“Roth, yes.” I was trembling.
“Tell him something from me. Tell him this. Tell him Goddo’s going to kill him. Understand that?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t forget?”
“No.”
“I’m going to help you remember.”
And then Goddo opened the jaws of the dog and clamped them around my face, so I had to breathe in the bloody stinking death of it, breathe it down into my lungs. And Goddo scraped the teeth across my cheeks.
TWELVE
“Oh my God.”
I hadn’t been expecting Maddy Bray to answer the door.
“I’m here to see … Shane said to come.”
Of course, I should have gone home after the incident with the Temple Moor kids. So why hadn’t I? Partly because I wasn’t thinking right. I’d spent the time with Goddo and his mates in a state that switched between ordinary fear and absolute terror. And then my life disappeared into the mouth of the dog. And after that I was numb. I was nothing.
But it wasn’t just that my head was wrong. There was more to it. It was that I thought Shane could help me. I don’t mean with practical things—sorting my face out, dealing with Goddo and Roth, that sort of thing. I mean, I thought he could make me feel better. Stupid, really. I didn’t even know him. Didn’t know what it was he was supposed to do. But I still thought he could save me, save my soul.
“What happened to you?”
Maddy looked appalled, almost disgusted. I hadn’t realized that I was that bad.
“I had some trouble.”
“You better come in.”
Maddy was still wearing her school uniform, but she’d loosened it up and she looked good.
Shane’s house was old and tall. Everything about it, all its points and curves, seemed to reach up to the sky. It made my house, all the houses in my street and the streets around it, feel squat and low and mean, like caves.
Maddy moved to one side and I stepped into the hall. In our house the door opened into the living room. This space echoed like a church, and there were even stained-glass windows, one in the door behind me, another up over the stairs on the landing. The floor was made of little black and white tiles, and for a second I stopped, entranced by them.
“Should I take my shoes off?”
Maddy laughed, and I felt stupid. In our house you always had to take off your shoes when you came in to stop you messing up the carpet.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, and then I think she felt bad about laughing, because she gave me a nice smile, a sweet smile. “Shane’s parents don’t seem bothered. Anyway, they’re not here. We’re all in the basement. Shane’ll know what to do. With your face, I mean. Through here.”
I followed her down the hall and round into a kitchen full of polished wood and stainless steel, and then through a door and down into a new, dark world. It took me a few seconds to get used to the murk. Then I saw that there were five other kids sitting around on old chairs and a sofa. A big telly was on in the corner.
“Hey, Paul!”
Shane got up and came over to meet me, smiling. When he reached me, his smile disappeared. “What the hell happened to your face?”
The others got up as well now and gathered round. It was oddly like the scene with Goddo and his gang, except with less of a feeling that my throat was about to be slit.
So I told them the whole story. Halfway through, Shane disappeared and came back with a tin box with a red cross on it. He used cotton wool and some stinging stuff out of a bottle to clean the cuts on my face. I was sitting down on the sofa by then, and Shane sat next to me, his face full of concentration and concern.
“Looks worse than it is,” he said.
And then I explained how my face came to be like this: the dog, the head, the teeth.
“That’s gross,” said a girl with white skin and purple lips. Her lips hadn’t been purple when I’d seen her at school earlier that day.
“But its bite was worse than its bark,” said another kid, who I didn’t know. For some reason I found the remark more annoying than funny.
It was only after I’d finished the story that Shane took the time to introduce the other kids.
“Maddy you know,” he said, and then explained to the rest of the gang: “Paul was the one who got her off the hook with Mrs. You Know Who.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. Excellent!” said a boy who was really too fat and happy looking to be a freak, but he was going for it anyway.
“This is Billy,” said Shane, aiming his thumb at the happy kid, and Billy gave me a wave.
After that I met the purple-lipped girl, whose name was Serena. She didn’t seem very interested in me, or anything else for that matter. But you had to say she was pretty, whatever color her lips were. Then there was Stevie, who was eight feet tall and silent. And last of all a boy called Kirk. He was the one who’d said about the dog’s bite being worse than its bark.
Kirk looked exactly like Shane. It was uncanny. I don’t just mean he wore the same clothes as Shane; he’d somehow made his face look like Shane’s face. It wasn’t that they had the same features or anything, and when you studied really hard, you could see that they were completely different. But from some power of worship, he’d forced his features into a Shane mask.
“What’s your favorite bit?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. Did he mean my favorite bit of being attacked by the Temple Moor kids?
“Withnail, he means,” said Billy, the fat one.
“What?” I was still in the dark.
“Withnail and I—you know, the movie.”
The movie? The film, he meant, on the telly. A DVD.
“Sorry, I’ve never heard of it.”
“Oh, man, it’s brilliant,” said Billy, already halfway into a rolling laugh. “We’ve all seen it at least a thousand times. I like Uncle Monty.”
“Fatties of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chins,” said Kirk.
This was all getting really weird. I just didn’t understand what anyone was saying.
“Oh, if you haven’t seen it you’ve got a real treat,” said Shane. “The first time is always the best, but too often you don’t know what it was until it’s gone. That’s the tragedy of experience.”
Then he used the remote to flick the DVD back to the beginning, and for the next hour and a half we all watched Withnail and I. It was about two actors in the sixties or maybe seventies, who get drunk all the time and take drugs and do stupid things and it really was quite funny, or it would have been if the freaks hadn’t shouted out all the best lines.
But I had a good time. I really did. I needed something to take away the memories of the dog’s jaws, and the film did the trick. Billy was friendly, nudging me whenever a really good bit was coming up, and Shane was kind, and Maddy smiled at me twice, which made it three times now, all together. The girl with purple lips—I mean, Serena—didn’t say much, and eight-foot-tall Stevie didn’t say a word, but that was fine.
The only one I wasn’t sure about was Kirk. Everything he said had an edge to it, even if the edge was hidden. An edge of sarcasm, sometimes an edge of something worse. And whenever he spoke, he looked over at Shane to see if he’d heard it, to see if he thought what he’d said was clever. Nothing he said was aimed at me—at least I don’t think so, because sometimes it was hard to tell with him. They all knew I’d been through something serious, and it wouldn’t have looked good if he’d taken the piss. But I sensed he wanted to. I got the impression that he didn’t want an outsider in their group. And, however nice the others were, I was definitely an outsider.
I sensed something else as well. He didn’t like the attention Shane paid to me. Didn’t like it one bit.
In a quiet part of the film Kirk asked what bands I liked. I’d been dreading something like that. I knew that there were right answers and wrong answers. I sensed the attention of the whole group on me. What were the freak bands? I had a horrible
feeling that there were some bands that were fake freak, or freak lite, aimed at nine-year-old girls. If I picked one of those by mistake, it’d be a disaster. Then I had a flash of inspiration. Go ancient.
“I like the Beatles.”
Before Kirk could speak Shane said: “Hey, Paul, good choice. The White Album is my second favorite of all time.”
“Nice,” said Stevie. I think it was the first time he’d opened his mouth.
Kirk looked confused, his eyes darting from Shane to me and back. “Yeah, mine too,” he said.
It was fantastically feeble, and even Stevie laughed. Then there was a general discussion, and names flew about, and I lost track of which ones they liked and which were supposed to be lame.
It was nine o’clock when the film finished.
“I’m going to call for a pizza,” said Shane. “You want in? We’ll put some music on, hang out some more.”
“Yeah, give the boy an education,” said Kirk, in a way that sounded friendly.
I realized I was hungry, and part of me wanted to stay in this warm dark cave with my new friends. Maybe even find out some more about the music they were raving about. But they weren’t really my friends, not yet, and I was worried that I might already have outstayed my welcome, plus my brain was frazzled with all the stuff that had happened today. I needed some time to think, to sort things out in my head.
“No, I’d better be going. My parents … Thanks, though.”
“OK, that’s cool. I’m going upstairs to phone.”
I said goodbye to the others. Billy shouted something friendly, and Maddy smiled again. That made four times.
On the way up Shane said, “We didn’t really talk much about Roth, about what to do.”
“I delivered the package. I did what he said.”
“Yeah, I guess you did. But he’s … dangerous, you know.”
I laughed. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Shane pulled a serious face, and then smiled back. “Sure you have. But I don’t just mean that he’s a thug, that he can smack you around. I mean he’s dangerous … God, this sounds stupid … dangerous to your soul.” I’d never heard Shane sound so uncertain, so unsure of himself. But, strangely, that made me take what he was saying even more seriously. “Do you get me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I get you.”
“OK then,” he said, sounding relieved, but still serious. “So tomorrow, you should hang out with us. When you stick together … well, you must have noticed, his sort leave you alone.”
“Thanks,” I said, a bit embarrassed.
There was music upstairs. Shane opened a door into another huge room, and the sound poured out. It was something classical. I’d never been in a house before where people played music like that. Two adults, Shane’s mum and dad, I guessed, were sitting on a funny-looking sofa. They were drinking wine from big, tulip-shaped glasses. They both had their eyes shut. It felt wrong going in there, like walking in on people doing something private.
“Hey, Mum, can I get a pizza for the guys?”
Shane’s mother opened her eyes. They were enormous and so blue they looked inhuman, something mineral. There was a kind of stillness to her face. She looked quite a lot like Shane. She was very beautiful.
“Of course, use my credit card when you telephone—it’s in my bag in the hall.” And then those astonishing eyes turned on me. “Who’s your new friend?”
“This is Paul. He got into a bit of a scrape.”
Shane’s mother stood up and walked over to me. “So I see. And are you going?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to … got to get home.”
I blushed. I couldn’t meet those blue eyes, and I looked at my feet.
“But you’ve been hurt.” She put out her hand and touched my cheek, where the teeth had cut me.
“It’s nothing. It doesn’t even hurt. Shane put some stuff on it.”
“Well, you must let me give you some money for a taxi.”
That made me panic. I’d never been in a taxi. I didn’t know how you did it, what you said—I mean, where to go, and how much you gave the driver.
“No, honest, I’m fine, thanks, thank you,” I said, and then I basically just ran out of there, shouting a quick goodbye to Shane.
It’s raining. Did I say it was raining? No, perhaps I can’t say that it is raining. All I can say is that there are huge droplets of rain caught perfectly still in the air. I can see the shape of them, pulled long, like teardrops. I can even see some that have just hit the ground, bursting like tiny bombs. The faces around me are wet. Hair is slicked down and darkened by the rain. And then everything changes. Each drop of rain is suddenly nearer to its explosive little death. And the knife again is closer, the knife shining in the rain.
THIRTEEN
I got in at about ten. My mum and dad were watching the lottery draw on the telly. The living room had layers of stale smoke hanging in it, and Mum was holding a cigarette straight up, balancing a crooked tower of ash. I’d given up nagging at her about smoking. It just annoyed her.
I was supposed to be in by nine. My dad looked round from the sofa.
“Where you been, Paul?” He sounded like he wanted to make the effort to care, but couldn’t quite be bothered.
“Just out, Dad. Like I told you, with some friends.”
I waited for a couple of seconds to see if he said anything else, or if Mum would say something. But they were lost in the numbers on the telly.
“Is there anything to eat?”
A pause.
They didn’t even play the lottery.
“Put yourself some oven chips on,” said Mum after the last ball had bobbled into place.
I went to the kitchen and looked in the freezer compartment of the fridge. There weren’t any oven chips. There were some peas and a tray of ice. I found some cheese in the fridge, and some white sliced bread in the bread bin, so I made a sandwich. The cheese was hard and cracked, like the skin on an old man’s foot. I thought about Shane and the beautiful kitchen in his house, and about his parents listening to classical music with their eyes shut.
Dad came in to put the kettle on. “Cup of tea’ll help wash that down,” he said, nodding at my stale sandwich.
I should say more about my dad. He’s quite tall and broad, and his belly is big and solid, not the kind you can stick your fingers into. But, despite the fact that there was a lot of him, there’s something about him that makes you think he’s smaller than he is. It might be his head. He’s going badly bald, and all his features are squashed into the middle of his face.
My dad’s loud. He shouts a lot. And laughs a lot. But his laughing is really a kind of shouting. Even his ordinary talking is loud, as if everyone else is a bit deaf or too far away.
But he’s OK, my dad, he really is. Sometimes he collects me from school, either just in the wagon, which was what he called the front bit of the truck, or sometimes the whole thing, with a container hooked on the back. It was worst when the container was for something embarrassing, and it said it on the side. Once the container was full of, you know, ladies’ sanitary things, and the next day some kids sang the song from the advert at me. Another time it was for pies, and they all said it was because my dad used to eat a truckload of pies every night. Either way it was pretty embarrassing. He’d honk his horn when he saw me and shout out my name. Sometimes when I saw him waiting out at the front of the school, I’d go back inside and hang around until he’d gone.
Although I hated being collected by him in it, I actually liked it inside the wagon. The seat was worn smooth, and you felt really high up and powerful, and it was where my dad was at his happiest. All the things he used to tell me about when he was at school, and about wars from the past, he told me when he was in his wagon. We didn’t talk very much apart from then.
But, like I said, my dad’s OK really. He’s rough, but he never hits us or anything. He’ll sometimes grab me and rub his fist into the top of my head, and that hurts, but he’s only
playing. I remember when I was little he used to tickle me, but so hard it felt like he was hitting me, and I’d beg him to stop, but he never would. I mean, in my memories he doesn’t stop, but just carries on, until I think about something else.
The main thing about my dad is that he’s obsessed with war and everything to do with it. All kinds of war. The Greeks and Romans, knights, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Wellington, ships, guns, the Battle of Britain, Lancaster bombers, Stalingrad. He’s got loads of war books, as well as a whole shelf of videos we can’t play because the machine’s bust. He says there’s no point getting it fixed because everything just comes out on DVD now. But he won’t throw the videos or the machine out, and we don’t have a DVD player yet. I read the books too, because they’re the only books in the house. Except for Mum’s books, which are all about sad ladies falling in love with dark strangers. Actually she doesn’t even read those now, because she’s too tired.
Mum is the opposite of Dad. She’s small and quiet and she looks nice, and she is nice when she’s not too tired. Although she’s the opposite of him, she never disagrees with Dad. Or if she does disagree with him, then it’s only in her head and never makes it as far as her mouth. She works really hard. She’s a cleaner at the hospital, and she sometimes takes on extra jobs doing offices in town.
But I’m back in the kitchen now, with Dad.
He started looking at me in a funny way. “What happened to your face?” he said suspiciously. “Have you been fighting?”
I don’t think he’d have minded that much if I’d said yes. In fact I think he’d have loved it if I had been, and I’d made a joke of it, saying, You should see the other guy, or something like that.
“No, Dad. Not really.”
“Well, how did you get that on your face then, lad? Did it happen up at Temple Moor?” He sounded more … I don’t know … disgusted than concerned. “It looks like a bite or something.”
“It’s nothing, Dad.”