Chalk Page 9

  I locked myself in and stood there for a while. I didn’t want to piss in Drake’s toilet. Finally, I did.

  I opened the door and found Angie waiting there. I actually tried to close the door again but she grabbed me, the first time a girl had touched me, and swung me to slam me against the wall. ‘What,’ she hissed, ‘is going on?’ I was so used to Waggoner being there that I was startled he wasn’t going to answer for me. ‘How can you be his friend all of a sudden?! Are you threatening him with what you saw?’

  ‘What? No! D’you think I want to be his friend?’

  She looked puzzled. ‘What?’

  I’d said too much. Without Waggoner there, it had come pouring out of me. But now I was looking at her face, I was angry again. ‘How can you . . . go out with him?’

  She looked angrily at me. But compromised as well. ‘Are you just pretending to be his friend?’

  ‘No,’ I said, like I answered every playground question, but it was also sort of true, and she must have heard the true part.

  ‘I’m with him because of when he was born,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ She let go of me. ‘What sort of music do you like?’

  I didn’t feel able to buy records in the Top 40. Radio 1 was not for me. Previously, I’d learn what was Number One by overhearing what kids said on Tuesday afternoons when the new chart was announced at 12:45. But now me and Waggoner were part of Drake’s lot, I heard everything they listened to, that narrow spectrum of stuff they were allowed to like: the Boomtown Rats, the Police, Stiff Little Fingers. There was Blondie too, but Blondie were complicated. They were kind of New Wave, and that was good, but they were kind of pop too, and girls liked them, but Debbie Harry was lush, and at least they weren’t poofs like the New Romantics. Selway said he’d give Debbie Harry one. Or two. Differently, like.

  I didn’t want to answer Angie, because this was a test I’d been set, but I was undercover. ‘Boomtown Rats, The Police, Stiff Little–’

  ‘I mean, what do you really like?’

  I stared at her. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even find the meaning of her question. She realised she wasn’t going to get a reply and stepped back, shaking her head, not disappointed in me so much as missing something she needed to know.

  I quickly went back down the stairs. Waggoner had opened a drinks cabinet and found a bottle of Cinzano Bianco. He was pouring out plastic cups of it, but not to everybody. He moved diagonally across the room. He went from Selway to Blewly to Rove to Drake. He left Netty blinking, her hand outstretched. He raised the bottle in a toast. ‘Absent friends,’ he said.

  ‘Any time, any place, anywhere,’ slurred Rove, singing like Lang would.

  Waggoner shook his head. No.

  Fifteen

  The days after the end of term. Those low, dark days. Dark in the mornings, dark in the afternoon. The crisp, dry cold. Stars right across the sky that Christmas Eve. At half past eleven, Waggoner and I were sitting in my dad’s car, at the bottom of the hill that led up to St. Swithin’s in Compton Bassett, listening to the Grumbleweeds on Radio 2.

  Why had Angie asked what music I really liked?

  People were walking past in their coats, heading into church, looking over their shoulders at me and Waggoner sitting in a car with the interior light on. I’d said I wanted to go to Midnight Mass, and Mum had looked oddly at me. Dad had just shrugged and laughed. “Are you getting religion?” he said. I said no, no. So they drove us over with them and Aunt Dar, but when we got there, I took a few steps towards the church and didn’t want to go in. I didn’t know why I’d even wanted to come here. Waggoner stood beside me, looking annoyed. I broke away from Mum and Dad and took a step back.

  Mum looked over her shoulder and called for Dad. Dad came back, looking around at the well-dressed people going into the church. ‘Don’t make a scene,’ he said, in the voice that always made me stop doing whatever I was doing, a voice that was more fear than anger. ‘Make up your mind, one way or the other.’

  ‘It’s going to be boring,’ I said quickly. ‘I didn’t think it would be. I’ll stay in the car, I’ll be fine, sorry.’

  Mum, afraid of the cold, tried to get Dad to drive me home. But I insisted that I had a book. It was only an hour. Because of the lack of time and the cars backed up down the hill, I won that one. Dad shook his head as he went in. Mum managed a thin smile at the people going in.

  So we sat there in the car. Waggoner was reading a horror magazine he’d hidden inside his coat. The bells rang. People ran in at the last moment. The bells stopped. Then we were alone. Our breaths misted up the windows. I gave up trying to read. I curled up, my head on my knees, my duffle coat wrapped around me. I switched off the car radio. ‘Why couldn’t I go into the church like everyone else?’

  ‘We could have.’

  I let out a long breath. I fell back into my seat. I let my mind wander for a moment. ‘Do you think there’s intelligent life in space?’

  He grunted.

  ‘Mum always says they’ll be just like us. But I’d hate it if they were just like us.’

  * * *

  When we got back from Compton, Dad, who’d let all his anger fall from him and had been smiling about another Christmas from the moment he got out of church, opened up a bottle of Newcastle Brown and poured a glass for Mum and himself. He asked me if I wanted a drop, a joke as always, and I said no.

  ‘You usually say yes!’ Mum said. They hadn’t noticed when I’d slept in the car on the way home from Drake’s and woken looking ashen the next morning. I’d spent the rest of the party, after the benediction of Cinzano Bianco, being undercover and drinking lager, which I’d now decided I didn’t like.

  Dad told me to make sure I had my stocking out. I told him there was no need this year. It was a waste of money.

  ‘A waste of money! Father Christmas doesn’t worry about money! Just you think on! You’re not too old yet. Next year maybe you will be.’

  I tied my stocking to the bedpost. Waggoner hadn’t bothered with one. It was a waste of money. I was an adult now. I closed my eyes, pulled the curtains closed, got into my pyjamas and got into bed beside Waggoner. I thought of Drake’s lot and was angry still, and was pleased by that.

  * * *

  Something woke me up.

  There was a light. A white light at the window. White on black.

  The moon.

  The curtains were open.

  I was awake. I was afraid. I had grabbed the sheets in my fingers, hanging on.

  There was someone moving about in the room.

  Waggoner was still beside me. No. No. This is Father Christmas, right? My dad. He’d have pulled back the curtain so he could see what he was doing. I mustn’t look. He mustn’t see me looking. He mustn’t know I know he’s Father Christmas.

  I looked sideways. Waggoner was sitting up, grinning. The bastard. The bastard!

  I leapt up myself. To apologise to Dad. To say I hadn’t seen anything, to make up some story–

  It was Father Christmas. He’d come in through the window, in his red coat with white fur trim, his sack over his shoulder. He looked comically surprised to see me for a moment, then smiled and put a finger to his lips. He upended his sack, and started carefully packing my stocking with presents. There were candy canes and balls that had segments of different colours and teddy bears that climbed up on their own and whizzed down into the stocking like they were on a slide. It all looked very expensive. I was very frightened. I started to protest. He looked suddenly furious at me. He opened his mouth and roared.

  That doesn’t sound likely, does it? How about this?

  I looked sideways. Waggoner was sitting up, grinning. The bastard. The bastard!

  I leapt up myself. To apologise to Dad. To say I hadn’t seen anything, to make up some story–

  I shouldn’t have done that. I’d caught him as he was leaving. He was closing the curtains. He looked back at me, and for a moment he looked so lost, helpless, angry, disappointed. />
  ‘Dad. What are you doing in here?’ I said.

  He stopped whatever it was he was going to say. ‘The curtains had come open,’ he said. He came back over. ‘I was checking up on you. I see Father Christmas has been. But you get back to sleep.’

  That sounds more likely. But how about this?

  I looked sideways. Waggoner was sitting up, grinning. The bastard. The bastard!

  I leapt up myself. To apologise to Dad. To say I hadn’t seen anything, to make up some story–

  It stood by the open window. It was naked. It had a wound on its throat and a wound on its forehead, and it was white from suffocation. It was Lang, the victim, back. No. It was what had become of him. Its eyes were pits.

  It ran at me.

  I yelled, wrenched up the covers to hide. It ripped the covers out of my hands.

  ‘It’s not my fault!’ I shouted.

  It grabbed for me. Waggoner seized it by the throat. He had the sharpened 50p piece in his hand. He shoved the coin into the thing’s mouth, then pushed and twisted until, with a great cry of pain, it swallowed the coin. ‘Back to the barrow from which you were born,’ he said. I thought of the roundness he’d seen on the downs, when before there’d been a depression. ‘Take the blood back; complete the connection.’ He hauled the being over to the window with the billowing curtains, and shoved it out, sent it scampering and sobbing back into the dark.

  I pulled the covers over my head and curled up into a ball and was instantly asleep.

  Sixteen

  By the time the Christmas holidays ended, Phil Collins was at Number One with ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Doctor Who had started a week earlier. That was a big thing for me, something I loved which wasn’t okay to love. Mum and Dad would stay silent as I watched it, knowing I had to hear everything. Waggoner had sat through it, empty again, incapable of having an opinion.

  When we got back to school, the building looked different. Just slightly. When you went down a corridor that was meant to end in a junction, it felt like it was on a vague curve. The angle of the school against the ground was different. The lines of the playing fields seemed complicated. It tired my eyes to look at them.

  I heard a crash that first day. Angie, her friends running to her, was lying at the bottom of the stairs, looking round in surprise. She did it twice more in the next week. Waggoner saw that and laughed. ‘She thinks she knows more than the rest of them,’ he said. ‘But she’s got everything the wrong way round.’

  Games now had become warm-up exercises followed by athletics, probably because Mr. Rove felt that was the least dangerous option. Mrs. Parkin was in charge of boys and girls together. In the changing rooms that Tuesday, Surtees must have said something about Drake, or Drake thought he had. Showing no anger, Drake hit him hard in the stomach, kicked him across the back and spat onto the top of his head, then used his bare foot to rub it into Surtees’s hair, knocking his head against the ground with it. Surtees kept screaming in alarm until Drake marched off.

  The next morning, in the corridor outside the form room, I heard Surtees behind me, talking to Fiesta and Cath. I turned round and punched him on the arm, then grabbed it, got his fingers in a lock, with him trying to wrestle back at me. I enjoyed hauling at him, feeling him push against me. I thumped him hard in the stomach. He went down.

  Applause. Glorious.

  Waggoner looked tiredly at me.

  * * *

  On the minibus, there was Elaine, who was two years down from me and also stood on the town hall steps in Calne. She had short black hair. On the way home that night, she pointed at all the boys in the bus, and told us where we’d all be on her list of who to send Valentine’s cards to. All the others were in the top two hundred. Though none of them placed higher than one hundred and fifty, and that was Grayson, who was in her year. I wasn’t on the list. She said I was the last person, below girls, below her mum, below the bus driver, below the bus itself, that she would ever send a Valentine’s card to.

  I said she was only saying that because she really wanted to send me one. That surprised everybody. I’d talked back.

  She said she really didn’t.

  * * *

  On the town hall steps the next day, I mentioned it again. I asked if she’d chosen what card she was going to send me. She said she wasn’t, and if I wasn’t careful, she’d send me a snake.

  * * *

  I asked Mum if I was a Catholic. She said no, we were Church of England; why was I asking? I said it was because I knew a Catholic. She said, Oh.

  That day, I’d joined in with a group of kids clustered around Cath, shouting ‘Cath, Cath, Cath!’ at him. He’d looked around, going, ‘No, I’m not,’ over and over again.

  * * *

  Surtees and me, the next week, in an alcove off a corridor. He was slapping and putting his knees up. I was thumping him in his stomach, and then on his back, on his head, throwing him down.

  ‘He’s much tougher than you are, Surtees,’ said Selway, watching.

  I swooned at the pleasure of the boy who’d helped rip open my cock.

  * * *

  Other boys on the bus joined in, a couple of days later, when I asked Elaine again about the Valentine. ‘What are you going to send me, then, a snake? A chocolate snake? Is that because you love me?’

  There’d been a snake in Doctor Who the previous night, and just for a second I thought I’d left myself open to admitting I’d seen it, that she was going to say something about that. But she didn’t! Even if she had, I’d have said something back. I was sure I would.

  She just looked angry at me, then turned away.

  * * *

  That day at school, Surtees was showing people his five special offer cards which he was going to send off for his Top Trumps Sports Cars pack. I grabbed his hands, prised open his fingers one by one, pulled the cards off him.

  ‘They’re mine!’ he screamed. ‘I’ll tell!’

  I tore them into pieces and threw them onto his shoes.

  He bent to scrabble and pick up the pieces. I laughed, the most free I’d ever felt, the laughter bursting from me like piss.

  * * *

  I started to ask Elaine about the valentine every day. She sat there, ignoring me now, ignoring everyone on the bus, because we were all looking expectantly at her.

  One night, when she got off, I blew her a kiss, then all the boys were doing it. I looked around. I had done something that was copied in a good way!

  She walked quickly off into the dark.

  * * *

  ‘You’re happier these days,’ said Dad the next Monday on the way back home. That night, there was going to be a big meeting of the parents and teachers about what had happened to Lang, and the horse on the football pitch. ‘You were singing under your breath. Are you having a good time with your mates? Helps you to work hard. It all goes towards that bursary.’

  I listened that night after they came home from the meeting. Lang’s assailant hadn’t been seen. Many motives had been guessed at, but none of them had anything to do with the school. No connection with the vandalism on the soccer pitch, which was done by local hooligans. No parents had taken their children out of the school.

  I kept grinning. I was trying the expression, seeing how it felt.

  * * *

  I kept on at Elaine every day, and now the whole bus did too. Men at Work went to Number One with ‘Down Under’, the lyrics of which were meant to be different, ruder, to what was on the radio. I sang it at her on the bus, and all the other kids, including the ones who’d been her friends, sang along. ‘When the women blow and then chunder.’ We did it over and over, until the bus driver bellowed at us to stop.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day itself, which was a Monday, Elaine wasn’t waiting on the town hall steps. But she was at school that day. I saw her across the playground. I went over, I walked through her friends. Waggoner came with me, irrelevant, looking awkward. I asked Elaine what had happened about my card. Was it w
aiting for me at home? She didn’t reply. She looked at her feet. Her friends started saying things loudly at me. But I didn’t care. I kept on asking her.

  Then suddenly Angie was there. She stepped between me and Elaine. Waggoner looked alarmed. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said, pretend punk stupid. But I walked off. They called things after me. But they were just girls now. Elaine wasn’t on the bus that night, either.

  * * *

  Dad picked something up from the table when we got in through the door that evening, a red envelope, held between finger and thumb like a dead mouse. He’d said in the car that there was a surprise. ‘And what would this be?’ he comedy murmured, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I took it.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘We shall want to know.’

  I took it into my bedroom. I hadn’t wanted to open it in front of him, because I thought it might be from Elaine, that it might say something bad inside. I decided that if it did, I’d wait until tonight, set fire to it on one of the cooker rings, flush the ashes and tell them I’d lost it. Then Elaine was really going to pay.

  On the other hand, could it be a real valentine? It must be. Because I was tough now. That was what girls liked. I was being tough without Waggoner’s help.

  Waggoner stood there, empty, caring nothing about all this. He caught my glance, finally, and sighed. ‘All this stuff, how you are right now, is nothing to do with getting your revenge.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘It’s everything. It’s victory.’

  He just shrugged.

  I opened the envelope. The card had a strange design on the front. Two stick figures, drawn quite well, like someone might draw stick figures for an advert. But it was homemade. One figure was a man, and the other was a woman, because she was wearing a skirt. They were looking at each other, quite far apart. That was weird. There was no writing on the front.