Bully (29 page)

‘Well, we were all playing Running the Gauntlet down at the Cutter Street cemetery. Loads of us. It was a right laugh…’

Running the Gauntlet was a game which, if we’d had any sense about us, we’d have copyrighted when we got the chance. We invented it, see, and although we’d long grown tired of it, it was still played with gay abandon, in some form or other, by groups of kids in virtually every year of our school. If only we could have made a board game version of it and tried to sell it to Waddingtons…

But I’m not sure if Waddingtons would have been interested in our game. I’m not sure that making a kid run over the top of as many graves as he could while everyone else simply threw shit at him – anything they could find – until he finally surrendered, would fit in with their ideals of ‘fun for all the family’. I’m not sure if they’d have agreed that it fit the age bracket of eight years up, either. And the game wouldn’t have been easy to replicate en masse; it wouldn’t have easily translated to other towns and villages or cities, where there weren’t the sheer number of graveyards. Where there wasn’t a plot of some form or other at the end of every fucking street.

‘And?’ demanded Twinnie.

‘Yeah, don’t go pretending you got friends, Peaker; just tell us the details,’ said Dick, like a dick.

‘Sorry,’ said Tommy, flinching involuntarily. He did it so many times these days that it had developed into a kind of nervous tic. ‘So anyway; Mark was running the gauntlet and he was doing pretty well at it. Getting pretty close to your record, Bully. And I reckon that’s why he was just so desperate to make that last grave, right over at the back of the bone-yard. Barry lobbed this half-brick over at him and Mark just made this mad leap over all that overgrown grass and shit… For a second, we all just stood back and watched and we were thinkin’
he’s gonna make it, he’s gonna make it
and then Mark came crashing down right on top of the grave. Landed so hard that his leg went right through the topsoil. Landed so hard that he opened up this hole at the top. When we all went over, he already had his arm reached right in there. And when he pulled out the skull, all the younger kids just ran away. And it was pretty scary…’

‘So where’s the skull now?’ I asked.

‘Still down there… I came to tell you lot as quick as I could.’

‘It better still be there,’ warned Twinnie.

On the radio, Don McLean warned that it was a day for dying.

And so, the five of us slipped through the woods that marked the bottom boundary of Newton Mills School. We cut across Church Street lower down, where we were sure that we wouldn’t be seen. Almost had to turn back when we saw the familiar sight of Mr. Swann’s car pulled up haphazardly against the kerb, but when we saw the smoke inside, we knew we were all right.

We started to get excited as we climbed over the allotment wall and Twinnie started to run. Trampled all over the plot right next to my dad’s, but I didn’t care. The chase was on. Soon we were all shouting and laughing and generally had a good time like we were the boys in
Stand by Me.
We were off to see part of a body; we knew that this was a major step in our school-of-hard-knocks education. We knew it was an event that would long live in the memory. I suppose I was the Geordie character, trying to eek out meaning from the encounter; Dick and Lion were like Vern Tessio and the other one – the boggle –eyed one… But that was where the comparison fell down. Twinnie was no Chris Chambers. In fact he was more like Ace Merrill; dangerous, unpredictable. A force of nature.

We could see the crowd of kids even as we turned the corner from Hangman’s Row and onto Cutter Street. Hoards of them, like the school had burned down again and everyone had been turfed out. Half of them probably had no idea why they were there; the other half were only there ‘cos their friends were. We barged through them all, sending snotty-nosed bastards skittling off all over the place. The cocks of the school were here now, and the rules of the game had changed. Soon, the crowd became aware of our presence. Silence started to creep in. Nobody wanted to be the one poor fucker that was picked on for the habitual beating. Nobody wanted to be forced to run the gauntlet; not if we were playing.

We reached the gates; those big black imposing things. Twin gargoyles stared down at us; dared us to go through. And we stared right back at them as we squeezed between the bars. Through the gates, there were only a few stray boys knocking around, and we soon sent them off with a dad-like clip round the ear and warnings not to come back.

We were left alone. Just me, Twinnie, Dick, Lion, Tommy and Manky Mark. Manky Mark who was sitting over in the far corner of the cemetery, holding the skull out in front of him like he was practicing for the school production of
Hamlet.
We picked out our path between the graves and made for him. Everything was under cover of the fallen golden leaves, you could barely tell where path ended and grave began. We could barely tell what we were walking on. A million people in a million other-worlds suddenly shivered involuntarily and asked:

Did someone just step on my grave?

As soon as we reached Sparky, Twinnie took the skull from him. And then he just looked at it as though he didn’t really know what to do with it. It was a skull. It was part of a dead human. It had strange fission-marks on the top of it; a big crack on the cheek-bone; big gaping eye sockets; a pronounced forehead. But it didn’t
do
anything.

Twinnie started manipulating the jaw; making the rotten teeth clack-clack together.

‘I’m coming to get you, Tommy Peaker,’ he said in this terrible ghost-voice.

Tommy’s bottom lip quivered, but only for a moment. Then he realised that he’d better start running. Twinnie was already almost on him, waving the skull around like it was just another half-brick.

‘Get him, Twinnie,’ roared Dick.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ muttered Lion.

I kept schtum. Watched Manky Mark’s reaction. Was he going to stick up for his ‘friend?’ Was he going to make any move to put a halt to the inevitable beating that Tommy was going to take? Evidently not. Quietly, he started to walk away from us. He stalked back across that bone-yard and made for the gates. He never once looked back, never once took the time to check whether Tommy was being forced to kiss the skull, never once took the time to check whether Tommy was being forced to take down his pants and allow the skull’s rotten teeth to touch his tiny prick.

Which is what was happening. Already the skull had become just another torture-instrument. Already, it was secondary to the main game; making Tommy Peaker’s life as miserable as possible in as many inventive ways as possible.

‘Here; have a look at this,’ said Lion, tapping me on the shoulder. Like me, he’d shunned the torture session. Like me, I think he still had some kind of secret reverence for the graveyard. He still believed that otherworldly things could happen in places like that and that there was some mystery in the world.

He led me over to the grave right in the corner. It was almost hidden by thick bushes but we pushed our way through. It was the grave in which Mark had found the skull. Must have been; there was a massive gaping hole in the middle of it.

‘I just stuck my hand in there,’ said Lion, as though he wanted a gold star or something. ‘There’s other bones in there. Dare you to have a go…’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Boring.’

‘You’re chicken-shit,’ laughed Lion. ‘You don’t
wanna
put your hand in there in case something reaches out and grabs you…’

Lion was right. I’d seen that film round at Twinnie’s once. He’d rented it from M and S Video Supplies despite clearly being fourteen. It was the one where stray bony hands kept pushing out from the graves and pulling people in with them.

‘Give us one of your tabs and I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I bet you didn’t really do it, anyway. Nobody saw you do it so why am I supposed to believe you?’

Lion grinned. Pulled his deck of Dorchester and Grey from his trouser pocket. Held them out to me.

‘Dorchester and Grey Lion?’ I said, taking one. ‘Fuck’s sake mate. These are Dot Cotton fags.’

‘I know mate. Pinched ‘em out me mam’s handbag this morning. She’ll go ape-shit when she realises…’

I accepted the light. Inhaled the sickly flavour. Realised for the nth time that I absolutely detested the taste of cigarettes, but quite liked the head-rush that they gave me. The extra courage, the extra
fuck-it-all
ness that even holding a ciggie gave me. And then, before I could even give myself a chance to think twice, I bent down and thrust my arm elbow-deep into the hole. Felt live things scurrying away. Felt cold, dead bone. Felt something else which felt like a pulse; like the earth itself was pulsing. And then I think I felt the earth around the hole start to give way. And I think I felt myself being sucked into the hole. And I think I felt like I was drowning or about to be buried alive. To spend the remaining moments of my life with that pulsing thing that was under the earth.

I yanked my arm out sharpish.

Lion didn’t laugh like I hoped he would. Instead he was staring intently at my arm with an expression which bordered on the horrified.

Again he didn’t answer. I looked down at my arm. All of my fingers and most of my wrist was stained this awful purple colour. It was like someone had spilled a whole glass of Ribena over me and I’d just left it.

‘Aaaagh,’ I screamed. ‘Get it off me, get it off me…’

I started chasing Lion around, trying to wipe the mould or the stain or whatever it was off onto his school shirt. Dick and Twinnie must have been alerted by our noise because they were soon over with us, dragging Tommy Peaker behind them by the collar of his shirt. The collar was ripping badly now and there seemed to be a bad cut on his neck, too.

‘Where’s the skull?’ I asked, rubbing a leaf on my arm. The purple was disappearing rapidly now. Almost as quickly as it had come on.

‘Dick only went and smashed it off one of the gravestones,’ said Twinnie. But he didn’t sound too disappointed. ‘What’s that on your arm?’

Lion was only too happy to tell them, and as he did so, I got this terrifying vision of what was going to happen. I
knew
what they were going to do, probably even before they did.

‘Bully stuck his hand into the grave,’ said Lion. ‘That’s dead-body juice all on his arm.’

‘Dead body juice is
blood,
Lion,’ I corrected him, wearily.

‘Whatever. You got all shit on you from sticking your arm in there. And all for a ciggie,’ said Lion.

‘I did. Let’s go back up to school now. If you’ve smashed-up the skull, there’s not really any point being here, is there?’

Twinnie cocked his head and looked at me. I could see his mind working. The wheels of his one-armed bandit spinning round. Soon, they would all come to a stop, and there’d be a payout. And that payout would be paid directly to poor little Tommy Peaker.

‘Let’s see what happens when we stick Tommy’s hand in there,’ said Twinnie, finally.

‘Yeah!’ roared Dick. ‘Or why don’t we make him put his tiny little cock in there. See if that goes all mouldy like Bully’s fingers.’

Twinnie gave him a withering look: ‘You can go fiddling about with Tommy’s cock if you want. Me, I reckon we stick his head in.’

Lion and Dick grabbed Tommy’s kicking legs and held them still. Twinnie still had one hand clamped around the lad’s collar and one in his hair. They yanked him up off the ground, making it look very easy. There was nothing to Tommy after all; we’d seen his caved-in chest in PE once, when he was made to exercise in only his shit-encrusted y-fronts; teacher said that he’d heard the ‘forgotten kit’ excuse too many times to care any more. And Tommy’s legs were kinda knock-kneed too. And about the thickness of one of my arms.

There was nothing to him, and he didn’t have the strength to fight back. They lifted him up, spun him around a little bit, just to get him nice and dizzy, nice and frantic, and then they lowered him down again, head-first into the rapidly widening hole in the grave. Tommy screamed, but it came out all muffled, like he had a mouthful of grave-dirt inside him or like he was down the bottom of a well, shouting up at us.

They pulled him back up. His whole head was purple, either from all the blood rushing into it after the way they’d held him, or from that other stuff; the stuff that had coated my arm. The stuff that I could still see traces of, underneath my fingernails.

‘That’s enough now,’ I said, or think I said. My head was spinning. It was head loss, but not how I’d ever experienced it before. This was a loss of control that felt like an out-of-body experience. Like I was looking down on the five of us in that leaf-strewn, litter-choked graveyard and there was no way I could step in and alter the course of history. I felt at once old and young, at once dead and at once alive. It was as though the whole universe had collapsed in on itself and was dying.

Nobody paid any attention to me, so I figured that they’d not heard my remonstrations. They were laughing too hard now. Screaming abuse at Tommy Peaker, driven wild by their desire to inflict more agony.

‘Look at his face!’ yelled Twinnie. ‘He’s turned into a fucking blackberry.’

‘Let’s do it again, let’s do it again,’ shouted Dick.

And for once, they all listened to him, or were already going to do it anyway. So I stood back and watched, as helpless as Manky Mark, as they Dairylea dunked him into the death-juice filled grave. And I swear that I felt the earth move under my feet. It felt like Tommy, the earth which surrounded him, the grass on which we stood, were all being sucked into something down there. We were feeding the appetite for misery of something far larger than ourselves and there was only me that knew it.