Monday morning; the bus is late. Simon’s missed registration. He signs the late list at the school office, and shoves and pushes his way through the seething corridors along with the other thousand people till he gets to A2.
Some days he has to steel himself just to survive at school. It’s like shutting down all the hatches one by one, battening down until you’re just a hard shell. Nothing soft or vulnerable can be left showing or it will be mercilessly hunted down and slaughtered by someone. Kid or grown-up. There’s not much difference, it seems. The science teacher is one of the worst. And this is a decent school by most standards.
It’s different for the girls, you can see. They talk to each other, and go around arm in arm, and make this ridiculous fuss if they’re apart for a lesson; way over the top. It’s not that he wants to do anything like that, of course, but he would at least like to feel safe. Still, he’s got the rabbit to tell Johnny and Pike and Dan about today.
He joins the end of the Year Nine crush outside the double doors of the two art rooms. He can’t see Johnny or anyone, so he hangs back. Adam Skinner is sticking chewing gum into the back of Rachel Lintell’s long hair. The Year Sevens at the front of their queue into A1 are squashed against the doors. Adam Skinner has turned his attention to a small group of Year Seven boys who are playing catch with some girl’s pencil case. There’s always someone like Adam Skinner in your tutor group, whichever school you go to. Sometimes a lot more than one.
‘In a line! No pushing!’ Miss Jarvis arrives and takes her class in. You can still hear her shouting when the door’s shut. She’s leaving at the end of the term. Having a baby.
The Year Nine queue straightens itself and quietens down for no apparent reason. Mr Davies strides down the corridor and they file into their places in the art room. Almost everyone likes Mr Davies. He doesn’t shout. Doesn’t need to. How? It’s invisible, what he does, but he does something.
Johnny’s saved Simon a place on the tables near the window. Simon slips into the chair, dumps his bag under the table. He keeps his coat on.
‘I got a rabbit at the weekend,’ Simon tells Johnny.
‘You never! What with?’
‘Catapult. Perfect aim. Middle of the head.’
It sounds better that way. He doesn’t go into the neck-breaking business.
‘What did you do with it?’
‘Skinned it, cooked it, ate it.’ Simon grins, triumphant.
Dan’s leaning forward now. ‘What did you do with the skin?’
‘Kept it. I’ll show you later.’
Mr Davies is giving them that look. They shut up while he explains their task. They’ve been doing Surrealism this term. Salvador Dali. Simon’s favourite is the painting of a horse skeleton. It’s called The Happy Horse. They’ve each worked on four different surreal designs, one of which will be painted full-scale. That’s what they’re doing today. It’s a double lesson.
Mr Davies holds up some of the designs to show the rest of the class. He doesn’t mention names; that’s another good thing about him. He doesn’t pick on people, doesn’t humiliate. Isn’t sarcastic.
He holds up Simon’s design of a fish finger on top of an iceberg for the class to discuss. Simon’s good at drawing: an appreciative murmur goes round the art room and Johnny digs him in the ribs.
Once everyone’s busy with sketching out their pictures it’s easy to drift off. Simon goes back to the field, the dead rabbit, then the cliff, and his secret swim off the rocks. He’s in the sort of dream-state the surrealists talk about; he lets his hand doodle over the paper in front of him; finds himself drawing the images in his mind. Gets quite carried away.
‘I thought we’d decided on the iceberg?’ Mr Davies’s voice pierces the shell he’s surrounded himself with for the last half-hour. ‘But never mind: this is good. Very good. Fine draughtsmanship.’
The rabbit looks real: each hair, the lie of the ears, its terrified eyes. Mr Davies looks at Simon as if to take him in more closely. ‘The child and the savage…’ he mutters under his breath. He moves on to the next table.
‘What’s he on about?’ Johnny asks Simon.
Simon shrugs. ‘No idea,’ he says, although in fact he does. It’s what Dali thought painters should do: suspend the rational part of the mind, let the unconscious inform the painting. The primitive part of you. But it doesn’t do to let on too much. It’s OK to be good at art, as long as you’re crap at other things like maths, or English. Since he can’t spell, he’s OK. And now he can kill rabbits and stuff too.
It looks real. More real than real,’ Pike says. ‘You could sell that.’
‘It’s sick, your drawing,’ Rachel Lintell says as she goes past their table on her way to the sink. ‘Cruel.’
‘You’ve got gum in your hair,’ Johnny says innocently, to wind her up. ‘Did you know?’
She flushes, bites her lip, pulls her long plait round to see the disgusting pink mess clogging the strands. It won’t come out. They laugh. Simon thinks of the knife deep in his bag. You’re not supposed to bring knives to school, but he never goes anywhere without his. He lets himself imagine cutting through the thick pleat of hair. The knife blade is sharpened on a steel. It could cut through hair easy as butter. That slit up the rabbit’s belly: the thin red line and the way the flesh opened out.
‘OK, everyone. Time to clear up before the bell. Don’t forget to note down the homework for next lesson, please.’
There’s a sound like stampeding rhinos from the adjoining art room as the bell rings for the end of the lesson. Through the open door, Simon can see the Year Seven teacher in the corridor, looking as if she’s about to cry. Simon notices the way Mr Davies goes and stands next to her; he puts his hand on her arm.
‘Simon? Got a moment at the end of school today?’ Mr Davies asks as he’s shuffling out of the art room. ‘For a very quick word. Nothing to worry about.’
Simon shrugs. ‘OK.’ He runs to catch up the others who are already disappearing down the corridor.
‘Oi! No running!’ a voice shouts above the din. He takes no notice.
‘What does Davies want?’ Johnny asks him.
‘Don’t know. I’ve got to see him after school.’
‘Keener!’ Pike teases. ‘Expect he wants you to go into business with him. Make a fortune.’
‘Get off!’
‘He makes a mint, you know. As an artist. Got his own studio and everything. He’s probably going to invite you there.’
Dan joins in the laugh and Simon hangs back, suddenly uncomfortable. He loathes the way you never really know how you stand, not even with your mates. Not when you’re in school. Never know where the next insult’s coming from. He can’t seem to get tough enough not to mind.
In tutor group that afternoon the topic is ‘Safety Issues in the Holidays’. They have to watch a video produced by the government or someone, which has these stupid teenagers acting out. It’s an adult version of how young people behave, and so obviously phony. The teenagers are riding bikes by a canal, and one falls in and another nearly drowns because he wades in to save the first one even though he can’t swim. The girls just panic on the bank, doing nothing and squealing a lot. It’s supposed to teach them that you shouldn’t try to save your mates when they fall in water. But what kind of mate would you be to stand on the side and say you were going to find a large log – maybe – that they could hang on to? Or, that you were running off to phone the fire brigade, so please hang on and don’t drown in the meantime?
‘Be serious!’ Mrs Fielding keeps saying. She tries to get them to discuss the issues, which starts everyone off on telling their worst-ever accident stories. They all love that. Adam Skinner tells a wonderful story about his brother playing on the railway line which may well be true, knowing Adam Skinner’s brother, but Mrs Fielding thinks he’s making it up. Then Skinner tells the bit about where his brother’s mate falls off a railway bridge and gets decapitated by an intercity train, and the class goes quiet and a bit twitchy, and the stories change to people they know who’ve died. Simon keeps quiet.
‘I don’t know why you’re all so interested in death,’ Mrs Fielding says at the end of tutor time. ‘Too many horror movies, no doubt.’ Luke Butler makes his usual profound comments, like, ‘Well, it’s what life’s all about isn’t it, miss, death?’
She doesn’t reply, but sums up her main lesson points: ‘So, don’t hang out near water, railway lines, roads, building sites, cliffs, old quarries or mineshafts. Not that many of you will ever move beyond the computer screen in your bedroom. So you’ll be perfectly safe.’ She smiles to soften the dig. She has a personal vendetta against screens.
At the end of the day, Simon trails back along to the art department.
Mr Davies is stacking cartridge paper away in the cupboard. He looks up and smiles.
‘Thanks for coming. Won’t keep you long. Got a bus to catch?’
Simon nods.
‘Just wanted to say you did a fantastic piece of work this morning. I mean it. Truly outstanding. You’ve got real talent.’
Simon looks at his feet. His ears are burning. ‘Thanks,’ he grunts.
‘You’ve chosen art next year? GCSE?’
Simon nods.
‘Good. You could really go somewhere with that sort of talent. Where d’you get that from, eh? Dad or Mum an artist?’
Simon shakes his head. ‘Mum’s a learning support thingy.’
‘And Dad?’
Si clears his throat. The silence stretches out.
‘No.’
‘There’s something dark, something quite –’ Mr Davies fumbles for the right word – ‘disturbing in your work, isn’t there? Quite a theme of yours, yes? The dead rabbit, and that skull you drew the other week, and the bird skeleton?’
‘What’s that all about, then?’
Simon shrugs. ‘Nothing. It’s just things I find, mostly.’
Mr Davies shrugs back. ‘You don’t want to talk about it. That’s fine. Why use words when you’ve got images, anyway?’ He smiles. ‘Go on, then. Get your bus. But I’m usually here, end of the day, if you want to talk about anything.’
Simon hurries out and up the drive to the bus stop. No one there: he’s missed the bus, and all for nothing. The road is dusty. Each time a car passes, it stirs the small heaps of dry leaves which have fallen from the two horse-chestnut trees at the top of the school drive. Conkers are already beginning to form: small green balls suspended from the twigs where the flowers were, back in May. The tarmac smells hot; everything has slowed down. The school looks strange with no kids, no noise.
What did he mean, ‘quite a theme of yours’?
No sign of a bus. Perhaps there isn’t another one. It’s not that far to walk. Better than waiting here. He shifts his backpack on to his shoulder and follows the route the bus would have taken, up to the main road, and then the lengthy trek along it. There’s no pavement for the first stretch; two delivery lorries thunder past, blasting their horns but not slowing down. Then there’s a lull in traffic, and as he starts the downward stretch, the landscape opens out on one side; he can see over fields criss-crossed with drystone walls and stumpy wind-blown hedges, all the way to the sea. Two buzzards wheel in a great arc over the moorland, calling their thin lonely mew mew.
There must be a quicker way back, rather than along this bleak strip of main road which follows the contours of the land, the more shallow gradient. Need a map, Simon thinks. There must be farm tracks, shorter, steeper ways over the land. Every so often he passes a gate, the faint mark of a track over grass, not signposted as a footpath, and maybe only the place where foxes or badgers have their runs. Or sheep. The moorland is dotted with them. Nothing much will grow here but grass and sedges, heather and gorse.
The land is pockmarked with outcrops of granite, the bones of the land jutting through its thin skin of turf. There are the remains of old mines and quarry workings. Lines of mineshafts run underground, rotten and collapsed; it’s a long time since any were used. Simon likes to imagine it when it was all heaving with life: men with stone-dusted faces climbing up out of the earth, horses pulling carts of stone; the chimneys smoking the air. The crank and crash of pulleys hauling trucks along a mineshaft.
Now there’s no sign of human life except the occasional farm building. Far towards the horizon there’s a square grey house with washing blowing in its windswept garden; and westwards, a church tower nestling in a dip in the land, ringed by trees. From here they look like dark giants with their arms all stretched out one way. The wind has blown them into this shape.
Mr Davies’s house and studio are over there on the edge of the moor.
A farm lorry roars past Simon, blasting its horn and spraying him with muck from the side of the road. He squeezes himself back against the hedge, swearing, his words caught in the rush of air the lorry sucks in. He watches the lorry slam on its brakes as it hits the bend in the road and skids slightly on the hot tarmac.
Just beyond the bend he can make out a small dirt track off to the left, between high hedge-topped walls. Anything has to be better than walking along this main road. It’s impossible to get completely lost; there’s always the line of the coast to follow, even if it does go the long way round, in and out and up and down every dip of the cliff. And there must be a quicker way straight across the fields.
Sweat trickles down his neck. He’s still wearing his school jumper. He feels too exposed at school to take it off. Nobody here, though. He shoves it in his bag. The sun beats down on his arms and neck; it’s still high in the sky and there’s hardly any shade. His shoes are grey with dust. The track runs at a right angle to the main road, straight towards the sea, going nowhere. No sign of houses or even farm buildings. He keeps going for a few hundred metres; there’s a break in the stone wall, a stone stile, ancient and lichen-covered. A path, then. Yes; just a few metres further down there’s another stile, the other side of the track. He’s hit some old field path, and the right-hand branch is going roughly in the right direction. He’ll risk it.
The first bit is easy enough: diagonally across the rough grass field there’s another stone stile, into another small field. This one has sheep grazing in it; they look up at him with their narrow slitty eyes. He narrows his own, pretends to fire an imaginary crossbow, makes the hissing sound. The sheep wheel off, one after another, in alarm. Simon laughs out loud. They’re so stupid, sheep.
The next stile isn’t so obvious. He goes up and down the prickly hedge, searching for a way through. It takes a while. He finally pushes through a small gap, stinging himself on nettles as he clambers over a rusty line of barbed wire. This can’t be the way. He glances at his watch: it’s quarter to five already. He’s normally home by now. He’s too hot and thirsty; nothing left in his water bottle. He needs a spring, or even an animal trough. There’s a way of getting to the clean water before it’s contaminated by bugs and bacteria.
Aboriginal children are taught to memorize the water holes in their tribal territory. Cherokee Indians listen to the sound of water because they think it has a voice, telling them things.
This field is bone dry. His throat feels scratched by dust from the road. No wild strawberries here. The blackberries won’t be ripe for weeks. He tries sucking a small hawthorn berry but it’s dry and rough inside; no moisture. Simon sits down at the edge of the field. It’s so still, so unbelievably silent. No birdsong, even, no traffic. Not even an aeroplane droning overhead, or the coastguard helicopter. He could be miles from anywhere. In the silence, he hears the faint rustling of leaves along the dry ditch: some small animal, a mouse or a shrew. He wishes he had the catapult. There’s bound to be rabbits.
He needs to find the path; this wasn’t the right way through. He retraces his steps back through the hedge and the nettle patch.
A single shot splits the silence. The echo ricochets along a stretch of stone wall at one edge of the field. Simon stops, shocked, heart thumping. He’d thought he was completely alone. Someone has been here all the time, watching him. Someone with a gun. Trying to frighten him? He turns slowly round. Still no one. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the shot came from, the way it bounced and echoed off the granite. He stands, waits, listens.
A slight sound rustles behind him; he whips round. A shadow. The figure of a man.
It’s as if he’s appeared out of thin air. He has crept up without Simon hearing a thing, not until the very last minute. Simon’s heart thuds. He wishes he had his knife in his hand.
The man’s not that old, although his face is tanned and creased from being out in sun and wind and all weathers. He’s got a shotgun under his arm, muzzle down. Old army boots. A torn shirt, grubby hands. His eyes are pale, watery, unfocused.
‘What are you doing here?’ His voice sounds rusty, as if he’s not used to talking, and the hand holding the shotgun is shaking. The man keeps glancing round nervously.
Simon’s mouth has gone dry. He can sense immediately that there’s something strange about this man, something not right. He glances at the gun again. ‘I’m looking for the path – the stile. I thought there was a path across the fields.’ His voice comes out squeaky, all wrong.
The man’s eyes focus briefly on Simon. ‘You shouldn’t be here. It isn’t safe. You keep away.’
Fear prickles along Simon’s neck. ‘Sorry,’ he stutters. ‘I just lost the path…’
The man looks troubled by something Simon can’t see. He’s staring across the field, muttering. Simon looks in the same direction, but there’s nothing there. The man’s breathing heavily, his hand on the gun.
Close up, the man smells odd too. Not exactly disgusting, but a smell of earth, or metal, or something like that. Simon shifts away slightly. Over there, he thinks. That looks like a way through the hedge. Just get away, fast. Make a run for it. Or maybe better to walk away quietly, steadily, so as not to be threatening or challenging, or whatever. Something he saw on television flashes into his mind – an SAS bloke coming across this remote tribe who were all armed with poisonous arrows; he had to keep very still and move slowly, show he wasn’t a threat. They were that close to killing him…
It’s the worst feeling, turning your back when someone’s got a gun. But there isn’t any other option. The small field seems to have grown huge.
Nearly there.
The hedge has overgrown the stile completely, he can see as he gets close up. It’s another stone one, with a broad slab across the top. Simon fumbles in his bag for his knife, to cut through the tough stalks of brambles and nettles. He can sense the man still watching him; it makes him clumsy. The knife feels good in his hand, though; the blade is sharp. He climbs through the hole he’s cut, a tunnel through the hedge, and clambers over the granite stile. There’s the faintest indentation over the grass the other side to indicate where a path might be. He starts to run across the field.
A gate at the far end takes him on to a deeply rutted farm track which runs downhill towards a cluster of low grey buildings. It’s the farm with the washing he saw from the road. He walks towards it, heart still thumping. A dog starts to bark. The track leads straight into a farmyard where chickens scratch and run freely; there’s a car parked, a grey Citroën with rusting hubcaps. A woman comes and stands in the doorway of the farmhouse to see what’s making the dog bark.
‘You looking for someone?’ She doesn’t smile.
‘No,’ Simon stammers. ‘I’m trying to find the path home. To town.’
‘Coast path’s straight ahead, down the track. Or there’s the Coffin path, across the fields. I wouldn’t go that way, not by myself.’ She folds her arms over her apron, like somebody in an old horror film. Black and white.
Simon doesn’t hang about. He takes the track to the coast path. So what if it’s longer?
At last he can see the houses at the edge of the town, the beginning of the paved path, and proper seats, and litter bins, and the rough track he can take to short-cut back up to the top of the town where their house is. He’s desperate for a drink.
Almost home. He glances at the girl’s house; she’s not there tonight. The door’s shut. But his is wide open, and Nina is standing there. She doesn’t smile or wave or anything as he comes up the hill.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Pre-emptive strike.
‘Where the hell have you been? You’re hours late. I phoned Johnny and then Dan, and even Pike, and they finally remembered something about the art teacher and then I phoned school and he wasn’t there and I ended up having to phone him at his home address and he said you’d left school well before four. You don’t think, do you? And look at the state of you! That white top! You’ll have to wash that before tomorrow, you haven’t got another one and you can’t go in looking like that –’
‘I said I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t use that tone with me! I was on the verge of getting the police out for you!’
‘Just slightly over the top. I missed the bus, so I walked. Big deal. And I tried to do a short cut but it ended up longer. Made a mistake. Sorry. And now I’m desperate for a drink – OK?’
He pushes past her into the kitchen, drops the bag en route, shoves his head under the running tap to gulp in cold water. It trickles down his chin; he closes his eyes. He can’t tell her about that strange man now. She’s already too worked up.
Nina stumbles over the dumped bag in the dark corridor; the knife slips out on to the floor. She picks it up.
‘What’s this doing in your school bag? You know you’re forbidden to carry knives at school. What’s got into you, Simon? This is ridiculous!’
She slumps in a kitchen chair. She looks as if she’s about to cry. Or get really angry. He sits down opposite her, in the place that is still laid for supper. Nina and Ellie have already eaten. He closes his eyes while she goes on and on and on.
The phone rings. Nina answers it, Simon half listens from upstairs. She’s talking about him. She laughs, a new, different note in her voice. He stops listening. Lies back on the bed, head resting on his hands.
It’s still light, though the sun’s almost set. Perfect for going out with the catapult. An air rifle would be even better. The field will be covered in rabbits, young ones who don’t know much about danger yet. Don’t run when they first see him crouched in the shadow of the hedge. He thinks again of the weird bloke, that single shot echoing out across the fields. Who is he?
Nina stands in the doorway of his room. ‘We must get those curtains fixed up,’ she says.
He doesn’t say anything.
‘Finished your homework?’
He nods, although he hasn’t done any.
‘That was your art teacher. Kind of him, don’t you think? Phoning to check you were safely back. Beyond the call of duty, I reckon. He said some nice things about you. Your work. Well done, Si.’ She smiles.
Is she about to hug him? He hopes not.
‘Matthew Davies. “Call me Matt,” he said. He’s got a lovely voice. What was he talking to you about after school, anyway?’
‘Art.’
‘Well, yes. But what exactly?’
‘I don’t know. Just stuff. He asked if you were an artist.’
‘No, of course.’
‘Oh.’ She sounds disappointed. What is the matter with her these days?
‘He’s invited me in for a chat too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re very talented, he says. We should discuss your future. That’s really good, Si. That he’s taking special notice of you.’
‘Don’t go on about it. OK? Don’t make such a big deal of everything.’
He watches the window darken. Stars come out. The Plough, and the North Star, and the three stars of Orion’s Belt.
Just before he falls asleep he sees again the figure of the man, hears the shot ring out. He was trying to scare him off, wasn’t he? He wasn’t shooting rabbits or foxes. Simon thinks about Johnny’s dad’s gun, and the instruction manual they’d pored over, him and Pike and Johnny after school one afternoon. The warning, printed in black, bold letters: Danger of Death.
It’s everywhere. There’s nowhere safe. Better to be prepared. Ready. Better to be armed.