Black Swan Green (13 page)

‘A
what
?’

‘A tunnel the Ministry of Defence dug for a nuclear bomb shelter. The entrance is in the garden centre at Woolworths in Great Malvern. Gospel. One of the garden centre walls is a fake wall what hides a vault door, like in a bank. When the four-minute warning goes off, the Ministry of Defence lot at the RSRE’ll be ferried up to Woolies by the military police. Councillors from Malvern Council’ll be allowed in, so will Woolworths’ manager and assistant manager. Then the military police – who’ve kept out all the panicking shoppers with their guns – they’ll be allowed in. They’ll grab one or two of the prettier shop assistants for breeding. Which rules my sister out, don’t it? Then that door’ll close and all of us’ll get blown to Kingdom Come.’

‘Kelly didn’t tell you all this, did she?’

‘Nah, the bloke my dad buys horse shit off of for the garden, his mate’s the barman at the RSRE.’

It must be true then. ‘Jesus.’

In a drift of khaki pine needles I saw antlers, like Herne the Hunter’s. But it was only a branch. ‘S’pose we may as well join forces,’ I said. ‘Hunting the third tunnel. The lost one.’

‘But,’ Moran kicked a pine cone but missed, ‘who’ll do the interview with the
Malvern Gazetteer
?’

I booted a pine cone way up the gloomy path. ‘Both of us.’

Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It’s ace. Petalled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. Moran and I got to the barn at the far side, dizzy with intergalactic travel. I was laughing more than Moran ’cause Moran’s dry trainer wasn’t dry any more, it was glistening in cow shit. Bales of straw made a ramp up to the griddly barn roof, so up we climbed. The cockerel tree you can see from my bedroom wasn’t running left to right now, it was running right to left. ‘Skill place for a machine-gun nest, this barn,’ I said, displaying my military expertise.

Moran squidged off his shitty trainer and lay back.

I lay back, too. The rusty iron was warm as a hotty.

‘This is the life,’ sighed Moran, after a bit.

‘You can say that again,’ I said, after a bit.

‘This is the life,’ said Moran, straight off.

I
knew
he would. ‘That’s
so
original.’

Sheep and lambs were bleating, fields behind us.

A tractor was chuntering, fields ahead.

‘Does
your
old man ever get pissed?’ Moran asked.

If I said yes I’d be lying, but if I said no it’d look gay. ‘He has a drink or two, when my Uncle Brian visits.’

‘Not a drink or two. I mean does he get
so fucking plastered
he…he can hardly speak?’

‘No.’

That
No
turned the three feet between into three miles.

‘No.’ Moran’d shut his eyes. ‘Don’t look the type, your dad.’

‘But yours doesn’t, either. He’s really friendly and funny…’

An aeroplane glinted, mercury bright in the dark high blue.

‘Maxine calls it like this, she calls it “Daddy’s going dark”. She’s right. He goes dark. He starts…y’know, on a few cans, and gets loud and makes shite jokes we have to laugh at. Shouts and stuff. The neighbours bang on the wall to complain. Dad bangs back, calls ’em all the names under the sun…then he locks himself in his room but he’s got bottles in there. We hear them smash. One by one. Then he sleeps it off. Then afterwards, when he’s all so sorry, it’s all, “Oh, I’m never touchin’ the stuff again…” That’s almost worse…Tell you what it’s like, it’s like this whiny shitty nasty weepy man who isn’t my dad takes my dad over for however long the bender lasts, but only I – and Mum and Kelly and Sally and Max – know that it
isn’t him
. The rest of the world doesn’t know that, see. They just say,
Frank Moran showing his true colours, that is
. But it ain’t.’ Moran twisted his head at me. ‘But it is. But it
ain’t
. But it is. But it
ain’t
. Oh, how am
I
s’posed to know?’

A painful minute went by.

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you
look
at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything. But too many things’d’ve gone wrong if I’d tried to say this to Moran.

Moran sniffed, ‘Fancy a nice, cool bottle of Woodpecker?’

‘Cider? You’ve brought cider?’

‘No. My dad drunk ’em all.
But
,’ Moran fumbled in his bag, ‘I’ve got a can of Irn Bru.’

Irn Bru’s fizzy liquid bubblegum, but I said, ‘Sure,’ ’cause I hadn’t brought any drink myself and Irn Bru’s better than nothing. I’d imagined I could drink from fresh springs but the only water I’d seen so far was that farty ditch.

The Irn Bru exploded in Moran’s hand like a grenade. ‘Shit!’

‘Watch out with that Irn Bru. It’ll be all shaken up.’

‘You don’t flamin’ say so!’ Moran gave me first swig, as he licked his hand clean. In return, I gave him some Cadbury’s Caramel. It’d oozed out of its wrapper, but we picked off the bits of pocket fluff and it tasted okay. I got a hayfever attack and sneezed ten or twenty times into a nuggety hanky.

A vapour trail gashed the sky.

But the sky healed itself. Without fuss.

CRAAAAAAWWWKKK!

I’d slid halfway down the curve of the barn roof, clattering between dreaming and waking, before I got my balance back.

Three monster crows sat in a row, where Moran had last been.

Of Moran there was no sign.

The crows’ beaks were daggers. Their oily eyes had cruel plans.

‘Piss off!’

Crows know when they’re a match for you.

St Gabriel’s bell rang eleven or twelve times, the crows made me too uneasy to keep count. Tiny darts of water hit my face and neck. The weather had turned while I’d been sleeping. The Malverns’d disappeared behind wings of rain, beating just fields away. The crows parascended up and off.

Moran wasn’t inside the barn, either. Obviously he’d decided not to share the front page of the
Malvern Gazetteer
. What a traitor! But if he wanted to play Scott of the Antarctic versus Amundsen the Norwegian, that was fine by me. Moran’s never beaten me at anything in his
life
.

The barn smelt of armpits, hay and piss.

Rain began its blitz, tranging bullets off the roof and strafing the puddles round the barn. (Serve Moran the Deserter right if he got a drenching and caught pneumonia.) Rain erased the twentieth century. Rain turned the world to whites and greys.

Over the sleeping giant of the Malvern Hills, a double rainbow linked the Worcestershire Beacon with the British Camp. Ancient Britons got massacred by the Romans there. The melony sun dripped steamy brightness. I set off at a fast yomp, jogging fifty, walking fifty. I decided, if I passed Moran, I wouldn’t say a word to him. Cut the traitor dead. The wet turf squeaked beneath my trainers. I climbed a shaky gate and crossed a paddock with jumps for horses made from police cones and stripey poles. Past the paddock was a farmyard. Two silage towers shone like Victorian Apollo spacecraft. Trombone flowers snaked up trellises and a flaky sign read,
HORSE MANURE FOR SALE
. A cocky rooster eyed its hens. Rain-soggy sheets and white pillowcases hung on a washing line. Frilly panties and bras too. A mossy track disappeared over the rise, towards the main road to Malvern. Passing a stable, I peered into the hot, manure-reeky dark.

Three horses, I made out. One tossed its head, one snorted, one stared at me. I hurried on. If a bridlepath goes through a farmyard it can’t be private but farmyards definitely don’t feel public. I’m afraid of hearing
Trespasser! I’m going to give
you
a prosecutin’ you’ll
never
forget!
(I used to think trespassing was about Heaven and Hell, because of the Lord’s Prayer.)

So anyway, over the next gate was this medium-sized field. A John Deere tractor was ploughing it into slimy furrows. Seagulls hovered behind the plough, plucking easy fat worms. I hid till the tractor was headed away from the bridlepath.

Then I began legging it across, like an SAS agent.

‘TAYLOR!’

I’d got noosed before I’d even reached a sprint.

Dawn Madden sat in the cockpit of an ancient tractor, whittling a stick. She wore a bomber jacket and mud-starred Doc Martens with red laces.

I steadied my breath. ‘All right’ (I meant to call her ‘Madden’ ’cause she’d called me ‘Taylor’) ‘Dawn.’

‘Where’s,’ her knife shaved stringy loops of wood, ‘the fire?’

‘Huh?’

Dawn Madden mimicked my
Huh?
‘Why’re you running?’

Her oil-black hair’s sort of punky. She must use gel. I’d love to gel her gel in for her. ‘I like to run. Sometimes. Just because.’

‘Oh, aye? And what brings
you
so far up the bridlepath, then?’

‘No reason. I’m just out. For a doss.’

‘Then,’ she pointed to the bonnet of the tractor, ‘you can doss there.’

I badly wanted to obey her. ‘Why?’ I badly didn’t want to obey her.

Her lipstick was Fruit Gum redcurrant. ‘’Cause I’m telling you to.’

‘So,’ I scrambled up the front tyre, ‘what are
you
doing here?’

‘I
do
live here, y’know.’

The wet bonnet of the tractor made my arse wet. ‘That farmhouse? Back there?’

Dawn Madden unzipped her bomber jacket. ‘That farmhouse. Back there.’ Her crucifix was chunky and black like a Goth’s and nestled between her subtle breasts.

‘Thought you lived in that house by the pub.’

‘Used to. Too noisy. And Isaac Pye, the landlord, he’s a total slimeball. Not that
he
,’ Dawn Madden nodded at the tractor ploughing the field, ‘is much of an improvement.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Official stepfather. That house is his house. Don’t you know
anything
, Taylor? Mum and I live there now. They got married last year.’

Actually now I remembered. ‘What’s he like?’

‘Brains of a bull.’ She peered at me round an invisible curtain. ‘Not only the brains, judging by the racket
they
make some nights.’ Stewy air stroked Dawn Madden’s milk-chocolate throat.

‘Are those ponies in the stable yours?’

‘Have a good snoop round, did we?’

Her stepfather’s tractor was heading back this way.

‘I only looked into the stable. Honest.’

She got back to her knife and stick. ‘Horses cost a fortune to keep.’ Whittle, whittle, whittle. ‘
That man
’s letting the riding school keep them there while they’re doing some rebuilding. Anything else you want to know?’

Oh, five hundred things. ‘What are you making?’

‘An arrow.’

‘What do you want an arrow for?’

‘To go with my bow.’

‘What do you want a bow and arrow for?’

‘What-what-
what
, what-
what
-what-what?’ (For one horrifying moment I thought she was taking the piss out of my stammer but I think it was more general.) ‘All questions with you, ain’t it, Taylor? My bow and arrow’s to hunt boys and kill them. The world’s better off without them. Spurty scum, that’s what little boys are made of.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Can I see your knife?’

Dawn Madden tossed her knife, right at me. It was sheer fluke that it was the blade’s handle that hit my rib and not its fang.

‘Madden!’

Her stare said
What?
Dawn Madden’s eyes are dark honey.

‘That could’ve stuck right into me!’

Dawn Madden’s eyes are dark honey. ‘Oh, poor Taylor.’

The clackering tractor reached us and began a slow turn. Dawn Madden’s stepfather beamed hate-rays my way. Rusty earth sluiced round the blades of the plough.

Dawn Madden did a spazzo yokel voice at the tractor. ‘“Made o’ moy flesh an’ blood or not, young missy, we’re going to have more
respect
in this ’ouse or you’ll be out on your bony arse an’ don’t you go thinkin’ Oi’m bluffin’ yer ’cause I never bluff no one!”’

Her knife’s handle was warm and sticky from her grip. The blade was sharp enough to hack off a limb. ‘Nice knife.’

Dawn Madden asked, ‘Hungry?’

‘Depends.’

‘Pi
cky
.’ Dawn Madden unpeeled a squashed Danish pastry from a paper bag. ‘Won’t turn your snout up at a bit of this, though, right?’ The girl tore a bit off and waved it at me.

Its icing glistened. ‘Okay, then.’

‘Here, Taylor! Here, doggy!
Come!
Good boy!’

I crawled over the bonnet towards her, on all fours. Not doggily, but carefully, in case she swatted me into the nettles. You never know with Dawn Madden. As she leant towards me I saw the bumplets of her nipples. No bra. My hand moved towards her.

‘Paws down! In your teeth, doggy!’

She fed me like that. Arrow to mouth.

Lemony icing, cinnamony dough, raisins sweet and sharp.

Dawn Madden ate too. I saw the cud pulp on her tongue. Closer now, on her crucifix I saw a skinny Jesus. Jesus’d be warmed by her body. Lucky guy. Pretty soon the Danish was all gone. Delicately, she spiked the cherry on the tip of her arrow. Delicately, I lifted it off with my teeth.

The sun went in.

‘Taylor!’ Dawn Madden peered at her arrow’s tip. Her voice went furious. ‘You
stole
my cherry!’

It stuck in my throat. ‘You…gave it me.’

‘You
stole
my fucking cherry and now you’ve got to
pay
for it!’

‘Dawn, you—’

‘Since when’ve
you
been allowed to call me
Dawn
?’

The same game, a different game, or no game?

She pricked my Adam’s apple with her arrow. Dawn Madden leaned in so close I could smell the sugar on her breath. ‘Do I
look
like I’m joking, Jason Taylor?’

That arrow was
really
sharp. I probably could’ve swatted it off before she could puncture my windpipe. Probably. But it wasn’t that simple. For one thing, I had a boner as big as a Dobermann.