The Knife That Killed Me (20 page)

Except that Roth is not satisfied. He is feeling with his free hand inside his jacket. And I remember now that wide shape beneath the black handle. With a shout he pulls it from his pocket. It is a fat-bladed meat cleaver, its edge ground razor-sharp. He flourishes it above his head. He is going to kill Goddo with it.

I realize then that I have to move, have to stop this atrocity. But Roth changes his grip, and I hesitate. Now he
holds out one of Goddo’s hands against the soil. He scrabbles and twists until a finger is isolated. And then up goes the cleaver again. For a second it pauses, bright against the mackerel sky. And then it falls, and I have done nothing to stop it.

Except that it doesn’t fall, or rather its fall is caught.

Roth looks round, looks up, and his face is filled with mystery, disbelief, utter bafflement. This was something he had never expected.

Miller.

Neatly, Miller takes the cleaver from Roth’s hand and hurls it toward the beck. As it turns slowly in the air, I half believe that a hand will burst from the water to catch it, but it enters uncaught and soundless.

“Shouldn’t have called him that,” said Miller, his face expressionless. And then he just walks away.

Why did Miller betray Roth like that? Is it really a betrayal when what you are betraying is evil? Maybe he’d been waiting for this moment for years. Maybe it was just a whim. But I think there comes a time when the corrosive burning works down to the part that won’t burn, that won’t corrode, and Miller had reached that part, his core. And when he reached it, he found that there was still something noble there, even if it expressed itself in an act of treachery.

Now I turn back to the fight. Roth is lost, his arm still stuck up in the air as if he is answering a question in class. Ridiculous. He looks ridiculous. Who could have thought such a thing? And Goddo rises up from under him, and all
the Templars, freed now from the enchantment of defeat, close upon him, and all I can see is the ripple of arms and legs working, like a soft machine.

But there is no time to understand the soft machine, no chance to explore how it works, because a shape is rushing toward me. Bates, in a blind panic, runs like a rat toward the beck. He pushes me and I fall back. I get up to see that not all the Templars are gathered around Roth.

Mickey, his face covered in blood, a flap of skin hanging loose from his cheek, is alone. No, not quite. Didn’t Roth once say to me that when you’ve got a knife, you’re never alone? And in his hand is not that penknife of his, but a cheap, long-bladed kitchen knife.

I don’t know if in some way his mind has mixed up Bates and me, or if he just wants to hurt someone, and I am easier to reach than Bates, who has fled across the brown beck, or Roth, who is still caught in the workings of the soft machine, the Templars on him the way vultures cover a carcass.

Whatever the reason, Mickey fixes his eyes on me and begins to run, holding the knife. For a second I think about taking out
my
knife, the beautiful killing blade that Roth gave me. But I have already made that decision. And anyway, there is no time.

TWENTY-NINE

I have
visitors. My mother and father come every week. We sit in a bare room, facing each other across a wooden table. On the table there is a vase and in the vase there is a plastic flower. They believe me when I say that I did not mean to hurt Shane. Does that make it easier for them? I think it makes it harder. My father talks about things that are happening in the world. My mother’s eyes fill with fat, unfallen tears. I tell them that one day I will come out, and that I will be good.

But how can I be good? Now I have killed a boy, killed him with a knife, how can I ever be good again?

I hoped that Maddy might come to see me, and the other freaks, Billy, Stevie, Serena. I could have explained to them what happened, got them to forgive me. But they will never come, and they will hate me forever. I think about Maddy, and imagine a life we might have had together. Not even a whole life, but just a few months, a year, two years, going out, normal things.

Never, never, never, never, never.

Shane died before he reached the hospital. Hell, he died straightaway. The knife blade bounced off his rib and up into his heart, and his heart stopped, as hearts will. But they tried. Reviving him, I mean. The ambulance guys tried, the ER people tried, the surgeons tried. They took him to the same hospital he’d walked out of an hour earlier.

He’d left Casualty to come and keep me away from the fight. I heard the story in full later, of course. How he’d called the others, told them to help, said that he’d be there soon. That he saw my fight with Mickey, and came to stop me from doing something stupid.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed to see him, in the hospital, or afterward. What happened just after I stabbed Shane is a bit murky. You’ll probably think that’s because I don’t want to remember it all, and you’re right.

Someone must have told the teachers. The police. The
ambulance. All turned up. The police first. A car pulled up on the road next to the field, and two coppers came running. One fell, and there was laughter—don’t know who from. At the first sight of the police, everyone who could run ran. Scattered everywhere. For a while the two policemen tried to grab some of the runners, but it was no use, and anyway they soon realized where the action was. Here, with me and Shane, dying.

People were in my face. Maddy was wailing and crying. I think she hit me. Someone hit me. Perhaps they all hit me.
He was trying to help
, they were shouting. I wanted to tell them about Kirk, how it was all his fault, but nobody listened to me. Before the police reached us, I pushed my way closer to Shane. His eyes were closed, and his body was trembling, just tiny little movements, like a leaf in a breeze. I think I said,
Sorry, sorry, sorry
. And then the trembling stopped.

The police arrested me. They found the knife. Both knives, I mean. The one I’d taken off Mickey, and the one concealed in my pocket. That was the knife that led to my conviction. I’d gone armed to the battle. I was a knife killer.

But I’m alive, so how can I talk about the knife that killed me? Because I’m not alive. Because I died back there on the gypsy field, when I took the life of my friend Shane. Died in my heart, died in my spirit, died in my brain. True, my body moves. Moves from my cell (they call it a room, but it is a cell) to the showers, to the dining hall, to the recreation room, to the toilet, and back to the cell. But what
moves is a zombie, an animated corpse. I don’t know when I will be set free, but it doesn’t matter. Because the chains and the bars are inside me, and I will never be free of them.

I think about Shane all the time. When you kill someone you love, they will be with you forever. I see his face, smiling at me when we first met. See him smiling at other times, down in his basement or in the streets, just hanging out. I hear his quiet voice. I can’t quite make out his words, but I know they are wise, and without reproach.

I saw his eyes in his mother’s eyes in the court, saw his mouth in his father’s mouth.

But Shane is not the only ghost that haunts me. I could live with the ghost of Shane. The ghost of Shane could be my friend. But there is another ghost.

Let me not call him a ghost but a god.

Because Roth is not dead. The rage of the Templars could not kill him. Saved him, in fact. Because he was hurt, the world saw him as a victim. There was no court case for Roth, no charges to answer.

He was in hospital with Shane. But he lived when Shane died. Because, you see, the cruel gods are stronger than the kind gods, and they will always beat them in the end.

You doubt it? Look at the world, my brother, my sister.

And so the spirit of Roth is here with me also, and battles for my soul.

And I don’t know who will win.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Knife That Killed Me
is a story about the excitement, the despair, the joy, and the horror of contemporary teenage life. High school is where things happen: where you find yourself caught up in violence and brutality; where you try to negotiate the labyrinth of power relations; where mistakes can lead to beatings, or worse. But it’s also where friendship and love burn like phosphorus in your head.

The setting, the characters, even much of the plot of
The Knife That Killed Me
, came straight out of my own experiences at a tough inner-city school in the industrial north of England. The brutality began with the teachers and passed on down through the school psychos and bullies until it bounced up against the flakes and nerds at the bottom.

And yet for me, those really were the best of times, when anxiety and desire made every day feel special, like a movie, like something that mattered.

The impetus for writing this book was a startling and tragic series of deaths involving teenagers and knives that dominated the news in the UK from 2006 to 2008. It seemed that you couldn’t open the newspaper or turn on the TV without staring into the eyes of a kid who’d been stabbed to death, usually by another teenager. It was a new phenomenon in the UK: we suddenly found ourselves in a new place, where the quaintly old-fashioned fist and boot had been replaced by a much more dangerous weapon.

I wanted to write a story that looked beyond the headlines, that strove to see how two young people could find themselves in a situation in which one held the hilt of a knife, and the other folded his guts around the blade.

The Knife That Killed Me
is not at all like the other books I’ve written for young adults.
Hellbent
and
Jack Tumor
are surreal, gross-out comedies, albeit comedies mottled with darkness.
The Knife That Killed Me
is dark all the way through. Instead of making the reader laugh, I want to grip him or her by the throat, gradually increasing the tension until it hurts. It’s a harrowing story but, I trust, a compassionate one too.