‘You said you’d “washed your hands of the whole affair”, Michael.’
‘I did, yes,’ Dad can’t hide satisfaction to save his life, ‘but I didn’t count on not being able to park my own car on my own drive. That’s all I wanted to say.’
Something silent smashed without being dropped.
Mum left the table. Not angry, and not tearful, but worse. Like none of us were there.
Dad just stared at where she’d been sitting.
‘In my exam today,’ Julia twisted a strand of her hair, ‘this term I’m not totally sure about, “pyrrhic victory”, came up. Do you know what a “pyrrhic victory” is, Dad?’
Dad gave Julia a very complicated stare.
Julia didn’t flinch.
Dad got up and went to the garage, for a smoke, most like.
The wreckage of dessert lay between me and Julia.
We watched it for a bit. ‘A what victory?’
‘“Pyrrhic”. Ancient Greece. A pyrrhic victory is one where you win, but the cost of winning is so high that it would’ve been better if you’d never bothered with the war in the first place. Useful word, isn’t it? So, Jace. Looks like we’re doing the dishes again. Wash or dry?’
The whole of Great Britain’s like it’s Bonfire Night and Christmas Day and St George’s Day and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee all rolled into one. Mrs Thatcher appeared outside 10 Downing Street, saying, ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ The photographers’ flashbulbs and the crowds went crazy; she wasn’t a politician at all, but all four members of Bucks Fizz at the Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone sang ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves’, over and over. (Has that song got any verses or is it just one never-ending chorus?) This summer isn’t green, this summer is the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Bells’ve been rung, beacons lit, street parties’ve broken out up and down the country. Isaac Pye had an all-night happy hour at the Black Swan last night. In Argentina riots’re being reported in the major cities with lootings and shootings and some people’re saying it’s just a matter of time before the junta’s toppled. The Daily Mail’s full of how Great British guts and Great British leadership won the war. No prime minister’s ever been more popular than Premier Margaret Thatcher in the entire history of opinion polls.
I should be really happy.
Julia reads the Guardian, which has got all sorts of stuff not in the Daily Mail. Most of the 30,000 enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians. Their elite troops all raced back to Port Stanley as the British paratroopers advanced. Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets. Having your intestines pulled out through a slit in the belly! What a 1914 way to die in 1982. Brian Hanrahan said he saw one prisoner being interviewed who said they didn’t even know what the Malvinas were or why they’d been brought there. Julia says the main reasons we won were (a) the Argentinians couldn’t buy any more Exocets, (b) their navy stayed holed up in mainland bases, (c) their air force ran out of trained pilots. Julia says it would’ve been cheaper to set every Falkland Islander up with their own farm in the Cotswolds than to’ve gone to war. She reckons nobody’ll pay to clean up the mess, so that much of the farmland on the islands’ll be off limits until the mines’ve rusted.
A hundred years, that might take.
Today’s big story in the Daily Mail’s about whether Cliff Richard the singer’s having sex with Sue Barker the tennis player, or whether they’re just good friends.
Tom Yew wrote a letter to his family the day before the Coventry was sunk. The letter made it back to Black Swan Green, just a few days ago. Dean Moran’s mum read it, ’cause she was Tom Yew’s godmother, and Kelly Moran got the details out of her. Our navy men thought the Falkland Islanders were a bunch of inbred bumblers (‘Honest,’ Tom wrote, ‘some of these guys are their own fathers’), like Benny the dimwit handyman from Crossroads on TV. They even started calling the islanders ‘Bennies’. (‘I’m not making this up – I met a Benny this morning who thought a silicon chip was a Sicilian crisp.’) Soon everyone in the lower ranks was saying ‘Benny’ this and ‘Benny’ that. When the officers found out, an order was issued to get the men to stop using this name. The men stopped. But a day or two later, Tom was hauled over by his lieutenant, who demanded to know why the crew were referring to the locals not as ‘Bennies’ but as ‘Stills’. ‘So I told the lieutenant “Because they’re still Bennies, Sir.”’
Dad was half wrong, half right about the landscape gardener doing a runner. When the company stopped answering their phone, Mum drove to Kidderminster but there was only a broken chair in an empty office. Wires stuck out of the walls. Two men loading a photocopier on to the truck told her the firm’d gone bankrupt. So the rockery rocks stayed on our driveway for two more weeks, until Mr Broadwas got back from his holiday in Ilfracombe. Mr Broadwas does some gardening work for my parents. Dad sort of elbowed Mum out of the rescue operation. At eight o’clock this morning (today’s Saturday) a lorry with a fork-lift truck pulled up outside our house. Out of the cab got Mr Broadwas, and his sons Gordon and Keith. Mr Broadwas’s son-in-law Doug drove the fork-lift truck. First, Dad and Doug took down the side gate so the machine could lug the granite to the back. Next, we all got stuck in digging the hole for the pond. Hot and sweaty work, it was. Mum sort of hovered in the shade, but men with spades put up an invisible wall. She brought a tray of coffee and Dutch butter biscuits. Everyone thanked Mum politely and Mum said ‘You’re welcome’ politely too. Dad sent me to Mr Rhydd’s on my bike to get 7-Up and Mars Bars. (Mr Rhydd told me it was the hottest day of 1982 so far.) When I got back me and Gordon carted the buckets of topsoil to the end of the garden. I didn’t know what to say to Gordon Broadwas. Gordon’s in my year at school (in a dimmer’s class) and here was my dad paying his dad. How embarrassing’s that? Gordon didn’t speak much either, so maybe he felt embarrassed too. Mum was looking stonier and stonier as the rockery in the garden and the rockery in her blueprint got more and more different. After the pond’s shell was lowered and we stopped for toasted sandwiches, Mum announced she was going into Tewkesbury to do some shopping. As her car pulled out and we got back to work, Dad did a jokey sigh. ‘Women, eh? Banging on about this rockery for years, and now it’s off to the shops…’
Mr Broadwas did a gardener’s nod. Not an ally’s nod.
By the time Mum came home, Mr Broadwas, his sons, Doug and the fork-lift truck’d gone. Dad’d let me fill the pond with water from the hosepipe. I was playing Swingball by myself. Julia’d gone out to celebrate the end of the A-levels at Tanya’s Night Club in Worcester with Kate, Ewan and some of his friends. Dad was nestling little ferny claw plants into the chinks between the rocks. ‘So,’ he waved his trowel, ‘what’s the verdict?’
‘Very nice,’ said Mum.
Right away, I knew she knew something we didn’t.
Dad nodded. ‘The boys didn’t do a bad job, eh?’
‘Oh, not bad at all.’
‘Best garden pond in the village it’ll be, Mr Broadwas said, once my shrubbery’s got a grip. Have a pleasant tootle round Tewkesbury, did we?’
‘Very pleasant, thank you,’ said Mum, as a tubby man with joke-shop sideburns trundled a large, white, lidded wheelie bucket round from the front of the house. ‘Mr Suckley, this is my husband, and that’s my son, Jason. Michael, this is Mr Suckley.’
Mr Suckley gave me and Dad a ‘How do’.
‘That’s the pond,’ Mum said to him, ‘please, Mr Suckley.’
Mr Suckley wheeled his bucket to the edge of the pond, balanced it there, and raised a sort of gate. Water sluiced out, slooshing with it a pair of enormous fish. Not the tiddlers you get in plastic bags from the Goose Fair. These beauts’d’ve cost a packet. ‘The Japanese revere carp as living treasures,’ Mum told us. ‘They’re symbols of a long life. They live for decades. They’ll probably outlive us.’
Dad’s nose looked very, very out of joint.
‘Oh, I know your for
k-lift gizmo was an unexpected expense, Michael. But think what we saved by using granite instead of marble. And surely the best pond in the village should have the best fish? What’s the Japanese name for them again, Mr Suckley?’
Mr Suckley emptied the last dribbles into the pond. ‘Koi.’
‘Koi.’ Mum peered into the pond like a mother. ‘The long gold one’s “Moby”. The mottled one we can call “Dick”.’
Today’d been so full of stuff that Mr Suckley should’ve been the end. But after tea I was playing darts in the garage when the back door slammed open. ‘Get a-way!’ Mum’s shriek was mangled with anger. ‘GET AWAY, you dirty great BRUTES!’
I ran to the back garden in time to catch Mum hurling her Prince Charles and Princess Diana mug at a gigantic heron, perched on the rockery. Tea floated out like liquid in zero gravity as the missile passed through a belt of sunlit gnats. The mug exploded when it hit the rockery. The heron raised its angel’s wings. Quite unhurriedly, one mighty flap at a time, it climbed into the air. Moby was flapping in its beak. ‘PUT my FISH DOWN!’ yelled Mum. ‘You damn BIRD!’
Mr Castle’s puppety head popped over the garden fence.
Mum’s staring at the heron, appalled, as it shrinks into the lost blue.
Moby’s flipping in the Day of Judgement light.
Dad watched all this through the kitchen window. Dad isn’t laughing. He’s won.
Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
Spooks
So here I was, tying cotton to Mr Blake’s door knocker, cacking myself. The knocker was a roaring brass lion. Here be the fumbler who should be in bed, and here be the beast who bites off his head. Behind me, in the playground, Ross Wilcox was willing me to balls it up. Dawn Madden sat next to him on the climbing frame. Her beautiful head was haloed by the street lamp. Who knows what she was thinking. Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley spun on the witch’s hat, slowly, assessing my performance. On the high end of the seesaw perched Dean Moran. Pluto Noak weighed down the low end. His fag glowed. Pluto Noak’s why I was where I was. When Mr Blake’d confiscated the football after Gilbert Swinyard’d booted it into his front garden, Noak’d said, ‘If you ask me, that old git deserves a’ (he’d licked the words) ‘cherry-knocking.’ ‘Cherry-knocking’ sounds a pretty term but prettiness often papers over nastiness. Knocking on a door and running off before the victim answers sounds a harmless prank, but cherry-knocking says, Are we the wind, or kids, or have we come to murder you in your bed? It says, Of all the houses in the village, why you?
Nasty, really.
Or maybe it was Ross Wilcox’s fault. If he hadn’t snogged Dawn Madden so tonguily, I might’ve sloped off home when Pluto Noak mentioned cherry-knocking. I might not’ve bragged how Hugo my cousin does it by tying one end of a reel of cotton to the knocker and then drives his victim crazy by knocking from a safe distance.
Wilcox’d tried to snuff the idea out. ‘They’d see the thread.’
‘No,’ I counter-attacked, ‘not if you use black, and let it go slack after knocking so it’s lying along the ground.’
‘How’d you know, Taylor? You’ve never done it.’
‘I bloody have. At my cousin’s. In Richmond.’
‘Where the fuck’s Richmond?’
‘Virtually London. Ace laugh, it was, too.’
‘Should work.’ Pluto Noak spoke. ‘Trickiest part’d be tyin’ the thread in the first place.’
‘It’d take balls,’ Dawn Madden wore snakeskin jeans, ‘would that.’
‘Nah.’ I’d started it all. ‘It’s a piece of piss.’
Tying a thread to a knocker when one fumble means death is no piece of piss, however. Mr Blake had the Nine o’Clock News on. Through the open window wafted fried onion fumes and news about the war in Beirut. Rumour has it, Mr Blake’s got an air rifle. He worked at a factory in Worcester that makes mining equipment but he got laid off and hasn’t worked since. His wife died of leukaemia. There’s a son called Martin who’d be about twenty now, but one night (so Kelly Moran told us) they had a fight and Martin’s never been seen since. Someone’d got a letter from a North Sea oil rig, another from a canning factory in Alaska.
So anyway, Pluto Noak, Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley bottled out so they were pretty damn impressed when I said I’d loop the thread. But my fingers were fumbling one simple granny knot.
Done.
My throat’d gone dry.
Dead carefully, I lowered the knocker on to the brass lion.
The crucial thing was not to flunk it now, not to panic, not to think what Mr Blake and my parents’d do to me if I got caught.
I backtracked, trying not to scuff grit on the path, unspooling the cotton.
Mr Blake’s prehistoric trees cast tigery shadows.
The gate’s rusty hinges squeaked like glass about to shatter.
Mr Blake’s window snapped open.
An air rifle went off and a pellet hit my neck.
Only when the TV noise’d deadened did I realized that the window’d snapped shut. The bullet must’ve been a flying beetle or something. ‘Should’ve seen your face when the window went,’ snargled Ross Wilcox as I got back to the climbing frame. ‘Shat your cacks, it looked like!’
But no one else joined in.
Pete Redmarley flobbed. ‘Least he did it, Wilcox.’
‘Aye,’ Gilbert Swinyard gobbed, ‘took guts, did that.’
Dean Moran said, ‘Nice one, Jace.’
By telepathy I told Dawn Madden, Your spazzo boyfriend hasn’t got the nerve to do that.
‘Playtime, kiddiwinkies.’ Pluto Noak swivelled off the seesaw and Moran crashed to earth and rolled into the dirt with a squawk. ‘Gi’s the thread, Jason.’ (The first time he’d called me anything but ‘Taylor’ or ‘you’.) ‘Let’s pay wankchops a call.’
Warm with this praise, I handed him the spool.
‘Let us go first, Ploot,’ said Pete Redmarley, ‘it is my cotton.’
‘Yer lyin’ thief, it ain’t yours, yer nicked it off yer old biddy.’ Pluto Noak unspooled more slack as he climbed up the slide. ‘Anyway, it takes technique, does this. Ready?’
We all nodded, and took up innocent stances.
Pluto Noak wound the thread in, then delicately tugged.
The brass lion knocker answered. One, two, three.
‘Skill,’ mumbled Pluto Noak. That skill splashed on me.
A blunt axe of silence’d killed every noise in the playground.
Pluto Noak, Swinyard and Redmarley looked at each other.
Then they looked at me too, like I was one of them.
‘Yeah?’ Mr Blake appeared in a rectangle of yellow. ‘Hello?’
This, I thought as my blood went hotter and waterier, could backfire so shittily.
Mr Blake stepped forward. ‘Anyone there?’ His gaze settled on us.
‘Nick Yew’s dad,’ Pete Redmarley spoke like we were in the middle of a discussion, ‘is selling Tom’s old Suzuki scrambler to Grant Burch.’
‘Burch?’ Wilcox snorted. ‘What’s he sellin’ it to that cripple for?’
‘Breakin’ an arm,’ Gilbert Swinyard told him, ‘don’t make no one a cripple, not in my book.’
Wilcox didn’t quite dare answer back. To my delight.
All through this, Mr Blake’d been firing us this evil stare. Finally he went back in.
Pluto Noak snorted as the door closed. ‘Fuckin’ fierce or what?’
‘Fierce,’ echoed Dean Moran.
Dawn Madden bit her bottom lip and sneaked me this naked smile.
I’ll tie fifty threads, I thought-telegrammed her, to fifty door knockers.
‘Dozy old fucker,’ mumbled Ross Wilcox. ‘Must be blind as a bloody bat. He treaded on the thread, most like.’
‘Why,’ Gilbert Swinyard answered, ‘would he even be lookin’
for a thread?’
‘Gi’us a go now, Ploot,’ said Pete Redmarley.
‘Nokey-dokey, Sneaky Pete. Too much of a laugh, this. Round two?’
Mr Blake’s knocker knocked once, twice—
Immediately the door flew open and the cotton reel was jerked out of Pluto Noak’s hand. It clattered over the tarmac under the swing.
‘Right, you—’ Mr Blake snarled at the non-existent cherry-knocker who wasn’t cowering, terrified, on his doorstep, or anywhere else.
I had one of those odd moments when now isn’t now.
Mr Blake marched round his garden, trying to flush out a hiding kid.
‘So how much,’ Gilbert Swinyard asked Pete Redmarley in a loud, innocent voice, ‘are the Yews askin’ Old Burcher for that scrambler?’
‘Dunno,’ said Pete Redmarley. ‘Couple of hundred, prob’ly.’
‘Two hundred and fifty,’ Moran piped up. ‘Kelly heard Isaac Pye tell Badger Harris in the Black Swan.’
Mr Blake walked up to his gate. (I tried to keep my face half hidden and hoped he didn’t know me.) ‘Giles Noak. Might have known. Want to spend another night in Upton cop shop, do you?’
Wilcox’d grass me off, for sure, if the police got involved.
Pluto Noak leant over the side of the slide and dropped a spit-bomb.
‘You cocky little shite, Giles Noak.’
‘Talkin’ to me? I thought yer wanted that kid who just banged yer knocker and ran off.’
‘Bullshit! It was you!’
‘Flew back up here from yer door in one giant leap, did I?’
‘So who is it?’
Pluto Noak did a fuck you chuckle. ‘Who is it what?’
‘Right!’ Mr Blake took one step back. ‘I’m calling the police!’
Pluto Noak did this devastating imitation of Mr Blake. ‘“Officer? Roger Blake here. Yes, well-known unemployed child-beater of Black Swan Green. Listen, this boy keeps knocking on my door and running away. No, I don’t know his name. No, I haven’t actually seen him, but come and arrest him anyway. He needs a good ramming with a shiny hard truncheon! I insist on doing it myself.”’