the rain shplatterdrangs on the swivelled-up garage door. My radio-alarm glowed 06:35 in numerals of Mekon green; 150 minutes of life left, that was all. I could already see the rows and columns of faces in my class, like a screen of Space Invaders. Guffawing, puzzled, appalled, pitying. Who decides which defects are funny and which ones are tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes.
If God made each minute last six months I’d be middle aged by breakfast and dead by the time I got on the school bus. I could sleep for ever. I tried to push away what was in store by lying back and imagining the ceiling was the unmapped surface of a G-class planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Nobody was there. I’d never have to say a word.
‘Jason! Up time!’ yelled Mum from downstairs. I’d dreamed I’d woken in a gas-blue wood and’d found my granddad’s Omega, in one piece, in fiery crocuses. Then came running feet and the thought it was a Spook running home to St Gabriel’s graveyard. Mum yelled again, ‘Jason!’, and I saw the time: 07:41.
I mustered a muzzy ‘okay!’ and ordered my legs out of bed so the rest of me’d have to follow. The bathroom mirror, worse luck, showed no signs of leprosy. I thought about pressing a hot flannel to my forehead, drying it and then complaining to Mum of a temperature, but she’s not that easy to fool. My lucky red underpants were in the wash so I settled for my banana-yellow ones. It’s not a PE day so it won’t matter. Downstairs, Mum was watching the new breakfast TV on BBC1 and Julia was slicing a banana into her Alpen.
‘Morning,’ I said. ‘What’s that magazine?’
Julia held up the front cover of Face. ‘If you touch it when I’m gone I’ll strangle you.’
I should’ve been born, hissed Unborn Twin, not you, you cow.
‘Is that expression supposed to mean something?’ Julia hadn’t forgotten last night. ‘You look like you’re wetting yourself.’
I could’ve retaliated by asking Julia if she’d strangle Ewan if he touched her Face, but that’d’ve been admitting I was an eavesdropping maggot. My Weetabix tasted like balsa-wood. After I’d finished, I cleaned my teeth, put today’s books in my Adidas bag and Bic biros in my pencil case. Julia’d already gone. She goes to the sixth-form site of our school with Kate Alfrick, who’s already passed her driving test.
Mum was on the phone telling Aunt Alice about the new bathroom. ‘Hang on, Alice.’ Mum cupped the phone. ‘Have you got your lunch money?’
I nodded. I decided to tell her about the form assembly. ‘Mum, there’s—’
Hangman was blocking ‘something’.
‘Hurry up, Jason! You’ll miss the bus!’
Outside was blowy and wet, like a rain machine was aimed over Black Swan Green. Kingfisher Meadows was all rain-stained walls, dripping bird tables, wet gnomes, swilling ponds and shiny rockeries. A moon-grey cat watched me from Mr Castle’s dry porch. Wished there was some way a boy could turn into a cat. I passed the bridleway stile. If I was Grant Burch or Ross Wilcox or any of the council house kids from down Wellington End, I’d just skive off and hop over that stile and follow the bridleway to wherever it went. Even see if it leads to the lost tunnel under the Malvern Hills. But kids like me just can’t. Mr Kempsey’d notice straight off that I was absent on my dreaded form-assembly day. Mum’d be phoned by morning break. Mr Nixon’d get involved. Dad’d be called out of his Wednesday meeting. Truant officers and their sniffer dogs’d be put on my trail. I’d get captured, interrogated, skinned alive, and Mr Kempsey’d still make me read a passage from Plain Prayers for a Complicated World.
Once you think about the consequences, you’ve had it.
By the Black Swan girls were clustered under umbrellas. Boys can’t use umbrellas ’cause they’re gay. (’Cept for Grant Burch, that is, who stays dry by getting his servant Philip Phelps to bring a big golfing umbrella.) My duffel coat keeps my top half dryish but at the corner of the main road a Vauxhall Chevette’d splashed a big puddle and soaked my shins. My socks were gritty and damp. Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard and Nick Yew and Ross Wilcox and that lot were having a puddle fight, but just as I got there the Noddy-eyed school bus pulled up. Norman Bates looked at us from behind his steering wheel like a sleepless slaughterman at