still couldn’t say ‘Nothing’. (Truth is, black means you fancy yourself as a hard-knock. Adults can’t be expected to understand.) ‘My duffel’s a bit warmer, that’s all. It’s parky out.’
‘Lunch is one o’clock sharp.’ Mum went back to changing the Hoover bag. ‘Dad’s coming home to eat. Put on a woolly hat or your head’ll freeze.’
Woolly hats’re gay but I could stuff it in my pocket later.
‘Goodbye, then, Mrs Taylor,’ said Moron.
‘Goodbye, Dean,’ said Mum.
Mum’s never liked Moron.
Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Drugger’s End in a brick cottage that pongs of gravy too. His real name’s Dean Moran (rhymes with ‘warren’) but our PE teacher Mr Carver started calling him ‘Moron’ in our first week and it’s stuck. I call him ‘Dean’ if we’re on our own but names aren’t just names. Kids who’re really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yew’s always just ‘Nick’. Kids who’re a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have sort of respectful nicknames like ‘Yardy’. Next down are kids like me who call each other by our surnames. Below us are kids with piss-take nicknames like Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar who’s Knickerless Bra. It’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard, just ‘Swinyard’ he’d kick my face in. Or if I called Moron ‘Dean’ in front of everyone, it’d damage my own standing. So you’ve got to watch out.
Girls don’t do this so much, ’cept for Dawn Madden, who’s a boy gone wrong in some experiment. Girls don’t scrap so much as boys either. (That said, just before we broke up for Christmas, Dawn Madden and Andrea Bozard started yelling ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Slag!’ in the bus queues after school. Punching tits and pulling hair and everything, they were.) Wish I’d been born a girl, sometimes. They’re generally loads more civilized. But if I ever admitted that out loud I’d get BUMHOLE PLUMBER scrawled on my locker. That happened to Floyd Chaceley for admitting he liked Johann Sebastian Bach. Mind you, if they knew Eliot Bolivar who gets poems printed in the Black Swan Green parish magazine was me, they’d gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone.
So anyway, as Moron and I walked to the lake he told me about the Scalectrix he’d got for Christmas. On Boxing Day its transformer blew up and nearly wiped out his entire family. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. But Moron swore it on his nan’s grave. So I told him he should write to That’s Life on the BBC and get Esther Rantzen to make the manufacturer pay compensation. Moron thought that might be difficult ’cause his dad’d bought it off a Brummie at Tewkesbury Market on Christmas Eve. I didn’t dare ask what a ‘Brummie’ was in case it’s the same as ‘bummer’ or ‘bumboy’, which means homo. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘see what you mean.’ Moron asked me what I’d got for Christmas. I’d actually got £13.50 in book tokens and a poster of Middle Earth, but books’re gay so I talked about the Game of Life which I’d got from Uncle Brian and Aunt Alice. It’s a board game you win by getting your little car to the end of the road of life first, and with most money. We crossed the crossroads by the Black Swan and went into the woods. Wished I’d rubbed Vaseline into my lips ’cause they get chapped when it’s this cold.
Soon we heard kids through the trees, shouting and screaming. ‘Last one to the lake’s a spaz!’ yelled Moron, haring off before I was ready. Straight off he tripped over a frozen tyre rut, went flying and landed on his arse. Trust Moran. ‘I think I might’ve got concussion,’ he said.
‘Concussion’s if you hit your head. Unless your brain’s up your arse.’ What a line. Pity nobody who matters was around to hear it.
The lake in the woods was epic. Tiny bubbles were trapped in the ice like in Fox’s Glacier Mints. Neal Brose had proper Olympic ice-skates he hired out for 5p a go, though Pete Redmarley was allowed to use them for free so other kids’d see him speed-skating around and want a go too. Just staying up on the ice is hard enough. I fell over loads before I got the knack of sliding in my trainers. Ross Wilcox