to herd sheep? With Shep, his border collie? “Oh Give Me a Cot in the Land of the Mountains”? Could this be why he sent you for his whistle?’
‘I think he’s just doing the bus queues, sir.’
‘End cell. Under the tender gaze of the Holy Lamb.’ Mr Dunwoody got back to Story of the Eye without another word.
I walked down the empty hive. Desks come to resemble their owners, the way dogs do. Mr Inkberrow’s desk’s all neat stacks and piles. Mr Whitlock’s is grubby with seed-trays and copies of Sporting Life. Mr Kempsey’s cubby-hole has a leather chair, an anglepoise reading lamp like my dad’s and a picture of Jesus holding a lantern by an ivy door. On his desk was Plain Prayers for a Complicated World, Roget’s Thesaurus (Dean Moran’s dad calls it ‘Roger’s Brontosaurus’), Delius: As I knew him. Mr Kempsey’s whistle was exactly where he’d told me. Under the whistle was a thin stack of Xeroxes of Xeroxes. I folded the top Xerox up and slipped it into my blazer pocket. Just because.
‘Hunting for a needle in the ocean?’ Mr Dunwoody’s head appeared round his partition. ‘As the Asiatics might say? In lieu of a haystack?’
I thought he’d seen me nick the sheet. ‘Sir?’
‘Pearls before swine? Or a whistle on a desk?’
I dangled the whistle at Mr Dunwoody. ‘Just found it, sir…’
‘Wherefore dalliest thou? With the speed of a wingèd monkey, convey it presently to its rightful owner. Huzzah!’
First-years were playing conkers in the queue for the Black Swan Green bus. In Miss Throckmorton’s I was skill at conkers. Us third-years can’t play conkers, though, ’cause it’s too gay. It’s maimball or nothing. But at least the conkers was something to watch. Wilcox’d made it risky even to talk to Jason Maggot, School Stutterkid. After Mr Kempsey’d herded the Birtsmorton lot on to their bus, he blew his whistle for the Black Swan Green kids. I wonder if he meant for me to take that sheet. When you decide Mr Kempsey’s all right, he acts like a prat. When you decide Mr Kempsey’s a prat, he acts all right.
Three rows from the front’s too girly a seat for a third-year boy, but sitting near Wilcox’s squad at the back’d’ve been asking for it. Middle-ranking kids trooped past the spare seat next to me. Robin South, Gavin Coley, Lee Biggs didn’t even look at me. Oswald Wyre shot a ‘Maggot!’ at me. Across the playground a bunch of kids by the bike sheds’d turned to puppet shadows in the mist.
‘Christ!’ Dean Moran sat by me. ‘What a day!’
‘All right, Dean.’ I felt miserable I felt so grateful.
‘Tell yer what, Jace, that Murcot’s a bloody nutter! In woodwork just now, right, a plane flew over and what does Murcot yell at the top of his lungs? “Hit the deck, boys! It’s the goddam Jerries!” Honest to God, we all had to get down on our hands and knees! D’yer reckon he’s going senile?’
‘Could be.’
Norman Bates the driver started the engine and our bus moved off. Dawn Madden, Andrea Bozard and some other girls started singing ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. By the time the bus got to Welland Cross, fog was closing in thick.
‘I was going to invite yer over this Saturday,’ said Moran. ‘Dad got a video recorder off this bloke in a pub in Tewkesbury.’
Despite my problems, I was impressed. ‘VHS or Betamax?’
‘Betamax, of course! VHS’s going extinct. Problem is, when we got the video out of its box yesterday, half its insides was missing.’
‘What did your dad do?’
‘Drove straight over to Tewkesbury to have it out with the bloke who’d sold it him. Problem is, the man’d vanished.’
‘Could anyone at the pub help?’
‘No. The pub’d vanished an’ all.’
‘Vanished? How can a pub vanish?’
‘Sign in the window. “We have ceased trading”. Padlocks on the doors and windows. FOR SALE sign. That’s how a pub vanishes.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Some trailers were parked in the Danemoor Farm lay-by, despite the hill of gravel left there to ward off gypsies. They hadn’t been there this morning. But this morning belonged to a different age.
‘Come over on Saturday anyway, if yer want. Mum’ll cook yer lunch. It’ll be a right laugh.’
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday had to be got through first. ‘Thanks.’
Ross Wilcox and his lot’d streamed off the bus first without even a glance at me. I crossed the village green thinking the worst of this turd of a day was over.
‘Where d’you think you’re going, Maggot?’ Ross Wilcox, under the oak