The Knife That Killed Me (4 page)

The worst kind of fights—or the best kind, if watching pain is your idea of fun—are the ones where the two kids hate each other and stand there punching, not caring if they get hit so long as they land a few as well. There aren’t many fights like that, and they don’t last long, because of the fury of it.

This fight began like that. There was a good crowd around them, the way there always was for a fight, and I think most kids were hoping to see Roth get a spanking, because everyone was scared of him and he always did whatever he wanted.

There was that usual time of intense silence before they started, with Roth staring straight at Compson, and Compson trying to stare back, except you could see he wasn’t really focused on Roth, but somewhere behind him. And then there must have been some kind of signal, and they came straight together, and Compson hit Roth twice, quite hard, somewhere up around the forehead. But it was like hitting a truck with a newspaper. Roth didn’t even flinch. Hardly even put up his hands.

And when those two punches had no effect, whatever fight there had been in Compson left him, and he ran away, or rather he tried to run away, but the wall of kids bounced him back, with hard laughter. As soon as it was obvious that
Compson was no match for Roth, they’d all changed sides. Nobody likes to back a loser, especially an embarrassing one. He ran round the circle, skittering off the edge of it, looking back over his shoulder at Roth. Roth didn’t chase Compson, but just waited awhile, a couple of circuits maybe, and then simply cut him off.

It only took one great scything punch from Roth to lay Compson out flat. The sound was horrible. A sickening soft sound—I mean, the sound of something soft hitting something hard. Almost a squelch, you’d have said. A squelch or a splat. I was standing out of the circle, and so I couldn’t see that well, but it was enough, and I heard the sound, and I thought that Roth might have killed Compson with that one big punch, killed him dead.

Roth then did something really bad. Something that had never been seen in our school before.

It took us to a new place. Like the way that the invention of the machine gun took war to a new place.

Compson was on the floor, not even moving. I could just see him through the shifting cage of legs. The punch had got him right in the teeth, and the front of his face had collapsed like a wet bag. He was making a soft slurping noise, so I knew he wasn’t dead.

The crowd had gone completely silent and Roth looked slowly around at the kids there, eyeing each one in turn, and no one could stand that black stare and so they would look down or away or shuffle back as though even his look was dangerous.

And when he’d stared everyone out in that slow methodical way, almost like it was a boring job he had to do, he looked down at the kid lying on the floor, and he sort of shuffled around inside his trousers—Roth, I mean, not Compson, who still hadn’t moved, and you really would have thought him dead except for that wet sound coming from his ruined mouth. And Roth took out his thing—you know, his
thing
—and he grunted with it in his hands, and his face became vacant and far away, and then a thick yellow stream of piss came out and splashed down into the face of Compson.

Well,
that
made him move. He spluttered and rolled, and then got up onto all fours and looked at Roth, a look with murder in it, as well as defeat, but Roth stared blandly back at him, the way you’d look at something reasonably interesting but not really to do with you, and then gave a little half-smile. Compson couldn’t hold the look any more than the watchers in the circle could, and he rolled into a ball and whimpered, as if to say,
Please don’t hit me again
.

Everyone was embarrassed then, and went away. I went away too, but I looked back, and I thought I’d just see Compson lying on the ground by himself, because you’re never so alone as when you lose a fight. And he was still there, but he wasn’t alone. Bates and Miller were with him, kicking him, and stamping on him, and spitting on him, and I wanted to do something about it, but I was frightened, and I went home, and anyway it wasn’t my business.

And that’s what I was remembering when Roth took
my pathetic weapon away from me, the way he’d take sweets from a baby. And I thought some of those things might happen to me now.

But none of those things happened. What happened was that Roth sort of put his big hand against my cheek. I don’t know what you’d call it. It was softer than a slap, harder than a touch. And he smiled at me. His teeth were weird. I mean, really weird. They didn’t seem to come in different kinds—you know, the front ones different to the back ones; they were all the same, and each one was separate, with a space in between. They were like the unevolved teeth of some ancient animal.

“Look at that,” he said, his voice almost warm, almost affectionate. “Will you look at that.”

I didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what to say.

“Smack him,” said Bates. He was bobbing and shuffling like someone needing to go to the toilet.

Roth turned on him. “What?”

Bates was moving even quicker now, foot to foot, up and down, side to side.

“’It ’im. His face, his guts. Make him shit himsen.”

Roth waited. A breath, two breaths. His face as bland as putty.

At last: “I think he’s all right.”

“What? But you saw him … saw what he did.”

“Shut it.”

“Yeah, but—”

And then Roth reached over and grabbed Bates by the scruff of his neck and pulled him closer, giving him a little shake as he did so. Exactly the way you would with a cat. Bates made a high-pitched noise, a sort of squeal.

“Yeah, but what?”

“Nothing, Roth, I was only saying—”

“Well, don’t.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

“What do you reckon, Miller?”

“I reckon he’s all right.”

“I think he’ll do. What do you think, eh?”

Roth was looking at me closely. Not smiling, his face gray putty again. I was so frightened of him I still couldn’t say anything.

He wasn’t like the other nutters. He was clever and shrewd. It should have meant that you’d be able to understand him better. The others had a kind of unpredictability. Like cats, you didn’t know which way they’d turn. But deeper down you could understand them. You could see what they wanted. They were like beasts, and their cravings were the cravings of beasts, and they cowered like beasts cower when they come up against something stronger than them. But Roth was completely incomprehensible. Unlike the beasts, he did everything for a reason, but there were no rules for understanding him. Maybe there was a logic there—in fact I’m sure there was—but it was an alien logic. It was like the Spaniards coming up against the Aztecs. The Aztecs went to war to catch people so they could cut out their hearts to
appease their gods, so they’d make it rain and help the crops grow. According to their rules this was all rational. But to the Spaniards it was evil and mad.

I’m not really getting this across. The thing about Roth is that as well as being stronger and harder than anyone else, there was also the fact, the terrible fact, that he was cleverer too. Not clever meaning good at maths or English, but clever meaning that he knew what was happening inside you.

And now he put his heavy arm around my shoulders and drew me away from the others. The weight on me was hard to bear—he was pressing down and squeezing me.

“Don’t mind them, they’re all right. Just a bit thick,” he said, his voice now oddly musical. “You’re not thick, though, are you?”

It was funny. The second time today someone had said that.

“Depends what you mean by thick.”

Roth smiled more broadly now, showing me those inhuman, wide-apart teeth.

“That’s what I’m getting at. These jokers would never think like that. You see, I said thick, and you wanted to know what I meant by it. That’s ’cos you’re thinking”—he pointed to his head—“using this.”

And now I’m ashamed to say this part, but I don’t want to leave out anything important. When he said that, his voice made soft, intimate, just for me, I felt a glow inside me, a kind of happiness, warmth, peace.

Roth was someone I hated,
should
have hated, more
than any other person. Hated because he was a bad kid, cruel and vindictive. The kind of kid who would beat another to a pulp and then piss in his face. The kind of kid who would get his thicko mates to throw chewing gum in my hair to help pass the time in a boring geography lesson.

But all he had to do was say those simple words to me, and I was happy.

What I felt toward him then, for those few seconds, was love.

“We’ll have a chat sometime,” said Roth, and then he wandered away, and the others followed him, because they had no idea what else to do with their lives.

That left me standing alone, no more able to think for myself than Bates or Miller. So I gazed into the distance. And across the playground I saw the group of weird kids, and I noticed that they were looking over in my direction. I didn’t intend it, but my eyes met those of Shane, and he nodded to me. It was a tiny gesture, one you’d hardly notice, but it was there. I don’t know what he meant by it. Then I took in some of the others in the group, and for just a second I caught the eyes of Maddy Bray, and she might have smiled at me, but then another kid gave her a sort of shove from the side, which I think was meant to be friendly, but which seemed wrong for Shane’s gang, as they didn’t go in much for that kind of physical kidding around.

And then a bell was ringing and it was time to go.

SEVEN

My dad
went to my school. Twenty years ago. When he’s had a few drinks he tells me what it was like in the olden days. I’ve made it sound like a rough school now, but back then it was worse. The biggest difference was that the teachers used to hit the kids. All the time. There were three ways of getting hit, my dad said. The basic way was just to get slapped, hard, on the face. Dad said it was OK if they just came up and slapped you, but sometimes you’d be mucking about and a teacher would be behind you, and so you couldn’t see the slap coming and it would hit you out of the blue.

The next step up was being hit with the edge of a ruler on the back of the hand. Dad said there was a special ruler in each class and it had a steel edge and was as heavy as a wrench. You had to hold your hand out, knuckles up, and the teachers, if they were cruel, would leave you waiting for a minute, for two minutes, until your hand started to shake. You couldn’t stop it, he said. Didn’t matter how hard you were. He said sometimes they’d make do with that—the teachers, I mean. Making you tremble. And that was quite bad, but not as bad as when they went through with it, and really let you have it. He said it hurt so much the world would go black for a couple of seconds, and sometimes a kid would wet his pants, but my dad said he never did. It would leave a row of blue lumps, topped by a spot of blood, across your fingers, near where they joined onto your hand. Dad said that you could get it for virtually nothing—for forgetting to bring something to school, for not being in a straight line, for smiling when you should have a face of stone. For having a face of stone when you should be smiling.

But the top of the range was the cane—a long whippy stick of bamboo. Even then there were variations. Backside or hand. Dad said that getting the cane on the hand actually hurt the most, but it somehow wasn’t half as bad as having to bend over a chair, feeling as helpless as a worm on the pavement, and taking it on the arse. Dad said that kids always boasted when they got caned on the hand, but when it was the arse, they just shut up, and nothing could get them to talk about it.

They can’t hit you now. The teachers, I mean. You can tell that some of them want to, some of them
really
want to. You can see their jaws working in little circles with the effort of not hitting you.