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  He pointed out the older boy who was still riding his bike in the old car park.

  ‘Go and get that bottle off him and you can join our gang.’

  ‘Ok,’ Peredur said. And he wheeled his bike round and went out. They laughed as he went.

  When he arrived the older boy was standing upright on the pedals of his bike hopping it in circles while he swigged at the bottle. He sat and pulled the bike into a wheelie as he came towards the boy and threw down the empty bottle into the grass.

  ‘They all too chicken?’

  The older boy sat astride his bike, sitting low back, his baggy tracksuit shiny about him. Under the peak of his cap there were two strips shaved into his eyebrow.

  ‘They told me to come and get their bottle back.’

  Peredur stood there in his favourite t-shirt and the wrinkled armbands and the shin pads on his legs and the tin bowl that didn’t fit properly on his head.

  ‘Whatever! Just go and tell them to come and get it. They’re taking the piss.’

  The place was like a distraught meadow. The tarmac of the parking bays had been scraped up and grass had crept its way back. Here and there a willow burst from the ground. Piled earth and spoil made small mounds that were cut up with bike tracks. The boy went to pick the bottle up. This incensed the youth.

  He scooted up on his bike, walking it along, and slipped off the grip from his handlebar and with the butt of the grip struck Peredur firmly between his shoulder and his neck. There was a brief hesitation when Peredur hardly moved. Then something snapped.

  He had never before been struck. Not once had a hand been raised to him in direct violence. He did not understand the act.

  But there was something there. Yes. Some distant bark inside my blood. My chemicals collided. I felt extremely calm. The light caught the bottle in the grass and it looked like some strange kind of water. The dull throb ached out from my neck, more like sun falling on a part of my body than anything. I kind of felt a warm, lazy calmness. I turned around and pushed him. I think he was surprised.

  He fell over his bike, clumsy, and I hopped onto him and then I looked at the two stripes shaved into his eyebrow as a kind of sighting line and lifted up my arm with the holly stick. Easy. Like a stretch in my sleep.

  He span round and pushed the older boy and, only half on the bike as he was, he fell awkwardly. The small child lit up. His surprise and spitting fury made the older boy laugh, a yawing delinquent clamorous laugh that split suddenly into a wheeling muffled scream, a scream already blocked with fluid as the dart smashed through his eye and out through the nape of his neck. He lay there, gasping like fish, his blood bubbling and oozing.

  ‘That was tight,’ Owain said to Kay. ‘You shouldn’t have sent him. He’s obviously not right. It makes us look like we’re taking the piss. What if he’s got brothers or something?

  ‘I bet he’s had a beating.’

  He got up to go and see what had happened and made his way to the old car park.

  When he arrived Peredur was dragging the older boy behind him along the ground.

  ‘There’s your bottle,’ he said. ‘Tell Arthur I did this. And tell that tall one he should be careful picking on those little ones.’

  When Owain got back to the gang he was white pale and had been sick. He still shook.

  ‘He didn’t want to be in the gang,’ he said.

  From The Celtic Echo

  Child Terror

  Local Youths ‘Afraid To Go Out’

  Local youths have been terrorised by a one-boy crime wave. The boy, who can’t be named owing to his young age, is said to be making the other children and teenagers ‘afraid to go out’.

  So far there have been sixteen reports of violent acts against other youths, and many other complaints, including the intimidation of a young girl in her own garden and the theft of some cake.

  ‘I know the kids are no saints themselves,’ says local parent Roy Hobbs, ‘but this one is beyond. He is something else.’ Mr Hobbs of Cwrt y Brenin called police after his son, 16, came home with a 10” piece of holly stick through his new bicycle helmet.

  ‘He’s going around with a big stick and it’s bullying. There’s no other word for it.’

  We spoke to one boy who didn’t want to be named for fear of revenge.

  ‘You are just playing around on your bike with your mates, doing wheelies and ramps and stuff and he just comes out of nowhere carrying this long pole and charges you and if you are unlucky he knocks you off your bike,’ he said.

  When asked why they didn’t do something to stop the child, the boy said, ‘We would get into trouble. Also, he is quite scary.’

  A police spokesman said, ‘Several youths between the ages of about eleven and sixteen have been driven over their bike saddles to the ground and there have been a number of other injuries and some damage to bikes and clothes.’

  When asked what police were doing about the rogue youngster, he said, ‘We are trying to locate the child. We have spoken with his mother who said he disappeared a week ago. At the same time, because he has committed crimes and is not simply missing but subject to a criminal investigation, we have to protect his identity as he is so young. So it is difficult. The parents are very angry and we also have to protect the child from possible illegal retribution.’

  And the father of the young girl whose cake was stolen had no hesitation telling us: ‘If I get my hands on him I will teach him a lesson. I am very proud of my little girl and still don’t believe that all he did was pinch her cake. Anything could have happened.’ It is also clear that the boy took a plastic ring from the girl.

  The plot thickened when on further investigation our reporter uncovered that several child gangs were operating in the area. Local Child Welfare Officer Nikki Hollis said she was aware of the gangs.

  ‘They are generally a mix of older and younger children – both boys and girls – and are generally defined by where the young people come from on the estates. Young people are keen to feel they belong to something and these gangs are an inevitable part of growing up here. Obviously this new boy has come in from outside.’

  Talking to older gang members, who preferred to remain anonymous, our reporter was horrified to be told of ‘large stashes of weapons’ ranging from sticks and stones to catapults, home-made crossbows and bits of pipe.

  ‘Whoever controls the technology controls the estates,’ said one gang leader. ‘The better weapons you can make or get hold of, the more powerful you are. But this kid has no fear. He will come at you with a stick.’

  When asked whether they were aware of these gangs, one parent said, ‘I know the kids split into gangs and fights do happen. But that’s natural. There is nothing for the children to do here so they end up fighting, but until now it’s all been high jinx.’

  The fights are often organised and some have been filmed on mobile phones and put up on youtube.

  One concerned resident said, ‘Maybe this is what these kids need. It might sort them out.’

  For legal reasons the details cannot be published but we can reveal that the boy allegedly responsible for these crimes was born on one of the estates but was taken away by his mother at a young age. We spoke to an ex-neighbour, Mr Sikes, 72, who remembers the child: ‘(He) was an ugly little thing, all shrivelled it seemed to me. He was ill-tempered, always wailing and generally frightful. He would bite and hit. He was a terror to his poor mother.’

  Rev Edmund Jones, local minister, also remembers the baby: ‘I saw him myself. There was something diabolical in the way he looked, the way he moved. He screamed all the time, which used to frighten people, but otherwise he was harmless.’

  It is also thought that the boy might be respons­ible for the grievous assault last Sunday on a sixteen year old who was beaten to the ground and stabbed in the eye with a sharpened stick. There were no eye witnesses. The boy is still in hospital in critical condition.

  We stopped calling him Ape Fro
g after that. At least to his face. It was difficult – you’ve seen him – because some names, you know the way they stick if they’re right. Ape Frog. He was kind of like an ape frog. But after we’d seen him lose it a few times we didn’t say it to his face any more.

  We knew who his father was but I don’t think he knew why we called him that. Ap Efrog. Ape Frog. But we wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t a little bit like an ape frog.

  A functional room in the police station. Daytime. Various information posters on the walls, most of them somewhat torn. A big whiteboard. They sit round an unfussy table.

  – Sixteen counts of ABH. (Shuffles the papers.) That’s not including that boy he turned into a vegetable. (Takes a swig of coffee, clearly it’s lukewarm.) In his fucking eye! Christ!

  – “No-eye” witnesses. I can’t believe they wrote that. (A snigger.) So what’s the story?

  – Mother, alcoholic. Father, deceased. Tits up in the boating lake. Never knew a duck would go for something’s face like that. Wasn’t pretty. Probable a water rat or something got at it first. I don’t think the duck knew what it was doing.

  – (Shuffles papers, fingers the lines of information.) ...brother, one – no, three. Half-brothers they are, I should say – arrested. Another deceased. Two others AWOL. Warrants out...

  – Quite a tribe, then.

  – Quite a tribe. Fair dos, she tried to get him out of that. Third wife, incidentally. I say wife. Not actual wife. Nineteen when she had the boy, which made him Ap Efrog boy number seven. All accounts she upped and left.

  – To?

  – Seems she had some kind of arrangement with the guys running the retirement village. Apparently she’s their on-site cleaner. I guess they owed Efrog a favour. From what I’ve heard, she’s away with the fairies.

  – Those cabins?

  – Those cabins.

  – And now?

  – Still there.

  – (In a sappy voice, all sorry sounding.) But her kid’s all growed up.

  – All growed up. Oh well. At least he’s livened things up a bit. We were in need of some entertainment ...what do you do with a fucking eight year old who sticks a fucking stick in someone’s eye?

  – Social Services.

  – Social Services. They’re already talking to her. Fat lot of use that will do. (Pauses. He fingers the case sheets. Looks momentarily grim.) You should read these.

  They look up at a monitor, at the eight year old sitting quietly on the bed in the holding room and looking innocent and like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

  – We need to go and speak to his mother again.

  The police pulled up in the yard and got out of the car.

  – We should have a WPC with us, one said. They looked at the dilapidation of the place.

  They knocked a lot before she let them in and she came to the door in a shift with an old worn jumper over it. The younger of the policeman felt slightly sick at the sight. For some reason he thought of a dead gull floating at the edge of a pond.

  – Mrs Efrog, said the other policeman.

  – Don’t use that name now, she spat. There was a hesitation.

  – May we come in?

  They went into the lounge and she went back into the chair like she was sucked back into it. The younger policeman didn’t want to sit down in the place. Everywhere there were black sacks of clothes that had never been unpacked.

  The air was not shifting in the room and the place was thick with cigarette smoke and stank artificially of the plug-in room scenter. The telly was on with the sound off.

  – We’ve found your son, they said.

  There was a horrible moment when she seemed to solidify, as if her mind went from a thick gloopy paste to a grey crust like before you get sick. Then she spoke.

  – He was such a nice boy. Such a nice boy.

  That cloud of blue smoke hung there like a separate atmosphere.

  The younger policeman was looking at a strange sick-looking stain on the carpet and he had no idea what it was.

  She started to talk of her son. The young policeman phased out. He couldn’t connect. His eye went over the room. Shreds of carpet were up where it met the door to the kitchen and it looked like a hide torn up, the netted plastic beneath a grey weave like the sheath over a muscle. He couldn’t shake the idea of dead animals out of his head. The lino the other side of the carpet grip in the door was worn so that there were big scales in the pattern. It was filthy. You could see that from here.

  He stared at the bright gold carpet grip, lined and patterned like some fabulous artefact.

  – He is a shepherd, my boy. A shepherd.

  – Mrs Ef... you are aware it’s your son, probably, committing these assaults.

  The younger policeman was staring at one of the black sacks. It had split and the extraordinarily coloured shoe had come out of it, as if it had hatched itself onto the carpet.

  – My little goats he used to call them. My little goats. Such a gentle boy.

  There was an ammonial smell as he lifted the log and the boy squatted back, sitting on his heels. A rich smell too came up off the leaf litter. Had you seen the log, you would have thought the boy too young to lift it. But he had unusual strength.

  He watched the woodlice scatter, the boy, now and then herding them again into the centre of the log with the end of his stick.

  He was too young to count very far, but made a show of it, tallying off the grey woodlice as he always did. His numbers were his own, and it was the process of tallying that was the thing.

  Presently the woodlice ceased to scatter and they gathered as a herd. He stroked their backs and they crouched and stilled.

  When he went back to the log that next day and raised it again, he saw the earwigs there amongst the woodlice. He was concerned that they were some horrible outcasts. They were foreign and unusual to him and he marvelled at them, thinking that they must have been missing for a long time, running wild under the trees, so thin and undernourished they seemed compared to the others.

  Driving them and steering them, he succeeded in catching both in his hands, and ran to his mother.

  ‘I found a strange thing, Mam,’ he said, and he opened his fist.

  ‘My!’ said his mother, ‘you must have been as fast as St Shane to catch them,’ and she beamed, for she was sober then, and okay with the world.

  – Come on, he said. We’re getting nowhere here.

  The woman was absent. It was as if she slept with her eyes open. Some small change happened in the light outside, and for a moment the bottles that were about the floor seemed to enlarge, as if they had taken a breath.

  – You realise that it’s likely your son will be taken into foster care, said the policeman.

  She looked at him then. Her jaw slipped like it was gaining weight.

  No, she said. No.

  Peredur had gone from there, leaving the youth bleeding out into the grass of the old lot.

  He remembered the pictures in the little girl’s books.

  When he met the other boy he stopped his bike. There was a moment of utter derision from the other boy, seeing how he looked.

  ‘You with them lot from Cwrt y Brenin?’ he asked Peredur.

  ‘I am with Arthur,’ Peredur said.

  ‘I wouldn’t admit that if I was you,’ said the other, older boy.

  ‘I am looking for Arthur,’ Peredur said.

  The other boy did not know what he meant by that.

  ‘Well, if you’re from Cwrt y Brenin that means I don’t have much choice. Can’t just let you pass. Rules are rules.’

  Peredur looked around at the edgeland of the place. A large patch of burdock grew close by with a kind of regal aspect. He stared at a patch of scarlet cups, a strange fungus there by his feet. He seemed to see everything in hyper-detail.

  When he got off the boy he picked up the half block and stood over him.

  ‘You tell him,’ he said, ‘I did this because you made me
.’

  The other boy’s hand was in the air, stretched before him, his fingers spread wide, as if he would be able to catch the block. He was frightened.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ he said. He had wet himself. He had felt that Peredur had beaten him with stones.

  Peredur watched him cycle away. He looked up. The clouds were moving passively over. He felt an affinity. Their calm, distant flight.

  *

  From The Celtic Echo

  Correction: In last week’s article ‘Child Terror’ we erroneously reported the child had stolen some cake. It was in fact mini sausage rolls. We apologise for any confusion the error might have caused.

  From that time on I have felt that I am not always in my right mind, and my reason is sometimes all over the place, and I have done a thousand mad acts.

  I was seen by a number of people. [Note: find Ed. Psych reports, dossier from fostering agency.] Most of the questions were ridiculous.

  – Show me on the doll where your father touched you. Point to cock.

  – What is your favourite colour? Red.

  – Why? The colour of blood. Blah, blah.

  The foster family was paid very well. I was considered disruptive. He took time off work to ‘protect his family’ from me and was compensated for that.