“Hey, psycho-boy, lost your pills?”
I looked up, but still fished around with my left hand. A couple of kids from my year loomed over me. Steve Wilson was one of the cool kids, if by cool you meant vain, shallow and asinine. His hair was greased into a quiff, and his tie-knot was the size of a baby’s head. His friend was called Gamble or Grimble or some such, and he looked the same, with the minor handicap of a spray of acne like a meteor shower across his cheeks.
“I’m looking for your soul. I heard I could find it in the trash.”
Wilson stared at me with a perplexed expression on his handsome, dumb face. “What the hell does that mean? If it’s supposed to be funny, then it’s not, and if it’s supposed to be clever, then it’s not. But if supposed to be lame, then you hit the jackpot.”
Grimble or Gamble or whatever laughed through his nose, squirting a little snot.
On consideration, I thought Wilson was probably right. But I didn’t care, because my fingers touched something hard and thin and long at the bottom of the bin. I reached round, found another and pulled them both out.
“What you got there, weirdo?” said Wilson, though this time there was genuine interest in his voice.
“Text me and I’ll let you know,” I replied as I walked out, hiding what I’d found under my blazer.
“You haven’t even got a phone, nut-job,” Wilson called after me as I swung the door shut in his face.
I went straight out into the Upper School playground. This was the set-up: the front of the school was for years seven–nine, the back of the school was for years ten and eleven. The Sixth Formers could go wherever they wanted, but usually just hung out in their common room. Any Lower School kid who strayed into the Upper School playground would be lucky to escape with nothing worse than a debagging, and any older kid who ventured into the realm of the Lower School would be mobbed and pelted and harried until he got the hell out.
But the side of the school was different. It was called the Interzone. It was a no man’s land, where, in theory, anyone could go. It was also a dark and dangerous place. There were long fissures in between different school buildings where the sun never shone, folds and wrinkles in the school’s skin, where lurkers lurked and shirkers shirked. This was where you’d find the goths and the emos, the psycho kids and the skins, the demented and the tormented. There was the corner where the Lardies ate their pies and currant buns. White-faced kids would gather round a Ouija board, or consult with some fake witch about love charms or wart cures. And deep in the dark heart of the Interzone was the foul and sordid alley where the Bacon-heads sought oblivion in their highly-processed, pig-flavoured drug of choice.
It hadn’t always been like this. Before the New Regime, the Interzone was nothing more and nothing less than the side of the school. But Shankley’s crackdown had forced all the seediest elements – as well as the innocent outsiders, anyone odd or freaky or just plain different – into that murky world. There they were left, boiled and sweated down to a toxic concentration, like tree-frog poison.
I began to walk towards the Interzone, but the Interzone wasn’t my destination.
I had a pair of chopsticks in my hand with the initials L. M. on them, and I was headed for Chinatown.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHINATOWN
CHINATOWN wasn’t part of the Interzone, but it was as close as the “real” world came to that place of dreams and nightmares. Chinatown was the corner of the schoolyard bordering the Interzone. It wasn’t like they had an ornamental arch there or dancing dragons. In fact, it was no more than four concrete benches, but it was where the Chinese kids hung out, and someone had given it the name and the name had stuck.
This wasn’t my first visit to Chinatown. And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen these chopsticks.
I’d noticed Ling Mei on my very first day at the school. I’d moved from out of town, and I hadn’t met anyone Chinese before. She sat two rows in front of me, and even from behind I could tell she had something. Then she dropped her pencil, and somehow it rolled back to me, even though it should, by all the laws of physics, have rolled forwards. I bent and picked it up, and she reached back and smiled with her lips together, then looked down and then up again, still smiling. She was simultaneously demure and innocent, and hopelessly exotic. Her hair, so densely black you’d think it came from the heart of a dead star, was yet light enough to move in a breeze you could barely feel. The soft caramel of her skin was utterly flawless, so perfect, in fact, that you craved something – a mole or a freckle – to stop the heat of its perfection from burning your eyes out.
But I was twelve, and I could no more sweet-talk a girl than I could milk a yak. So it was two years before I finally asked her out for a coffee, and that was only because of the onions. We were working at the same bench in the domestic science class. We were making a Spanish omelette, and had to chop onions. Even then I hadn’t said much, though my chest was beating as if some kind of big bird was in there, trying to flap its way out.
Then the onions got to work on our eyes. Soon there were tears streaming down our cheeks, and that seemed to release a heck of a lot of emotion, as if the causal chain between feeling and physical effect had been reversed. We were laughing – laughing at each other, laughing for each other – with the tears falling off our faces and splashing onto the work surface. And I saw something that gave me hope, and with hope, courage. I saw her teeth. Before that day I’d only ever seen that closed-mouth smile of hers, the one she’d blown my way on the first day of school. But now the lips opened, and there they were. White, of course. White and small and lovely. But one tooth – at the front on the left, in between the incisor and the canine – crossed over another. Crossed over it by the merest millimetre, but crossed just the same. She was not perfect. She was something beyond perfect, because utter perfection engenders within itself the flaw of unattainability.
“You drink coffee?” I asked, wiping the wet off my cheek.
She gave the tiniest little shake of her head, and suddenly her face was serious. There was a pause of maybe a second into which you could have fitted a couple of full-length operas, right down to the fat lady singing. Then the smile again – the one without the teeth.
“Tea.”
I saw Ling Mei now, sitting with the other kids in Chinatown. They were eating noodles with chopsticks out of cardboard cartons, except for Ling Mei, who was using a plastic canteen fork. The moment I saw her, that bird came back to life in my chest, as I knew it would, flapping and squawking, like there was a fox in there chasing it. But today I wasn’t here to moon around, yearning and dreaming. This wasn’t one of the rainy nights I spent leaning against the lamppost outside her house, with my collar up and my hat brim down, hoping to prove my worth by sheer bloody perseverance, until her dad would come out with their Jack Russell terrier snarling at the end of its rope, and tell me to clear off before he called the police.
No, today I was here to find out why Ling Mei’s chopsticks had hit the bin just after the stick insects had fallen like dry hail on the tiles of the toilet floor.
She turned just before I reached her. The smile flickered, then died, and she bent back to her noodles.
“Hey, Ling Mei.”
I was too close to ignore.
“Hi,” she said, as if I were a complete stranger.
I sensed the collective hostility of the group. Four guys and two other girls. I knew a couple of them by name. One I knew too well. Jimmy Tan had gone out with Ling Mei after me. He hated my guts. His guts I could take or leave.
“Not seen you use a fork before,” I said.
“You think I don’t know how?”
“I think you can do anything you set your mind to.”
“So why do you care how I eat?”
Ling Mei sounded bitter. She sounded hurt. And I couldn’t blame her, not after what I’d done. I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Look, Ling, I’m sorry—”
“This mental ca
se bothering you, Ling Mei?”
That was Jimmy Tan.
“Butt out, Bruce,” I said, without looking at him.
“It’s OK, Jimmy,” said Ling Mei. “I can handle this.” Then she looked at me again, her face like an angel with bad news. “Just tell me what you want, John. Then go, please. Just go.”
I took the chopsticks out of my pocket.
“I found these.”
Her eyes opened wide, but she didn’t say anything.
“You hear about the stick insects?”
I guessed that word had gotten round. It’s what word did, at our school.
She nodded, and a tiny cloud passed over her face.
“I was there when it happened. In one of the cubicles.” Suddenly I wasn’t happy with the picture that might have formed in her beautiful head. “I mean just sitting out maths, like you do.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Yeah, well, we can’t all be geniuses. Anyway, I heard someone dump the bodies. Then whoever did it threw these in the bin. That’s where I found them.”
I handed the chopsticks to her.
She looked at them for a moment, then up at me, as what I was saying sank in. Her face found an expression I’d never seen there before. It was one part outrage, one part anger, one part huge sadness.
“What are you saying? That I did this? You’re saying I killed those poor creatures? With my chopsticks? You’re a—” And then she said some bad words; first some bad English words, and then, when she’d used them up, some bad Chinese words.
Before I had the chance to say anything back, I sensed a movement off to the side. It was Jimmy. He was reaching behind his back. I knew what was coming next: I was going to be staring at two pieces of heavy wood, joined by a short length of chain – a nunchaku, called the numchuck by idiots. In either case, a serious piece of hardware. I was guessing that Jimmy’s nunchaku would be Okinawa style: instead of being rounded like a broom handle, the wood was octagonal, the sharp edges designed to inflict maximum damage.
I took a step back and got into my fighting stance. Then I saw something glinting in the fingers of another of the Chinese kids. Tony Yu. We had a couple of classes together. He was OK. OK, that is, when he wasn’t holding a hira-shuriken, better known as a Ninja death star.
This wasn’t looking good.
“I’m not here to fight you, Jimmy,” I said. “But I will, if I must.”
And then I noticed that the expressions on their faces changed.
“He thinks he’s Jackie Chan,” said someone.
Another kid sliced the air with a couple of comedy karate chops.
Laughter. Hard, mocking laughter. Maybe they were hiding their fear. Maybe they were just laughing.
Then from his backpack Jimmy pulled out, not a nunchaku, but a banana. The hira-shuriken in Tony Yu’s hand turned into a coin that he tossed in the air, caught and tossed again.
Suddenly my head hurt, and I had that feeling you get sometimes, you know, like when you put a T-shirt on back to front, and realize that something’s wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it.
“OK, get lost, you’re putting me off my dessert,” said Jimmy. And then he threw the banana peel in my face.
That was enough. I’d taken a lot of crap today. It was time to hand some out.
“STOP!”
It was Ling Mei.
She was talking to the Chinese kids. “He can’t help it. He’s been … he’s not…”
Then she swivelled and she was suddenly right in my face.
“My chopsticks were stolen from my bag this morning. You get that? Stolen! I had nothing to do with the death of those things, nothing. If you ever thought I did, ever thought I could, then it means you never knew me, never cared for me, never – never…” And then she trailed off, because she knew that if she carried on, then she would lose control completely, and the world would see her weep.
I thought about taking Ling Mei’s hand, but something told me the time for holding hands was gone.
“Look,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady, “if I don’t find out who did this, the Shank is going to cancel the Wiz, and tell the Queens it was down to me.”
Jimmy laughed and drew his hand across his throat.
“You want white or red roses on your grave?” said Tony.
I ignored them. “I never thought you had anything to do with it, Ling Mei. I just wanted to know who could have taken the chopsticks. It’s the only clue I’ve got.”
She looked at me, her beautiful face red and puffy from the suppressed tears. The fire of hatred had burned out, as hatred that comes from lost love always will.
“Anyone in my registration class could have taken them. Or anyone who bumped into me in the corridor afterwards.”
Great. That narrowed it down to pretty well the entire population of the school.
“You should go now,” she added.
I looked at Tony Yu and Jimmy Tan and the other Chinese kids, their faces either blank or hostile or scornful.
She was right.
I went.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A DANGEROUS LADY
SO, I’d gained a faceful of banana skin and lost my dignity. But that’s the truth of Chinatown: you take something away, you leave something behind. And you never know who’s going to get the best of the bargain.
I sat on a bench and put my collar up against the cold wind. Then I fished around inside my brain, hoping to pull out a good one. My only lead had been the chopsticks, but it had melted like a prawn cracker on my tongue. Ling Mei had nothing to do with this, and she couldn’t help me train a spotlight on the perp.
What did that leave?
A football rolled towards the bench. I punted it back to the players, without getting up.
Nothing.
No, not nothing. I still had a pocket full of stick insects, and I knew where they had come from. I got up and walked back to the main school building.
“Where you going?”
A hand was on my chest, pushing me back.
“I’m doing a job for the Shank.”
“If you mean ‘Mr Shankley’, say Mr Shankley.”
There were two prefects on duty at all the doors. These two punks were just going through the motions. One had fat lips and goofy teeth and looked like he was auditioning for the role of Village Idiot. The other, the talker, stank of cheap cigarettes and urine. Cheap urine. He’d obviously just dipped into the Interzone for a smoke, and maybe sat in a puddle of something unpleasant. Maybe he’d brought his own puddle with him.
I pulled the Warrant out of my pocket and shoved it in the prefect’s face.
“Tell it to the Chief,” I said, and walked through them like they weren’t there.
I trudged up the stairs and along corridors ripe with the tang of unwashed kids, until I reached the science department.
I looked through the toughened glass window of the biology lab. Mrs Maurice was right there at her desk. She looked like she was marking papers. Her hair was up and she had on her reading glasses. There was a cardigan draped over her shoulders and a pencil in her mouth. Only the shiny apple was missing to complete the picture of the perfect schoolmistress.
But the image was as misleading as a party hat on a panther. Mrs Maurice was deadly, and I gulped twice before I knocked on that door.
“Come,” she said, without looking up. I knew why she did that, and it had nothing to do with her being engrossed in the biology paper she was marking. You see, Mrs Maurice looking up was a thing to behold, a thing of rehearsed, theatrical accomplishment that could be almost operatic in its impact. And she wasn’t going to waste it until her audience had settled.
So, it wasn’t until I was in the room that she put down her pencil and slowly unfurled herself. In one sinuous, silky movement, she slid off her glasses and shook out her lustrous hair. As her face rose, she slowly opened those huge, dark eyes. So slowly, in fact, you’d think they’d never get there. And in a way you
’d be right, because her eyes always did look as if they were in the act of closing again, as if she was in the first dreamy stages of a kiss.
And if you think that all makes Mrs Maurice sound like a honey, you’d be right. And dead wrong.
Despite the fact that she had the power to make the world see her in soft focus, there were moments when you got a glimpse of reality. If she waited a little too long in between Botox injections, the lines around her mouth and eyes would reappear. At the end of a long day, her skin would lose its lustre and her eyes their depth. And one girl swore blind that she’d once seen a millimetre of a grey hair that was almost white at the roots.
That girl might have been lying, but even if it were true, Mrs Maurice was still an awful lot of woman for one kid to handle.
“Hello, Johnny,” she said, making my name sound slightly obscene, the way she always did. I’d been in her class a couple of years before and she knew me pretty well. “It’s been such an awfully long time since I had you up in my lab.”
I coughed. I blushed. I coughed and blushed some more.
“I’m here on business,” I said. Actually, what I said was “I’m here on b–b–business.”
“Business?” Mrs Maurice smiled the word rather than said it. “What sort of business?”
I walked the rest of the way to her desk.
“This sort of business.”
I emptied Funt’s hanky full of dead stick insects over the exam paper she was marking.
She was not an easy lady to shock.
“Oh, I was wondering when they would turn up again.”
“You knew they were missing?”
She turned her pout up to eleven, and said in a little-girl-playing-with-dolls voice: “Of course I knew they were missing. They were my babies.”
It was creepy and cute in about equal measure.
“When did they go walkabout?”
“I really couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t get in until late today. By the time I came up from the staffroom it was, let me see” – she sucked thoughtfully on her pencil, and I fought to stop my eyes from going crossed – “half past eleven—”