Beneath the Earth

by John Boyne

  Someone stuck a picture of Justin Bieber on my locker with the words ‘Danny loves Justin’ written across it in pink highlighter and it took me three gos to get it down as there was so much Sellotape all over it. As if I’d love that jumped-up skinny minger anyway with the big wrinkly forehead on him.

  Liam Wilson was particularly nasty, which was a bit rich as I’d pegged him long ago as one of my lot, and he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew, which was what really drove him demented. We’d been at a party only a couple of months earlier and ended up sitting outside in the garden together, trying to smoke a cigarette and not doing a great job of it, when he leaned in a bit closer than was totally necessary and pressed his right leg against my left before saying ‘Christ, Danny, I’ve an awful horn on me right now, do you ever get that way?’ And then he looked right at me and smiled, and I said nothing, just edged away, for I tell you this, I might have been desperate for a bit of boy-on-boy action but I’d have preferred to ride my pillow like I usually did of an evening than get anywhere near his skanky cock. The lad looked like Worzel Gummidge after a hard night out. So he went in for the kill, of course, and made sure that I was abused by everyone with a mouth on them.

  But it all ended a few days later and I was left in peace. Tommy Devlin, class president, captain of the hurling team and the fittest thing this side of Calais, was away at his granny’s funeral in Donegal when all the bullying was taking place and when he came back pretty much every lad in the room piled on top of him to tell him the news. He listened to them without saying a word before walking over to my desk and staring down at me with a baffled expression on his face.

  ‘Is this right what they’re telling me, Danny?’ he asked.

  ‘It is, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘Christ on a bike,’ he said, shaking his head as he considered it. ‘You’re some lad. But look, fair fucks to you all the same.’ And then he shook my hand before walking away and that was the end of the matter, and I knew then that there wasn’t a boy or girl in the school who would dare say a negative word to me ever again or they’d risk falling out of favour with himself. And of course I was head over heels for Tommy Devlin by lunchtime, but that’s another story.

  It was pretty rough there for a few days before it got better again and it was all Lizzie’s fault. And I swore I’d get her too one of these fine days.

  The first I knew about the woman from Waterford was a text message that she sent Dad on his birthday. Thinking of you, xx, it said. The contact name was listed only as ‘KM’. I racked my brain to think of any ‘KM’ who my parents knew but could think of no one. And it was hardly likely to be Kylie Minogue sending the text. I suppose I shouldn’t have read it but the phone was sitting right there on the kitchen table and there was no one else in the room. I thought it might be important and, if it was, then he’d want me to go upstairs and tell him.

  Dad and I weren’t talking that morning because we’d had a row the night before when he found out about a bit of mischief I’d been up to and he’d said that there wasn’t much more that he was willing to put up with from me, that there were days when he wondered whether there was something wrong with me in the head.

  Mam had been saying for ages that I needed to see a behavioural specialist but I’d said that if they so much as parked the car outside the local pharmacy while I was in the back seat that I would take a hatchet to my own skull. That rightly shut them up. But after this row I heard Dad telling Mam that they’d been hiding their heads in the sand for too long and it was time to take action.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll let us bring him,’ Mam said.

  ‘He’ll do what he’s told,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll drag him there if I have to.’

  ‘Do you think it’s our fault?’ she asked, putting on the old whiny voice.

  I could listen to no more, as I heard Lizzie’s bedroom door open upstairs and if she caught me eavesdropping she’d land me in it. She’d done that sort of thing before.

  I made a note of ‘KM’’s number on my own phone before marking the text message as unread and later that day I phoned it from the payphone in the village. I had no plans for what I was going to say, I just wanted to know who ‘KM’ was and whether or not I could use the intelligence I gathered against him in some way. It was a woman’s voice that answered and she was all breathless, like she’d just got through seducing the milkman’s son. I could picture her, all blowsy and red-haired with make-up all over her face and lipstick on her teeth. A fridgeful of chocolates and white wine.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Martin,’ I said, lowering my voice and doing my best to give a good impression of my dad. It wasn’t bad, if I say so myself. I covered the mouthpiece a little with one hand so my voice sounded a bit muffled.

  ‘Oh sweetie,’ she said, squealing like a pig. ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to call today. Happy birthday, by the way. Did you get my text? Any chance that I’ll see you later?’

  I hesitated. I hadn’t thought through what I might say when the conversation got going. I don’t think I’d really believed that Dad was seeing another woman and to realize that he was surprised me a little. I’d thought better of him, if I’m honest. ‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘I’d say you want to see me for a bit of sex, is it?’ I asked, and then there was a long silence on the other end.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asked finally, her voice colder than before, and I hung up immediately, my heart pounding in my chest.

  I walked in circles outside the phone-box for ages trying to think of what to do even though Sharon Lewis and Graham Rushe were sitting on a wall opposite holding hands and doing kisses with each other. Getting the auld shift. I must have walked around the phone-box a hundred times but I didn’t get dizzy. Eventually Graham marched across the road and gave me a puck on the shoulder. ‘Are you watching us?’ he asked.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Are you watching us, you perv?’ he repeated. ‘Me and Sharon?’

  ‘Sharon and I,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up, you,’ he said, pushing me back against a tree.

  ‘If you hit me again I’ll kick you in the balls,’ I said, and he just grinned and hit me another puck on the shoulder.

  ‘Go on so,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do it another time,’ I said.

  ‘Stop watching us, do you hear me?’

  ‘I’ll tell on yous,’ I said, and he started to laugh but then just shook his head.

  ‘Jesus, Danny,’ was all he could say.

  And then he turned to walk back across the road and nearly got hit by a car. Sharon leaped off the wall and screamed like she was in a horror film and Graham shouted ‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST’ at the top of his voice because I’d say he fairly felt the thing pass him by and I fell down on the grass and broke my shite laughing. He turned and looked at me but he was in shock, I think, because he said nothing, just crossed back over the road, took Sharon by the hand and they disappeared off through the trees together. I’d say he was going to do sex with her.

  I stayed in the village for a long time that afternoon, watching people going by, trying to decide what I should do next. I wasn’t going to let Dad bring me to any behavioural specialist, that was for sure. The fact was, it was either him or me. And it wasn’t going to be me. But this was all last year, of course. It’s old news.

  Liam Wilson, who’d tried to seduce me that time in the garden and make me his love slave, told me the news about Lizzie and Geoffrey. Liam didn’t usually talk to me much because he knew that I knew his deep, dark secret while mine had already been revealed to the world and no one cared any more. I think he was worried that if anyone saw him talking to me then they’d know he wanted to kiss me and pull my pants down and touch me all over.

  ‘Do you think it’ll last?’ he asked me.

  ‘Do I think what will last?’

  ‘Lizzie and Geoffrey.’

 
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘You do of course. They’ve started seeing each other.’

  I stared at him. ‘Lizzie, my sister Lizzie?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Did you not know?’

  I looked away and felt a pain inside me because I liked Geoffrey, he was my friend and sat beside me in school and never made fun of me. I didn’t like him as much as I liked Tommy Devlin, but still. Something about the idea of him and Lizzie together made me feel sick.

  ‘You’re making this up,’ I said.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘I don’t fancy you, Liam,’ I said, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head and his face went red like Blusher’s. He opened and closed his mouth about a million times while he tried to think of something to say but there was nothing there – his head was empty, poor lad – and he just marched off, telling me to go eff myself. He actually said ‘Go eff yourself, Danny,’ because he was too frightened to say fuck.

  I’d said that I was going to get Lizzie and I saw my chance now. It was Friday night and she was getting all dolled up, the eyelashes curled and the tiny dress on, and I knew she must be going somewhere with Geoffrey. I took her phone and switched it off so she couldn’t ring to find it and I waited until she left and then I followed her into town and right enough there was Geoffrey waiting for her outside the multiplex and he gave her a big kiss right there on the street before the pair of them went inside.

  I thought about going home and leaving them to it. I thought about causing no trouble. But then I remembered what she’d done to me and the promise I’d made to myself to get her and I didn’t want to go back on my word. So I stayed where I was.

  It was more than two hours later when they came out again and I was freezing and half asleep with the cold but I knew they wouldn’t go straight home because no one ever did when they went on a date, or so I’d been told, and sure enough they didn’t let me down because they didn’t take the turn that would lead to our street but the one that led to Geoffrey’s dad’s farm instead and off the pair of them went, hand in hand, giggling like a pair of fools. I stayed a good distance from them and kept my footsteps quiet so they wouldn’t hear me following them.

  They made their way to one of the hay sheds and went inside, turning a light on and closing the door behind them. For a few minutes I didn’t know what to do because I got a pain in my head and I thought I might have to go home and take a Nurofen Plus but then the pain started not to hurt as much so I wandered over to the shed and took Lizzie’s phone from my pocket, switching it on and turning it to mute in case it made any noise. Rachel the lezzer was probably texting her to find out whether she could come over to shave their legs together.

  The wooden slats weren’t fully fitted together and it was easy enough for me to find a place where I could see through. I knew what I expected to see and that’s what I saw – Geoffrey riding Lizzie up against one of the haystacks – but he was going at it good style because she was covered in hay and he had his arms in the air like he’d just scored a winning goal. Plus she was wearing a stupid hat that she’d found in the shed that said Castlerea Farms on it. It didn’t look very romantic, to be honest.

  When she got home that night, I was waiting for her in her room.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked, and I had to hand it to her: you’d swear nothing had been going on at all for she didn’t have a hair out of place. She looked as neat as she had when she’d left the house a few hours earlier.

  ‘I found your phone,’ I said, holding it up.

  ‘Give it here,’ she said, trying to swipe it off me.

  ‘Hold on there,’ I said, pressing send on the text I’d spent the last hour composing. ‘Here you go,’ I said, handing it across.

  She stared at the screen. There was a simple message in green, sent to Rachel the lezzer. ‘I have no self-respect,’ it said, followed by a link to a YouTube video. She stared at it, confused, before looking back at me.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She pressed the link. The video started within a couple of seconds and I watched her as she went pale and threw the phone on the floor, letting out a quick scream that made me laugh.

  ‘Here, you dropped this,’ I said, picking it up and handing it to her.

  ‘Danny,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Tell me you didn’t send that. Tell me it’s a joke.’

  But sure it wasn’t a joke, so I couldn’t say that it was. I don’t tell lies.

  Mam says that Lizzie is going to stay on in London now and has decided to sit for her A-levels instead of her Leaving Cert. Auntie Dolly got her into an all-girls’ school near Wimbledon; she had to tell the truth about why she’d left Ireland but whoever was in charge apparently thought that she was the victim in all of this and that everyone deserved a second chance. I think she just wanted an international superstar in the school.

  I asked Mam could I take Lizzie’s old room as it’s bigger than mine and isn’t overlooking the main road. I said we could take all of Lizzie’s things and put them into storage or just throw them away, maybe burn them in the incinerator, and she stopped what she was doing and just stared at me like she’d never seen me before in her life.

  ‘Danny, is there some way that I can help you?’ she asked. ‘Is there something I can do? I’m your mother and I love you. I don’t care about all the things you’ve done, I just want you to be happy. But I don’t know how to help you. Can you tell me? Can you tell me, Danny? Can you tell me how to help you?’

  And I just laughed because I hadn’t a clue what she was banging on about. I think she must be getting the Alzheimer’s because it’s not me who’s let her down, it’s Lizzie, who’s officially a slut and is famous all over the world as Haystack Girl. Five and a half million hits and counting on YouTube. They keep taking it down but someone keeps opening a new account and putting it up again. Some mischief-maker.

  Dad’s stopped calling over to see me but he’s not living with the woman in Waterford any more. Apparently the relationship fell apart when the newspapers took an interest in her. And there’s absolutely no way I can be blamed for that. But he’s moved up to Dublin and isn’t even talking to Mam any more. I don’t know where things stand between him and Lizzie. I’d say he thinks she’s great and goes over on the plane and takes her out for dinner and they go to see shows in the West End together.

  I’ve tried to make it up with Lizzie because, after all, she is my twin sister and we should be the best of pals. I can’t even remember why we fell out in the first place. It can’t have been because of Dad because that was his fault, not mine. Maybe it was the twenty euros she owed me (and owes me still). Maybe she didn’t want to give it back. Anyway, she won’t talk to me on the phone but I know she reads my emails because I write all the time and I tell her all the gossip from school. I told her how Tommy Devlin was killed in a car crash but she probably knew that anyway because it was all over the papers. I told her how it made me feel. Which was very sad. And I told her how Geoffrey is now class president and is still officially a legend for what happened on the haystack and how everyone respects him but still thinks that she’s officially a slut. And how Blusher looks like his head will explode every time Geoffrey says something in class because I know he’s thinking about the video, which I bet he’s watched about a million times at home and wanked himself silly over.

  I tell her everything I can think of, even the good things like how I got a part-time job in the kebab shop in town, but it doesn’t matter what I say, she always replies with the same message:

  ‘Get help, Danny. When you get help, we can talk. But not until then.’

  She doesn’t even sign it with an xx. Even Dad’s former girlfriend from Waterford had the decency to sign her text messages with an xx. That’s how completely horrible Lizzie is, so sometimes I don’t know why I bother saying that I’ll be friends with her again. If you ask me, for all the jokes we mak
e about them, The Smileys don’t have it so bad. At least they’re nice to each other.

  Rest Day

  Hawke, a grey wolf in human form, emerged from the forest on his hands and knees, pulling pine needles from his palms. A sticky resin from the verdure clung to the top of his tunic, sending a honeyed scent towards his nostrils, a perfume that reminded him of the private gardens behind his home on Hyde Park Square where he had hidden from his father on so many occasions as a boy. He crawled through the closely packed foliage, his eyes adjusting to survey the open land before him. It was night now. He was tired and hungry. He hadn’t eaten since that morning when Cole handed him a can of bully beef stolen from Westman’s backpack, the meat oozing red and fatty from its metal container in a manner that reminded him of the separated skulls on the bodies he dragged across the boot-tilled mud when he was on stretcher duty. ‘This is a conchie’s job,’ he complained, but no one listened. Westman himself had taken a bullet in the eye an hour before; his brains were still drying on his face, growing crusty in his long eyelashes, while Cole’s hands were looting his supplies.

  There were two cans, of course. Cole kept one for himself, eating it greedily, a finger soaking up the blood that remained behind, mingling with his own as he sucked on it, eyes closed in pleasure. He gave the other to Hawke because he liked him. They had a football team in common and it seemed that this was enough to forge a friendship.

  The bully beef tasted rotten, the juices a ghastly slime that stank to high heaven, but Hawke ate it all before throwing up in the latrines. Next to him, Oakley was standing with his cock in one hand, leaning against the wall and pissing on his boots, crying. But then Oakley was a crier; everyone knew that. He cried when the sun rose. He cried when the shelling started. He cried when the news came through that Lord Kitchener had gone down on the Hampshire and it wasn’t as if he’d even known the man.

  ‘You’ve heard about Westman then?’ asked Hawke but Oakley ignored him. He didn’t like to be disturbed while he was crying. He finished pissing and Hawke finished throwing up. Before leaving the latrine he told Oakley to put his cock away. ‘Tidy yourself up, man,’ he muttered.