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The bell went. It was hand-rung by the headmaster, a lanky man who went out into the playground to ring it. It was big, wood-handled. And suddenly the corridor was full of children and noise. Then they were gone and it was quiet and the corridors were empty.

  My new teacher came to get me. She was small and old and she wore spectacles on a chain round her neck. She ushered me inside. She closed the door behind her, and asked me to stand by her desk. The class looked at me. Blue eyes and brown eyes and lazy eyes and glasses. White knee socks and flared corduroys.

  The little teacher said, ‘This is Neil. He’ll be joining our class from today.’

  She showed me to a desk with an empty chair. The class watched. My legs felt strange, so I went to the desk with exaggerated caution. I sat in the chair, facing the blackboard.

  The kid next to me wore an orange tank-top with a blue zigzag across the chest. He was pale, with transparent eyebrows and clumpy orange hair that stuck up. He smelled of piss. He smiled. He said, ‘Hiya.’

  I said, ‘All right?’

  Then the teacher called the register. We got on with the lesson. I watched her write on the board. I was watching myself from high in the corner. I could see myself, bent over the little desk.

  During morning break, I loitered in the doorway as children spilled into the playground. It was a rule that everyone had to be out of the building. So I walked as slowly as I could, and went outside and sat on the stone steps.

  An older boy came up. He stood over me. His friends stood behind him.

  He said, ‘Are you a Yank?’

  I looked at him. The sun heliographing behind his head.

  I said, ‘English.’

  ‘Oooh,’ he said, ‘English.’

  They laughed and walked away.

  Back in the classroom, we studied hundreds, tens and units. The little teacher approached me. She asked what was wrong. I hadn’t done hundreds, tens and units. She kneeled and helped me. She smelled like lavender. I started to cry.

  When she’d gone, I wiped snot on the back of my hand.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Billy Flockart, the boy with the ginger hair. He said it: ‘Disnae matter’.

  After school, mothers gathered at the gates to meet the younger children. Some had prams or held the hands of fat toddlers. They stood in twos and threes. None of them was alone, except my mum. She stood there smiling.

  We walked home together. It wasn’t far. She asked how it had been. I told her I’d learned hundreds, tens and units and sat next to a boy who smelled of wee; he was nice, though.

  In the flat, Mum made me Noodle Doodles on toast. They were spaghetti shapes, and I liked them because the advert was funny. I liked Campbell’s soup for the same reason. The Campbell’s soup advert had a superhero in it, in an armchair, wearing slippers, which I thought was the funniest idea in the world.

  She passed me the plate. I looked down at shapes meant to be cars, boats, trees, dogs, little men with hats.

  She said, ‘Did you make any new friends?’

  ‘A few. Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’s a cunt?’

  She went to the kitchen and busied herself, her back to me.

  She said, ‘Why, love?’

  ‘People keep calling me an English cunt.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Just kids.’

  She put the kettle on. Rinsed out the pan in which she’d heated the Noodle Doodles.

  She said, ‘Never mind.’

  I turned in my chair. She was looking at me, drying the saucepan.

  I said, ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘It’s a horrible word,’ she said.

  She made a disgusted face. It transformed her.

  I turned away and ate my tea. I worried about being a cunt. It might have something to do with the way I walked or the colour of my hair or the way I smelled. Perhaps I smelled of wee too, and that is what it meant to be a cunt.

  I decided to ask Derek. I waited for him to come home. When the key turned in the lock, my heart quickened. He walked in, grinning. He was happy to see us: just me and Mum.

  I could feel her joy. It shone behind me like a lighthouse.

  Derek didn’t take off his coat or even put down his briefcase.

  He said, ‘Well? How did it go?’

  I wanted to say, ‘What does “cunt” mean?’

  But I didn’t want to see that disgusted look on Mum’s face again. It had reminded me of candlelight flickering on a gargoyle. And Derek looked so keen to hear good news.

  I said, ‘It was nice.’

  ‘Did you make friends?’

  ‘A few.’

  He stood there, the briefcase in his fist.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘You’ll settle in.’

  On Wednesdays, Mum didn’t meet me at school because she was having her hair set. The hairdresser was two or three doors along from Bobby’s Bookshop. So that was my favourite afternoon.

  After school, I ran across the road, and walked to the hairdresser. Inside, a sharp-edged fug of setting lotion and hair lacquer hung in the air and gave the light an ancient, varnished quality.

  The same women got their hair done at the same time every week, and quickly they learned to recognize me. Most of them were elderly; they were attentive and kind and knew about small boys. They asked me to fetch their bag and then dug around inside and gave me a barley sugar or a Murray Mint. Then Mum gave me 20p to spend at Bobby’s.

  Paying for the comics was always a silent transaction, except when I said thank you. Then I took the comics to the hairdresser and read them while Mum and the old women sat under the big hair dryers. The old women took obscure, smiling pleasure in the fact of my existence, of any child’s existence.

  On Friday, I got a parcel from Dad. It was wrapped in brown paper and secured with parcel tape. Mum had to cut it open with a bread knife. Inside was a letter:

  Dear Nip

  Hope you are still well and enjoying your new school.

  At the top was sellotaped a 50p piece. And the parcel contained Battle! and Action! comics. British comics were still printed largely in black and white, and mostly concerned the Second World War. Each featured several stories, told in episodes. They featured maverick protagonists, each of whom was his own man, unfettered by structures of command. By far my favourite story was Darkie’s Mob. It was about a hard cruel son of Satan who turned his rag-tag team into the most savage fighting force the Japs had ever known.

  Darkie’s Mob finished in tragedy so total I wept myself to sleep. For weeks I carried the thought of them around with me: Darkie and Flyboy, Smiley and Shorty, dead in the Burmese jungle.

  Although the extermination of Darkie’s Mob was the worst pain I had ever endured, most of my entertainment pivoted on violent death. But normally it was the violent death of Germans.

  One blustery Sunday, Derek and I sat down to watch The Dam Busters. He told me it was a good film. As soon as it started, I knew he was right. I loved the music. It was martial and triumphant, but undershot with melancholy. It made me feel English. And I liked Barnes Wallis, a boffin in spectacles who invented bombs that skipped like flat stones across the surface of a lake, in order to destroy some vital German dams. In films, German dams were always vital. So, for some reason, were ball-bearing factories.

  When the dams burst, I cheered. But then, at the end of the film, Barnes Wallis removed his spectacles, weighed down by his triumph.

  I said, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s just a scientist,’ said Derek. ‘Not a soldier. The bouncing bomb was just an idea. Now it’s worked, thousands of people have been killed. So imagine how he feels.’

  ‘But they were baddies.’

  ‘Not all Germans were baddies. And not all the people who died were Germans. Imagine what it must be like, having a wall of water a mile high slam down on top of your house.’

  He clapped his hands once, loudly.

  I imagined it.

>   I said, ‘Then why did the Dambusters do it?’

  ‘Because there was a war on.’

  I gave him a blank look.

  He hesitated. Then he said, ‘There was a man called Robert Oppenheimer. In America. During the war, he was boss of the Manhattan Project. It was a secret project to build an atomic bomb, before the Germans did. It was very important. But in the end, they dropped the bombs on two Japanese cities. They were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  ‘Thousands of people were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands. Burned to death. Atomized. There was nothing left of them, except their shadows: they’d been burned into the walls. The ones who lived, their eyes melted in their face. And they died over years: of burns, of horrible cancers. They gave birth to deformed children: babies born without brains, without eyes.

  ‘And Robert Oppenheimer was like Barnes Wallis. He was just a scientist. One day, they asked how he felt, about what his invention had done. And do you know what his answer was?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  ‘His answer was: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”’

  Derek had grown heavy in his chair. The rainy light had become slow and oppressive.

  Mum stepped out of the kitchenette, a tea-towel over her forearm. The smell and sound of roasting lamb.

  She said: ‘Der-ek.’

  He snapped out of it.

  He gave her an innocent look.

  He said, ‘What?’ and flashed me a grin.

  ‘You know what,’ Mum said. ‘He’s seven years old.’

  ‘Going on twenty-seven,’ said Derek.

  I basked in that like sunshine.

  But then Derek stood up and said, ‘Come on. Dinner time.’

  I tarried, sitting on my hands. I wanted to talk some more about the war. I was close to knowing something. But Derek clapped his hands, twice.

  ‘Come on now,’ he said. ‘Chop chop.’

  I went to wash my hands. It was one of the things he made me do. I turned on the cold tap and drizzled water over my fingertips. Then I dried them on a towel and went to help set out the little tables.

  After dinner, we watched the news. The local bulletin reported on a house fire. The newsreader was grave. But then she announced that only one person had died.

  I said: ‘One’s not many, is it?’

  Derek lay the palm of his hand on the crown of my head. It felt good. I could still feel it there, when he took it away.

  He said, ‘Well, it’s an awful lot to that person.’

  I thought about that all night. I thought about it until I went to bed, and I thought about it as I tried to sleep. I chewed it in my dreams.

  The saddest part of The Dam Busters had been when, on the eve of the mission, Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s dog was run over and killed. The dog was called Nigger, and Wing Commander Guy Gibson loved him. He was a good dog. And that is what I dreamed about: not about burning in chip fat, or about thousands of screaming Germans smashed and drowned by a wall of water; nor even about Robert Oppenheimer, turned by his own genius into a monster.

  I dreamed about Nigger the dog, and the sorrow of the brave wing commander, the very day before his most important battle.

  It was several weeks before someone at school actually hit me. The escalation towards it was incremental. An older boy and his friends backed me into a quiet corner in the playground. The boy twisted my ear, spat in my face. He contorted his mouth, called me a cunt. Soon, there was another corner, another boy from the same group. He slapped me and pulled my hair and punched me. Then he too delivered the mysteries: I was a cunt, a fenian, a radge. He rounded it off with a dead-leg. A dead-leg was more bemusing than painful.

  It was always one boy showing off to a group. There was at least one group for each year above me, but the oldest ones were the worst. An older boy would shove my shoulder and say ‘Hey, you’. He took a handful of my hair and twisted it in his fist. He pulled down on my hair so that I bent at the waist. He tried to punch my face, but it was awkward because I was bent double and most of the punches hurt the side of my head and my ears. He kicked me in the guts. He tried to knee me in the balls. His friend laughed and shoved. A few of them kicked at my shins and thighs and arse.

  Then he pushed me to the ground and spat on my face. He called me some more names and wandered off. I lay on the concrete.

  I got up and went to class. I saw the little teacher’s face and her eyes followed me as I walked to my desk, next to the boy who smelled of wee, and opened my jotter.

  I walked home with holes in my jeans and scabs on my knees. My collar had been torn from my shirt.

  When I came home with ripped and bloodied clothes, Mum was angry. She wore the disgusted face that I feared so much to see. That face was the worst of all of it. She looked at my clothes and told me that I needed to think. We didn’t have money to throw away. Did I think it grew on trees?

  Later, she passed the clothes to me, patched and sewn. I took the clothes and carried them to my bedroom and folded them up and put them away.

  And every day, Derek came home and asked how I was.

  I couldn’t tell him I was so scared of leaving the house that every morning I vomited. And I couldn’t tell him that sometimes I was scared to come home, because Mum got angry if my clothes were ripped.

  I couldn’t. As soon as he walked through the door, Mum’s happiness ignited and she changed. And Derek looked so thrilled to be home. I feared to disappoint and embarrass him: to make him think with shame of his big, happy, homecoming grin.

  7

  Long before I went to live with them, Mum and Derek had been to see a film called The Exorcist. Even now, they discussed it often, in subdued voices, the way people discussed a family secret. When I paid attention to what they were saying, Mum hushed Derek. It was as if ‘Exorcist’ was another word too bad to be uttered.

  I said, ‘What’s The Exorcist?’

  Mum gave me a look, the look she wore when she was lying. She said, ‘Nothing. It’s a film. A horrible film. That’s all.’

  I thought of the Hansel dream: the Battenburg-cake cottage, the witch outside in the forest, rushing through the trees. The stained wooden table and the long, rusty knives.

  Now, when I ran out to clean my teeth, it was The Exorcist I was scared of, although I couldn’t give shape to it. It was The Exorcist at my heels when I went to bed. It was The Exorcist who leaned over me at night, peering through the thin skin of my eyelids. It was The Exorcist on the other side of the bedroom wall, scratching.

  Eventually, I could no longer stand it, to have this thing stalking at my heels, leaning over me at night. On Saturday, when Derek had drunk some lager, I asked him to tell me about it. Mum tried to stop him. She put her hand on his knee. But he squeezed her hand and leaned forward in his deckchair.

  He said, ‘It’s a very, very frightening film. When your Mum and I went to see it, there were ambulance men in the cinema, waiting to take out the people who fainted.’

  I said, ‘What, grown-ups?’

  To think of a grown-up fainting in horror was terrible to me.

  ‘Grown-ups. They carried them out on stretchers. One man was so frightened, he had a heart attack. Right there in the cinema. Right in front of us.’

  I didn’t want to know any more.

  I said, ‘What’s it about?’

  Derek said, ‘It’s about a young girl, a little bit older than you, who becomes possessed by the devil.’

  ‘Derek,’ said Mum.

  He made an innocent face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s too young.’

  I said, ‘I want to know.’

  Mum looked at Derek. He was sitting back in his deckchair with his hands knitted in his lap. He was smiling.

  I said, ‘What does it mean, “possessed”?’

  ‘It means the devil gets inside you and takes over your body.’

  Mum said, ‘Derek. That’s enough. Look at him.’

  I said, ‘I’m all right. C
an that really happen?’

  ‘Can what happen?’

  ‘Can the devil get inside you?’

  A long silence.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Derek.

  It was cold. I could feel the dark windows.

  I said, ‘But it can’t really happen.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mum, ‘there’s no such thing.’

  But she had the same face on, that same look of disgust, and I knew she was lying.

  ‘Actually,’ said Derek, ‘The Exorcist is based on a true story. It really happened. Except it happened to a young boy. He was a little bit older than you.’

  ‘Derek,’ said Mum, ‘you’re frightening him.’

  ‘I am not,’ he said.

  ‘He isn’t, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘He’s talking rubbish,’ said Mum, ‘don’t listen to him. It’s just a film.’

  Resigned, Derek picked up the ukulele. But I wasn’t in the mood for singing. So he put the ukulele down and, instead, he told me a story.

  It happened when he was a boy, about my age. They lived on a farm in South Africa. His father had occasion to sack one of the farm workers, who was surly and lazy and dishonest. That night a monkey came by the farmhouse and did terrible damage. It broke windows, lit fires. And it came back the next night, and the night after that.

  Eventually, Derek’s father was advised by a local witch doctor to set a trap for the monkey. He told him what kind of trap it should be, and where they should set it, and all this they did. When the monkey came back, it fell into the pit they’d dug, and into the net with which they’d lined it. They hauled it out, and–as the witch doctor had instructed–they poured petrol on it and set it alight. It was a terrible sight, Derek said, the way the monkey writhed and burned. It screamed liked a baby even when the fire was out and it lay in the dirt, not yet dead. And that was the end of their monkey problems.

  But the story didn’t end there, because the next day, the man who had been sacked was found dead in his bed. His hut was perfectly unmarked, inside and out. But the man had burned to death. Only his blackened skull was left in the clean bed, grinning at the ceiling.