our doorstep. His metal files, stones, his (what?) flint flywheel. Crouched over it, his face glowing and creased like a goblin, eyes burning dangerous. One claw making the flywheel spin, faster, blurrier, one claw bringing the blunt blades closer, slowly, closer, till the stone touches the metal and buzzsawing sparks gush, furious blue, dribble, spurt into the drizzly Coke-dark dusk. I’d’ve smelt the hot metal. Heard it shriek itself sharp. One by one, he’d work through the dull knives. One by one, old blades’d be made newer than new and whistlier than Norman Bates’s Bowie knife and sharp enough to pass through muscle, bone, hours, dread, through Those kids must hate me. Sharp enough to slice What’ll they do to me tomorrow? into wafers.
God, I wish I’d said yes.
Being seen with either of your parents in public is pretty gay. But tonight loads of kids were walking to the village hall with their parents too, so that rule didn’t apply. The windows of Black Swan Green village hall (erected 1952) glowed buttery yellow. It’s only a three-minute walk from Kingfisher Meadows, slap bang by Miss Throckmorton’s. Primary school seemed so huge then. How can you be sure anything is ever its real size?
The village hall smells of cigarettes, wax, dust, cauliflower and paint. If Mr and Mrs Woolmere hadn’t saved us chairs up front, Dad and I’d’ve had to’ve stood at the back. The last time it was as full as tonight was on the Christmas nativity play night, when I’d been a Scruffy Urchin of Bethlehem. The audience’s eyes reflected the stage lights like cat’s-eyes at night. Hangman made me have to half-fudge a few key lines, to Miss Throckmorton’s disgust. But I’d played the xylophone okay and sung ‘White or Black or Yellow or Red, Come See Jesus in His Shed’ okay too. You don’t stammer when you sing. Julia had braces for her teeth then, like Jaws’ in The Spy Who Loved Me. She told me I was a natural. That wasn’t true but was so nice of her I’ve never forgotten.
So anyway, tonight the audience was hysterical, like a war was about to break out. Cigarette fug blurred the lines. Mr Yew was here, Colette Turbot’s mum, Mr and Mrs Rhydd, Leon Cutler’s mum and dad, Ant Little’s dad the baker (who’s always at war with the hygiene people). All yackering yackerly to be heard over the yackering yacker. Grant Burch’s dad was saying how gypsies steal dogs for fighting and then eat the evidence. ‘It happens in Anglesey!’ Andrea Bozard’s mum agreed. ‘It’ll happen here!’ Ross Wilcox sat between his dad the mechanic and his new stepmother. His dad’s a bigger, bonier, redder-eyed version of his son. Wilcox’s stepmother couldn’t stop sneezing. I tried to avoid looking at them, the way you try not to be sick by ignoring the fact you’re about to be. But I couldn’t help it. Up on the stage with Gilbert Swinyard’s dad were Gwendolin Bendincks the vicar’s wife and Kit Harris the borstal teacher who lives up the bridleway with his dogs. (Nobody’d try to steal his dogs.) Kit Harris’s got a gash of white in his black hair so all the kids call him Badger. Our neighbour Mr Castle walked on from the wings to take the last chair. He gave Dad and Mr Woolmere a heroic nod. Dad and Mr Woolmere returned the nod. Mr Woolmere muttered to Dad, ‘Didn’t take old Gerry long to get in on the action…’ Taped to the front of the trestles was a length of wallpaper. On it was painted VILLAGE CAMP CRISIS COMMITTEE. The VCC and C were blood red. All the other letters were black.
Mr Castle got to his feet and the hushers began hushing the yackers. Last year Dean Moran and Robin South and me were playing footy and Moran wellied his ball into the Castles’ garden, but when he asked for it back Mr Castle said it’d crushed a hybrid rose worth £35 and he wouldn’t give Moran’s ball back till we’d paid for his rose, which means never, ’cause you don’t have £35 when you’re thirteen.
‘Ladies, gentlemen, fellow Black Swans. That so many of you have braved this frosty evening is in itself proof of the strength of feeling in our community about our elected council’s shameful – shameless – attempt to meet its obligations under the’ – he cleared his throat – ‘1968 Caravan Sites Act, by turning our village – home, to all of