the gap in the hedge, Billy held fast between the twins, Sharples leading the way. They headed along the length of the hedge until they came to a fenced-off area, the size of a tennis court. Sharples lifted the barbed wire as high as it would go, twisted beneath it, then held it high again for the three of them to pass. The first Lees placed his hand on Billy’s head, almost gently, to make sure it wasn’t snagged on the wire; the second Lees ducked behind him, so close his bare leg rubbed against Billy’s. When all four of them were on the other side of the fence, Sharples took Billy’s arm and led him to what looked like a pile of grassed-over bricks. Billy heard the fat boys walk past beyond the hedge, talking together. He wanted to call out to them, wanted someone to know where he was, just in case, but Sharples’ fingers gripped tight above his elbow and he didn’t dare.
‘Look at this,’ said Sharples, shifting the nearest bricks to one side with his foot. Billy saw a small hole open up in the ground. The twins pulled more bricks away until the hole was the size of a well. Billy was scared of what they might do. He tried to pull away, but Sharples wrestled him to the ground in a moment. ‘Oh no you don’t, Gobface,’ he said. ‘Quick, you two, get his feet.’ They pinned Billy down, his head and shoulders hanging over the hole’s edge; he could see no bottom to it. He strained to lift his head away from the smell of damp earth that was filling his nostrils. When the three of them began to ease him further over the emptiness, he cried out in fear and the sound disappeared like a dropped stone into nothing. They had his arms held high behind his back; lifting them higher, they forced his head down deeper into the hole. For a moment, lifting his head up as far as it would go, he found he couldn’t breathe and then he caught a whistling from far below, a high-pitched whistling that seemed to be rising towards him like a scream. He struggled to break free. Someone was sitting on his legs. ‘Please let me go,’ he begged. All at once the weight on his legs was gone and he was being lifted by his arms a few inches more, and then a few inches more, until the upper part of his body was entirely suspended. He was crying now. ‘Please let me go,’ he stuttered through his tears. He heard what sounded like an echo of his own voice, but softer, more like a whisper, and closer.
And then he was being pulled back from the edge and the other boys were running back to the fence, helping one another through the barbed wire fence, Sharples cuffing the twins round the head. He was alone. He looked at himself. He was covered in mud, his shoes were soaking wet. He wiped his face with his bare arm. Shivering, he wriggled under the barbed wire and pushed back through the hedge until he was in the lane once more. He began to half walk, half hop in the direction he thought would take him to the school.
Billy discovered the space behind the cupboard that afternoon. He was the last to arrive. When one of the prefects collared him, he used his bloodied heel as an excuse and was let off detention. The sports master sent him off to the shower, then went outside for a cigarette. Stooping to tie a shoelace, Billy found himself alone in the corridor between the playground and the changing rooms. He had just straightened up when he saw a Lees twin stick his head out through the changing-room door. He darted back against the wall, behind a store cupboard he’d never seen open, taller than he was. He heard a low hum in his ears, a sort of whispering to his right. He turned his head to see what it was.
That was when he saw the niche. There must have been something there at one time, he thought later, a hatch of some sort, a passage leading into the darkness deep below the school. Now there was only the niche, half deep enough for a boy, the radiator just overlapping one side of it, the cupboard moved away from the wall to leave space for it. He could squeeze in and not be seen, he thought. The Lees twin had gone; he hadn’t been noticed. He tried the niche out for size. It was tight, but it worked. He could stay here for ever, if he needed to. The humming noise had stopped. He crouched until he was entirely hidden, picking the scabs of dried mud off his legs. The mud came off in scales, dried almost white, like clay. His leg was clean beneath it. Maybe he wouldn’t need to take a shower if he waited long enough. Maybe there would be no one else there but one of the prefects, to make sure nothing happened. He thought about the prefect he’d seen that first morning, with the sunlight on him, the boy beside the sports teacher before the run that afternoon, the boy who behaved like a man. Billy knew who he was now. He was Head Boy, captain of rugger, captain of football. His name was Mitchell; he was in his final year. He took them for prep sometimes. He’d come into the class in his sports kit and sit where the teacher sat, his mud-stained boots on the desk, reading a newspaper, while Billy pretended to work, watching his bare legs shift as he turned the pages.
Someone was walking along the corridor. The sound of steps seemed louder in the silence. He didn’t know who it was, and he didn’t care. He wanted to laugh with relief. He’d never felt safer, not since the day he started school. He had found a place to hide in. He had found his niche.
He woke up that night and it felt as though he had been hanging there over the hole, his head pushed down into the emptiness of it, or lying there in the playground still, with the knees of the bigger boy pressing into his arms and the gravel digging into the back of his head only seconds before, as though the time between then and now had been wiped away and he would never be allowed up, allowed to stand. He was breathing hard, so hard it sounded like another person, breathing in time, beside him. He lay there in the dark, too scared to move, listening to the nameless breath.
2
After the lesson, Horton pretends to be on his side, which makes it worse. He does this sometimes. When no one else is around, if no one else is looking, he comes over to Billy and asks him what he’s up to. ‘We looked for you,’ he says. ‘We wanted to show you something. You were hiding, weren’t you?’ ‘No,’ says Billy, wary. Horton stands there, his hands in his blazer pockets, while Billy waits to see what will happen next, how deviously he might get hurt. Some mornings, at break, Horton sidles across, takes something from his pocket, a packet of gum, a tube of Smarties, and offers one to Billy, and Billy takes it, whether he wants it or not. Other times, he punches Billy’s arm a little harder than Billy likes, grinning, then wanders off as though some mystery that has been puzzling him has been sorted out. Billy is better at most lessons than Horton. Horton sits next to him during prep and copies whatever Billy writes into his own rough book. He knows that Billy knows and will do nothing. He knows that Billy is scared of him, of what he might do if Billy doesn’t let him look. One day, when Billy turned over the page too fast – not really on purpose, just testing Horton to see what he would do – Horton got his compass out and stuck the point into Billy’s leg, deep enough to make it bleed.
Now, though, he’s offering Billy half a Crunchie and saying they can be friends if Billy wants. Billy takes the Crunchie, but doesn’t know how to answer. He doesn’t like the sickly orange sweetness of Crunchies, the way they crumble and go soft in your mouth, the way they hollow out, but he badly wants a friend, so badly even Horton will do. When he nods, finally, and says, ‘All right, if you like,’ Horton snorts. ‘You’re barmy, you are,’ he says, then saunters off to the next class, leaving Billy standing by himself. He waits by the classroom door, talking to Sharples, looking over his shoulder at Billy. They both
begin to laugh. Sharples makes the shape of a gun with his hand and points it straight at Billy’s head. ‘Poum,’ he says. The melting Crunchie is sticky and soft in Billy’s fingers. He’d drop it, kick it under a radiator, but he won’t give Horton an excuse to hurt him, won’t be seen rejecting the gift. He slides his hand, with the piece of Crunchie hidden inside it, into his blazer pocket. His mother will kill him when she sees what he’s done.
The hissing starts after tea that evening, a hissing in his ear that gets worse when he shakes his head. He thinks it’s the telly at first – he’s watching Thunderbirds; it might be one of the rockets. It is inside his ear, like something trapped, almost too quiet to hear at first, more like a tickle than a noise, then louder, so that he can’t concentrate on what he’s watching. His mother is sponging the lining of his pocket and asking him for the hundredth time what on earth he thought he was doing. He hasn’t told her how they bully him. He knows what she’ll do if he does. She’ll go to the headmaster and make a fuss. Then everyone will know and he’ll never be left alone again.
‘Are you listening to me?’ she says. He nods, then winces as the noise in his head turns into pain. ‘Because I really ought to tell your father, you know,’ she says. ‘We can’t buy you a new blazer every time you decide to get melted chocolate all over it. Thank goodness it’s on the inside.’ She looks across. ‘Are you all right?’ she says, her voice changed. He’s about to nod again, but the pain blocks him. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a headache.’ She puts the blazer down, touches his forehead with her damp cool hand. ‘I’ll get you half an aspirin,’ she says. ‘That should help.’ He has the oddest sensation that if he lifted his own hand to touch hers, to hold the comfort of her hand where it was, he would have to strain to reach it, it would be very far away, as far away as her voice. ‘Yes,’ he says, and his own voice is as distant as hers, lost behind the hiss. He presses his face into her apron, the way he did when he was small, as close as he can get.
That night he dreams about Mitchell, the Head Boy. They are standing together at the edge of an enormous field, watching a game being played that Billy has never seen before and can’t understand the rules of. He knows that he and Mitchell are about to be called onto the pitch. He turns to run away but Mitchell leans down towards him and grips his arm. His hand is strong. He squeezes Billy’s arm and Billy understands that this ought to hurt. But it doesn’t. Somehow, he knows that Mitchell won’t hurt him. ‘I don’t want to play this,’ he says, ‘I hate games,’ but now Mitchell looks impatient. ‘It isn’t up to you,’ he says. His tone is kind but weary. He pulls Billy onto the pitch. There is a noise behind them, of people cheering. The pitch becomes narrower, as though someone is rolling it up like a carpet at each side, leaving a central furrow into which all the players are forced, a furrow that leads to a hole going deep into the earth. Mitchell is very close to him; Billy can feel the heat of bare golden skin on his own skin. The teams stop playing to watch them approach. When they reach the centre of the pitch, with barely enough room to move, Mitchell turns and Billy sees that his back is opening up and becoming wings. ‘Hold on,’ Mitchell says and begins to rise from the earth, the wings beating slowly, immensely heavy and yet there they are, already high above the pitch, high above the hole, and Billy is attached to Mitchell by a string coming out of his chest and entering the other boy’s, at the level of the heart. If it breaks, he thinks, I’ll fall and die.
The first time he stole a magazine he did it on impulse. Nobody was looking and he was afraid they might not let him buy it. It looked too old for him. He would be eleven in two months’ time. He glanced round the shop. He’d come in for the new monsters comic and some sweets, but someone had made a mistake and put this other magazine where the one with the monsters ought to be and his hunger had passed when he saw the man on the rocks. The colours on the cover were bright, the writing jagged, thrilling in a way he didn’t understand. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Before he knew what he was doing he’d slipped it under his blazer and shifted his satchel across, to hide it. Outside, still shocked by what he’d done, but excited too, as though he’d been given an unexpected gift, he darted round to the back of the shop and slipped the magazine between his school books. On the bus home that evening, when everyone else had got off and he was alone on the back seat, he took it out and started to read the stories inside, but his eye was constantly distracted by pictures like the picture on the cover. He almost missed his stop. Shaking, he slid the stolen magazine back into his satchel. He knew that he would have to hide it from everyone, his parents most of all.
‘You owe me,’ says Horton, pushing him up against the wall.
‘What for?’ says Billy.
‘For that Crunchie.’
‘I don’t,’ says Billy. ‘You gave it to me.’
‘I what?’ Horton turns round. ‘Did you hear that?’ he says. Sharples comes over.
‘Hear what?’
‘He says I gave him a Crunchie.’
‘It was half a Crunchie anyway,’ says Billy. He’s still half dreaming, still floating above the rolled-up pitch, or he wouldn’t have answered back. Sharples steps up swiftly, his red face inches from Billy’s, and punches him in the stomach.
‘I didn’t ask you,’ he says while Billy struggles for breath. ‘You speak when you’re spoken to.’
‘He owes me,’ says Horton.
‘How much?’
Horton grins. ‘How much has he got?’
Sharples jerks Billy upright, lifts him until only his toes touch the ground. ‘You look,’ he says. Horton looks disgusted, then pushes his hands into the pockets of Billy’s shorts while Billy wriggles. He pulls out a fistful of coins, shows them to Sharples.
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ says Sharples.
Billy nods.
‘Is that enough to pay you back what he owes you?’
Horton shakes his head.
Sharples drops Billy, then holds him by the throat. ‘You’d better have it tomorrow or I’ll do you over. Have you got that?’
Billy nods. I hate you, he thinks. I hate you, and I will make you pay. I will make you pay for this.
He gets to school late the next morning, hanging around outside the school gates until he hears the bell, then belting across the yard and squeezing in through the assembly-hall door as someone tries to close it. He stands at the end of the row of his form, staring ahead. Last in, first out, he thinks, but as soon as the assembly is over, Wolf catches him by the collar.
‘Not so fast, my lad,’ he says. ‘I saw you sneak in. What kept you?’
‘My dad was late leaving me,’ says Billy. ‘It’s not my fault.’
Wolf raises an eyebrow. ‘You’d better tell your dad to come and see me at break then, hadn’t you? Unless you’d like to stand in for him? Take your punishment like a man?’
I can tell him, thinks Billy. I can tell Wolf what they’re going to do to me. It’s his job to protect schoolboys. But he knows he can’t. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says. When Wolf walks off, reaching into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes, Billy’s hand flies up to catch him, to hold him back, but then falls away. There is no point.
Outside, they are waiting, not by the assembly-hall door where someone might see them, but down the corridor, outside the changing rooms. The Lees twins, Sharples, Horton, two or three other boys who always hang around with them when they hit someone. Billy hesitates. If they haven’t seen him, he can sneak round the back of the art room and work his way through the bins and the piles of broken desks to the front of the school where one of the masters might notice him. If that happens he’ll still be in trouble but at least he’ll be protected until they’ve gone off and found someone else to hurt. He should have stayed with Wolf. Everyone is scared of Wolf.
Too late. He’s been spotted. ‘Come over here, Gobface,’ Sharples says. ‘We’ve got something to show you.’
He turns and runs down the corridor, his heart thumping. He knows they’ll follow, but where
else can he go? And then he remembers the niche. Before they have time to turn the corner, he has slipped behind the store cupboard, next to the radiator, and is hunkered down with his face turned to the back of the cupboard, the heat of the radiator on the nape of his neck, its gentle, insistent hiss in his ear. His eyes are closed to hold in tears. Behind the hiss, he can make out a hurried breathing, which must be his although it seems to be at a distance, some little way away from him, where the wall should be. There seems to be more room than he remembers, as though the niche has relaxed for him, welcomed him somehow. He crouches down, opens his eyes, waits for his heart to calm in the unexpected darkness. You’re safe now, he hears himself say, or thinks he does.
Then, all at once, there is silence. He lets his breath out slowly. Safe, he thinks again, and a voice, like the echo of his own, says safe. He strains to hear where it came from but all further sound is drowned out by the racket of their shoes on the floorboards beyond the cupboard and Sharples saying he’ll kill the little fucker when he finds him. And I’ll kill you, says the voice, so close to Billy’s ear he can feel the words’ warmth on his skin, like water almost, something liquid, a soothing touch. A strengthening touch. ‘He’s here,’ says someone – it sounds like one of the Lees twins – and Billy flinches, the voice is so near. They must be standing on the other side of the cupboard. ‘I can smell him,’ says the voice and one of the other boys giggles. ‘Stinky Baby Billy,’ says Sharples. ‘Baby Billy’s done a poo in his pants,’ says Horton. There is a grinding, dragging sound, as they pull the cupboard away from the wall. Billy closes his eyes again, straightens up, steps back into where the wall ought to be, but he must have miscalculated. He takes another step, hands reaching round behind him into the unexpected emptiness. Slowly, heart pumping, he opens his eyes to the light that should be flooding in as the heavy cupboard is shifted away from the wall, all four boys tugging and pushing to move it, to reach their prey. But there is darkness, just like before, dark as the hole in the field. I’ve gone blind, he thinks, and then, stretching his arms back as far as they can go, encountering nothing, I’ve gone mad. Something in his body knows that where the cupboard stood to protect him there is now only open space and the four boys standing there and staring at a radiator, at a wall, and not seeing Billy. He is there, in front of them, as they are in front of him, but he isn’t there as well. He is somewhere else, somewhere safe, somewhere they will never reach unless he wants them to. He strains to see them and gradually, as though a veil has been lifted to be replaced by a finer veil, they are lined up before him, shoulder to shoulder, their faces distorted by bewilderment, anger and disappointment, and what might be fear. For a moment, he sees the face of the prisoner of war, roped to the rock, surrounded by the waving saw-edged claws of the crabs, and the face is no longer that of the man, but Horton, Horton wincing as the crab bites into the soft flesh of his thumb, rips at the flesh with its pincers. I’m free, he thinks, as they step away, push the cupboard back against the wall.
Two Dark Tales Page 10
