David Mitchell - Black Swan Green

Contents

Do not set foot in my office. Thats Dads rule. But the phoned rung twenty-five times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless its a matter of life or death. Dont they? Dads got an answering machine like James Garners in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But hes stopped leaving it switched on recently. Thirty rings, the phone got to. Julia couldnt hear it up in her converted attic cause Dont You Want Me? by Human League was thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldnt hear cause the washing machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty rings. Thats just not normal. Spose Dadd been mangled by a juggernaut on the M5 and the police only had this office number cause all his other I.D.d got incinerated? We could lose our final chance to see our charred father in the terminal ward.

So I went in, thinking of a bride going into Bluebeards chamber after being told not to. (Bluebeard, mind, was waiting for that to happen.) Dads office smells of pound notes, papery but metallic too. The blinds were down so it felt like evening, not ten in the morning. Theres a serious clock on the wall, exactly the same make as the serious clocks on the walls at school. Theres a photo of Dad shaking hands with Craig Salt when Dad got made regional sales director for Greenland. (Greenland the supermarket chain, not Greenland the country.) Dads IBM computer sits on the steel desk. Thousands of pounds, IBMs cost. The office phones red like a nuclear hotline and its got buttons you push, not the dial you get on normal phones.

So anyway, I took a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and said our number. I can say that without stammering, at least. Usually.

But the person on the other end didnt answer.

Hello? I said. Hello?

They breathed in like theyd cut themselves on paper.

Can you hear me? I cant hear you.

Very faint, I recognized the Sesame Street music.

If you can hear meI remembered a Childrens Film Foundation film where this happenedtap the phone, once.

There was no tap, just more Sesame Street.

You might have the wrong number, I said, wondering.

A baby began wailing and the receiver was slammed down.

When people listen they make a listening noise.

Id heard it, so theyd heard me.

May as well be hanged for a sheep as hanged for a handkerchief. Miss Throckmorton taught us that aeons ago. Cause Id sort of had a reason to have come into the forbidden chamber, I peered through Dads razor-sharp blind, over the glebe, past the cockerel tree, over more fields, up to the Malvern Hills. Pale morning, icy sky, frosted crusts on the hills, but no sign of sticking snow, worse luck. Dads swivelly chairs a lot like the Millennium Falcons laser tower. I blasted away at the skyful of Russian MiGs streaming over the Malverns. Soon tens of thousands of people between here and Cardiff owed me their lives. The glebe was littered with mangled fusilages and blackened wings. Id shoot the Soviet airmen with tranquilizer darts as they pressed their ejector seats. Our marinesll mop them up. Id refuse all medals. Thanks, but no thanks, Id tell Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan when Mum invited them in, I was just doing my job.

Dads got this fab pencil sharpener clamped to his desk. It makes pencils sharp enough to puncture body armor. H pencilsre sharpest, theyre Dads faves. I prefer 2Bs.

The doorbell went. I put the blind back to how it was, checked Id left no other traces of my incursion, slipped out, and flew downstairs to see who it was. The last six steps I took in one death-defying bound.

Moron, grinny-zitty as ever. His bumfluffs getting thicker, mind. Youll never guess what!

What?

You know the lake in the woods?

What about it?

Its onlyMoron checked that we werent being overheardgone and froze solid! Half the kids in the villagere there, right now. Ace doss or what?

Jason! Mum appeared from the kitchen. Youre letting the cold in! Either invite Dean insidehello Deanor shut the door.

Umjust going out for a bit, Mum.

Um where?

Just for some healthy fresh air.

That was a strategic mistake. What are you up to?

I wanted to say Nothing but Hangman decided not to let me. Why would I be up to anything? I avoided her stare as I put on my navy duffel coat.

Whats your new black parka done to offend you, may I ask?

I still couldnt say Nothing. (Truth is, black means you fancy yourself as a hard-knock. Adults cant be expected to understand.) My duffels a bit warmer, thats all. Its parky out.

Lunch is one oclock sharp. Mum went back to changing the Hoover bag. Dads coming home to eat. Put on a woolly hat or your headll freeze.

Woolly hatsre gay but I could stuff it in my pocket later.

Good-bye then, Mrs. Taylor, said Moron.

Good-bye, Dean, said Mum.

Mums never liked Moron.

Morons my height and hes okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Druggers End in a brick cottage that pongs of gravy too. His real names Dean Moran (rhymes with warren) but our P.E. teacher Mr. Carver started calling him Moron in our first week and its stuck. I call him Dean if were on our own but names arent just names. Kids whore really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yews always just Nick. Kids whore a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have sort of respectful nicknames like Yardy. Next down are kids like me who call each other by our surnames. Below us are kids with piss-take nicknames like Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar, whos Knickerless Bra. Its all ranks, being a boy, like the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard just Swinyard, hed kick my face in. Or if I called Moron Dean in front of everyone, itd damage my own standing. So youve got to watch out.

Girls dont do this so much, cept for Dawn Madden, whos a boy gone wrong in some experiment. Girls dont scrap so much as boys either. (That said, just before school broke up for Christmas, Dawn Madden and Andrea Bozard started yelling Bitch! and Slag! in the bus queues after school. Punching tits and pulling hair and everything, they were.) Wish Id been born a girl, sometimes. Theyre generally loads more civilized. But if I ever admitted that out loud Id get BUMHOLE PLUMMER scrawled on my locker. That happened to Floyd Chaceley for admitting he liked Johann Sebastian Bach. Mind you, if they knew Eliot Bolivar, who gets poems published in Black Swan Green Parish Magazine, was me, theyd gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone.

So anyway, as Moron and I walked to the lake he told me about the Scalectrix hed got for Christmas. On Boxing Day its transformer blew up and nearly wiped out his entire family. Yeah, sure, I said. But Moron swore it on his nans grave. So I told him he should write to Thats Life on BBC and get Esther Rantzen to make the manufacturer pay compensation. Moron thought that might be difficult cause his dadd bought it off a Brummie at Tewkesbury Market on Christmas Eve. I didnt dare ask what a Brummie was in case its the same as bummer or bumboy, which means homo. Yeah, I said, see what you mean. Moron asked me what Id got for Christmas. Id actually got 13.50 in book tokens and a poster of Middle-earth, but booksre gay so I talked about the Game of Life, which Id got from Uncle Brian and Aunt Alice. Its a board game you win by getting your little car to the end of the road of life first, and with the most money. We crossed the crossroads by the Black Swan and went into the woods. Wished Id rubbed ointment into my lips cause they get chapped when its this cold.