I could feel the man thinking. I’m pretty sure that he knew what had gone on. I don’t mean everything that had gone on – I mean the basics. I mean that the badgers had been dug out and baited.
“Where are you, son? Can you tell me your exact location?”
There was a threat in his voice now.
“I’ve just got a question, that’s all.”
“I can trace this call, you know. I can find out where you are. You could be in serious trouble.”
That was a mistake. He shouldn’t have threatened me. Definitely shouldn’t have bluffed me.
“You’re the bloody Badger Protection League, not the F-B-bloody-I,” I said. “You can’t trace anything. I’ve got a simple question. I want to help this badger. Will you help me do it?”
I heard the man take a deep breath to get a grip on himself.
“What is it you want to know?”
“The sett where I found him … it got smashed in. But it was a—” I tried to remember the name. What was it? “Out, out something …”
“Outlier?”
“That’s it, an outlier. There was just one tunnel. So I think there must be the main sett somewhere near.”
“Possible, yes, possible.”
“And my question is, if I find it, will the other badgers take the baby back again?”
There was a pause. The man didn’t make any noise, but I could tell that he wasn’t angry or bored any more. Now he was trying to work out what the best thing to do was.
“Yes, most times they will,” he said. “The sooner you get it back, the better. But, look, if you tell me where you are, we have volunteers all over the country who can take this over. And if there’s been any criminal activity around the badgers, then, as long as you played no part in it, you won’t get into any serious trouble.”
I thought about me and Kenny helping to dig out the sett. I thought about what Jezbo and Rich and Rob would say. I knew we’d end up getting the blame, some of it at least.
But I thought about something else as well. Me and Kenny had had a bad few years. Nothing much good had happened to us. And, for that matter, we hadn’t done much good either. But with the badger there was a chance for us to make a little difference to the world. We could put some goodness in, like sugar in tea.
“Thanks, mister,” I said. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
It wasn’t much of a funny comeback, but funny comebacks weren’t really my thing.
I was about to slam the phone down when the man said, “My name’s Steve. What’s yours?”
And I said, “Nicky,” without really thinking. But then I did think and I knew it didn’t matter because there are millions of kids called Nicky in the world, and I could be any of them.
Then I did put the phone down.
By now it was five o’clock and I was knackered – I’d been up since before dawn, remember. I went and lay on the couch in the living room. The telly had been on all day, with the sound turned off. Kenny liked it like that. He got a bit freaked if he ever came in and the telly was off.
I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again I knew that a lot more than a second had gone by, and that something was wrong.
Nineteen
I rushed out to the shed. The door was open. There were voices from inside.
“This one is the badger,” one was saying. “He’s called Snuffy, and he’s mine. You can’t pet him because if he bites you he’ll never let go. Then they’ll have to take you to hospital in the ambulance and have Snuffy cut off by a doctor.”
“Kenny,” I said from the door, “you promised that you wouldn’t tell Samit.”
They both spun round. Samit was holding Tina. The eyes behind his thick glasses were as big as dinner plates.
“No I didn’t!” Kenny said. I don’t know if he meant that he hadn’t promised or that he hadn’t told. I loved Kenny, but he could be a massive liar.
“I won’t tell anyone else,” Samit said. He held the dog close to him, as if he thought that would stop me from getting mad and whacking him.
“If you do tell anyone, Jezbo will find out and he’ll come and kill Snuffy,” I said. I was trying my best to look and sound scary.
It worked, but only because Samit was eight years old. If he’d been nine, he’d have seen through me.
Samit and Kenny both looked down at their feet.
“OK,” they said.
“You can feed them their dinner,” I said, a bit softer.
“OK!” they said again in totally different voices.
I heard my dad come in late. Kenny was asleep. The animals were out in the shed.
I thought my dad was going to be drunk, but he wasn’t. He looked tired.
“Where you been, Dad?” I asked.
“Looking for work, son.”
He hadn’t tried to get work for ages.
“Any luck?”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing happening around here. Might as well look for work at the North Pole.”
Even though he looked tired, like I said, there was something a bit different about Dad tonight. He didn’t look happy, but he looked a tiny bit less sad than normal. I mean that thing he said about the North Pole – it was almost a joke. I couldn’t remember the last time he had tried to make a joke.
I wanted to ask him about it, but I didn’t know how to put it into words. So I made us each a cup of tea and waited for him to tell me.
“I was in town,” he began. Then he stopped and blew across his tea to cool it. I sat across from him at the kitchen table and sipped my tea. The table top was covered in scratches and marks. I saw where Kenny had written “Keny” with the point of his fork.
“I went into Starbucks,” Dad said. “I had a voucher for a free coffee that I tore out of the newspaper. There was someone there I used to know from school. Don’t look so bloody startled. Aye, I went to school too, you know. She went off to become a nurse. She works at Seacroft now. We got talking, and she said they need care assistants on the ward.”
“Care assistants?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Just someone who helps the nurses,” Dad said. “Changing bandages, wiping arses, getting the patients fed, that sort of thing. She said that I’d got more exams than most of the people that work there. She reckons they’d take me on for training, if she put a word in for me.”
“Did you tell her about the … trouble, the trouble with the police and that?”
My dad nodded.
“She said it would be OK as long as I didn’t get a prison sentence. You know, as long as it was just community service.”
I knew my dad was trying to tell me something. It wasn’t just that he had a girlfriend. Or might have a girlfriend. And maybe even a job. There was something else as well. But he didn’t tell me then, not with words. We sat and finished our tea without saying anything else, but you know how some silences are filled with tension and make you feel sick?
Well, it wasn’t one of those.
Twenty
Two things woke me up the next morning. The first was the sun coming through the window. The curtain had fallen down yonks ago, and I didn’t know how to fix it. It didn’t matter much when it was dull or rainy outside, as it was most days, but when the sun shone it got me right in the eye.
The second was the noise. It was a bit like the sound of the sea in a seashell, and a bit like the sound of birds in the morning. But it wasn’t the sea and it wasn’t birds.
I got up and went outside just wearing my pyjama bottoms.
A crowd of little kids was bubbling around the door of the shed, like the froth when you shake a Coke bottle.
I should have been mad. But I just couldn’t be. Not when I saw the way that Kenny was lording it over them. He was a sort of king, or a god, even, because he had the magic thing in his arms, the
wild thing.
Yeah, the stupid berk was holding the little badger out to show them all, and they were taking it in turns to stroke it. What gave it all an extra edge of drama was that the badger would have a little snap at the fingers that tried to touch it, which made the kids squeal out in fear and joy.
“Bloody hell, Kenny,” I said. I tried to get a bit of the badger’s bite into my voice. “What are you playing at?”
Kenny wasn’t listening. Maybe he couldn’t even hear. There must have been fifteen kids there. They were crammed in the shed, like Quality Street when you first open the tin at Christmas.
“SHUT UP!!!” I yelled, and they did simmer down. I shoved my way to the front. It was like wading into the sea at Bridlington, with the waves slapping at your thighs.
Samit was holding Kenny’s piggy bank. Tina had her paws up on the rim of the box so she could watch everything. She looked OK, in spite of the scabs she had all over her from the bites.
As I watched, another kid put 10p in the piggy bank and tried to stroke the badger.
“That’s enough, Kenny,” I said.
“Why?” Kenny asked. “I’ve nearly filled my piggy bank up again. We can get chips or anything. I said to Samit I’d buy him some if he held the piggy bank.”
“Kenny, have you got the faintest flipping idea what a secret even is?” I said. “Who told them about this?”
“Er, it was sort of my fault, Nicky,” Samit said. He looked a bit sheepish. “I told my brother, and then he blabbed.”
“I don’t blame you, Samit,” I said. “I told Kenny not to tell anyone. As soon as one person knows this sort of thing, everyone knows it. Especially in a place like this. If the police find out, or …”
“If the police find out what?”
Well, that got rid of the little kids. They scattered like leaves in a gale, revealing the tall, gaunt figure of my dad in the shed doorway.
Twenty-one
My dad said “oh” when he realised what Kenny was holding.
No – actually he didn’t say “oh”. It was just that his mouth made the shape it would have made if he had said “oh”, but nothing came out. The first words he actually said were, “Bloody hell!”
Kenny stared at my dad, then at the badger, then at me. Then he thrust the badger behind his back.
“I haven’t got anything,” he said. “Have I, Samit?”
Samit looked around in confusion. My dad helped him out.
“Go home, Samit lad,” he said. He didn’t say it unkindly.
Now all the other kids had melted away and it was just me and Dad and Kenny and the badger. Tina was still looking over the rim of her box.
“Where’s this from?” my dad asked.
“I don’t know,” said Kenny. He’d stopped trying to hide the badger and was holding it in front of him again. It didn’t seem to mind.
I thought I’d be best off with the truth. So I told Dad about Jezbo and Rich and Rob, and the death of the old badger.
When I said Jezbo’s name my dad stiffened, like someone had yanked the hairs at the back of his neck. But he didn’t say anything until I’d finished the story. About half way through, Kenny got bored with holding the badger and put it back in the box with the dog.
At the end my dad said, “You can’t keep it, son. There’s laws about this. If the police find out I’ve got a wild animal, I’ll be in breach of my bail. You know what that means.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’ve got a plan.”
I thought my dad was going to ask me what the plan was, but he just said, “It’s gone by next weekend. At the latest.”
Twenty-two
I’d always been a bit of a loner at school. There were a couple of kids I sometimes used to hang out with at break, but that was it. And I’d join in if there was a big footie match on in the playground. I didn’t get picked first or last – I was one of those kids in the middle, not so good or so crap for anyone to care much if I was on their side or not.
But most of the time it was just me, sitting on a bench reading a book or walking around trying to stay out of trouble.
I used to quite like it when it rained, because then I could spend break in the library. If you got there early enough, you could even get on the computers.
It was raining today. And that was good, cos I had work to do.
I knew from the badger book I’d read that there would be a main sett within a couple of miles of the outlier in the Copse. And I had a rough idea what I had to look for. The book said that badger setts are nearly always on the edge of a wood, right next to fields. Badgers like to be able to forage in the woods for worms and beetles and that sort of thing, and then go and eat whatever’s growing in the fields. Sweetcorn, carrots, whatever.
So I got straight onto Google Maps and started searching. I put in our postcode and zoomed and scrolled around until I found the right place.
Even just on the normal view it was amazing.
Like I said before, all I’d ever seen when I looked at the countryside were the bare fields. But that was wrong. I’d lived there all my life but all of a sudden now I could see loads of things that I never even knew were there. There were little streams and, more importantly, woods. Some of them were quite big. The thing is that a lot of them were miles off the main roads, so you’d never know about them. I thought I might have spotted some of them from the top deck of the bus, but not in a way that had sunk in.
When I switched to the satellite view it was even better. You could zoom right down so you could see every single tree.
I’d always thought about the place I lived as a bit of a dump. But now I saw it like this, from above, with the fields and the trees, it looked like a nice place after all.
By then the break was over and I had to go back to lessons. It didn’t matter. I’d found what I was looking for. Just a mile away from the Copse there was a small wood.
And Google Maps even gave it a name.
Brock Wood.
And because I’d never heard the word “Brock” before, I looked it up. That’s when I got really excited.
Brock was an old word for badger.
Twenty-three
After school I asked my dad if he’d help me fix up Kenny’s bike. Dad had been filling out some forms on the kitchen table. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him doing that sort of thing. I thought it might be something to do with the DVDs and the court case.
“That bike’s a bit small for you,” he said.
“I know, Dad, but it’s the best I’ve got and I need it for …”
“For this plan of yours?”
I nodded.
He sighed and put down his biro. “I’ll get my tools.”
Even when Kenny’s bike was new it wasn’t a cool one.
It wasn’t a mountain bike or a racer or anything like that. It was just a kid’s bike, maybe for a nine-year-old. And now it was a mess, with brown paint flaking off and rust all over it, like dirty dandruff. Both tyres were flat. We pumped one up OK, but the other had a puncture. My dad fixed it, then fitted the wheel back on. He fixed the brakes and then he looked at the gears.
“I can’t fix them,” he said. “But I can lock it in second gear for you, so it won’t be too bad.”
It took about an hour, and at the end of it I had a rubbish, uncool bike. But it was a rubbish, uncool bike that I could ride.
Kenny had appeared from school half way through. For once he didn’t gabble away. He just stood and watched Dad work. I don’t think he could remember seeing Dad do anything like this before.
“Can I go on it now?” he asked when it was finished.
“I’m just gonna test it for you first,” I said.
I was off before he had the time to come back at me.
To get to Brock Wood, I had to bike down the lane past the Copse. The b
ike was fine as long as the going was flat or downhill, but going up even a little hill was torture. The bike was old and it was small. I prayed nobody saw me, cos I must have looked pretty stupid.
After the Copse there were more fields. Some had sheep in, some were empty. Then there was a railway line with a tunnel under it. We never used to come this far when on a walk. Every step was double, as you’d have to come back again the same way.
I hadn’t printed off the map, as you had to pay 20p a sheet at the library, but I remembered it really well. There was a sort of a track just before the railway line. It was too rough to cycle on, so I wheeled the bike. The ground rose up a little – more of a hump than a hill. Then there it was. Brock Wood.
On Google Maps it had looked dead small, but now I was facing it, it seemed like a forest. How had we never discovered this before?
I knew one thing – it was too big for me to explore in one evening. It was already starting to get dark. At least I knew what I was looking for. Big holes, on the side of a bank or in the roots of a tree. They should look like a capital “D” lying on its side.
There was a barbed wire fence between the wood and the field. I held up the top strand but I still managed to snag my hoody as I ducked under.
I knew I only had a few minutes, so I focused on the part of the wood right where I came in. It was beautiful under there. The trees were much taller and fatter and more … I don’t know what the best word is … majestic, yeah, much more majestic than the trees in the Copse. And it all just felt older, as if there had never been a time when this wood didn’t exist.
I broke a stick off a bush and used it to swipe and swish my way through the undergrowth, like an explorer with a machete. I found rabbit shit, birds’ nests and an old pram someone had dumped a hundred years ago. Then I found the remains of some tramp’s campfire and a hole that might have belonged to a mouse or a rat. Or maybe it was just a general hole that didn’t belong to anything.
I even found a long axe-handle, broken off near where the axe-head would have gone. It was smooth and heavy, and I wanted to keep it. But I knew it’d be tricky to cycle with it, so I stuck it in the ground near one of the barbed wire fence posts. I thought I could collect it one of these days.
Brock Page 4
