‘Oy!’ Ross Wilcox picked up a clod of earth. ‘Forgot yer breakfast, yer bumboys!’
Grant Burch must’ve ordered Phelps not to turn round.
The soil-bomb’s trajectory looked perfect.
It was. It exploded on the back of Phelps’s neck.
It’d been a risky fight for Ross Wilcox, but it’d gone brilliantly. Burch’s scalp makes Wilcox the hardest kid in the second year. He’ll get invited to be a member of Spooks, most like. He settled on his throne on the Hollow Log. Ant Little said, ‘I knew you’d have Grant Burch, Ross!’
‘Me too,’ said Darren Croome. ‘We was saying, on our way here.’
Ant Little got out a packet of Number Sixes. ‘Smoke?’
Ross Wilcox swiped the entire pack.
Ant Little looked pleased. ‘Where’d yer get yer ear-stud put in, Ross?’
‘Did it myself. Needle, candle to sterilize it. Hurts like shit but it’s a piece o’ piss.’
Gary Drake stabbed a Swan Vesta against the bark to light it.
‘You two…’ Wayne Nashend squinted down at Dean Moran and me. ‘You was here with Burch, wasn’t yer?’
‘I didn’t even know about the scrap,’ Dean Moran protested. ‘I’m off to White Leaved Oak, me. To stay with my gran.’
‘Walking?’ Ant Little squinted. ‘White Leaved Oak’s over the Malverns. It’ll take ages. Why doesn’t yer old man drive yer?’
Moran looked awkward. ‘He’s ill.’
‘He’s on another of his benders,’ Wayne Nashend said, ‘ain’t he?’
Moran looked down.
‘Then why can’t yer mum drive yer?’
‘Can’t leave my dad, can she?’
‘What about you,’ Gary Drake speaks snakishly, ‘President Jason Taylor of the Grant Burch Arse-Slurpers Association. What are you doing here?’
You can’t just say, ‘I’m out for a walk,’ ’cause walks are gay.
‘Yee-HAAAAAR!’ Squelch straddled a limb of the Hollow Log like a horse and whipped his own bum with a whippy stick. ‘Gonna kick dat boy’s ass to da middle o’ next week!’
‘You,’ Darren Croome flobbed, ‘should be in Little Malvern Loonybin, Squelch.’
‘Well, Taylor?’ Ross Wilcox isn’t so easily distracted.
I spat out my flavourless Juicy Fruit, desperate for a way out. Hangman was gripping the root of my tongue and every letter in the alphabet was a stammer-letter.
‘He’s coming to my nan’s too,’ said Dean Moran.
‘You didn’t tell us that, Taylor,’ accused Ant Little, ‘not before Ross kicked the shit out of that wankstain Burch.’
I managed to say, ‘You didn’t ask, Little.’
‘Me and Taylor were meeting here.’ Moran began heading off. ‘That was the plan all along. He’s comin’ to my nan’s too. C’mon, Jason, better be off now.’
The Christmas tree plantation was dark as eclipses and whiffed of bleach. Armies of them in endless rows and files. Flies, titchy as commas, got into our eyes and nostrils. I should’ve thanked Moran for the lifeline he’d thrown me back by the Hollow Log, but that would’ve meant admitting how badly I’d needed it. Instead, I told him about the Dobermanns. But it wasn’t news to Moran. ‘Oh, Kit Harris? I knows ’im all right. Divorced the same woman, three times. She must need her bloomin’ head examinin’. Kit Harris loves one thing only and that’s them dogs. He’s a teacher, believe it or not.’
‘A teacher? But he’s a psycho.’
‘Yep. At a borstal, out Pershore way. His nickname’s “Badger”, ’cause o’ that streak o’ white hair. Not that anyone calls him that to his face. Once one o’ the borstal kids took a dump on the bonnet of his car. Guess how Badger found out who done it.’
‘How?’
‘Squeezing bamboo needles up every kid’s fingernails, one by one, till someone grassed on the kid who done it.’
‘No way!’
‘God’s honest, that is. My sister Kelly told me. Discipline’s tougher at borstals, that’s why they’re borstals. At first, Badger tried to get the kid who done it expelled. But the headmaster of the borstal wouldn’t do it, ’cause if yer get expelled from a borstal that means automatic prison. So a few weeks later, Badger organized a wide-game on Bredon Hill. At night.’
‘What’s a wide-game?’
‘Like an army game, a war game. They do ’em in the Scouts too. One side has to capture the other side’s flag, stuff like that. So anyway, the next morning, the kid who’d crapped on Badger’s car’d disappeared.’
‘Where to?’
‘Exactly! The headmaster told Interpol and that, the kid’d run away during the wide-game. Happens all the time at borstals. Kelly got to the bottom of it, though. But you have to swear on your own grave you’ll never tell anyone.’
‘I swear.’
‘On yer own grave.’
‘On my own grave.’
‘Kelly was in Rhydd’s when Badger comes in. This was three weeks after the kid’d disappeared, okay? So. Badger buys