The Knife That Killed Me (11 page)

It was something I’d noticed. True, everyone hated the freaks, but Roth himself never seemed to give them any of his special attention. It was as if they didn’t quite register with him. Once or twice I’d seen him gazing in a vague way to where they stood, his eyes unfocused, maybe thinking he ought to do something about them, put in some personal, hands-on persecution, rather than letting the lightweights and no-marks do the job. But then he’d give his head a little shake and move on to some other project.

You could spin that a couple of ways. Either the freaks were so insignificant he didn’t have to bother with them, or he felt threatened by their strangeness, worried that maybe his weapons wouldn’t work against them. I suppose there was a third option—he just hadn’t got around to them yet.

I can’t say precisely why, but I knew that saying that, about Roth not bothering them, would get to Kirk. It undermined the freaks’ role as victims, made them less like a gang of Jesuses, more like a bunch of nerds.

“We’re not exactly best mates, though,” he said, his eyes wandering along the horizon, like he was searching for something way off. Trying to look deep.

And just at that moment I saw a ball flying toward us, kicked by one of the mob of Year Eight kids who were playing a cross between football and the Second World War. They’d probably seen it happen the day before and thought how clever it was, belting the ball at the losers. The ball was one of those half-sized ones of silvered leather, and quite heavy. Hurt if they get you in the face. If it had been heading toward Kirk, I’d probably have let it fly on. But it wasn’t. It would have hit Serena. And so I caught it. The other freaks had seen it at the last second, and they were all flinching, some throwing their hands up, others cowering down. For some reason the image froze in my head, as if I’d taken a photo of it. They were like a great black spider, legs and arms at crazy angles. Or like the victims of an explosion.

But I caught the ball, and it must have looked quite cool. There was a disappointed sigh from the Year Eights. One of them, not the one who’d kicked it, came up and demanded that I give him his ball back. Yesterday I would have done.

“Nice ball,” I said, and began to hand it to him. But then I whipped it away and gave it a massive punt, out over the school fence, over the beck and into the gypsy field beyond, where it bounced a couple of times in the furrows and rucks of the rough grass, and then bobbled out of sight.

The Year Eight kid looked at me, his mouth open. He had close-cropped hair and his ears were scabby and septic from a piercing that had gone tragically wrong.

“What was that for?”

“I felt like it. Next time it’s your head.”

You could see the confusion in his eyes. These were the freaks, he was thinking, you can kick your ball at them and that’ll be funny, and all they’ll do is tut at you and then move further away. They don’t kick your ball into the gypsy field. They don’t talk to you like they’re not scared.

And then he trudged off on the long walk out of school, following the road over the beck and round to the gypsy field. It was a good job he was only a scabby Year Eight midget.

“That was awesome,” said Billy, in the space after the kid had gone.

“I thought it was a bit mean.”

That was Shane. He’d appeared unnoticed in all the action. Maddy was with him.

“But they kicked the ball at us,” I said, annoyed that he hadn’t appreciated what I’d done. “You always let them, and so they keep on doing it. It’s like Hitler.”

Everyone laughed at that. I suppose it was a bit of an exaggeration. But that made me want to carry on with it.

“No, I mean it. Like when they didn’t stand up to him in the nineteen thirties and so he just carried on getting worse.”

“Appeasement,” said Kirk, to show he knew the word.

Well, I knew the word as well. It was war. It was my subject.

“So why didn’t you thump him then?” said Shane. “You’re bigger than him, the kid who wanted his ball back. You should have really taught him a lesson.”

It took me a second to realize that he was being sarcastic. Normally when people are being sarcastic you can tell, because they use a special sarcastic voice and even wear a special sarcastic face. But Shane just said it in his normal voice, and his face was his normal face.

It was my turn to be confused now, and I felt just like the Year Eight kid had looked.

“I didn’t want to hit him. I just wanted him to … I don’t know … be more careful.”

I felt terrible. And I also felt that I shouldn’t be feeling terrible. What I’d done wasn’t that bad. I’d kicked the ball, not the kid. That made me annoyed with Shane. Who did he think he was to act as my conscience? I began to turn away, my shoulders hunching up around my ears. Then I felt Shane’s hand on my arm.

“How’s that face of yours?”

And that was it, all trace of criticism was gone, and I was grateful he’d even remembered that I’d been hurt.

Sucker.

I sat at their table for lunch. Serena had brought in a salad made of seeds and bits of weird-shaped lettuce, and Stevie Stick Boy just drank a Coke. But the others had normal food. When I asked Stevie if that was all he was
having—the Coke, I mean—he said that he could only eat when it was dark. And then Kirk said it was because he was a vampire, and Shane said not to be a dick because vampires didn’t drink Coke and anyway it was the middle of the day right now, so if Stevie was a vampire he’d be burning, wouldn’t he? Then they got on to talking about vampires in general, which was a big thing with them. Shane said it was funny how vampires, meaning Dracula in particular, came to be seen as aristocrats, counts and stuff, because originally they’d just been shambling peasants, and he said it was all down to Byron, or rather his doctor, whose name I can’t remember, who wrote a story about a posh vampire, which was really meant to be Byron. I was a bit lost in all this, and I think Shane knew it, because then he explained that two hundred years ago Byron was not only the most famous poet, but the most famous human being in England, and that he had a clubfoot and he got off with everyone, including choirboys and his own sister. And his wife divorced him because he tried to do something to her so filthy that she could never even talk about it. So it meant that his doctor’s story—the one about the vampire—became really famous really quickly, and that’s how the idea of the posh vampire took hold.

I thought that was all quite interesting, even if none of them could tell me exactly what a clubfoot was, which is something I wanted to know. What was strange is how it didn’t seem strange, all that talk. It wasn’t as if I normally spent my meal times talking about vampires and dead poets, and so it should have freaked me out. But it didn’t.

The other thing was that I forgot about the knife.

Then, at the end, I was stretching to get my bag from under the table, and I touched Maddy’s hand by accident. I said sorry, and she smiled at me again. Number five. Then I stretched further, trying to reach my bag, and something fell out of my blazer pocket. Like I said, I’d completely forgotten about the knife, and it took me a second to realize what had happened. It clunked on the tiles, still in its leather sheath. Maddy picked it up for me, not thinking.

And then she saw properly what it was, and she held it out on her palm, her eyes wide.

“What the hell …?” said Kirk.

I snatched the knife and looked around at my new friends. They all appeared stunned. And something else. Impressed, maybe? Amused, slightly? I don’t know.

Except Shane. He looked utterly blank. I couldn’t face him.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, to no one in particular, and then I bolted.

SIXTEEN

A few
days later I saw it happen.

Those days had been good. I’d been hanging out with Shane and his gang. For the first time since going to that school I felt like part of something. I wasn’t really a full member of their gang, and I hadn’t turned freak, not really. But I had changed. I looked a bit different, and I was thinking about things I hadn’t thought about before. About the world and what was wrong with it—not just the tiny bit of it that I was in, but the whole world. When I walked, I didn’t always keep my head down. I hadn’t got up the courage to talk
to Maddy much, but she didn’t seem to mind if I stood near her in the playground or sat next to her at lunch.

It wasn’t all good. Kirk didn’t like me, and quite often he’d make sure the talk went in a direction I couldn’t follow. But Kirk was only one kid. And I knew from experience that getting snubbed was a hell of a lot better than getting punched.

Anyway, the next Wednesday afternoon I was in the science lab on the third floor. The sinks there overlook the back of the school. Out that way you first have a small square of playground, then the big rectangle of the all-weather field, then the fence and the school gates, and then a building that used to be a social club but is now a nothing, a shell like a rotten tooth. There’s always graffiti on the walls of the club. Body parts, names, swearwords—all that. I once thought that I should do it too—make my mark on the wall, I mean. I bought a can of white spray paint and sneaked out late. But then, when I reached the club and stood in front of the wall, I couldn’t think of anything to write. I shook the can so it made that rattling noise, but nothing else. I didn’t have a nickname I could spray, and there wasn’t a girl I fancied, not then. I didn’t want to write the name of a crappy football team, and I didn’t want to copy the other things scrawled there, the f-words and the c-words and the ugly pictures. I was as empty as the social club. So I threw the can into the gypsy field and went home again.

But now, looking out over the back of the school, I saw that some kid was doing what I hadn’t been able to do. I
couldn’t make out what he was spraying, but there was no mistaking that combination of sweeping arm movements and quick little steps.

Words.

I watched him for as long as it took me to wash out my test tube, not thinking much about who he was or what he was writing. I didn’t even point it out to the kids on either side of me.

I’d forgotten about it by going-home time. But then I saw the crowd. I remember in junior school, we had some tadpoles. Someone had found a jellied mass of spawn in the beck, which was a miracle, because nothing was supposed to live in there except rats and thick green scummy weed. We fed them with a little piece of meat tied to some string. It took the tadpoles a while to realize that it was dinnertime, but then they’d all swim over to the meat. What happened then wasn’t really what you’d expect. They wouldn’t go mad, like sharks having a feeding frenzy. No, they’d all gather round the meat, shoulder to shoulder, nudging closer but hardly moving. Sometimes one would wriggle for a few seconds, but then go back to the patient nudging and crowding. You couldn’t really see them eat because their mouths were too small.

The kids gathered around the wall were like that, all pressing forward, some wriggling, but mainly just this concentrated, passive attention.

I was with a kid called Emmery. He wasn’t really a friend of mine, but we sometimes walked home together
because he lived in the same street. Emmery was a bit gormless, but all right apart from that. He had to get another kid to do his tie after PE, and he wore slip-on shoes to get around the problem of laces.

“Something going on,” he said.

“Looks like it. I think I saw someone spraying on the wall earlier.”

“A kid?”

“Yeah, but not one of ours, I don’t think.”

“Was it another thingy?”

Emmery laughed, a moist, slightly mental laugh. He was talking about last year, when a really big dirty picture appeared on the wall. It was famous for a while.

“Dunno.”

We joined the back of the crowd.

“What does it say?”

Emmery could read, just, but the writing was too scraggy for him.