Bird Blood Snow Read online

  As I said, I saw a number of people, and they decided I should be ‘Kept Occupied’. I call them ‘they’. They had various ideas. Fishing (calm) and woodwork (constructive). And boxing (an ‘outlet’).

  The gym had this smell to it. There was an old cabinet in the house they’d taken me from like that. Layers of use and varnish. It stank alternately of sweat and Lynx; and sometimes someone would bring in a chip supper, watch the bouts. That would stink the place out.

  I would get taxis everywhere because they paid for everything. When they dropped me off at the door the old guy was having a cigarette outside. He went in and I followed him. I noticed he had a limp.

  It didn’t feel it to me back then but it was a small place. What was I? Eight? Nine?

  First time I went in it was the light got me. Such a white light. Ominous dark windows up around by the ceiling, nothing you could look out of. And the noise. If the footwork was good, the brush of the daps on the canvas. And the speedball, going like a train. Yes, all that. Had quite an impression on me.

  I think they called it ‘An Outlet For His Anger’. They should have said aggression. I don’t think they knew the difference. Whatever. The idea was to ‘Calm Me Down’. Right! The idea was to put me up against some bigger kids so I learnt I wasn’t so tough. Except that wasn’t going to work, was it? You can fight or you can’t. Some people who can fight never find it out. Others fight all the time and are never good at it. It’s a gift. Something you’re given. And when you’re little, like I was then compared to the others, you’re not going to half do it, are you?

  Well, I watched the sparring for a while. (Later – that time I had to go through the kitchens to get out of a place, the police piling in at the front – the light, the activity, the noise back there, kind of reminded me again of all this.)

  He patted the bench next to him, the old man, and I went and sat down. It had a smell, too, that bench. A smell of leather and the musk of the old man’s sweat. And the same smell of wood that was under everything. I was so much smaller than him that I didn’t sink at all into the cushion, just rested up on it.

  It was out of place there, too grand that bench, embroidered at the back with this tapestry of an old stag hunt. The woven dogs were after the stag and it was twisted and I remembered the deer in the fence. I wondered if all that polished, varnishy smell in the place came out of the bench. There was a weird heat given out by an old coil heater up on the wall. You have to remember it was a few years ago now. Orange wires, glowing there.

  ‘You know how to box?’ he asked me.

  I guess Uncle, as we called him, was the first person to have influence on me. The first real person I listened to.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘if someone taught me, I would know.’

  ‘If you know how to throw a stone,’ he replied, ‘you know how to throw a punch.’

  There were two lads in the ring, few years older than me, eleven, twelve-ish. They were all padded up; body pads and gloves, and head guards – one yellow, one a kind of dark red, almost brown, leathery – same as the old bench.

  ‘Tell me,’ said the man, ‘which of the lads fights better?’

  The two coloured, plasticy heads were bobbing round like balls on water. It wasn’t like I was used to from the fights I’d got into. There weren’t many punches going in.

  ‘The one with the yellow hat,’ I said, ‘could probably have the other one if he wanted to.’

  The old man looked at me. First time I remember anyone doing that. Seemed to last a long time, that look. With a kind of interest if you like. Without some comment coming. Some snigger.

  ‘Go and put some gloves on kid. Have his head guard. See if you can get a hit in on the yellow lad there.’

  They put on the gloves for me, weird feeling. Suddenly my hands felt floaty. The head guard was wet with the other kid’s sweat. They laced it up warm. It was too big really, and shifted about when they made me shake my head; so they taped it down. Can’t smell glue without thinking of that.

  I wonder if ‘they’ realised the mistake they’d made right away. I don’t think he even got a punch off, but I get like that, always have: don’t feel a thing against myself once it starts.

  I just kept punching him, all in the face, until his eyebrow was down over his eye and the blood was streaming.

  Uncle was up on his feet. He was stroking his hand through his grey hair and giving me that look. They were patching up the other kid. Not much use, those head guards. It took no time at all. The blood was coming out so fast it was pooling up against his cheek guard until they took it off.

  ‘Well, boy,’ said Uncle. ‘Come and sit a minute. You’re quite something, aren’t you.’

  Yes. I am quite something.

  I remember when he first turned up at the gym. He was a scrawny thing. Big lumps of bone in him and these kind of elastic muscles. You probably know the name the other kids had for him, behind his back. Kids are cruel and right like that.

  He was too young to start really but they pushed for it. They played it down, what he’d done, but the talk was about and I knew. I’d had other kids similar. Not quite like him. But there for the same reason.

  I tried to give him something to lose. I tried to give him a sense he had talent, and that if he practised he could be good, and that if he messed up he’d throw all that away.

  Born days, I’d never seen anything like it. There was a kind of calm and control. You would not believe the speed. A kid of his age. He made other people look frozen.

  ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘Everyone’s going to tell you you’re a bad kid. They’re going to pick on you, and push you. What you’ve got is a big thing, but it can go against you.’ I told him he was uncommonly strong. I remember that because I don’t think I’d ever said the word ‘uncommonly’ before. But I didn’t want to say unnatural. Unnatural made it sound like he was weird, but uncommon, well, like he was special.

  ‘Whatever they do to wind you up,’ I said, ‘just take it. Don’t react. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it.’ I tried to get him to understand it was all about discipline. ‘Trust me,’ I said, ‘and don’t get involved.’

  I’m telling it now like it happened right after, but it was a while, a few years maybe – they brought someone in to watch me. Again some old guy, this time with a couple of others with him. I think they were shocked how little I was. Young, I mean.

  ‘So, you know how to punch,’ said the man.

  There was a big heavy bag in the corner of the hall, probably as big round as I could reach back then.

  ‘Glove up,’ said the man, ‘let’s see you work the bag.’

  What happened next is something I swear to. On Halfpenny’s leg. Don’t ask me to understand it. But sometimes we’re given signs.

  I went at the bag. It had to weigh forty-five kilos, (I know it did, it was written right there, large, right where I was punching it), and the thing came off the hook. I lifted it up and dropped it off the hook.

  There was a kind of consternation.

  It took a few of them to hang it back and I went at the bag again. The hook itself came down, little bits of plasterboard and paint, and they couldn’t hang it back then. A few punches in, right-hander, that’s the truth. The thump of the bag coming down again shut everybody up. I was pretty much as surprised as them.

  ‘Well, lad,’ said the guy. He was kind of aglitter now. ‘I’ve never seen a boy punch like that. You’ve not even started to grow yet. Mercy,’ he said, I heard him saying it, ‘what this bastard will do when he fills out.’

  – The boxing seemed to help.

  Yes. I held it together for a while. It was something to focus on.

  – Where was Arthur at this time?

  He was there, quietly there.

  – But you weren’t on such a quest.

  I tried to let things go.

  That was difficult, sometimes. In school.

  I could take people picking on m
e and they knew the lines. They didn’t push too far. But it was just seeing how anything weak got picked on. Anything weak or different. Even the teachers. How they would ‘Make An Example’ of somebody. I didn’t understand it.

  Leave it alone, Uncle had said. Don’t get involved.

  – You saw yourself as some sort of protector?

  I was different, but I was not weak.

  I heard crying and there she was, pretty little thing twtied by her bike all tears and sniffles, clutching her Ken. The doll kept coming apart. Its legs and arms and head were ripped off and she kept trying to stick them on, and they would fall to the ground, and then her crying would go up another notch. Why did they push me like this?

  I asked ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Your fault, your fault,’ she said. Every time she sniffed the little syrup of snot she had shot back up her nostril, like a snail hiding.

  ‘Why is it my fault?’ I said.

  ‘You made your mother die. Because you ran off from her and she died.’

  Now, I have to admit to not knowing this. They’d taken me away from her, yes; because she was an ‘influence’; but this was the first I’d heard of her death. I can’t really remember how that felt. Just that there was a great coming back of something in me.

  She kept talking, twtied there over her broken man doll. Something about kids, but my head was like when the wind gets right into the trees and it’s all just movement and noise. The loudest hush.

  ‘...and because you live with us,’ – she was their natural born child – ‘he broke my doll. And he said you’d be next, if you went anywhere near him.’

  Well, a great calmness came on me. What’s the point in not being what you are? It was like all that rage and sound, the crashing branches in my head, had stilled. Stilled into a great tree waiting to be cut down on something. And somewhere, up there, whispering in its branches, my little voice was back.

  I helped her bury the doll, and then I went after him.

  *

  From Police Taped Interview # xxxx Incident No. XX

  Case: ______________

  ‘He’s a fucking lunatic, man.’

  ‘Ok, ok. Let’s calm down.’

  ‘Calm down! Fuck. He’s a fucking...’

  ‘Enough. Right. Get him out of here.’

  On the tape there is the sound of the chair scrape and the door and the kid being taken out; a shout of ‘Hey, watch my arm, man.’

  ‘Fucking kids.’

  As you went out from the centre of the town it was like paint had peeled off things with age. The veneer fell away. Each consequent street looked worse.

  The big house was at the end of an empty street mostly empty of cars. That made it look not properly inhabited.

  The house was covered with scaffold and the state of the scaffolding suggested it had been there some time. The poles were pocked and rusted. The small garden in front had gone feral. Peredur stopped outside the place.

  From the scaffolding a bony head looked down on him. The light of the sky behind gave it a fuzz of blond-red hair. A face seemed to spiral down, investigate, recognise the boy as someone like itself. (Did the place choose Peredur, or did Peredur choose the place?)

  ‘You wanting in? Or are you looking for someone?’ The voice fell down on Peredur, felt bony, hit him somewhat. Little chippings of words.

  He had not eaten, Peredur, and was hungry and faint. All about the cracked paving in front there were the little flags of ash trees.

  ‘Ask can I come in,’ Peredur said.

  Soon after, the door opened. The floorboards had been taken up in the entrance and there was a walkway made of scaffold planks.

  *

  He went through into the front room. Some twenty or so figures lay about. They were difficult to determine in the low light.

  The windows were blind squares of chipboard and the air was thick with dope. It stank of piss in the room. From the trappings still around you could see the place had once been an hotel.

  They lay about in abstract clothes distraught with individuality. They were all marked some deliberate way, had dyed hair, pictures in their skin, metal in the skins. They looked all the same somehow. They were not functional.

  A fire burned in the grate and in the thick heat and the light of it the bodies through the smoke looked like they bobbed in a soup. Peredur felt light headed. [We don’t know, his memory is unclear on this, but he had been without food for several days now.

  He had dealt with the boy who broke the doll and then gone out into the brake beyond the estates. He felt numb about his mother.] Bits of the ornate wooden fire surround were pulled off and were burning in the fire.

  Suddenly the television volume cracked on. There was a girl band on the screen, but it was as if she had come from the TV, a chamber she had walked into the room from.

  She was in a ripped silk dress and her skin showed white through the dress.

  His floating eyes lit upon her, went back to the television, his mind following. It was like his mind was a butterfly, blinking, flapping its wings on the flower of the screen.

  I remember her black hair and her red cheeks. On her cheeks she’d painted hearts. She was a deck of cards.

  The butterfly took off, a small fish, fluttered through the soup.

  I had never seen such a beautiful sight.

  ‘Are you okay? she asked, her voice, her voice herbs sinking in the fluid. [He was almost certainly ill.]

  Not long after the batteries of the television went two others came in with food. One carried a fat three-litre flagon of cider, the other loaves of bread.

  ‘There was fuck all there. Hot food counter’s been cleared out,’ he hears one say. ‘Why is there a kid in here?’

  She was kind to me. It was like a pure kind. Different from the others.

  Take it, she says, take it. Her face, fallen from the television, floats before him. He chokes, coughs. The image of her scattering, petals collapsing from a dead flower. He tries to hand the bread away. Share it. Share it.

  You want more, she says. Take more.

  ‘Sleep,’ he says. ‘Need sleep.’

  He hears her talk, a gentle breeze blowing, that blows about the petals of her face.

  She makes a bed of cushions for him, like a mother.

  – Sis, think you’re kind of sweet on him.

  – What?

  – Give him some of this.

  – Fuck off. No way. He’s like a kid.

  He was woken by the crashing door as the police came in, the cursing as they missed their footing in the hall.

  *

  Memo to Social Services regarding care placement

  re: Peredur Ap Efrog

  Recommend moving P. to residential children’s home.

  Currently recovering in hospital (suffering expo­sure, dehydration), following removal from squat. Evidence of cannabis in bloodstream but unlikely to have been direct.

  Suggest he is moved directly medical staff happy. Clearly placement in foster care not working.

  The boy that opened the door was my age but he had the build of a man. When he opened the door it was clear he was simple. There were rabbits on his outsize pyjamas. There was some big woman behind him watching him carefully. It was a special treat for him, being allowed to open the door.

  They signed me over and the social worker and the police officer left. I could hear the simple boy being allowed to shut the door behind them. That was as good as it got, for him.

  Don’t stay. Don’t.

  None of the others had talked to me but this girl. She was like a small newt girl. A small wet newt. (I remembered, then, the name they used to call me. In a way I quite liked that. It gave me a kind of mythology.) She was detached from the world and her words moved like she was tiny and wet and clambering through grass.

  There are nine of them, said the newt. And Mother and Father. I felt her words moving over me like a newt. They won’t let us out.
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  I saw how scared they all were. How timid. They’ll let me out, I thought to myself.

  I lay awake. Something in my brain was asking to be known. It was like a word you can’t quite think of battering around the inside front of your skull as you try to remember it, like a big fat fly against a window.

  I watched the light change, coming through the curtains onto the wall before me. The orangey light of the night lamps around the building gave way to a powdery white. Then there was the pattern of the leaves, backlit on the curtain, and I saw pictures in that, and that’s when the boy screamed.

  I went out into the corridor. The carer was grabbing hold of the boy and he was screaming.

  It was surprising how easily her skull split. When I rammed it into the corridor wall. It made a sort of eggy sound, really. Her hair cap spread out like a dish on her head.

  She started gibbering. Please. Please. Peredur, please. Skulls bleed, they really do. The blood was spitting when she talked.

  She fell to blubbering.

  They told me. They told me you’d hurt people. We knew you would hurt someone. You have to let us help you.

  I had only been there a night. I was surprised that she knew me. Again I felt that lovely sunshine calmness after busting her. Some odd white liquid ran from her nose.

  Later I found out he walked in his sleep. That he did this. That he often screamed at daybreak. Woops!