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  There was Lang, getting out of his dad’s car. I’d never seen his dad before. He was like a big Lang, thin and with a mop of reddish hair. It was strange seeing Lang being dealt with like he was a child. It was strange seeing nobody laugh at this care. Lang was white. He looked lost in the snow. He had a Spurs scarf wrapped tightly around his throat, and now there was only a faint scar on his head. He wandered up to Drake’s lot, fell in beside them.

  ‘All right,’ Blewly said to Lang.

  Waggoner and I joined them.

  Lang looked startled.

  ‘All right,’ Selway said to Waggoner.

  Drake nodded to us and grunted.

  Lang looked slowly between us and the rest of them. Back and forth. Was this a joke? He looked back to his dad at the car, couldn’t quite do the sniggering he wanted to. What was going on?

  Waggoner took a kung fu magazine from his pocket, and started showing Drake pictures of the nunchaku he wanted to buy.

  Lang burst forwards between them. He couldn’t quite grab the magazine from Drake. He opened his mouth in an exclamation that couldn’t come out. He looked around the group. Come on! This wasn’t possible! What were me and Waggoner doing in Drake’s lot? How had that suddenly changed?

  ‘What?’ said Drake.

  Even after a couple of weeks, I hadn’t got used to it. I still went to school every morning expecting to be beaten. I’d felt the change the moment Mr. Rove had broken the surface of the water, Lang in his arms. The world had shuddered, different images colliding in my eyes. Silence had crashed in, cutting off the shouts. Then we’d been falling, towards the other side of the pool! I’d grabbed the rail. The water had fallen away from me. I was left hanging there. Kids were falling, silently screaming, hitting the side of the pool, the water bursting up around them and over the other side. Then the water had slammed back against us. The silence became kids shouting again, as they floundered in the fizzing water that bashed from one side of the pool to the other.

  Mr. Rove had concentrated only on Lang. He’d kept him alive.

  I’d looked over my shoulder and I’d seen Angie, on the edge of the pool, having only just clambered out, forcing her friends into a wet, square huddle, urgent. Louise was taking big, shuddering breaths, scared when the rest of them were calm, professional.

  Waggoner had grabbed me. ‘Come on,’ he’d said, urgent himself.

  Mr. Rove was yelling for someone to call 999, and the rest of us to go back to the changing rooms. As we went, Drake’s lot fell in, running, beside me and Waggoner. I was afraid they were going to do something. But then Waggoner had said fuck and Drake had said fuck back, and then suddenly Drake’s lot were talking to me and Waggoner like we’d been in the same gang forever. Waggoner had started to laugh and run and leap up and down, water flying off his wet skin into the winter air. He was steaming like it was smoke pouring out of him.

  * * *

  Life as one of Drake’s lot wasn’t easy for me. It was easy for Waggoner. He’d flicked up his collar and messed his hair like Elvis Costello. He folded his tie thin. It didn’t look like it’d look on me.

  Drake would spend most of his time with his lot being silent. When he talked, it was about his dad, who sounded like a god and was always getting him stuff, or about how his mum was a fucking bitch. Every now and then he’d grab one of the others, almost always Rove, and push him over and laugh, or slap him around the face, just lightly. Rove would say stuff about how rich his dad was. ‘Cath is a poofter,’ he’d say. ‘He likes it up the arse.’ Which would set Selway off about how he’d seen these two girls together in this porn mag. Blewly would nod every time any of them mentioned some cool thing they had, and say he had it too.

  In those two weeks, they got hold of Surtees a couple of times. My own lot hadn’t tried to talk to me about how I wasn’t going over to join them any more. I saw them looking in our direction a few times. Drake used his knife to slice right down the back of Surtees’s blazer, leaving a flapping gap which they all laughed at. They grabbed Cath too, and walked him right round the playing fields, surrounding him, asking details about how he was a poof and what he wanted to do to Fiesta.

  Waggoner started bringing things into school, magazines and sticker books and different sorts of fags. He always said he’d let Blewly borrow the magazines and never did. I didn’t join in. They didn’t notice me amongst them. I didn’t know why Waggoner was doing this. It was better, maybe. It didn’t feel as good as it should have.

  * * *

  I looked over at Lang during Biology. He was sitting beside Rove, but was looking over at Drake all the time. Drake now sat beside Waggoner. That is, beside me. Fiesta had suddenly started sitting elsewhere, and nobody had said anything about it; it was just part of the change. I would look to one side, and see Waggoner at our twin desk, and then to the other side and see Drake there.

  Lang looked translucently white. He still had an astonished expression on his face. I could see the wound round his throat, brown-red and twisted like old tree bark. Everyone was looking at it.

  Mrs. Pepper wasn’t going to say anything to stop them. She was older than most of the teachers. She had her hair pulled right back, and wore huge baggy dresses with deep pockets. Like a lot of the people Mr. Rove employed, she seems in retrospect to have been more like someone who worked on the estate. She nodded and tutted as if she was wise. ‘Nothing you children say or do surprises me,’ she once told Surtees, when she’d overheard him saying something pornographic about Blewly. ‘Once children were brought up to go into professions or into service; now it’s computers or the dole queue, and it’s always obvious who’s going to be who.’ She was currently teaching us about how genes reproduced through a series of diagrams. She got us to draw the diagrams of the different stages. When one of the girls asked what happened in between, how you got from one shape to the other, Mrs. Pepper cheerfully said she didn’t know. The diagrams would appear in the exam, same as every year, and after that none of us would have to worry about this stuff ever again. That got a laugh, as she’d known it would. She always said that, she said. Once things get fixed in a particular way, they stay fixed. Wasn’t that a comforting thought? Lang put his hand up and asked to leave the room, and was gone until the end of the lesson.

  * * *

  Lang got his courage together at first break. He came right up to Waggoner and me and said, ‘Right, I owe you that fight.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Waggoner.

  ‘I would, only you’d get in trouble for picking on me. Because you’re a spasmodic spasmo!’ He half sang the words like they were from a song he’d made up, accompanied by his usual high kick to thin air.

  Drake was silent.

  Lang kept on at Waggoner. ‘How’s your cock? Did you find it? Have you got it in a bottle? Does your mum take it out every night for her douchey dildo? Bet you kiss her muff under the mistletoe.’ He pulled a sprig of mistletoe out of his pocket and wobbled it around at crotch level.

  Waggoner flicked his 50p piece in the air. It caught the low winter sunlight.

  Drake was still silent.

  Lang looked between them. He burst into tears. He ran for the loos. Rove started laughing, but Drake thumped him on the arm, and he shut up.

  * * *

  When we came in after break, I didn’t see what happened. Lang and Waggoner weren’t in sight. We were all crowding at the top of the little stairs, going back to the form rooms. Suddenly Lang broke away from a tussle in the group. ‘All right now, now if you want it, you fucking fucker!’ He did his awkward little dance again, showing gaps of white flesh between his trousers and his short socks. He’d backed to the top of the big stairs. He cried out as he tripped. He fell like a tree, his feet caught together as they slipped on a muddied, snowy footstep. His head hit the marble balustrade. Blood splashed onto the white.

  The crowd rushed forward. The ones at the front nearly followed him, like a penny falls at an amusement arcade.

  He was rolling d
own the stairs, arms together, a bundle.

  At the bottom of the stairs, coming out of his office, was Mr. Rove. A shaft of sunlight through one of the big windows caught the body. Lang looked like a ghost. Mr. Rove looked down at Lang as he rolled against his shoes.

  * * *

  The neck wound had reopened, and Lang had swallowed his own tongue. He’d been asphyxiating when the ambulance men got there. Mr. Rove had once more been called upon to do first aid. They took Lang straight to Emergency.

  Drake shook his head. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  Lang was taken to Chippenham hospital. Once again, he was going to be okay.

  * * *

  On December twenty-first, Lang woke in hospital at around 7:20 a.m. The time and date seem in retrospect like they might be important. Maybe the importance of something being about to happen was what had woken him. I, however, was still sleeping. Which is, I suppose, how I know all this.

  The ward was in darkness. All the other patients were asleep. The nurse who should have been at her desk was elsewhere. Lang had been kept in for observation longer than expected, because his blood didn’t seem to be clotting properly, and the throat wound was thus proving difficult. Depending on the test results, he was going to be home for Christmas. He reached for the glass of water beside his bed. There was someone standing there.

  The blow to the head silenced him. It hit the old spot, the beauty of a bruise already there. It switched him off. The pillow shoved down over his face pushed him into a coma. The dressing around his throat was taken off, the stitches cut like entering a turkey. The blood was allowed to flow free this time, out of his throat and over the bedclothes in a perfect circle.

  Time of Lang’s third and final death: 7:26 a.m., at the moment of dawn on the solstice, just as the first rays of direct sunlight came into the room through the big window above his bed.

  We were later told that it had taken awhile for anyone to notice anything was wrong. Perhaps Lang had been so pale he was almost invisible.

  The coroner found mistletoe in his stomach.

  Fourteen

  Lang was dead.

  The things in me that thudded and shifted against each other had made me feel sick, when I heard confirmed what I’d dreamt about Lang, from a shout Mum had made when hearing the news over the phone. Those feelings made me have to sit down or lean against the wall, sweating and tired. I’d felt immediately like telling. But telling what? Something impossible. Waggoner remained calm. He still had his 50p piece. The edge was bloody. I told him to clean it, but he shook his head.

  On the Wednesday before Christmas, me and Aunt Dar decorated the lounge like we always did. Aunt Dar smelled of something sweet, and had the roughest hands. She wore pinnies. She said I was quiet. I was. I kept making myself remember Waggoner’s promise that when all this was over, I’d be healed. If only I could keep going, I’d be whole again.

  Just before the end of term, Renée and Renato had gone to Number One with ‘Save Your Love’. Everyone hated it. Now I had it going round and round in my head, but I didn’t want to get rid of it, because if I did, I’d start thinking about things.

  There was going to be a parents and teachers meeting in the new year. By then, the police or the coroner might have something to say about what had happened.

  Dad came into the room looking vaguely proud. Friend of yours on the phone, he said. He could drive me over if I wanted.

  * * *

  Drake sounded careful on the phone, like this was official because parents were listening. He asked if I’d like to come over to his dad’s farm tomorrow afternoon. Some friends, he didn’t even say ‘mates’, were getting together to talk about ‘Vincent’. I handed the phone to Waggoner. He’d said yes before I had time to argue.

  * * *

  The Drake farm was a big silver barn and buildings. Frost on the mud, making it stand up in spikes. It smelt of shit. The sun was very low, making the silver shine.

  Waggoner and I got out of the car. I told Dad I’d find my way in. He said okay, he’d meet Mr. Drake when he picked us up. I had to give them his condolences about his son’s friend. I was to be polite to Mr. and Mrs. Drake. They owned half of Wiltshire.

  I waited until he’d driven off and turned the corner, but Waggoner had already set off across the mud. I caught up with him. He looked calm. There were sacks and boxes of stuff piled up against a barn. A label saying HORSE TRANQUILISERS. Which sounded worrying in itself, making me wonder why they needed them. ‘Why are we here? We didn’t have to come. Are you going to get another one of them here? It’s . . . it’s too soon for another, isn’t it?’

  ‘We have to wait for the times and places. This all has to be done by the book. It’s got to be meaningful.’ We’d got to a big white door with dog dishes in front of it. From behind it, I could hear voices: Drake, Rove . . . Angie. Other girls. Waggoner knocked.

  Drake opened the door. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt, cut off at the shoulders, and jeans. ‘Hi,’ he said. His voice still sounded strange, but his face was stoic as always. I followed Waggoner in. Some of the football kids were in one corner of the living room, Goff and Sadiq and some others. Selway was with them. Blewly and Rove were on their own. Drake went to sit between them and the football kids.

  Angie and her three friends, Jenn, Netty and Louise, were all gathered together in another corner. There were no other girls. Angie met my gaze guardedly.

  Waggoner said hi and sat down with Drake. I sat beside him. I would let Waggoner do the talking.

  They all had cans of lager. Drake was cutting up tobacco with his knife. I kept looking at it. He kept looking over to Angie, as if waiting for her to approve. But she gave no sign. Drake got a pizza covered in sausage and bacon out of the oven and offered it round. Angie sighed at that too. ‘Vegetarian,’ she said. Netty and Jenn turned it down with similar looks on their faces, but Louise took a slice.

  It got dark. Drake switched on ornamental lights. His parents didn’t seem to be at home. It felt odd that the death of Lang would make these kids so quiet. Every now and then someone sniggered, but nobody laughed back. They were trying very hard to be somber, forcing it on each other.

  I took strength from Waggoner beside me. I was here undercover, overhearing all this. It was a world I’d never glimpsed before.

  Drake lit the fag and passed it round, like it was a spliff. ‘Lang always liked doing this,’ said Blewly, looking at the carpet. ‘He was a really good mate. He always gave us stuff.’

  ‘And he was tough,’ Selway added. ‘It took three goes to take him down.’

  ‘My dad always said he was great,’ said Rove. ‘He wasn’t a fucking pansy like some people fucking said he was.’

  ‘He was ace,’ said Waggoner.

  The fag came round to me. I didn’t know what to do. I put it in my mouth, felt the warm paper, felt the wetness of the others’ mouths, handed it to Waggoner before my disgust made me spit it out. Nobody noticed.

  Louise got the fag and took a great, decadent puff of it, waving it between two fingers like she had vast experience. Netty and Jenn took quick little puffs too. Angie turned the cigarette aside with a look, and Jenn quickly handed it on to Goff, having to get up and walk over to do so. Drake got up in the same second, walked to the kitchen door, looked back to Angie. She slumped and sighed theatrically. No. He only went out for a second, then came back.

  As the night went on, we heard what had happened. The skinheads who’d painted the horse had had it in for Lang, heard he was injured, and snuck into the hospital in disguise. Melmbury, knowing Lang was so good at football . . . Selway said ‘Fucking hell’ loudly before Netty could finish that. She looked annoyed.

  Cans of lager got passed round. I took a drink. My first drink. Waggoner was throwing back cans, then stamping them flat and throwing them into the kitchen like shuriken stars.

  Rove told a story about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman captured by a tribe of coons—Blewly looked to Sadiq and laughe
d, said ‘coon’ again—and imprisoned in a barrel. But after a while everyone realised he’d forgotten the punchline.

  Selway went over to sit beside the girls. They talked for a bit. Louise pushed her hair back and fixed it there, and they started carefully snogging. I tried not to stare. I looked over to Angie. She met my gaze. Just for a moment, she let me see an enormous sadness and anger on her face.

  Drake leapt to his feet. Everyone looked at him. Even Selway looked up from Louise. Drake belched. Everyone laughed. ‘Shut up!’ he yelled. Everyone did. ‘He was a sodding good guy,’ he said, finally, as if deciding. ‘He was too young to die. He didn’t deserve it.’

  I found myself curled up around something mean in my stomach again. Rove, his big hands grabbing for another can. Blewly, still sniggering at the belch. Selway, his hands on Louise’s chest. But most of all Drake. Did he really believe what he’d just said? I wanted to prove the opposite, on a blackboard, with equations and diagrams. From interfering with my clothing to Kermit the Frog, it all equals Lang deserved to die. His voice meant he deserved to die. His expression meant he deserved to die. I could feel the pain all up my front and legs again. I concentrated on the pain, let myself keep feeling it. I didn’t feel undercover any more. I felt like an obvious wound.

  I had to go upstairs and find the bathroom. Waggoner stayed downstairs, which hadn’t happened before, but I had no idea any more what was weird and what wasn’t. Beside the bathroom there was a door open to what I assumed was a spare room, filled with odd stuff. I couldn’t contextualise what I saw through the doorway, so I looked inside. I realised this must be Drake’s parents’ bedroom. There were empty beer cans strewn around, a pile of cigarette ends that obscured what might be an ashtray, dog shit on the floor. The duvet had stains on it. I didn’t understand it. I backed out and found the toilet.