bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
Spooks
So here I was, tying cotton to Mr Blake’s door knocker, cacking myself. The knocker was a roaring brass lion. Here be the fumbler who should be in bed, and here be the beast who bites off his head. Behind me, in the playground, Ross Wilcox was willing me to balls it up. Dawn Madden sat next to him on the climbing frame. Her beautiful head was haloed by the street lamp. Who knows what she was thinking. Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley spun on the witch’s hat, slowly, assessing my performance. On the high end of the seesaw perched Dean Moran. Pluto Noak weighed down the low end. His fag glowed. Pluto Noak’s why I was where I was. When Mr Blake’d confiscated the football after Gilbert Swinyard’d booted it into his front garden, Noak’d said, ‘If you ask me, that old git deserves a’ (he’d licked the words) ‘cherry-knocking.’ ‘Cherry-knocking’ sounds a pretty term but prettiness often papers over nastiness. Knocking on a door and running off before the victim answers sounds a harmless prank, but cherry-knocking says, Are we the wind, or kids, or have we come to murder you in your bed? It says, Of all the houses in the village, why you?
Nasty, really.
Or maybe it was Ross Wilcox’s fault. If he hadn’t snogged Dawn Madden so tonguily, I might’ve sloped off home when Pluto Noak mentioned cherry-knocking. I might not’ve bragged how Hugo my cousin does it by tying one end of a reel of cotton to the knocker and then drives his victim crazy by knocking from a safe distance.
Wilcox’d tried to snuff the idea out. ‘They’d see the thread.’
‘No,’ I counter-attacked, ‘not if you use black, and let it go slack after knocking so it’s lying along the ground.’
‘How’d you know, Taylor? You’ve never done it.’
‘I bloody have. At my cousin’s. In Richmond.’
‘Where the fuck’s Richmond?’
‘Virtually London. Ace laugh, it was, too.’
‘Should work.’ Pluto Noak spoke. ‘Trickiest part’d be tyin’ the thread in the first place.’
‘It’d take balls,’ Dawn Madden wore snakeskin jeans, ‘would that.’
‘Nah.’ I’d started it all. ‘It’s a piece of piss.’
Tying a thread to a knocker when one fumble means death is no piece of piss, however. Mr Blake had the Nine o’Clock News on. Through the open window wafted fried onion fumes and news about the war in Beirut. Rumour has it, Mr Blake’s got an air rifle. He worked at a factory in Worcester that makes mining equipment but he got laid off and hasn’t worked since. His wife died of leukaemia. There’s a son called Martin who’d be about twenty now, but one night (so Kelly Moran told us) they had a fight and Martin’s never been seen since. Someone’d got a letter from a North Sea oil rig, another from a canning factory in Alaska.
So anyway, Pluto Noak, Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley bottled out so they were pretty damn impressed when I said I’d loop the thread. But my fingers were fumbling one simple granny knot.
Done.
My throat’d gone dry.
Dead carefully, I lowered the knocker on to the brass lion.
The crucial thing was not to flunk it now, not to panic, not to think what Mr Blake and my parents’d do to me if I got caught.
I backtracked, trying not to scuff grit on the path, unspooling the cotton.
Mr Blake’s prehistoric trees cast tigery shadows.
The gate’s rusty hinges squeaked like glass about to shatter.
Mr Blake’s window snapped open.
An air rifle went off and a pellet hit my neck.
Only when the TV noise’d deadened did I realized that the window’d snapped shut. The bullet must’ve been a flying beetle or something. ‘Should’ve seen your face when the window went,’ snargled Ross Wilcox as I got back to the climbing frame. ‘Shat your cacks, it looked like!’
But no one else joined in.
Pete Redmarley flobbed. ‘Least he did it, Wilcox.’
‘Aye,’ Gilbert Swinyard gobbed, ‘took guts, did that.’
Dean Moran said, ‘Nice one, Jace.’
By telepathy I told Dawn Madden, Your spazzo boyfriend hasn’t got the nerve to do that.
‘Playtime, kiddiwinkies.’ Pluto Noak swivelled off the seesaw and Moran crashed to earth and rolled into the dirt with a squawk. ‘Gi’s the thread, Jason.’ (The first time he’d called me anything but ‘Taylor’ or ‘you’.) ‘Let’s pay wankchops a call.’