The Knife That Killed Me (8 page)

Here comes some fun, they thought.

I took the box out of my bag and held it out in front of me as I approached them. I was trying to look purposeful, but not dangerous. Ha! That was funny. As if I could ever be a
danger to them. But I wanted at least to look like I was there for a reason, and not just like some aimless kid, ripe for robbing of his pocket money.

The gang had stopped talking among themselves, and now watched me, their stares openly hostile. I was frightened. I tried to think of my dad, tried to think what he’d have done. But thinking about my dad never really helped me. Somehow thinking of his strength always made me feel weaker. Imagining his courage made me want to hide.

About ten meters away from them I stopped and shouted out: “I’ve got something for Goddo.”

My voice chose that moment to crack, and it came out as a squeaking croak. At least that broke the tension, and they laughed.

Too hard.

Too long.

“Hear that, Goddo, he’s got something for you,” one of the kids said at last, copying my squeak. The laughter swelled again. It was impossible to know how this would turn out.

Something about Goddo reassured me. He was a head taller than the other kids, but he had the kind of face that fell easily into a smile.

“He better bring it here then,” he said.

His tone wasn’t unfriendly, and the words still had that smile or the promise of a smile behind them. I was struck by the difference between him and Roth. There was never a time when Roth wasn’t asserting his dominance over you,
letting you know that he was the master and you were clay. Goddo seemed less concerned with making the world bow to his will. But it might have been an act. After all, I was still far enough away to have a chance of escaping if I ran for it, so he could just have been trying not to scare me off.

But the truth is that I was more scared of Roth than of any of these kids, and I wasn’t going to run. I walked the rest of the way to the group.

“It must be your birthday,” one of the gang said. A scrawny kid with spiky hair. He looked like something spat out by a dog.

I stretched out my arm to Goddo and he took the package.

“Who’s it from?” he asked.

“Roth.”

“Roth?” he said, looking puzzled.

I hadn’t thought for a moment that he wouldn’t know who Roth was. It was like not knowing who Jesus was, or the Queen.

Then he twigged.

“Oh, you mean that ape-man?”

The others laughed. The spiky-haired kid did an ape walk, rolling along on bandy legs, his knuckles dragging on the ground.

I didn’t like that. I don’t mean calling Roth an ape-man; I mean the fact that Goddo didn’t seem to know what this was all about. Although I wasn’t exactly delighted at
the idea of running drugs, I thought at least it was a deal between them, something they’d agreed on. That’s where my safety lay.

Goddo weighed the package in his hands. “Quite heavy. What is it?”

“Dunno. I’m just the messenger.” At least I’d got the sentence out without squeaking.

“Open it up,” said the spiky-haired kid, pulling at Goddo’s arm.

“What do you think I’m doing?” replied Goddo, shrugging him off. He picked at the Scotch tape. “Give us your knife, Mickey.”

A knife. I felt another surge of unease.

Then Mickey, the scrawny kid, took out a Swiss Army knife. I felt oddly reassured by that. Yeah, a penknife can kill you, but it’s not exactly the weapon of choice for a gangsta. What if you opened up the corkscrew or nail file instead of a blade?

Goddo found one of the shorter blades and cut through the wrapping. The brown paper eased open, and Goddo let it fall. The box inside had a picture of a heart on top.

“I was wrong, it’s Valentine’s day,” said Mickey.

He was obviously the comedian of the group. But this time the others were too engrossed in the box to laugh.

It was then that I really should have run, while they were checking out the package. Even if they’d bothered chasing me, they might not have caught me.

Goddo had been smiling, but now his face changed.
He moved the box to one hand and looked at the fingers of the other, touching them together as if there was something sticky on them. Then he held the box up to eye level and peered underneath.

“Something leaking,” he said, almost to himself.

Then he opened the box.

And dropped it.

Mickey let out a scream, and the rest of the gang shouted and stepped back.

Again I should have bolted. I’d have made it, I know I would. But I was hypnotized by the box, caught by my desire to see what it contained. So I moved forward rather than away, and looked at what Goddo had dropped.

The box was empty. Its contents had rolled out. For a second I couldn’t see what it was. I moved closer still. And then I saw.

It was a head.

A dog’s head.

Black and brown fur. The shocking pink tongue, lolling. Dull eyes, staring. White teeth. Blood thickly oozing.

Looked like a pit bull. Except a pit bull never appeared so vulnerable. Or so dead.

“Suzie.”

Goddo spoke the word. And then he did the shocking thing. He picked up the head he had let fall from the box, brought it to his face and kissed the black lips.

I must have made some sort of noise then, because they all turned and looked at me. I think they’d forgotten I was
there. Too late now, I tried to run, but they were on me. Two grabbed my arms and one held me by the hair, pulling my head back. Mickey stood in front of me. Somehow he’d got the knife back from Goddo. He pointed the blade at my exposed neck. They were all shouting and the world seemed to spin and reel in my eyes.

“Slit his throat,” someone said, one of the kids holding me.

“Yeah, bleed him.”

“You saw what he did. I’m gonna cut his head off. Send it back to them. Head for a head.”

The kids holding my arms pulled and twisted them further behind my back, and I felt the hand in my hair circle closer to my scalp, and then yank back. I gasped with the pain. But I never took my eyes off the knife. Mickey put the blade to my throat and pressed. I felt it cut into me, felt a trickle of warm blood run like a tear.

“Aw, baby cry, baby cry.”

“Leave him.”

Goddo again. I felt a swell of pure gratitude toward him. He pushed Mickey out of the way, and my gratitude turned to horror. He was holding the head. His eyes had gone. He looked mad. I mean mad crazy, not mad angry.

He put his face close to mine, then raised the dog’s head.

“Why?”

“I swear I didn’t know. Roth … it was a trick … against me. I’m not his mate.”

I was trembling. And yes, tears were streaming down my face. I don’t know if Goddo was hearing me.

“Do you know what this was?” he said, pressing the head against my cheek.

“I didn’t know it was in the box. I promise. I thought it was drugs.”

“This was my puppy,” he said, and moved away.

His back was to us. We all waited. I don’t know how long. He turned to face us again, and I knew I was saved.

“Let him go.”

A sort of collective moan came from the gang.

“But what he did … Goddo, we’ve …”

“Shut it. Like he said, he’s only the messenger. The post boy.”

“Still, though, Goddo, we’ve got him. Yeah, he’s the one we’ve got. Sometimes you have to make do with that. So we send them a message back.”

“Least we should do is cut him.”

Goddo ignored them. He took another step toward me.

“Come on, Goddo, let’s teach them a lesson,” said Mickey from the side, his voice quiet, urgent, pleading. “They can’t do this. They can’t show us this disrespect. This is war.”

Goddo looked at him, as if for the first time. And his face changed again. Not angry, not crazy, not laughing. Deadly serious. Suddenly he looked like Roth.

“For once you’re right, Mickey,” he said. “It
is
war. But this little poof isn’t the one.” He turned to me. “You said Roth sent this?”

“Roth, yes.” I was trembling.

“Tell him something from me. Tell him this. Tell him Goddo’s going to kill him. Understand that?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No.”

“I’m going to help you remember.”

And then Goddo opened the jaws of the dog and clamped them around my face, so I had to breathe in the bloody stinking death of it, breathe it down into my lungs. And Goddo scraped the teeth across my cheeks.

TWELVE

“Oh my
God.”

I hadn’t been expecting Maddy Bray to answer the door.

“I’m here to see … Shane said to come.”

Of course, I should have gone home after the incident with the Temple Moor kids. So why hadn’t I? Partly because I wasn’t thinking right. I’d spent the time with Goddo and his mates in a state that switched between ordinary fear and absolute terror. And then my life disappeared into the mouth of the dog. And after that I was numb. I was nothing.

But it wasn’t just that my head was wrong. There was more to it. It was that I thought Shane could help me. I don’t mean with practical things—sorting my face out, dealing with Goddo and Roth, that sort of thing. I mean, I thought he could make me feel better. Stupid, really. I didn’t even know him. Didn’t know what it was he was supposed to do. But I still thought he could save me, save my soul.

“What happened to you?”

Maddy looked appalled, almost disgusted. I hadn’t realized that I was that bad.

“I had some trouble.”

“You better come in.”

Maddy was still wearing her school uniform, but she’d loosened it up and she looked good.

Shane’s house was old and tall. Everything about it, all its points and curves, seemed to reach up to the sky. It made my house, all the houses in my street and the streets around it, feel squat and low and mean, like caves.

Maddy moved to one side and I stepped into the hall. In our house the door opened into the living room. This space echoed like a church, and there were even stained-glass windows, one in the door behind me, another up over the stairs on the landing. The floor was made of little black and white tiles, and for a second I stopped, entranced by them.

“Should I take my shoes off?”

Maddy laughed, and I felt stupid. In our house you always had to take off your shoes when you came in to stop you messing up the carpet.

“I don’t think so,” she replied, and then I think she felt bad about laughing, because she gave me a nice smile, a sweet smile. “Shane’s parents don’t seem bothered. Anyway, they’re not here. We’re all in the basement. Shane’ll know what to do. With your face, I mean. Through here.”

I followed her down the hall and round into a kitchen full of polished wood and stainless steel, and then through a door and down into a new, dark world. It took me a few seconds to get used to the murk. Then I saw that there were five other kids sitting around on old chairs and a sofa. A big telly was on in the corner.

“Hey, Paul!”

Shane got up and came over to meet me, smiling. When he reached me, his smile disappeared. “What the hell happened to your face?”

The others got up as well now and gathered round. It was oddly like the scene with Goddo and his gang, except with less of a feeling that my throat was about to be slit.

So I told them the whole story. Halfway through, Shane disappeared and came back with a tin box with a red cross on it. He used cotton wool and some stinging stuff out of a bottle to clean the cuts on my face. I was sitting down on the sofa by then, and Shane sat next to me, his face full of concentration and concern.

“Looks worse than it is,” he said.

And then I explained how my face came to be like this: the dog, the head, the teeth.

“That’s gross,” said a girl with white skin and purple
lips. Her lips hadn’t been purple when I’d seen her at school earlier that day.

“But its bite was worse than its bark,” said another kid, who I didn’t know. For some reason I found the remark more annoying than funny.

It was only after I’d finished the story that Shane took the time to introduce the other kids.

“Maddy you know,” he said, and then explained to the rest of the gang: “Paul was the one who got her off the hook with Mrs. You Know Who.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Excellent!” said a boy who was really too fat and happy looking to be a freak, but he was going for it anyway.

“This is Billy,” said Shane, aiming his thumb at the happy kid, and Billy gave me a wave.

After that I met the purple-lipped girl, whose name was Serena. She didn’t seem very interested in me, or anything else for that matter. But you had to say she was pretty, whatever color her lips were. Then there was Stevie, who was eight feet tall and silent. And last of all a boy called Kirk. He was the one who’d said about the dog’s bite being worse than its bark.

Kirk looked exactly like Shane. It was uncanny. I don’t just mean he wore the same clothes as Shane; he’d somehow made his face look like Shane’s face. It wasn’t that they had the same features or anything, and when you studied really hard, you could see that they were completely different. But
from some power of worship, he’d forced his features into a Shane mask.