‘Yer lyin’ thief, it ain’t yours, yer nicked it off yer old biddy.’ Pluto Noak unspooled more slack as he climbed up the slide. ‘Anyway, it takes technique, does this. Ready?’
We all nodded, and took up innocent stances.
Pluto Noak wound the thread in, then delicately tugged.
The brass lion knocker answered. One, two, three.
‘Skill,’ mumbled Pluto Noak. That skill splashed on me.
A blunt axe of silence’d killed every noise in the playground.
Pluto Noak, Swinyard and Redmarley looked at each other.
Then they looked at me too, like I was one of them.
‘Yeah?’ Mr Blake appeared in a rectangle of yellow. ‘Hello?’
This, I thought as my blood went hotter and waterier, could backfire so shittily.
Mr Blake stepped forward. ‘Anyone there?’ His gaze settled on us.
‘Nick Yew’s dad,’ Pete Redmarley spoke like we were in the middle of a discussion, ‘is selling Tom’s old Suzuki scrambler to Grant Burch.’
‘Burch?’ Wilcox snorted. ‘What’s he sellin’ it to that cripple for?’
‘Breakin’ an arm,’ Gilbert Swinyard told him, ‘don’t make no one a cripple, not in my book.’
Wilcox didn’t quite dare answer back. To my delight.
All through this, Mr Blake’d been firing us this evil stare. Finally he went back in.
Pluto Noak snorted as the door closed. ‘Fuckin’ fierce or what?’
‘Fierce,’ echoed Dean Moran.
Dawn Madden bit her bottom lip and sneaked me this naked smile.
I’ll tie fifty threads, I thought-telegrammed her, to fifty door knockers.
‘Dozy old fucker,’ mumbled Ross Wilcox. ‘Must be blind as a bloody bat. He treaded on the thread, most like.’
‘Why,’ Gilbert Swinyard answered, ‘would he even be lookin’ for a thread?’
‘Gi’us a go now, Ploot,’ said Pete Redmarley.
‘Nokey-dokey, Sneaky Pete. Too much of a laugh, this. Round two?’
Mr Blake’s knocker knocked once, twice—
Immediately the door flew open and the cotton reel was jerked out of Pluto Noak’s hand. It clattered over the tarmac under the swing.
‘Right, you—’ Mr Blake snarled at the non-existent cherry-knocker who wasn’t cowering, terrified, on his doorstep, or anywhere else.
I had one of those odd moments when now isn’t now.
Mr Blake marched round his garden, trying to flush out a hiding kid.
‘So how much,’ Gilbert Swinyard asked Pete Redmarley in a loud, innocent voice, ‘are the Yews askin’ Old Burcher for that scrambler?’
‘Dunno,’ said Pete Redmarley. ‘Couple of hundred, prob’ly.’
‘Two hundred and fifty,’ Moran piped up. ‘Kelly heard Isaac Pye tell Badger Harris in the Black Swan.’
Mr Blake walked up to his gate. (I tried to keep my face half hidden and hoped he didn’t know me.) ‘Giles Noak. Might have known. Want to spend another night in Upton cop shop, do you?’
Wilcox’d grass me off, for sure, if the police got involved.
Pluto Noak leant over the side of the slide and dropped a spit-bomb.
‘You cocky little shite, Giles Noak.’
‘Talkin’ to me? I thought yer wanted that kid who just banged yer knocker and ran off.’
‘Bullshit! It was you!’
‘Flew back up here from yer door in one giant leap, did I?’
‘So who is it?’
Pluto Noak did a fuck you chuckle. ‘Who is it what?’
‘Right!’ Mr Blake took one step back. ‘I’m calling the police!’
Pluto Noak did this devastating imitation of Mr Blake. ‘“Officer? Roger Blake here. Yes, well-known unemployed child-beater of Black Swan Green. Listen, this boy keeps knocking on my door and running away. No, I don’t know his name. No, I haven’t actually seen him, but come and arrest him anyway. He needs a good ramming with a shiny hard truncheon! I insist on doing it myself.”’
That my cherry-knocking’d led to this was horrifying.
‘After what happened to your waster of a father,’ Mr Blake’s voice’d turned poisonous, ‘you should know where human sewage ends up.’
A sneeze exploded out of Moran.
Here’s a true story about Giles ‘Pluto’ Noak. Last autumn his then girlfriend Colette Turbot’d been invited by our art teacher Mr Dunwoody to Art Club. Art Club’s after school and it’s only open to kids Dunwoody invites. Colette Turbot went and found it was just her and Dunwoody. He told her to pose topless in his darkroom so he could photograph her. Colette Turbot said I don’t think so, sir. Dunwoody told her if she squandered her gifts she’d waste her life marrying pillocks and working at checkouts. Colette Turbot just left. Next day Pluto Noak and another mate from Upton pork scratchings factory appeared at lunch in the staff car park. Quite a crowd gathered. Pluto Noak and his mate each got a corner of Dunwoody’s Citroën and rocked it over on to its roof. ‘YOU TELL THE PIGS WHAT I DONE,’ he