Aidan was exactly the wrong age to witness my wee Clint Eastwood performance with Shuggie. He was fifteen, just one year younger than me: young enough to be reckless, old enough to be brave.
Never do heroics. Even if they do you no harm yourself, some stupid shining-eyed tosser will be far too impressed. And then a few months later they’ll try to live up to your pointless example, and that’s when they’ll get themselves killed.
I got my overdue kicking a week after my defection. They were waiting for me to drop my guard, which I didn’t, but I thought I’d probably better get it over with. I’d been the other end of the boot myself, so there was no point making an official complaint.
They were waiting among the sick-looking trees on that footpath beside the computer store, and I was expecting them. It was only about half the crew, four or five of them. Nice to know I was popular. It didn’t take long because only Kev’s heart was really in it – honestly, I was quite touched.
This didn’t mean they didn’t put the boot in quite efficiently, of course, because a kicking’s a kicking. Eventually, I hoped, some teacher pulling out of the school gates in his car would decide he couldn’t in all conscience drive on by, even when it was only me.
You don’t fight back. Everybody says that. And you know what? They’re right. I just curled in on myself, since the most important thing was to protect my head and my guts, not to mention my precious genitals. For the most part I managed to achieve all this, but you can’t protect everything all at once. So that’s when my nose got broken.
The teacher with the conscience, luckily, was McCluskey. When his car turned out of the gates, he swerved on to the kerb, leaping out practically before he’d braked, purple with fury. Obviously he couldn’t touch anyone for fear of being sued, but they legged it anyway, because nobody ever liked to push McCluskey to the point where they – or their bereaved parents – might be forced to sue him. He had a natural moral authority; in other words, he scared the living shit out of everybody.
Risking a timeout for a second, Sunil bent down to me. ‘Sorry ’bout that,’ he muttered, then hared away with the rest of them.
Dragging me up by the arm, McCluskey laid into me like it was my fault, which in a way it was.
‘You stupid wee fecker, Geddes.’ He could shout like this because he was outside the gates and outside school hours, or at least that’s what I assumed. Whatever, I wasn’t going to upbraid him for his language. ‘You thick tossers want to kill each other, just do it when I’m not going to fall over your bleeding corpses. Right?’
‘Right, sir,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of blood and a nose that didn’t belong to me. The words I managed to get out, I won’t even try to spell phonetically. ‘Understood.’
‘What are you, Geddes?’
‘Stupid fecker, sir.’
‘Stupid wee fecker, and … ?’
‘Stupid wee fecker and a thick tosser. Sir.’
He sighed and stared at my face, gripping my arm too hard because I was swaying. I didn’t like to wipe my nose in case it looked like I was snivelling, which was something McCluskey would not tolerate, but there was a warm stream of blood coming out of both nostrils, and McCluskey briefly let me go, fumbled in his car and shoved a faceful of tissues on to my nose. He caught me in the nick of time, just as I was about to lose my centre of gravity all over again.
‘Are you all right, Geddes?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Aye, right.’ He sighed. ‘Look, Nick. You’re smart and you’re not a bad guy. Right?’
‘Aye, right,’ I mimicked.
His face darkened again. ‘That’s not smart. That’s stupid. Stop trying to be stupider than you are, Geddes.’
‘Right, sir.’ He had the knack of making me feel ashamed of myself, and what was with all the flaming ‘sirs’? McCluskey made me feel like I was in the army or something.
‘It may be cool to be stupid, Geddes, but it is phenomenally stupid to want nothing more than to be cool. Why in God’s name did you ever get involved with a loser like Naughton?’
I gave him my stupid-question-sir look.
He held on to his temper. ‘Can I give you a lift home?’
‘You are fecking joking, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Sir.’
Instant death sentence for fraternising with enemy aliens, and he knew it. ‘I suppose I am, Geddes, I suppose I am. Are you sure you’re all right? Well, even if you aren’t, I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it. What are your parents going to say about this?’
‘I’ll deal with them, sir.’
‘I see.’ Experimentally he let go of my arm, and I managed not to fall over.
‘I won’t be pressing charges, sir.’
‘Funny ha ha.’ He gave me a last sharp look. ‘I heard about Hugh Middleton, by the way. You’re improving.’
For a moment I didn’t have a blind clue what he was on about. ‘Oh. Shuggie.’
‘Geddes, it’s just as well you’re a big ugly thug who’s perfectly capable of looking after yourself. Otherwise I’d be worried about you.’
‘But I am a big ugly thug, sir,’ I pointed out. ‘So don’t let me keep you awake nights.’
‘You don’t.’ He got into his car, wound down the window and chucked me another handful of tissues. When I dropped the blood-soaked batch in the gutter, he didn’t tick me off. ‘If your parents want to make a complaint ask them to contact me.’
That was pure officialese and he knew it. Just as my bravado was all spit and wind, and I knew it. My nose was bleeding so much I thought I was going to bleed to death (I know better now what that actually looks like) so when he’d gone I staggered back to the deserted school and through the swing doors into the toilets and propped myself over a basin to watch my blood swirl away. I blinked really hard and tried not to fall over.
‘The state of you,’ said a voice behind me.
By now I couldn’t help going abusive. ‘Puck off,’ I said. ‘Pucked up by ettire life, you.’
Undeterred, Shuggie soaked some loo roll and started cleaning up my face, not seeming to consider the notion that I might feel like breaking his nose. I didn’t, though, because the cold water felt good: soothing, numbing, as if it was soaking through my skin and all the way into my brain. I was terribly tired anyway and I could almost have fallen asleep on my feet, but just as my eyelids sagged, Shuggie coughed and stepped back to examine his handiwork. Nodding contentedly, he flushed away the bloody paper, and I muttered ‘Danks.’
‘Thank you, Nicholas,’ he said.
‘Puck off, Thuggie,’ I said.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Buddy do.’
‘Well, I understand. But thank you anyway.’ His gaze was very direct and unswerving. ‘You know, we have to look after each other now. I have to look after you. And you have to look after me.’
‘Like buddy hell I do!’
‘Of course you do. You haven’t got any friends left.’
‘Danks a buddy punch.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome. It was very brave of you.’
‘Bave,’ I glowered. ‘As in toopid.’
‘Bave,’ he said, ‘as in bave.’
His solemn straight face quivered not a jot so I had no excuse to hit him, though I knew fine Shuggie was laughing at me. Silently. Like an emotionally incontinent drain.
Shuggie Middleton was laughing at me.
If I thought Shuggie had got me looking remotely respectable, I was kidding myself. Distorted body image or something, looking at my reflection in the striplit toilet mirrors and thinking the black eye and the skinned cheekbone and the swollen jaw didn’t look too bad, and that I could walk without almost doubling up. When I got home and Mum dropped her mug of tea, I just said ‘Football.’
‘Nick!’ She half crouched, not knowing whether to start with me or the broken mug and the spilt tea.
‘Rough tackle.’
Standing up straight, she bit her lip hard and I saw tears blur her green mascara. She wanted to hug me, that was obvious, but I hunched my shoulders and turned as if to leave the room. Clenching her hands at her sides, she blinked. ‘It’s not games day, Nick.’
Hmm. More switched on than I thought.
‘What happened to you, Nick?’
‘Told you. Bad foul.’
‘No, Nick.’ She had her hands full of broken china and I saw she’d cut the base of her thumb. She glanced down at the welling blood and she just let the drops spill darkly on to the carpet as she looked back up at me with tears burning in her green-rimmed eyes. ‘No. I mean, what happened to you?’
I just looked at her. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life. Part of me wanted to take the china shards out of her cupped hands and take her thumb and kiss the blood off it. The other half of me wanted to hit her.
‘You wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘You were busy.’
‘You never tell me anything!’
‘You were busy,’ I said again. ‘What was I supposed to do?’
It sounded like cheek. But the fact is, I really wanted her to tell me.
‘You were supposed to come to me.’ But she sounded only sad.
‘It’s too late now.’ That was the arrogance of youth speaking. Like I knew everything. Like everything that could ever happen to me had already happened. Hah.
‘It is not too late! I’m going to see Mr Pearson and …’ Her voice died under my glare.
I had to explain to her, in words of one syllable, that if she went anywhere near the Brain I’d make it clear it was all my fault, I started it, I was to blame. I was, after all, to blame. So in the end all Mum could do was drag me to A & E, where a doctor gave me a disapproving glare as she checked me over and sucked her teeth and stuck a dressing over my nose.
‘Suits you,’ said the woman tartly, eyeing her handiwork.
But that was all she said. She was busy with the deserving poorly and didn’t want to know anything about my little fracas. Anyway, she thought she already knew everything.
In school assembly next day we got the obligatory pained lecture on the futility of violence. This was not McCluskey’s idea, though undoubtedly it was his fault, since he must have felt obliged to report the incident to Pearson. It was a wildly irrelevant lecture, given that anyone in your average secondary school knows that violence is anything but futile, but Pearson liked to give it to us now and then, maybe so he could meet his anti-bullying targets. (There was no bullying culture at Craigmyle High. The Brain knew this because back when there was a bullying culture, he’d had the bright idea of getting bullies into dialogue with their victims. The programme was a huge success: after not very long, victims stopped turning up, since the perpetrators never failed to. These occasions were great for looking contrite, sounding sorry, and finding out what was really, really working on the bullying front.)
McCluskey sat on the head’s left, arms folded, glowering into the middle distance, meeting no one’s eyes and certainly not mine. What his body language said was this: I know the guy on my right is a prat. I know you have no respect for him. But until he shuts up and lets us all get on with our respective jobs, I will personally kill any giggler. It was like watching some politician give a speech to squaddies. The regimental sergeant major was up there next to the defence minister, and the squaddies knew if they stepped out of line they were going to die.
So we were all remarkably good in the circumstances. As usual somebody off to my left was quietly humming the theme tune to Pinky and the Brain, and others were harmonising, and this was making some first years practically explode into fragments with the effort of not laughing, which was of course the whole point. I wanted to start singing ‘Imagine’, which would have got me all kinds of complex Brownie points in my school rehabilitation, because it would be taking the mickey out of my notorious mother as well as our intense and well-meaning head. But I ached all over, my ribs and my nose hurt too much and any tune would have been unrecognisable. Besides, I found I couldn’t quite do that to my mother, even if I’d happily do it to Pearson.
Anyway, though McCluskey was ignoring the music merchant, his super-senses would lock on to me straight away. I was disgusted to discover that I cared what McCluskey thought of me and I didn’t want him to go on thinking I was stupid.
I certainly wasn’t the sharpest lemon in the bag. This is when I pocketed one of Mum’s kitchen knives and started carrying it to school.