Raven Summer (4 page)

“Aye?”

“Aye. About the future. About the directions I should take.”

“Aye?”

“Aye. It’s obvious, really. I should be something like an agricultural engineer.”

“What?”

“Aye. My dad deals with them all the time. Says there’s great opportunities.”

I let him go on about what the job is, what it can lead to. We go to sleep soon afterwards.

I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.

One day Mum’s spreading cream onto a bruise on my chest.
She’s inspecting all the nicks and scabs and cuts. She tells me I should take more care, but Dad just snorts at her.

“He’s just being a proper lad,” he says. “Let him be. What’s the point of living in the backwoods if you can’t get a bit of blood on you?”

Then he points at my body, at all the stripes and nicks and bruises on it.

“Anyway, look,” he says. “His skin’s just like one of your paintings.”

She pauses in her movements for a moment. She regards me, then begins to touch the colors and marks more gently with her fingertips.

“Well, well,” she murmurs as I back away.

She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it.

“You’re right,” she says. “The boy’s a living work of art.”

One Saturday morning I’m wandering alone
when my name’s called out. There’s laughter. I look around stupidly. A stone falls from the sky, then another. Then Nattrass and a couple of his mates, Eddie and Ned, are coming out from behind a dilapidated cow shed.

“You’re looking dozy, brother,” says Nattrass. “What’s up? You in love or something?”

His mates laugh along with him. They’re all filthy, streaked with earth and sweat.

“We saw you,” he says, “and we thought, We could probably let him in on it. He’ll have the guts for it.”

“For what?” I say.

“Come and see.” He smiles. “If you let on, mind, you’ll suffer for it.”

They lead me back to where they came from. Past the cowshed, into the long narrow allotment behind Nattrass’s house. It’s all overgrown. A broken greenhouse with an ash tree growing in it. Brambles and raspberries growing wild. It’s Nattrass’s place, his hangout, his hideout. I remember it well. Used to play here so often, until we started growing apart, until I started hanging out with Max.

They’ve cleared a space. They’ve marked out a square. They’re digging a pit. Their spades are resting on the great pile of earth that’s been dug out.

“Go on, then,” says Nattrass. “Ask what we’re up to.”

He wipes the sweat from his brow with a filthy hand.

I look down into the pit. No treasure, as usual: just stones and tangled roots and soil. It’s maybe six feet wide. It’s already two feet deep.

“Go on,” he says.

“OK, so what you doing?” I ask.

“We’re digging your grave, Liam! Hahahaha!”

His mates roar with laughter along with him.

“Just joking,” he says. “Get a spade, Liam, come and help, otherwise come back and have a look tomorrow.”

“If you’ve got the nerve for it,” says Eddie.

“Aye, if you’ve got the nerve,” says Ned.

They grunt and laugh together. I spit.

“Just one thing,” says Nattrass. “We don’t want you telling nobody. OK, brother?”

I just look at him and turn away.

I go back the next day. As I walk by the cowshed, I hear kids’ voices. Two girls are coming towards me, leaving the allotment.

“Don’t go, Liam,” says one of them, Nancy Sloane. “It’s horrible. It’s cruel.”

But it just entices me. I shrug and smile and step past them.

There’s a little cluster of kids there.

“Let Liam through,” says Nattrass.

I sidle through. I look down with the others. The pit’s three feet deep now. There are three adders in it, two of them curled up dead still, the other slithering, squirming. It tries to raise its head towards the pit edge but it could never reach. Nattrass laughs and knocks it back with a stick. There’s a couple of mice in there as well, hunched together in a corner, petrified.

“They’re savage little buggers, Liam,” he says. “Mebbe they’re magic to townies like you, but they bite farmers. They bite dogs. They bite ramblers. They bite little bairns playing in the fields. And they’re ten times worse in hot years like this. So I been out catching them. Better that they’re here in my pit than out there being wild and doing harm.”

He pokes the squirming snake again. It bares its fangs. Nattrass licks his lips and spits.

“See what I mean, brother?” he said. “It’d bite you as soon as look at you.”

I pick up a fallen twig from the grass. I touch one of the snakes. It squirms, turns, bares its fangs. I touch it again. It bites. I feel the vibrations through the twig.

Nattrass grins.

“That’s right, Liam,” he says. “Get them angry.”

He looks around the faces.

“So,” he says, “who’s going first?”

He’s got a plank, six inches wide. He drops it across the middle of the pit.

There’s laughter, intakes of breath, muttered curses. A couple of kids head off home straightaway.

“Aye. Shove off if you like,” says Nattrass. “But remember, not a word. Otherwise …” He laughs. “Chickens!”

“I’ll do it,” says Eddie.

“I know
you
would,” says Nattrass. “But what about you, Liam, eh?” His eyes widen as he approaches. I clench my fists, get ready for him. But he just punches me gently in the ribs.

“Just joking, man. I wouldn’t ask nobody to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”

He steps onto the plank and walks straight across without a care in the world. He does it again. Stands in the middle and bounces. Pretends he’s falling, then steps across the three-foot gap from the plank to safety. We all do it. It’s easy. We shudder and gasp and we’re scared we’ll fall, but it’s easy. We pause. We watch as the squirming snake suddenly opens its jaws and stabs at one of the mice. The mouse shudders, wriggles, lies panting for a few moments, then it’s still. The other mouse squeaks, squeaks, squeaks. The snake bites that one, too, and it shudders on the earth and is still. Nattrass sighs, laughs. Another snake starts to move. The two snakes raise their heads six inches from the earth. We crouch at the rim of the pit and watch.

“Go on, my beauties!” murmurs Nattrass. “Go on!”

The snakes eye each other, then dart for each other. They writhe together, then separate and lie at opposite ends of the pit. The third snake moves, slithers around the pit.

We all watch, mesmerized.

“Time for episode two,” says Nattrass. “Too easy, that time. Wasn’t it?”

He holds up a black scarf.

“This’ll add a bit of spice,” he says.

He starts wrapping the scarf over his eyes. A few more kids head off home. Again, he does it first. Steps onto the plank, feels his way forward. All the snakes start slithering below him. He moves slowly. Short step, then balance, then short step again. He reaches the other side, pulls the scarf away, makes a fist, grins.

He dangles the scarf in the air.

“Next?”

Eddie does it, then another lad, Rod Hughes, then Ned. Then me. The blackness and the image of the snakes beneath are awful and the crossing is dreadful, terrifying. But it’s still easy. You just concentrate: one foot in front of the other, arms out wide, balance, next foot. The worst bit’s in the middle where the plank sags under your weight and you feel the snakes’ fangs are inches away. But you know you can easily jump to the side, even with the mask on. And the others guide you:
Two more feet, one more foot.
And they hold out their arms if you show any sign of tottering. You know that somebody will reach out, will give you an arm or a hand.

Then it starts to be a joke:
It nearly got you! Aaaaagh, look out! A bit to the left! Oh no, I meant the right! The plank’s cracking! Jump! Jump!

Then prodding, and poking, and shoving. And we’re all giggling and laughing and cursing, filled with excitement and
terror. And when the mask’s on you know that there’s nobody there to help, there’s only things to make it worse, to make it harder. And you think of the snakes and their slithering shapes and their jaws and fangs and venom. But you do it anyway because it’s so weird, it’s so engulfing, because you’ve never done anything like it before. And then of course one of us falls, Eddie Marks, a skinny lad, twelve years old. He topples as we’re prodding him. He can’t react in time and leap for the rim. He sprawls in the pit. We haul him out even as he’s falling. The snakes don’t get him. We throw him into the grass and he lies there screaming like a baby and he just won’t stop. And most of us are gasping air and shuddering and shaking and stamping and cupping our hands to our mouths and trying not to howl. And Nattrass moves among us, grinning. Then I crack. I go for him. I shove him over and grab him by the throat. He pushes me off and we writhe and struggle on the grass. I try to drag him to the edge of the pit. I see Eddie and Ned coming to us. Any second now there’ll be a boot in my face. But it doesn’t come, and anyway Nattrass is stronger. He’s fighting me off easily. He’s laughing.

“Oh, Liam,” he says. “I thought folk like you were all peace and love and joy. But you’re a bad bugger just like me, aren’t you, brother?”

And it’s him who’s dragging me, and he’s laughing and snarling and spitting and bleeding and I’m wishing I had Death Dealer with me to scare him off with.

He gets me to the pit.

“Come and get the bastard!” he yells at the snakes. “Come on!”

The snakes slide and slither but come no nearer.

“Come on!” he yells.

Then there’s a man’s voice, from Nattrass’s house, far away at the end of the overgrown allotment.

“Gordon!”

Nattrass is suddenly dead still.

“Gordon!” comes the voice again.

“Aye, Da?” yells Nattrass.

“What the hell you up to out there?”

Nattrass looks up at me. His dad’s disabled, lost his right arm in a tractor accident years ago. He hardly ever gets out. He’s hardly ever seen. I remember him, slouched in a dark room on a sofa watching TV. I remember the half-closed door, the smell of piss, stale beer, cigarettes.

“Nowt, Da!” yells Nattrass. “We’re just messing about, Da!”

He lets me struggle free.

“That’s right, isn’t it?” he whispers. “Just messing about. Just playing, eh? Just joking?”

I kneel, stand. There’s blood and saliva and snot all over me and I can’t tell which is his and which is mine. Nattrass is trying to pull himself together.

“Who’d’ve thought that Liam Lynch had that in him?” he whispers. He slips closer to me. “You’re just like me at heart, Liam. Just like you always were, if truth be told.”

“Gordon!” comes the voice again.

“Aye, Da! Aye!”

He waves the others away.

“Shove off,” he says. “Shove off, all of you. Quick!”

They start to go.

I spit blood onto the grass.

“We’re blood brothers,” he says. “Remember? We’re linked in blood.”

“Piss off, Nattrass,” I whisper.

“OK, brother. But you’ve started something. You know that, don’t you?”

“Gordon!”

He grins as I shove past him. I follow the others, past the dilapidated cowshed, heading homeward. Eddie Marks crouches in the next field, vomiting. I whisper to him that he’ll be all right, that he’ll get over it.

I look back. Nattrass is at the pit’s edge. He raises his spade high, plunges it downwards again and again and again, then heads towards the house.

The baby’s been in hospital for tests.
She’s being fostered in Newcastle. She’s fine and strong and healthy. There’s a picture of her with laughing nurses in the
Chronicle.
There’s a film of her with her foster parents on ITV.

They’ve called her Alison.

“It should be Perdita,” Dad says. “Like in Shakespeare.
The Winter’s Tale.
Perdita, that’s the name for foundlings.”

I watch Alison on her foster mother’s lap. I can still feel her, can still smell her.

“Oh, just look at her,” says Mum. “Who could abandon a mite like that?”

“Who
is
she?” I say.

The news moves on to a hit-and-run in Throckley, then
forward to Baghdad. More soldiers have died, including two lads from Gateshead.

“Who is she?” says Mum. “She’s a shining light in a dark dark world. That’s what she is.”

Mum says we should visit her.

“No,” says Dad. “Leave her alone to live her own life.”

“Live her own life!” says Mam. “She’s just a few months old. Anyway, you could say Liam’s like one of her family.” She laughs. “He’s like her big brother.”

Dad heads back upstairs. Mum phones social services. Impossible, they say. Then she says she’s the mother of Liam Lynch, one of the lads that found her, and they say OK.

So it’s into Newcastle the next day, all three of us. Out of the emptiness of the country to the bustle of town. The road in from the west is lined with shops selling saris and fruits and spices. Indian restaurants, Persian restaurants, Turkish takeaways. Dad says how great it is to see. A bit of cultural ferment, he says. Not like the paleface countryside we inhabit.

“So let’s move back, then,” says Mum. “Be fine with me.”

“Course it would, with your galleries and your cafes and your Jack Scott crowds. But d’you think I’ve got time to move, with my publishing schedule?”

Mum shakes her head and sighs at me.

“And to think he used to tell me he wrote because he loves it,” she says.

The foster home is a big double-fronted terraced house with a bright red door and checky curtains at all the windows.

The man that opens the door’s wearing a butcher’s apron. He holds his hand out. His hand’s fat and soft, just like the rest of him. His eyes are tiny and shining.

“You’ll be the Lynches,” he says. “And you’ll be Liam, that found our lovely Alison for us. I’m Phil. And this is Phil as well.”