Mr McClure looked us over from the head of the classroom, and said, "Who's running in the school cross-country on Wednesday? Let's have some hands in the air, here."
Let me tell you the worst thing about being a fat kid.
It has nothing to do with how you feel or how you look in the mirror; you feel okay and you see exactly what you want to see, so no problems there. The worst of it lies in those little incidents and throwaway remarks that stick in your memory and become an unwelcome part of your life for good.
Because the picture that I carried around in my head wasn't the same as the one that the rest of the world seemed to see, I'd fall for trouble every time. So there we were one day, about thirty-five of us in Latin class, and Mr McClure the Latin teacher was asking us which of the boys were going to be running in the school's annual cross-country race. This was a once-a-year three-mile slog across the local golf course and along muddy woodland tracks, and I had about as much chance of making it around the circuit as I had of levitating.
The girls nudged each other and all sixteen of the boys stared back with a kind of bovine stupidity, and so he changed his tack and asked who wouldn't be running.
And me, like a fool, I stuck my hand up.
He asked me why not and I told him that I had a dentist's appointment, and everybody roared. I sat there bewildered, because it happened to be true. The loudest of the barnyard sounds were coming from Colin Kelly and his cronies at the back of the room where they regularly shoved their four desks together and whiled away the hours defacing things. I suppose you'd have called Kelly the form's athlete; he had a collection of those little gilt cups and medals that the school bought cheaply out of a catalogue and handed out once a year on sports day. He was long-limbed and bony and he could dodge like a mongoose. . . and as far as the contents of his head were concerned, analysis would probably have yielded a teaspoonful of brains and a cupful of snot and a smattering of earwax, end of story.
McClure walked down the room toward them, and as they hushed and looked sheepish I could feel the heat moving away from me. McClure said, "What's the matter with you, Kelly?" and Kelly, surreptitiously trying to cover his exercise book with his elbow, said, "Nothing, sir."
"Are you running tomorrow?"
"Yes, sir."
"Don't mumble, Kelly."
"Yes, sir."
"Think you might win?"
"Yes, sir."
To be honest, this wasn't necessarily vanity on Kelly's part. He was probably fast enough to run on water without getting wet. McClure moved around to stand behind him and Kelly, beginning to sweat a little, fiddled with his pen as if trying to make out that he hadn't been using it for anything at all.
McClure said, "I know you've been training. What about the school record?"
"I'll get it easy," Kelly said.
"The word is easily, Kelly," McClure said, and he reached down and yanked the ineptly-hidden exercise book by its protruding corner from under Kelly's forearm. Kelly's elbow hit the woodwork with a loud clunk and McClure said to the class in general, "Does anybody here doubt Kelly's chances?"
Not a hand went up. McClure was holding the book in front of him to study the result of Kelly's efforts; knowing Kelly, it was probably something obscene. "So we all know that Kelly can run," he said. "And we all know that Thomas can draw and tell stories, and that Kelly couldn't wield a pen to save his life." And then there was more laughter as McClure tore the page from the book before walloping Kelly over the head with it and dropping it back onto the desk before him.
He screwed up the page and put it into the pocket of his tweed jacket as he moved back up the room at that slow, patrolling pace known only to schoolteachers and drill sergeants.
"We've all got something we're good at," he said. "It's putting the same kind of effort into everything else that's the real test of character. Wouldn't you say so, Kelly?"
"Yes, sir," Kelly mumbled, in a tone that was both dull and dark. I looked back and he was staring down at the desk with a face that looked like a sky just before a really bad rain.
As he drew level with me, McClure stopped and lowered his voice.
"Who's your dentist, Thomas?" he said. "Is it Norman Hope?"
I said that it was. Norman Hope was an old boy of the school with a surgery in one of the big old houses at the head of the golf course. He picked up most of his custom amongst the kids and couldn't even see a tooth without drilling and filling it. He was cheerful and friendly and milking the system for all it was worth.
"I'll phone him for you this afternoon," McClure said.
"Thank you, sir," I said hollowly.
The lesson went on. But I was too miserable to take much of anything in.
I suppose that McClure must have been one of the old-school generation who believed in all that stuff about sport being some kind of metaphor for life. He'd been decorated in the war and he'd taught for more than twenty years, so you'd think he'd have known better. It was tough enough being a kid at the best of times, without having to fall victim to someone else's philosophy; but he was decent enough in his way, and in that country of memory where I so often go stalking with machine gun and machete he tends to die less lingeringly than most.
The prospect of having to put on the kit and run was making my heart sink like a stone into deep, dark water. But even then an alternative strategy was starting to shape up in the back of my mind, and it wasn't the biggest of my worries; that was reserved for Colin Kelly, a more immediate and less predictable concern. McClure had done me no favours by using my name to bring him down a peg or so; Kelly wasn't likely to take it with good grace. He could move like a cat, but he had the mental acuity of a paperweight. You don't ask the Colin Kellys of this world to take a broad view of anything. You just throw in their bananas and slam the cage door, fast.
The lesson dragged on, the incident apparently forgotten.
The four of them were waiting for me when school let out for the afternoon.
*"Well, fuck me," Kelly said. "It's Thomas the Tank Engine."
I stopped in my tracks, mostly because three of them had spread to block my way and I could hear the fourth moving around behind me.
"Yeah," I said pleasantly, and with a confidence that I didn't feel. "Just steaming back to the old engine shed."
I'd emerged from the asphalt yard into the street only seconds before. Why couldn't I have taken another exit, just for today? Behind me was the main building of one of the last of the old-style grammar schools, a redbrick structure of motheaten charm with a gaggle of prefabricated overspill classrooms gathered around her skirts like bastard children. There had to be about twenty different ways in and out of the site; about five of these were official, the rest would have been impossible to cover.
But it was the end of the day. There was a hint of thunder in the air. I was toting along the great overstuffed briefcase that I always carried, everything that I could possibly need in one place because I could never rely on my memory to turn up with the right books for the right classes. And I was no great planner of battles, just an averagely-bright kid who read a lot and didn't move around much and whose physique nature had adjusted accordingly. All I'd had in mind was getting home.
Kelly made a kind of frowning squint at my remark and said, "You being funny?"
"You started it," I said.
"He thinks I was joking," he said to the others, and they made a noise like a chorus of cows. Damned if I can remember much about any of them today; their names and something about the way that one or two of them may have looked, but that's about all. They were just the crud that stuck around Kelly.
As they lowed and snickered Kelly said to me, "You want to try watching yourself sometime."
"For what?"
"Fucking entertainment, that's for what. You know what you are, don't you? You're a queer. You know what a queer is?"
"No," I said.
Apparently neither did Kelly for sure, because all he could say was, "It's what you are. Get his bag, Richard."
The one from behind me had a hold on my briefcase before I could get it up to hug it protectively to my chest, and he dug his nails into the flesh of my fingers to make me let go of the handle. We were right out in the middle of a dead-ended street, but I knew better than to hope for any help from behind the windows of the houses.
Just kids playing. Ignore them, they'll go away.
They tossed my bag from one to another and I made a few half-hearted lunges to get it back but I knew that I was wasting my time and in the end I just watched them, resigned, until they began to get bored. I knew how it would go, I'd been here before.
"It weighs a ton," Richard complained, so then they stopped and Kelly opened it up to take a look inside.
"No wonder," he said. "Look at all the crap in here."
What they were doing now was terrifically personal to me, and they knew it. When Kelly turned my bag upside down and emptied everything out onto the ground, that sudden shower of trinkets and books that flapped like birds was like the slamming of a door on some inner happiness. Nothing from the bag would ever be quite the same for me again.
He looked down at where my felt-tip pens had scattered. It was a bundle of about two dozen of them, a range of colours brighter than any rainbow, and the bundle had split so that they lay in a heap like a half-finished skyscraper at the end of a Godzilla movie.
"Thinks he can draw," Kelly said, and he hawked up snot with a sound like Norman Hope's suction tube; and then he spat right into the middle of the tangle of pens, and it landed in a slug with a sound like a chunk of meat propelled from a catapult.
"Draw with that," he said.
The others followed suit. One of them, a plug-ugly kid called Doug, managed to spit down his chin and onto his own trousers.
When they'd gone I picked up all of the books, but I left the pens where they were. It didn't much matter, they were cheap and I had others.
But these were the ones that I'd always remember.
*That night, around seven, Keith came over to my house.
We'd fixed this the day before. Keith was another of the regular gang of freaks who could be found shivering in their games kit around the goalmouth while the real play was all taking place downfield during the football season. His aversion to the track was as powerful as my own, and he'd asked me for some specialised help. He was short and skinny and pigeon-chested, and when stripped for the showers he looked like a long-legged duck. He was so nervous when he said hello to my mother that I had to bundle him upstairs before he could give the game away.
Keith said he was impressed by my bedroom, so he passed the test. This was my true home, the one place where the person that I was and the person that I wanted to be were merged into one. I had my drawings on the walls, my model aircraft suspended from the ceiling on cotton lines so that you could half-close your eyes and imagine them in flight, my stacks of Sexton Blake and Tarzan paperbacks from the local market bookstall (where, in truly philistine manner, they clipped off the corners of the covers to mark a new price in the space; I'd spend hours with card and watercolours restoring the copies that I'd rescued), an old Dansette record player under the bed with a stack of well-worn ex-jukebox singles and only one middle between all of them, some much-prized copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland which made me hunger for a film called Metropolis that I'd never even seen, more models, more books. . .
And, in what to the untrained eye would look like a disorganised mess on the chipped blue desk, my stories.
Keith said, "I brought some paper."
"What about the handwriting?"
"This is all I could get."
It was a note to the milkman, hastily written on a sheet torn from a cheap lined pad. Keith's mother's writing had the look of the hand of someone faintly retarded. Keith said "Will it be enough?" and I said, "It'll have to do."
So then I settled down with a pad of Basildon Bond and The Family Book of Health for reference, and started to compose. Keith peered over my shoulder for a while, but then his interest started to wane. I hadn't minded him watching just as long as he didn't start making suggestions, but now he wandered off and looked out of the window.
"It's starting to rain," he said.
I didn't say anything. I wasn't the one who was going to have to walk home in it later.
"If it rains tomorrow," Keith said, "they'll have to call off the run."
"Don't bet on it," I said.
The signature was the easiest part. You wouldn't think so, but it was. I'd worked out a technique which involved placing the two sheets against the shade of my bedside lamp and making a rough trace of the original lines in pencil. With this as a guide it was simple to do a quick, straightforward signature in ink, and then remove the pencil lines with a soft eraser when the ink was completely dry. The final forgery wasn't going to be exact, because I'd felt it necessary to tidy up the original a little -- what schoolteacher was going to believe in the authenticity of a note from a woman who couldn't even spell the days of the week? But the overall effect was just about right.
Keith had discovered the stories by now.
"Don't mess them up," I warned him. This was a time when I'd already laid down my belief that there was a special circle in Hell reserved for the abusers of books, somewhere midway between the cat poisoners and the child molesters. Keith said that he wouldn't and then sat there hamfistedly turning the pages, and I winced every time like I'd just taken a slap on a bad sunburn. The second note, which would be my own, took me almost twice as long as the first because of this.
As I was finishing, he held up the pages stapled to imitate a magazine and said, "What's this one about?"
"You just read it, didn't you?"
"I was only looking at the pictures."
I went over and took it from him, and began to turn the pages with rather more care. "It's about a man who loses his dog and goes to the dogs' home looking for it. When he gets there he finds they've sold it to this professor who's used it in experiments, so he goes to the professor's house and kidnaps one of his children and does all the same things to it, so when the professor finds out the next morning he goes mad."
Great, subtle stuff. I paused at my favourite page in the entire story, the one showing the professor tearing his hair out at the Corporation Tip as he confronted a great mountain of waste bags from the medical school that were just in the process of going under the bulldozer. Most of the bags had split and there were dead dogs and monkeys hanging out, and from somewhere in the middle of the charnel heap a plaintive voice was crying Dad-ee! Dad-ee! in a shivery-edged balloon.
"What's happening in this bit, here?" Keith said as I turned to the next page, and I said, "That's afterwards. The dog comes back."
"Isn't it dead?"
"No, it was all a mistake. It was another dog that looked just the same."
Keith made a sick-face, and shuddered. He'd actually gone a shade paler.
"Got any more like that one?" he said.
So I took him through some of the others, me curious to see if I could scare him enough to make him ask me to stop, and him grappling with his awe as if he'd found some streak of the spirit that he'd never even sensed before. I showed him the one about the solitary morgue attendant getting drunk on New Years' Eve as all the lonely suicides were brought in, and his reaction at midnight when they all rose up and started to party. I showed him the one about the slaughterhouse worker who built up such a terrific charge of bad karma during working hours that disasters happened to everyone around him as he unwittingly discharged it like static, but this one wasn't too effective - Keith didn't understand the concept of karma and, to be honest, I was a little shaky on its details myself. So then I showed him the one about a man who set a trap for a rat and instead caught some miniature, blind armadillo-like creature that bit him as he released it, and who started to pee tiny worms the next morning.
Yuk, Keith said, and crossed his legs and squirmed.
And then I showed him the one called Magpie.
This was my magnum opus. It concerned a man who trapped eight magpies and kept them in a cage in his darkened attic so they'd make his wishes come true in accordance with the old children's chanted rhyme that began One for sorrow, Two for joy and went on up to Eight for a wish. The story turned on the fact that he was cruel and neglected them, so that his wishes came true but all went bad in the end. Finally he repented of his wicked ways and returned to the attic for one last wish that would get him out of the big trouble that he'd brought upon himself, only to find that seven of the birds had starved to death and that only one - one, for sorrow - remained alive. And then there was this heavy knock on the attic door.
Keith didn't get this one, either. He said he'd never heard the rhyme, which I could hardly believe, and then he started arguing that it wasn't eight for a wish anyway, which was a pretty difficult line to pursue in view of what he'd just told me, and in the end it came down to me demanding Who's telling this story? And then finally it was time for Keith to go home, and I was so peeved at him I almost didn't hand over the note that I'd done for him.
Afterwards, when it was a couple of hours later and I was on my way to bed, I took another look at the note that I'd drafted for myself. It read Please excuse William Thomas from the cross-country run as he has a touch of sciatica, and it was signed - although she'd never know it - by my mother. It was a less certain strategy than the dental appointment ploy and slightly compromised in that I'd already promised something similar for Keith when my other plan had fallen through, but still it looked pretty good to me.
I opened my wardrobe door and cleared back the shirts on the rail.
Magpie.
I put the note in the chalk circle on the floor of the wardrobe. Pinned to the back boards, in a line, were eight identical bird pictures. I touched each in turn, and then I touched the note, and then I closed the door.
Eight, for a wish. Did I dare to wish for something bad to happen to Colin Kelly? Did I have that much of a nerve?
I already knew the answer to that one.
But the note came first. I'd leave it in there until morning, and then I'd present it without the slightest doubt that it would be accepted and believed. Keith would just have to take his chances. I'd done something different for him, of course. . . different paper, a different wording, and a different disease from The Family Book of Health.
I didn't know what leukemia was, exactly, but something so tough to spell ought surely to have been enough to keep a kid out of games for a week.
*Wilson, the gym teacher, read the notes and made no comment. I took this as a tribute to my skill instead of seeing the truth of the situation; that to Wilson we were flyspecks almost beneath notice, and that whereas under normal circumstances he'd simply have bawled us out and sent us to get our kit and given us some added humiliation as a penance for our effrontery, today he had more important things on his mind. He was a hatchet-face Scot, always in a tracksuit and a hurry, and the gym-teacher God had seen fit to eliminate every trace of humour and sense of justice from his nature. He spent nearly all of his time and energy on those kids who needed him least, and maybe they saw a different aspect of him. All I know is that he made kids like me feel like human ballast.
He told us that we were going to be race marshals, which I thought sounded great. The reality of it would be that we'd have to stand at some cold, wet spot in the woods where the track turned, waving the runners through and noting their names and times. But what the hell, it would be better than having to be one of them.
He kept us hanging around the tackle room for half an hour before giving us flags and a clipboard to carry and leading us out to the distant spot on the circuit where we'd have to stand. There was no conversation as Keith and I trooped in his wake toward the golf course. He didn't even look back at us, apart from when we were crossing the road. Without him along it would have been perfect because the school world seemed to fade out behind us as we pressed on into this different territory of birdsong and tree shadows and wide acres of grass just the other side of the pathway rail. The day was clear and cold. Rain had continued through the night, becoming so hard and fierce around one in the morning that it had sounded as if the roof above my bedroom had been stretched like a drumskin, but by dawn it had stopped to leave the sky washed-out and clean.
Walking was no problem for me. I could walk for ever. But on that circuit or anywhere else, I could run maybe two hundred yards before slowing to a plod like a gyroscope with a busted wheel.
"You'll wait here," Wilson said. We'd followed a muddy track, rutted and stony, that had led us to a spot in the woods where a stile marked the point where the pathway and the dirt track separated. Digging in the pocket of his tracksuit pants he said, "If anyone's not certain of the way, you wave them on over the stile. You don't leave until I come back and say you can go. Do you hear?"
We said we heard.
"You note the name and the time of every boy who goes through. You note them in these columns on this page, and I want to be able to read every one of them. Do you understand?"
We said we understood.
He'd taken out a small felt bag, from which he took what I'll always think of as an old man's watch. "This comes back to me in perfect condition. Anything happens to it and I guarantee, your feet will not touch the ground."
By which I took it to mean that he'd probably knock us around so badly that we'd have to be carted home in a wheelbarrow. I looked at the watch and saw that it was a cheap Timex, probably cheaper than the one I'd been given for Christmas and that I was wearing.
But I didn't say so.
Wilson's retreating presence was like a thumbscrew being released. We were out of the race and we were no longer under supervision. We began to breathe the clean air of a couple of freelancers.
Keith said, "Got any more stories?"
"I might," I said.
And then, to pass the time until the first of the runners should appear, I broke a rule and told him a story that I'd dreamed up but hadn't yet put onto paper. Keith's wide-eyed awe made him a great audience in many ways, although his regular failure to grasp the most central detail in a narrative tended to throw me a little. But it didn't seem to bother him, so I didn't let it bother me.
The story was about a struggling writer who couldn't get his book published and who finally in desperation went to the Devil to try to work out some kind of deal for the book to become a bestseller. In my story, the Devil had a shopfront office with the windows painted black and the word Łoans in flowing gold script on the outside of the glass. There was such a place, right on the busiest road in the old town about ten minutes' walk from where my grandmother lived, and it had spooked me ever since infancy. I think it was that black glass and the overheard phrase loan shark that did it. Sometimes an image can get into your mind early and rearrange the furniture to make itself at home, so that even when the light has been let in and the demons turn out to be just shadows you find that you're stuck with the new floorplan for life. The writer haggled with the Devil for most of an afternoon, but they couldn't come up with a deal that suited them both; until finally the Devil suggested taking one year from the very end of the writer's life in exchange for huge sales and a Hollywood deal, and the writer said okay. Who'd miss just one year, he thought, when by the time that it comes you'll be too old to enjoy it anyway? So he left his manuscript with the Devil and walked out into the street, and was promptly dropped by a massive heart attack as soon as he hit the pavement.
"What was his book about?" Keith said.
"That doesn't matter."
"Well, how come he dies?"
"Because he only has another year to live anyway," I explained patiently. "Only, he doesn't know it."
Keith contemplated the abyss of unexpected mortality for a while. Somewhere further along the dirt road on which we stood, there were the faint sounds of an approaching van or tractor.
Keith said, "You want to try selling some of those."
"The world's not ready for me yet," I said modestly.
The tractor, when it came into view about a minute later, proved to be that of the course greensman. It jarred and splashed through the ruts in the track, the greensman peering forward over the raised front shovel that had been loaded with fencing posts and about half a dozen rolls of new barbed wire. I don't know which was the more ancient, the man or the vehicle, and he had a skinny grey dog of similar antiquity that rode along on the platform behind the saddle. Keith and I backed off nervously to let them pass, even though there was plenty of room on the track. I'd never seen or heard him speak directly to anyone before, apart from a shout of Git off of there! heard from about a quarter mile's distance, and that fairly frequently.
But he pulled up level, and throttled back, and raised his voice over the sound of the hammering old engine. "What's all this about?" he called down to us.
"It's the school cross-country run," I said. "It happens every year."
"Not this year, it won't," he said. "Not through here. Who's organised it?"
"Mister Wilson," I said.
"And has he bothered to check on his route this morning?"
"I wouldn't know."
The greensman glanced heavenward, and my heart leaped happily at the thought of Wilson the Terrible being cast as a buffoon in some other adult's drama. "Well," he said, "you can tell your Mister Wilson that the rain's washed out the path and if he'd bothered to consult with me, I'd have told him so. You'd better not let anybody down there."
"It's too late," Keith chipped in. "They'll have started by now."
"Well, you turn them when they get here. That path drops away so sudden, you wouldn't see it coming. Send 'em around the outside of the wood and tell them to keep off the greens or I'll have 'em strung up like Nellie's bloomers." And then he slammed the tractor into gear against its noisy protests, and said, "Bloody Wilson again. I wouldn't pay the man in bottletops." And then the tractor lurched forward and the skinny dog, which had hopped down to mooch around and piss on something, hastily wound up business and galloped after.
When he'd gone, Keith looked at me.
"I'd better go and see what it's like," I said.
I climbed over the stile and followed the path for some way into the woodland before I reached the spot, and then I came upon it so suddenly that I almost lost my footing even though I wasn't even taking it at a run. The path was cut into a steep gradient with a streambed below, and it was just beyond where this stony yard-wide shelf went out and around a big old tree that the washout had occurred. The land above had come down in a great wave of earth and simply erased the path, and an old retaining fence from somewhere up above had been dragged down out of line and across. Because of the way that the big tree screened it, the whole arrangement was as neat and unexpected as any prepared deadfall. From where I stood I could look down and see the broken wire of the fence tangled into a rusty skein and half-hidden by raw earth and roots and leaves. The birds sang unconcerned and the stream bubbled in the middle distance and I was struck by a sudden and awesome thought, a realisation that seeped in as slow and as warm as a pee in the pants. . .
Colin Kelly would undoubtedly be the front-runner in the field.
It was like a door opening out into a dark and inviting land, and I slammed it as quickly as I could.
I was back at the stile a couple of minutes later.
"What are we going to do?" Keith said.
"We'll just have to send everyone around."
"That means messing up all the timings. Wilson'll kill us."
"He'll be just the same whatever we do," I said, taking the marker flags and trying to stick them in some kind of crossed arrangement in front of the stile. "And somebody could really get killed back there."
"Is it as bad as that?"
"You want to see it."
I was still messing with the flags, trying to get them to stay in some arrangement that had a look of warning about it, when Colin Kelly came pounding into view venting steam like a train.
As predicted, there wasn't another runner within sight of him. Loose-limbed and sullen, bottom lip hanging to show his teeth as he sucked air, he looked as if he'd been put together out of coathangers. He knew the route, and all he could see as he came up the dirt track was a familiar fat kid blocking it.
"Fucking get out of the way," he screeched as he bore down on me.
I stood my ground. "You can't use the path, Kelly."
"Says who?"
"It's all washed away. There's no way through the woods, you'll have to go around."
"Fuck off," Kelly said. He'd had to break his stride because I hadn't moved, and now he swung his arm to knock me aside; I ducked, and felt it pass through the air close to my head like a bony club. He ran into me and I pushed back at him, hard, and he stumbled and then recovered himself with an expression of rage and disbelief.
"I'm telling you to go around, Kelly," I tried to say in the brief half-second that was available to me, but he was beyond listening; from that day to this I've never seen a sight uglier than his twisted face thrust up against my own or heard a sound more vicious than his scream of "Shift!", delivered at maximum decibels as he grabbed hold of me and threw me down into the dirt with a yank that jerked my shirt entirely out of my pants.
By the time that I'd struggled to my knees, grazed and winded but barely aware of either fact, he'd hurdled the stile and was gone.
Keith was standing pale and scared, his mouth hanging open in a dark little O.
"You'd better go back and tell Wilson what he did," I said, only my voice came out as barely a whisper. I sat heavily on the step-up part of the stile.
"Me?" Keith squeaked.
"Tell him everything that Kelly said to me and that I said to Kelly."
"Can't you do it?"
"No," I said. "Think about it, and you'll see why. I'll stay here and stop the others. I think the race is over."
So he went, and I stayed, and about four minutes later the rest of the field started to arrive.
*Three weeks after that, during school time, I went around to Colin Kelly's house. It was mid-morning, and I was lucky; I caught his parents just as they were getting ready to go out.
Mr Kelly answered my ring at the door. It was a pleasant house on a road that had some trees along it, a few rungs upmarket from the place where I lived; there was a paved drive out front to park a car, instead of just the street. And the car looked nearly new.
"Yes?" Mr Kelly said, squinting down at me as if his mind was running just a few steps behind his senses, and I said, "I'm from Colin's class. I've brought something for him. Is that all right?"
"Oh," he said, making an effort, and he smiled a forced and hollow smile. "Come in, won't you?"
I went into the hallway. Mr Kelly was in a suit and tie and the atmosphere of the house seemed to be like that of the preparations on the morning of a funeral. The door to the kitchen was open and I could see all the way through to the back of the house, but I didn't see any Mrs Kelly.
I said, "We had a sponsored swim last week and I volunteered to get the present and the card. We all signed it." And I held up the carrier bag for Mr Kelly to take. As he took it, there was a sound from upstairs; I couldn't even have identified it, let alone understood it, but Mr Kelly raised his voice to carry and said, "It's one of Colin's friends from school." And then he looked at me. "I'm sorry, er..?"
"William. William Thomas."
"I'm sorry, William. We were just getting ready to go back to the hospital. I suppose you'll have to hear about this sometime. Colin lost the infected leg last night."
"I'm really sorry," I said.
"You can imagine, we're very upset."
"I wish I'd come another time."
"No. It's a very nice thought and a very nice gesture. I'm sure Colin will appreciate it. Let's have a look, here."
He seemed to have trouble telling one end of the carrier bag from the other, but finally he found his way in and partway drew out the item that I'd spent half the morning searching for.
"Trains," he said, looking at the picture on the front and trying to come up with something to say about it. "Colin likes trains."
"It's a Thomas the Tank Engine drawing pad," I explained. "It's a bit young, but it's the biggest one they did. Do you think he'll like it?"
"I'm sure he will."
"There are some felt tip pens in there as well, all different colours. And I drew the card myself."
"Yes," he said. "A bird. How nice. We'll have to be going soon. . ."
"William. William Thomas."
"Can we give you a lift anywhere, William?"
I politely declined, even though they'd be passing the school. I was out on license and I had no plans to hurry back. . . and I didn't much take to the idea of sharing a car with the so-far-unseen Mrs Kelly.
I glimpsed her, briefly, as the car passed me further down the road; she was just an anonymous woman, yet another kid's mother in a world that was full of them, and her head was bent as if in prayer. Or perhaps she was reading the card, signed by all of the form and with the bird that I'd drawn on the front.
A dark bird.
Just the one.
One, for sorrow.
*I burned the magpies shortly after that.
It wasn't that I'd ceased to believe in them. My faith was undiminished; it was like a child's touching faith in the baby Jesus, only darker and more ritualised and somehow more personal. It was as if I saw the outlines of forces unseen by others, the shapes of those great sombre machines that worked under the surface of reality to keep the show seamless and complete and which, if you knew just the right place to push, might occasionally yield to persuasion. I think the truth of it was that I felt scorched by their primitive heat. They saw through me too clearly for comfort, and I was unnerved by their ability to spit out the twisted progeny of my unformed wishes and appalled by my own willingness to offer a secret embrace to such malevolent offspring.
And then time passed by, and even that conviction faded.
When I reached sixteen, the excess weight abruptly burned away as if a hoop of fire had been passed over me. When you start thinking about sex for roughly eighteen hours a day, I suppose the energy has to come from somewhere.
Colin Kelly didn't return to the school. His parents moved him out to a bungalow somewhere out on the coast, and by all accounts started to smother and to treat him like he was five years old again. He got one of those legs that looks like something made out of Airfix and Meccano. I've no idea what happened to Keith. Wilson quietly left the school at the end of the year but I don't know what happened to him, either.
Make of it what you like. Maybe it was chance, it all just happened. Maybe there's a callous God with a sick streak of humour who's fond of setting up these little ironies every now and again. Maybe there was some power locked up in those bird pictures that only someone who'd been cut deep enough could release.
Or maybe it was the dogshit that I found and smeared all over the barbed wire in the deadfall before I returned to the stile. Who can ever say?
© Stephen Gallagher 1991