Kill you. The kind of thing we said all the time. I’ll kill you. Hadn’t Tierney said it before? You’re dead. Something like that. He didn’t mean it. And anyway, there was a queue, right?
Strawberry Girl
Stan went one way home, and I went another. I thought I’d take a shortcut across the low, damp, tussocky field by the side of the school—the gypsy field, it was usually called, because the gypsies turned up there sometimes, and stayed for a while, and then left. It was always worth having a look around after they’d gone. Not because there’d be anything valuable left behind, because that wasn’t the gypsy way, but occasionally there would be something interesting. A dead animal, or a burned chair, or a fridge with its insides all gone.
THAT WAS ALL RUBBISH, YOU KNOW. THE INTERNET STUFF.
Rubbish? Which bit? The bit that gave me a decent chance of living?
A LITTLE LEARNING IS A DANGEROUS THING.
Dangerous to you.
I KEEP TELLING YOU, WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER. YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME.
Yeah, one for all, all for one. Together we stand, divided we fall. Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. You’re just scared because Dr. Jones is going to cut you out and slice you up and eat you with a fine Chianti.
I expected a quick comeback: mine wasn’t the kind of tumor to take things lying down. But nothing.
Jack?
Still nothing.
Jack? C’mon.
Silence. Seemed like I’d really got to him.
Okay, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it.
Finally, his tone one of wounded dignity, Jack managed to speak: ARE WE NOT HURT WITH THE SAME WEAPONS, SUBJECT TO THE SAME DISEASES, HEALED BY THE SAME MEANS? IF YOU PRICK US DO WE NOT BLEED? IF YOU POISON US DO WE NOT DIE?
Like I said, I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings. But you started it.
DID NOT.
Did too.
And that was that, but I could tell Jack was still sulking. Although, to be fair, that whole confronting-your-own-mortality thing can do that to a tumor. Or a boy.
I was trudging along, following the path by the stream, leaning into the fine rain, which was probably causing all kinds of grief to the goshawk on my head, when I saw someone coming from the opposite direction. I knew who it was straightaway. Something about the way she looked like she wished that she wasn’t there at all, as if she aspired to invisibility. And then there was that hair, finer than the fine rain, pale and lost and beautiful. And she saw me, and I felt her stiffen with surprise and shame and something else.
GOD’S TEETH, NOT HER. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE HER?
Oh, welcome back. And shut up. I’m not in the mood for your noise.
But my heart was in my mouth, and I didn’t know why.
BLOODY OBVIOUS. NOT THAT THAT MAKES IT ANY LESS STUPID.
I’d never seen Amanda Something out of school before, didn’t know she even lived around here. She was wearing a plain brown dress that almost had a religious look about it. The sort of thing a trendy nun would wear, the sort who does work in the community, visiting prisons, that kind of thing.
If she kept coming, there would be no avoiding a meeting. I think she was contemplating turning around and walking away in the opposite direction, but she knew that that would be even more embarrassing than carrying on. And so, after a second, she carried on, and we approached each other. She was looking down at her shoes. They were as uncool as mine, but in a more plodding, old-fashioned way. If you hit a six-year-old child with one of my shoes (the standard measure for shoe clunkiness), you could probably make it cry, but it would be hard to do any real damage. If you hit the same child with one of Amanda’s, you would probably break its skull, and most likely death would ensue. En-shoe. Ha!
And at the last second she looked up. We were a meter apart. She had makeup covering her birthmark.
“Hello,” she said, and it looked like it might have been hard work.
It took me a few seconds to think of a clever response, but when it came it was a classic.
“Hello.”
She was blushing. I was blushing. It was a blush-a-thon, a blush-off, hardcore blush-on-blush action. So, we had something in common. But I couldn’t leave things at just hello and blush.
“Do you live around here? I haven’t seen you before. Here, I mean. I’ve seen you at school. You’re called Amanda, aren’t you?”
That all came out a bit too quickly, say eighty-five miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. But she smiled, and both of our blushes began to fade.
“Yes. I mean no. My name is Amanda, but I don’t really live here.” Her voice was very quiet, but precise. “I was just going past on the bus and . . . I thought I’d get off. Don’t know why.”
Did she mean that she’d spotted me from the bus, and got off just to meet me? But then she’d seemed surprised to see me, surprised and dismayed. Sometimes the more you think about people the stranger they become. Sooner or later you always hit a layer of mystery.
“I know you’re called Hector Brunty. And I know that you’re kind . . . that you did a kind thing, once.” And then, after a moment, she added, “You look different,” and the blush came back. “Your hair. I like it.” And she looked down at her clunky shoes again.
“Thanks. Um, yours is nice too.”
I CAN’T LISTEN TO THIS. LOOK, HECK, WE’VE GOT TO DITCH THIS GIRL. LOOK AT HER! SHE’S A—
I shut him out.
Amanda gave a little laugh and pushed back some strands that had fallen in front of her face.
There was another silence, and if you think this sounds like there were too many silences and that this must have been terrible, then you think wrong, because it wasn’t. It was so pent up with things, feelings, I suppose you’d have to call them, that this silence, this space, was about the most exciting thing in the world.
“What were you doing here?” she asked.
“I don’t live far away. And I came with Stan—you know Stan, little guy, my best friend—to have a look at—” The great big willy. Don’t say that, don’t even think of saying that. “Er, just to hang out.”
“Where are you off to now?”
“Nowhere. Nowhere special, I mean. Want to come?”
Amanda smiled and nodded, but didn’t say anything. And then we set off across the field away from the path and the stream. The ground was uneven with little mounds and troughs and soggy places that were almost like quicksand, and Amanda’s foot went down into one of the troughs, and I put my hand out to steady her and our fingers touched, and then we were holding hands and her hand in mine felt like the greatest thing that there could be, and thank God Jack T. had crept off somewhere, because I didn’t want him around to see this, didn’t want to listen to his comments.
And then it was my turn to have my foot sink down into something, and Amanda smiled at me as if I’d done it to make her feel less clumsy, but something went crunch and for a second I thought I’d broken my ankle, except it didn’t hurt very much, or at all, really, so we both crouched down to have a look at what had crunched.
My foot had gone through the turf overhanging a cavity in the soil. I pulled it out of the hole, and moved the grass aside so we could see.
Something white. Pottery, I thought. No, bones. White bones. Broken white bones.
For another horrific moment I thought that my first instinct was correct and my leg was smashed to bits, but of course my leg was right there, still perfectly fine.
“What is it?” asked Amanda, with a little shudder of horror. She pressed herself into me, as if I might be the one to save her from bones.
“I think it’s an animal.”
A BRACELET OF BRIGHT HAIR ABOUT THE BONE.
So Jack was still there, watching. Don’t know what he meant, though. There was no hair left on these cold bones.
I found a stick and had a bit of a poke around. The bones were pure white and as dry as chalk. Old bones. Ribs. Legs. Small bones. Amanda was close b
eside me, her strawberry hair touching my face. Her lips had parted, and she was breathing through her mouth. I moved some more grass with the stick and kicked aside the heavy soil and found the creature’s head.
It was a dog, some kind of little dog.
WEBSTER WAS MUCH POSSESSED BY DEATH, AND SAW THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN.
Lipless, it grinned at me, and that should have been creepy, but it was really just kind of sad, as if the little dog was trying to be friendly, even in its death and decay, waiting, as the years passed, to wag its tail, fetch a stick. To play dead.
And then I saw something that really was creepy, and Amanda saw it too, because she gasped and pulled away from my side, and put her hands to her face. It was an arrow. A short arrow, the kind they use in crossbows. Thick and heavy, with a steel point. A bolt, that was the word, and it was in the neck of the little dog. Someone must have shot the poor creature and left it here to die. I stood up, but I couldn’t escape from the bones and the grin and crossbow bolt and I had to fight the urge to sob, but then Amanda took my hand and pulled me away.
THE WOUNDS INVISIBLE THAT LOVE’S KEEN ARROWS MAKE.
Shut up, please.
AS YOU LIKE IT.
“It’s really raining quite hard now,” said Amanda, and we ran to the bus shelter, still holding hands, and we sat on the seats, which were specially designed to stop you getting comfortable in case you felt like moving in. And there we chatted for a while, with the rain drumming its fingers impatiently on the asbestos roof, and we talked about the bones of the dog and the arrow in its throat and it brought us together in the way that a shared experience of something fatal can, and I nearly told her about my head stuff, but I didn’t, because I thought it was too early to lay that kind of heavy crap on someone.
And there was something else I didn’t tell her about. I didn’t tell her about my hot date with Uma Upshaw, and you can probably guess why that was.
“Do you want to go somewhere else?” I asked after about an hour. I knew it was about an hour because I looked at my watch, but if you’d asked me to guess I would have said about ten minutes.
“I should get home, really. My mum and dad will wonder what’s happened to me.”
Three buses had already gone past, slowing as the drivers saw us waiting, then accelerating away with a belch of black diesel smoke when we didn’t move.
“What are they like?”
Amanda rolled her eyes.
“A pain. They both work at the university. So we haven’t got a telly.”
“That’s terrible. Even we have a telly, you know, just a basic one. What do you do instead?”
“We read, mostly. Sometimes my parents read plays out loud and I have to join in.”
“Man, that’s awful.”
“Not so bad, really.”
“You probably play chess and bridge as well. Or sing madrigals together.”
She laughed: “We’re not that weird.”
So she said, but I still guessed there was a madrigal or two in her past.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “My mum had a difficult time with me, so they decided not to have any more. What about you?”
“Nah, just me and Mum. I haven’t got a dad. Not one here, I mean. Everyone’s got a dad somewhere.”
Amanda didn’t ask anything else about my family, but I think we both came away with the idea that we were equally strange, in that respect.
Another bus trundled by. There were too many buses today.
“I’ll get the next one.”
While we were waiting I asked her what she was doing tomorrow.
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to meet up again? Just, you know, hang out for a bit.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Shall we meet here?”
She nodded again. “What time?”
“Whenever you like.”
PLEASE SAY NEVER.
“Three o’clock. My parents like us to have lunch together.”
In the ten minutes until the next bus came, we talked about music. (She liked classical, but also some olden-days stuff like the Beatles, and she said the greatest albums were, in order, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Revolver by the Beatles, and Forever Changes by Love. I wasn’t sure if the last one was real, or some kind of code. I said that I liked the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand but, to be honest, I was winging it, and I was relieved when the bus came and saved me from having to do any explaining.) When the doors sighed open, Amanda put one foot on the step-thingy, and then turned and gave me a kiss. Not the sort of deep tonsil-tickler I’d had from Uma Upshaw, but infinitely more wonderful.
The Dark knight
Returns
I opened the door and knew straightaway that things weren’t right. It was the laughter.
Clytemnestra.
I’d forgotten about her.
I went into the living room and there she was, lying on the sofa wearing some sort of flowing black membranous garment attached at both her wrists and her ankles. She looked like a crashed pterodactyl. Mum was in the good chair and there was a bottle of wine open between them and the spent husk of a second lying next to it. As soon as Clytemnestra saw me she flapped and writhed and finally managed to stand up.
I was transfixed by her hands, which were brown and wrinkly, but tipped by lethal red talons. Her hair was dyed Goth black, and there was a ring of black something around her eyes.
“Hector, Hector,” she said in a moaning, sighing way, like a dead thing, coming towards me with her wings outstretched, her talons twitching. “Come embrace me, my poor, good, beautiful boy.”
Every instinct told me to run, to hide.
“Hi,” I said. “Hello, Mum.”
The second bit was over Clytemnestra’s shoulder as she hugged me. I expected at any moment to feel her talons sink in to extract my life force.
“Your mother and I have been having a long talk.” Clytemnestra now had me firmly gripped at arm’s length. She was looking deep into my eyes, like a hypnotist. I felt myself growing weaker by the second. Soon I’d be a zombie, willing to fulfill her every wish. I had to fight loose, had to escape. “And now so are we.”
It was useless. Resistance was futile. The end was near.
“I’ve made some soup,” said Mum. “Moroccan bean.”
The next hour was pretty grim. Clytemnestra asked me all sorts of questions about how I was and how I felt and all that kind of stuff, never letting her eyes drift from my face for even a second. After the questions (my answers—”I’m all right,” “I feel okay,” “No, not sad at all, really, can’t complain, you know how it is”—obviously weren’t the ones she wanted, but I wasn’t going to go sharing my feelings with any old vampire) came a load of talk about how hard it had been on Christabel, and how we must all stick together. Mum and she carried on drinking the wine, and I had some soup, which wasn’t bad, actually, in a Moroccan beany kind of way, and, let me tell you now, there are worse ways than that when it comes to my mum’s cooking, and, for that matter, beans in general.
It was only later that I realized why, in fact, it wasn’t bad.
Finally I managed to escape up to my room. This was no time for the enlightened, progressive world of Watchmen, or even the aestheticized utopianism of the Justice League. No, this situation needed the near-fascist vigilante. It had to be The Dark Knight Returns. Batman has been in retirement for ten years. A gang called the Mutants has taken over Gotham City. The police are corrupt, the streets are meaner than a polecat with a toothache, and the old, familiar villains are more psychotic than ever. So out comes the cape. But Batman is out not just to right wrongs: he’s here to reassert his dominance, to show the world that he is still a player. It’s brutal stuff, especially when Batman takes on the leader of the Mutants, and his job isn’t so much to defeat as to humiliate him. It ends with a death, a funeral, a heartbeat.
Once I’d got that out of my system, I started to t
hink about Amanda. And about Uma.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. AND WE ALL KNOW WHO THE BEAST IS.
She isn’t a beast.
NO, NOT A BEAST. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT SHE IS. YOU’VE JUST BEEN READING ABOUT THEM. SHE’S A MUTANT.
“Shut up!” I’d been trying to internalize all my conversations with Jack since the moment of humiliation with Uma, but now my anger took over.
I CAN’T, I WON’T SHUT UP. THIS IS TOO IMPORTANT. SHE’S A FREAK. WE CAN’T HAVE HER. WE MUST TRY AGAIN WITH UMA. SHE’S THE ONE.
“She isn’t the one.”
I GIVE UP.
“Good.”
YOUR FUNERAL.
“I know it is.”
Silence.
SORRY, I DIDN’T MEAN . . . IT CAME OUT WRONG.
“And you seem to forget about the fact that my funeral means your funeral as well. Unless you know something I don’t, and you’re planning to beam out or something, you know, just before we crash. I can see it now. The shuttle’s heading into a black hole, or maybe a star about to go supernova, and we see the sweat on the pilot’s forehead, and someone screams ‘Pull her up, Steve,’ because, well, the hero’s always called Steve, unless it’s a made-up science-fiction kind of name like Svoron 17, and then we cut back to an outside shot of the shuttle, now just a black spot against the orange of the star, and next there’s a massive explosion, or maybe it’s just a little blip against the background, because sometimes that can look pretty cool in a bleak, how-small-a-thing-is-man way, and we think he’s a goner, and you get some reaction shots of the team back on the mother ship, and one of them’s probably Steve’s girlfriend, who’s half-Mulvanian, and they have four breasts, but as she is only half-Mulvanian, she has three, but anyway then when they’re all despairing (the crew, not the breasts, because not even Mulvanians have sentient breasts; for those you have to go to the warrior maidens of Kroyttzer VII), they pick up the bleep bleep bleep of the distress signal, and it’s all okay because he got out in the escape pod at the last second.”