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–Stay there.
He went into the fridge and came back out with an animal’s leg. It was over his shoulder. He was wearing a white coat. I thought it was a cow’s, the leg.
–Over here.
We followed him behind the counter to the wooden block. It was clean. I could see scrape marks from the brush. I’d seen him with the brush before. It was the same shape as a brush but instead of bristles there was metal. He got the leg from his back to the block with just barely a flick of his hand. It slapped the wood. He let us feel it.
–Now, lads.
His knife was in a scabbard on a hook above the table. He took it out. It made a swish. He let us look properly at it.
–That cost me hundreds of pounds, lads, he said.—Don’t touch it.
We weren’t going to.
–Now look here, he said.
He slid the knife over the meat’s skin—just slid it—and it came away; a chop. He made no effort; he leaned the edge on the leg, that was all. No noise, no tension. He was sweating though. He broke the chop’s bone with a different knife, a cleaver. He thumped it onto the bone, once, twice, and the chop fell flat on the block.
–Now, he said.—That’s all there is to it. And that’s what I’ll do to you feckers the next time I catch yis robbin’ my sawdust.
He still looked nice and friendly.
–Sprinkle it all back on the floor on your way out. Bye bye, lads.
He went back into the fridge. I made sure that all my sawdust was even all over the floor. Sinbad ran away after he’d flung his sawdust out of his pockets.
–He did a jobby, I told them all.—Down his leg.
–IT’S ALL DOWN YOUR LEG—
GICK GICK—LA LA—
–Down as far as his shoes, I said.
–IT’S ALL DOWN YOUR LEG—
GICK GICK—LA LA—
Ian McEvoy’s guineapig died because of a cold night. He came out to have a look at it before school and it was in a corner of its box covered in frost. He blamed his ma for not letting him bring it to bed with him.
–She said I’d’ve smothered it, he said.
–I’d prefer to be smothered than die from the cold, said Liam.
–It was subzero last night, I told them.
The life expectancy of a guineapig was seven years if you changed its water every day and gave it hot bran mash for its di
–Grass will do him, Ian McEvoy said she said.
His da was no help either.
–Buy him an anorak, he said.
He thought he was fu
We got his sister’s doll and a pin. We brought them down to the field; we smuggled them down. The doll didn’t look enough like Missis McEvoy.
–Doesn’t matter, said Kevin.
–She doesn’t have white hair like that, I said.
–Doesn’t matter, said Kevin,—so long as we’re thinking about her when the pins go in.
We were going to use Action Man for Mister McEvoy but Edward Swanwick wouldn’t let us have his one and he was the only one that had one.
–Doesn’t matter, said Kevin.—He’ll be all in bits when Missis McEvoy dies and that’s enough.
–He doesn’t like her much, said Ian McEvoy.—I don’t think.
–He’ll still miss her, said Kevin.
We beat up Edward Swanwick anyway, but not in the face.
Kevin was the highpriest again but he let Ian McEvoy stick in the pin first because she was his ma and it was his sister’s doll.
–Missis McEvoy!
Kevin held his hands up into the air.
–Missis McEvoy!
We held an arm and a leg each, like the doll was going to get away.
–You must die!
Ian McEvoy put the pin in her tummy, through her dress. I wondered was there a girl somewhere with white hair and big eyes screaming in agony.
–You must die!
I got her in the brain. Kevin got her in the gee. Liam got her in the bum and Aidan got one of her eyes. The pin marks were hardly there; we didn’t do anything else to the doll. Ian McEvoy wouldn’t let us. He brought it home. He went in to see. We waited for him outside. He came out.
–She’s making the di
–Damn.
–Stew.
It was Wednesday.
We weren’t too disappointed but we pretended we were. We squashed the guineapig through Kilmartin’s letter box and Missis Kilmartin never found out who’d done it. We wiped our fingerprints off it first.
She listened to him much more than he listened to her. Her answers were much longer than his. She did twothirds of the talking, easily that much. She wasn’t a bigmouth though, not nearly; she was just more interested than he was even though he was the one that read the paper and watched The News and made us stay quiet when it was on, even when we weren’t making any noise. I knew she was better at talking than him; I’d always known that. He was good sometimes and useless others and sometimes you could tell that you couldn’t go near him to ask him or tell him anything. He didn’t like being distracted; he said that word a lot, but I knew what it meant, Distracted, and I didn’t know how he was being distracted because he wasn’t doing anything anyway. I didn’t mind, only sometimes. Fathers were like that, all the fathers I knew, except Mr O’Co
I won a medal. I came second in the hundred yards except it wasn’t nearly a hundred yards; it wasn’t even fifty. It was a Saturday, the school sports, the first one the school ever had. There were twenty in the race, right across the field. He
–Well done, Mister Clarke. If only you were as quick with your answers in class.
I was quick in class; I knew more about some things than He
–His mickey is very hirsute.
–Hirsute!
–Hirsute hirsute hirsute!
The medal had a ru