Black Swan Green (39 page)

Dean and I stared back, waiting for the answer.

‘“Son, if I’d just been fightin’ for the
vonga
, for the
money
,” he told me, “that Welsh bastard’d’ve beat me.” Fightin’ just for money weren’t enough. Dad knew it. Only by fightin’ for
everythin’ he loved
, see, me, my mum, his family, our home, the
lot
, only
then
could Dad take the pain. So yer see what that says? Yer see what I’m sayin’?’

The sea of people washed me and Dean up outside the Black Swan, where Mr Broadwas and two pissed wurzels with black teeth and a grinning disease were perched on three stone mushrooms. Dean looked at his dad’s cup a bit nervously.

‘Coffee, son!’ Dean’s dad held his cup so Dean could see in it. ‘From my flask! Good an’ hot, for a night like this.’ He turned to Mr Broadwas. ‘The missus’s got him well trained.’

‘Good,’ Mr Broadwas speaks as slowly as plants, ‘for both of you.’

‘So how long,’ Isaac Pye pushed by, lugging a crate of beers from a van, ‘we staying on the wagon this time, then, Frank Moran?’

‘Ain’t gettin’ off of it.’ Dean’s dad didn’t smile back.

‘Leopards changing their spots, is it?’

‘I ain’t
talkin
’ ’bout spots, Isaac Pye. Talkin’ about
drink
. For them as’re all well and good with alcohol, alcohol’s all well and good. But for me, it’s an illness. Doctor just told me what I already knowed. Ain’t had a drop since April.’

‘Oh, aye? Since
April
, this time, is it?’

‘Yeah.’ Dean’s dad scowled at the publican. ‘April.’

‘If yer say so,’ Isaac Pye edged past into his pub, ‘if yer say so. But yer can’t bring beverages from outside on to my premises.’

‘No fear of that, Isaac Pye!’ Dean’s dad yelled, as if the louder he yelled it, the truer it’d be. ‘No
fear
of that!’

Halls of mirrors’re usually crummy affairs with only Fattypuffs and Thinifers mirrors. But
these
mirrors melted you to self-mutants. Spotlights brightened and blackened the room. I was alone. Alone as you can be, that is, in a hall of mirrors. I got out Wilcox’s wallet to count the money, but decided to wait till I was somewhere safer. ‘Maxine?’ I called out. ‘You here?’

I left to carry on the search, but as I moved an African tribesman with a neck giraffed by iron rings waded towards me from the depths of the first mirror. His ears were droopy and dripping. It was a dreamish sight.
Can a person change
, asked the tribesman,
into another person?

‘You’re right. That’s the question.’

I
thought
I heard a scuffle.

‘Maxine? Come out, Maxine! This isn’t funny!’

In the second mirror was a gelatinous cube. All face, no body, just twiggy limbs waving at its corners. By puffing out my cheeks I nearly doubled its size.
No
, answered the cube.
You can only change superficial features. An Inside You must stay unaltered to change the Outside You. To change Inside You you’d need an Even More Inside You
,
who’d need an Inside the Even More Inside You to change it. And on and on. You with me?

‘I’m with you.’

An invisible bird brushed my ear.

‘Maxine? This isn’t funny, Maxine.’

In the third mirror was Maggot. My waist and legs got squidged into a tail. My chest and head flared up into a big shimmering glob.
Don’t listen to them. Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake and Neal Brose pick on us because
you
don’t blend in. If you had the right hair and clothes and spoke the right way and hung out with the right people, things’d be fine. Popularity’s about following weather forecasts
.

‘I’ve always wondered what you looked like.’

Mirror four held Upside-down Jason Taylor.
What good’s Maggot ever done you?
At Miss Throckmorton’s I used to imagine people in the southern hemisphere walking round like this. A jerk of my leg moved my mirror arm. Flap my arm, my mirror leg flapped.
How about an Outside You
, suggested Upside-down Me,
who
is
your Inside You too? A One You? If people like your One You, great. If they don’t, tough. Trying to win approval for your Outside You is a drag, Jason. That’s what makes you weak. It’s boring.

‘Boring.’ I agreed with Upside-down Me. ‘Boring. Boring.’

‘
I’m
not bored!’ A furry ET leapt out at me.

I experienced a cardiac arrest in the hall of mirrors.

‘Loonies talk to themselves.’ Maxine frowned. ‘Are
you
a loony?’

Kelly Moran chatted to Debby Crombie by the toffee apple stall. As, surely, the richest kid in the Three Counties, I bought one for me, Dean and Maxine. Biting into toffee-armoured apples requires technique. Your teeth bounce off. Bash the hard toffee against your fangs, that’s the only way. Then sink your incisors in to prise off the crust of toffee.

Debby Crombie looks like she’s got a rugby ball up her jumper. The whole village knows she’s pregnant with Tom Yew’s baby. ‘That ET’s never real,’ she said to Maxine, ‘is it?’

‘It
is
real,’ said Maxine. ‘It’s name’s Geoffrey.’

‘Geoffrey the ET.
Stylish
.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Bit o’ news to warm the cockles of yer hearts.’ Kelly turned to Dean and me. ‘Angela Bullock heard from Dawn Madden
herself
that she’s not only chucked your old mate Loverboy Wilcox—’

Dean clucked. ‘We saw ’em have a
massive
barney earlier!’

‘But listen, this is even better,’ a squeak of pleasure escaped Kelly, ‘Wilcox’s lost his wallet, right, with
hundreds
of quid in it!’

(A mile-long neon Chinese dragon wove through the Goose Fair and bit my jeans pocket. Luckily, no one else saw it.)

‘Hundreds of quid?’ Dean gaped, literally. ‘Where’d he lose it?’

‘
Here! Now!
In the Goose Fair! Of course, Diana Turbot couldn’t keep a secret to save her
life
, so half the village’re truffling round looking for it right
now
. Probably been found already. But who’s goin’ to hand all that money back to an arsey turd like Ross Wilcox?’

‘Half of Black Swan Green,’ Dean answered, ‘is in his gang.’

‘That doesn’t mean they
like
him.’

‘How come’ (my voice felt wobbly) ‘Wilcox was walking about with hundreds of pounds on him?’

‘Well,
isn’t
that a tale o’
woe
!
Apparently
your mate Ross was at his old man’s garage after school when this car pulls up, right. Knock, knock, it’s the Inland Revenue. Gordon Wilcox’s years behind on his tax. Last time they visited he chased ’em off with a blow-torch, but this time they’d brought a copper from Upton. But before they can knock on his office, right, Gordon Wilcox whips open the safe and hands Wilcox Junior everythin’ in it to spirit off home. Out of sight, out of accounts, like. Big mistake! Wilcox hung on to it, didn’t he? Thought he’d impress his girlfriend with, shall we say, eh, Debs, the thickness of his
wad
? Maybe he meant to siphon a bit off. Maybe he didn’t. We’ll never know, ’cause it’s vanished.’

‘So what’s Wilcox doin’ now?’

‘He was sat smoking in the bus shack, last Angela Bullock heard.’

‘Must be shittin’ bricks,’ said Debby Crombie. ‘Gordon Wilcox’s sick in the head. Vicious.’

‘How d’you mean?’ I’d never spoken to Debby Crombie till tonight. ‘“Vicious”?’

‘You
do
know,’ Kelly jumped in, ‘why Ross Wilcox’s mum left?’

She realized her son was pure evil? ‘Why?’

‘She lost a strip of postage stamps.’

‘Postage stamps?’

‘One strip of five second-class postage stamps. They was the straw what broke the camel’s back. Honest to
God
, Jason, Gordon Wilcox beat that woman
so
black and blue, the hospital had to feed her through a tube for a week.’

‘Why didn’t,’ a black hole just got bigger, ‘he get sent to prison?’

‘No witnesses, a crafty lawyer who said she’d chucked herself downstairs over and over,
plus
his wife conveniently going mental. “Unsound mind”, the judge in Worcester decided.’

‘So if he’d do
that
,’ Debby Crombie clutched her rugby ball, ‘over a strip of stamps, imagine what he’ll do over hundreds of pounds! Sure, Ross Wilcox is a nasty piece of work, but you wouldn’t wish a maulin’ off of Gordon Wilcox on your worst enemy.’

Dean’d gone yahooo
ooo
ooo
ooo
oooing down Ali Baba’s Helter Skelter ahead of me. Just as I got my mat ready fireworks erupted in the sky over towards Welland. Guy Fawkes’ Night’s not till tomorrow, but they can’t wait in Welland. Stalks climbed, then pop-blossomed into slow-slow-
slow
…motion Michaelmas daisies. Raining-silvers, purples, phoenix golds. Crunkly
booms
arrived a second late…
boom
…
boom
…Firework petals fell away and faded to ash. Only five or six big ones went off, but what beauts they were.

No footsteps were clomping up the stairs of the tower.

Still perched on the lip of the slide, I got out Wilcox’s wallet to count Wilcox’s money. My money. The notes weren’t fivers, nor tenners, they were
all
twenty-pound notes. I’ve never even
touched
a twenty. Five of them, I counted, ten of them, fifteen of them…

Thirty
Queen Elizabeths. Starlight pale.

SIX
– I screamed –
HUNDRED
– silently –
POUNDS
.

If anyone found out,
anyone
, things’d get grimmer than I dared imagine. I’d wrap the notes in polythene, put them in a sandwich box and stash them away. Somewhere in the wood’d be safest. And it’d be safest to wang the wallet into the Severn. Shame. All I have in the way of a wallet is a zippy pouch thing. I sniffed Wilcox’s wallet so atoms from
his
wallet’ll turn into me. If only I could breathe in Dawn Madden atoms.

The Goose Fair’s literally magic, I thought, sitting there. It turns my weakness into power. It turns our village green into this underwater kingdom. ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials bubbled up from the Magic Mountain, ‘Waterloo’ by Abba from the Flying Teacups, the
Pink Panther
music from the Chair-o-Plane. The Black Swan was so full its innards were spilling out. Farther off, villages floated on empty spaces, where wide fields were. Hanley Castle, Blackmore End, Brotheridge Green. Worcester was a galaxy squashed flat.

Best of all?
I
’d be pounding Wilcox into a pulp. Me. Via his dad. Why should I feel bad about that? After what Wilcox’s done to me. Neither of them’d ever know it. It’s the perfect revenge. Besides, Kelly exaggerates. No father’d beat up his own son
that
badly.

Footsteps came up the tower. I hastily stuffed my fortune into my pocket, repositioned myself on the scratchy mat and a wonderful thought slid into my head as I slid off the lip. Six hundred pounds
could
buy an Omega Seamaster.

Grand Master of the Helter Skelter, tonight I leant into the curves.

‘Hey,’ said Dean, as the crowds swept us by Fryer Tuck’s Chip Emporium, ‘that’s never yer dad, is it?’

Can’t be
, I thought, but it was. Still in his Columbo overcoat and suit from the office. He had this ironed-in frown and I thought how he needed a very long holiday. Dad was eating chips with a wooden fork from a cone of newspaper. There’re dreams where the right people appear in wrong places and this was like that. Dad spotted us before I could work out why I wanted to dodge off. ‘Hullo, you two.’

‘Evening,’ Dean sounded nervous, ‘Mr Taylor.’ They haven’t met since the Mr Blake affair back in June.

‘Good to see you, Dean. How’s your arm?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ Dean wiggled his arm. ‘Right as rain.’

‘I’m very pleased to hear it.’

‘Hi, Dad.’ I don’t know why
I
was nervous too. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Didn’t know I needed your permission to come, Jason.’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that…’

Dad tried to smile but he just looked pained. ‘I know, I know. What
am
I doing here?’ Dad forked a chip and blew on it. ‘Well, I was driving home. Saw all the hullaballoo.’ Dad’s voice was somehow different. Softer. ‘Couldn’t very well miss the Goose Fair, could I? I’ll have a little wander, I thought. Smelt these.’ Dad waggled his cone. ‘Y’know, after
eleven years
in Black Swan Green this is my
first time
at the Goose Fair. I kept meaning to bring you and Julia when you were little. But something important always got in the way. So important, I’ve got no idea what it was.’

‘Oh. Mum phoned, from Cheltenham. To tell me to tell you there’s a cold quiche in the fridge. I left you a note on the kitchen table.’

‘Very thoughtful of you. Thanks.’ Dad gazed inside his cone as if answers might be written there. ‘Hey, have
you
eaten? Dean? Fancy anything from Fryer Tuck’s Chip Emporium?’

‘I ate a sandwich and a black-cherry yogurt.’ I didn’t mention the toffee apple in case it counted as throwing money away. ‘Before I came.’

‘I had three o’ Fryer Tuck’s All-American Taste-Tastic Hot Dogs.’ Dean patted his stomach. ‘Recommend ’em highly, I do.’

‘Good,’ Dad squeezed his head like he had a headache, ‘good. Oh. Let me give you a little, uh…’ Dad slipped two new pound coins into my hand. (One hour before, two pounds’d’ve been loads. Now it’s less than 1/300th of my entire estate.)

‘Thanks, Dad. Would you like to…uh…?’

‘I’d
love
to, but I have paperwork coming out of my paperwork. Plans to plan. Hotties to put in beds. No rest for the wicked. Good seeing you, Dean. Jason’s got a telly in his room, doubtless he hasn’t shut up about it. Come over and watch it! No point it just…y’know…sitting there…’