Mr Dunwoody’s face is fitted around his ginormous conk. He reeks of Vick’s Inhaler. Only a fellow stammerer’d notice his tiny slips on T-words. His art room’s got a clayey smell, for some reason. We never use clay. Mr Dunwoody uses the kiln as a cupboard and the darkroom’s a mysterious zone only Art Club members get to see. From the art room window you’ve got a view over the playing fields, so high-ranking kids bags those seats. Alastair Nurton saved me one. A solar system of hot-air balloons hung over the Malverns, over the perfect afternoon.
Today’s lesson was on the Golden Mean. A Greek called Archimedes, Mr Dunwoody said, worked out the correct place to put a tree and the horizon in any picture. Mr Dunwoody showed us how to find the Golden Mean using proportions and a ruler, but none of us really got it, not even Clive Pike. Mr Dunwoody did this Why am I wasting my life? expression. He pinched the bridge of his nose and massaged his temples. ‘Four years at the Royal Academy for this. Out with your pencils. Out with your rulers.’
In my pencil case I found a note that sent the art room spinning.
One number and four words’d just changed my life.
By the time you’re thirteen, gangs’re babyish, like dens or Lego. But Spooks is more a secret society. Dean Moran’s dad said Spooks started years ago as a sort of secret union for farmhands. If an employer didn’t pay what he owed, say, the Spooks’d all go round to get justice. Half the men in the Black Swan’d’ve been members in those days. It’s changed since then, but it’s still dead secret. Actual Spooks never talk about it. Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard were in it, me and Moran reckoned, and Pluto Noak had to be a leader. Ross Wilcox boasted he was a member, which means he isn’t. John Tookey is. One time he got pushed about by some skinheads at a disco in Malvern Link. Next Friday about twenty Spooks, including Tom Yew, rode up there on bikes and motorbikes. All the versions of what happened end with the same skinheads being made to lick John Tookey’s boots. That’s just one story. There’s a hundred others.
My bravery last night obviously must’ve impressed the right people. Pluto Noak, most like. But who’d delivered the note? I put it in my blazer pocket and scanned the class for a knowing look. Nothing from Gary Drake, or Neal Brose. David Ockeridge and Duncan Priest’re popular, but they live out Castlemorton and Corse Lawn way. Spooks is a Black Swan Green thing.
Some second-year girls jogged below the window in training for Sports Day. Mr Carver shook his hockey stick at a passing pack like Man Friday. Lucy Sneads’s tits bounced like twin Noddies.
Who cares who slipped me the note? I thought, watching Dawn Madden’s coffee-cream calves. It got there.
‘Pearls before swine!’ Mr Dunwoody snorted on his Vick’s Inhaler. ‘Pearls before swine!’
Mum was on the phone to Aunt Alice when I got home but she gave me this sunny wave. Wimbledon was on TV with the sound turned down. Summer gusted through the open house. I made a glass of Robinson’s Barley Water and made one for Mum too. ‘Oh,’ she said when I put it by the phone, ‘what a thoughtful son I’ve raised!’ Mum’d bought Maryland Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re new and totally lush. I grabbed five, went upstairs, changed, lay on my bed, ate the biscuits, put on ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO and played it five or six times, guessing what test the Spooks’d set me. There’s always a test. Swim across the lake in the woods, climb the quarry down Pig Lane, go nightcreeping across some back gardens. Who cares? I’d do it. If I was a Spook, every day’d be as epic as today.
The record stopped. I sifted through the afternoon’s sounds.
Spaghetti bolognese is mince, spaghetti and a blob of ketchup, normally. But Mum did a proper recipe this evening, and it wasn’t even anyone’s birthday. Dad, Julia and me guessed the ingredients in turn. Wine, aubergines (rubbery but not pukesome), mushrooms, carrot, red pepper, garlic, onions, toe-flake cheese and this red dust called paprika. Dad talked about how spices used to be like gold or oil nowadays. Clippers and schooners brought them back from Jakarta, Peking and Japan. Dad said how in those days Holland was as powerful as the USSR is today. Holland! (Often I think