Black Swan Green

About a third of the Runners got captured and turned into Bulldogs for the next pass. I hate that about British Bulldogs. It forces you to be a traitor.

‘So Helena, I see your mobile pagoda hasn’t gone up to the great Oriental junkyard in the sky yet?’

Hugo’s accent’d gone just a bit less posh and just a bit more London. ‘Mastering an arcade game shouldn’t take that long.’

‘Must’ve taken a pile of dosh, though,’ said Neal Brose. ‘To get that much practice, I mean.’

‘Money’s never a problem, not if you’ve got half a brain.’

‘No?’

‘Money? ’Course not. Identify a demand, handle its supply, make your customers grateful, kill off the opposition.’

Neal Brose memorized every word of that.

Ross Wilcox tried to trip Grant Burch.

Grant Burch counter-tripped Ross Wilcox.

Ross Wilcox counter-counter-tripped Grant Burch.

By now, they’d three-legged themselves to the lip of the embankment.

Julia reads the Guardian, which has got all sorts of stuff not in the Daily Mail. Most of the 30,000 enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians. Their elite troops all raced back to Port Stanley as the British paratroopers advanced. Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets. Having your intestines pulled out through a slit in the belly! What a 1914 way to die in 1982.

Loads of people say ‘I don’t give a toss’. But for Pluto Noak, not giving a toss’s a religion.

No point denying it, but admitting it made it realer.

‘But if I sliced Wilcox’s tendons, I’d get sent to borstal.’

‘Well, wakey fucking wakey, Sunbeam! Life’s a borstal!’

‘Why don’t people like them?’

‘Why should decent-minded citizens like layabouts who pay nothing to the state and flout every planning regulation in the book?’

‘I think,’ Mum sprinkled pepper, ‘that’s a harsh assessment, Michael.’

“But you just tell them,’ Alan Wall pointed towards the village, ‘we ain’t all the thieves an’ that they say we are.’

‘The boy could preach till he’s purple,’ the daughter told him. ‘They’d not believe him. They’d not want to believe him.”

The prosecution (a) pointed out it wasn’t my money and (b) considered the panic Ross Wilcox’d feel when he discovers he’s lost all this money. The defence produced (a) the dissected mouse head in my pencil case, (b) the drawings of me eating my dick on blackboards and (c) the never-ending Hey, Maggot? How’s the s-s-s-ssssssspeech therapy going, Maggot?

The judge arrived at his verdict in seconds. I stuffed Ross Wilcox’s wallet in my pocket. I’d count my new fortune later.

But the last person to see Ross Wilcox was Arthur Evesham’s widow, on her way home from bingo at the village hall. Ross Wilcox came bowling by and missed her by inches. She’s the one who knelt down by Ross Wilcox to see if he was dead or alive, the one who heard him grunt, ‘I think I lost a trainer,’ sputter out a bagful of blood and teeth, and garble, ‘Make sure no one nicks my trainer.’ Arthur Evesham’s widow’s the one who first saw Wilcox’s right leg stopped at his knee, looked back, and saw gobby smears streaking the road.

I put Neal Brose’s calculator into the vice.[…] Blank out the consequences. I gave the rod-handle thing a strong turn. Tiny pleas snapped in the calculator’s casing. Then I put all my weight on the rod thing. Gary Drake’s skeleton, Neal Brose’s skull, Wayne Nashend’s backbone, their futures, their souls. Harder.

“It’ll be all right,’ Julia’s gentleness makes it worse, ‘in the end, Jace.’

‘It doesn’t feel very all right.’

‘That’s because it’s not the end.”