But I wasn’t ready for three Hawker Harrier Jump Jets, close enough to the ground to hit with a cricket ball. The slam of noise was incredible! I bent into a tight ball and peeped out. The Harriers curved before they smashed into the Malverns, just, and flew off towards Birmingham, screaming under Soviet radar height. When World War III comes, it’ll be MiGs stationed in Warsaw or East Germany screaming under NATO radar. Dropping bombs on people like us. On English cities, towns and villages like Worcester, Malvern and Black Swan Green.
Dresden, the Blitz and Nagasaki.
I stayed curled up till the roar of the Harriers finally sank under the hum of distant cars and nearby trees. The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it. Mrs Thatcher was on TV yesterday talking to a bunch of schoolkids about cruise missiles. ‘The only way to stop a playground bully,’ she said, as sure of her truth as the blue of her eyes, ‘is to show to the bully that if he thumps you, then you can jolly well thump him back a lot harder!’
But the threat of being thumped back never stopped Ross Wilcox and Grant Burch scrapping, did it?
I brushed straw and dirt off me, and carried on walking till I came to an old-style bath tub in the corner of the next field. From all the hoofed-up mud, I guessed it was used as a feeding trough. In the tub a giant fertilizer bag was covering something. Curious, I pulled the fertilizer bag away.
Here was the dirt-smeared corpse of a boy my age.
This corpse then sat up and lunged at my throat.
‘AHSES TO ASHES!’ it gibbered. ‘DUST TO DUST!’
One whole minute later, Dean Moran was still pissing his pants. ‘Should o’ seen yer face!’ he wheezed through his laughter. ‘Should o’ seen it!’
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, yet again. ‘Congratulations. You’re a genius.’
‘Looked like you cacked yer cacks!’
‘Yeah, Moran. You got me really well. Okay.’
‘Best April Fool I ever done!’
‘So why did you bugger off? I thought we were s’posed to be looking for the tunnel together?’
Moran calmed down. ‘Ah, y’know…’
‘No. I don’t. Thought we had a deal.’
‘I didn’t want to wake you up,’ Moran said, awkwardly.
This is about his dad, said Unborn Twin.
Moran’d saved me from Gary Drake, so I let it go. ‘So are you still on for it? The tunnel? Or are you going to sneak off again on a solo run?’
‘I waited here for yer to catch us up, didn’t I?’
The unused field had a scrubby rise hiding its far side. ‘You’ll never guess who I saw back there,’ I began telling Moran.
Moran answered, ‘Dawn Madden, on a tractor.’
Oh. ‘You saw her too?’
‘Flamin’ nutcase, is that girl. Made me climb up her tractor.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yeah! Made me arm-wrestle her. My Danish for her knife.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did! She’s only a girl! But then she took my Danish anyway. Told me to bugger off her stepfather’s land or she’d get him to turn his shotgun on me. Flamin’ nutcase, that girl.’
Say if you hunt for Christmas presents in mid-December, find what you’re hoping to get, but then on Christmas Day there’s no sign of it in your pillowcase. That’s how I felt. ‘Well, I saw something better than Dawn Madden on a tractor, any day of the week.’
The chain of gossip laid itself out link by link. I’d tell Moran. Moran’d tell his sister Kelly. Kelly’d tell Pete Redmarley’s sister Ruth. Ruth Redmarley’d tell Pete Redmarley. Pete Redmarley’d tell Nick Yew. Nick Yew’d tell Tom Yew. Tom Yew’d come round to my house this evening on his Suzuki 150cc, tie me in a sack, and drown me in the lake in the woods.
‘“Well” what?’
‘Actually, they just snogged.’
‘Should’ve sticked around, yer should’ve.’ Moran performed his tongue-up-his-nostril trick. ‘Might’ve seen a bit o’ crump.’
Bluebells swarmed in pools of light where the sun got through the trees. The air smelt of them. Wild garlic smelt of toasted phlegm. Blackbirds sang like they’d die if they didn’t. Birdsong’s the thoughts of a wood. Beautiful, it was, but boys aren’t allowed to say ‘beautiful’ ’cause it’s the gayest word going. The bridlepath narrowed to single file. I let Moran go ahead as a body shield. (I didn’t read Warlord for all those years without learning something about survival techniques.) So when Moran suddenly stopped I walked smack into him.