King Crow Page 6

  Ashley went to get some booze nearly half an hour ago. I’m wondering where he’s got to when he appears round the corner, empty handed.

  —Fucking off-licences, he says.

  He’s tried three but was turned down at every one. I’m surprised. I think he could pass for eighteen, but apparently they all asked him for ID. It’s getting ridiculous. You can’t do anything. What’s wrong with alcohol? It’s mainly just water, with a few natural things added that make you feel good.

  They tried to force feed us fruit at my last school. They were part of some council scheme. Every day a truck would come and deliver apples, oranges, bananas, all kinds of horrors. We were all told we had to eat one. We just took them out at break time and lobbed them over the science labs. It became a sport – how far can you throw a fruit. The teacher didn’t understand why no one wanted bananas, but have you tried throwing a banana? They don’t travel far at all, you’re better off with an apple or, even better, an orange. You can throw an orange a fair old distance.

  —Trouble, Ashley says.

  I look up and see a group of five boys and three girls. They have spotted us and are walking across. Too late for us to run. The biggest one comes closer. He looks about seventeen, tall and rangy. He wears a white hooded top and a thick gold chain. Maybe it’s not real gold.

  —What you got there? he says to me, pointing at the Ronald McDonald I’m holding.

  —What’s it look like? Ashley says.

  This white hooded top gives the rest of his gang a look, who are these people? The rest of the gang gather round. A girl with wavy brown hair walks up to me.

  —Where you from? she says.

  —What’s it got to do with you?

  I am wondering why Ashley doesn’t shrink this white hooded boy like he did with the dull straw haired. Perhaps he is playing him along. The white hooded is a bit taller than Ashley and stockier, but I know that this won’t faze Ashley.

  —Watch it, he says.

  —Salford, I say.

  White hooded turns to me. —Where you going?

  —Nowhere.

  I look up at the sky again, slate grey clouds tinged yellow. A van pulls up with orange and red chevrons, it gives the white hooded a shock until he realises it’s a gas van not the police.

  —On holiday, I say. White hooded weighs me up. He looks at my school uniform, the mud on my shoes and trousers.

  —Where you staying?

  —A hotel.

  —Come on, he says to his gang, and they start to move off.

  —Wait.

  He stops and moves back to us.

  —What?

  —Where you off? White hooded looks back at his gang, half-amused. Then he turns back to them and walks off.

  The girl who quizzed me turns round, —Squat party, she says.

  —Is that an invite?

  The white hooded says straight away, —No chance.

  He moves off again. The gang follow him.

  —What about this lot? I say. I’m still holding Ashley’s coat and I pull his stash from the inside pocket. White hooded looks at it and it dawns on him what it is. He smiles a big banana smile.

  In a dark room staring at the girls. I look at my watch – just gone twelve. We still haven’t got anywhere to stay, but I’m coming up on the second pill so my concern is very much in the background. First time I’ve had E – it’s lovely. Orgasmic. Really happy and warm. White hooded is giving me a confrontational look, making me feel uneasy.

  —Maybe we should go, I say.

  —Nah, says Ashley.

  —I’m not sure about this place.

  Ashley takes out his bag of pills and necks another one. —Chill out, he says. He’s sold quite a few at this party. The DJ is playing drum and bass and the bass is really distorted. The Ronald McDonald clown takes pride of place in front of the decks. He now wears a hat and holds some glow sticks. He has a Day-Glo whistle around his neck.

  —Nice clown, says one of the girls to me. She is really pretty. I nod. She passes me a spliff and I take it off her.

  —Thanks, I say.

  —What’s your name? She says.

  —Cooper.

  —I’m Becky.

  She smiles and offers me her hand to shake. It feels warm and ever so slightly moist.

  —It’s a nice place this, I say. Just for something to say. Actually it’s sparse and run-down. The plaster has come away in great chunks. The brickwork’s exposed. It’s a shit hole.

  —It’s alright, she says, looking around. —The squatters are always having parties.

  I nod, and pass the spliff back. We stand and watch the dancers. There’s a man with dreadlocks juggling luminous balls.

  —So you’re on holiday, she says.

  —Yeah.

  —Which hotel are you staying in?

  —Er... I can’t remember the name now.

  She nods, then says, —You in trouble?

  —What makes you say that?

  Becky looks at me, cocks her head to one side like a dipper might do and I notice for the first time that she has bird-like eyes.

  —What happened?

  —What do you mean? She gives me that bird look again. —Nothing, I say at last.

  —You sure about that?

  She looks at me suspiciously but then smiles.

  —Bit of a man of mystery aren’t you? she says.

  I nod. I’m wondering if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but she smiled so it can’t be bad. We sit in silence. I take out my book on ravens and pass it to her.

  —I want to find some of these.

  Becky looks through the book. Not like the way Ashley looked through it. She actually reads bits.

  —You ever seen any?

  —Only in films, she says. —What’s that film with that bloke in it?

  I shrug, because I don’t know what she’s talking about. —We had a school trip. Tower of London. I saw them there. Only they’d been clipped.

  —How do you mean?

  —They cut their wings so they can’t fly off.

  —That’s cruel.

  —I want to see them in the wild, I say.

  —I’ve lived here all my life, she says, —and I’ve never seen them.

  I take the book back off her and turn to the maps at the back, specifically to the map of Helvellyn.

  —This is a good place to spot them, I say, pointing. —They’re not easy to find. Farmers shoot them. So they keep themselves to themselves.

  —And you’ve come all this way, just to see them?

  —Yep.

  —That’s a bit odd.

  We sit in silence, but it’s not uncomfortable. Her thigh is pressed against my thigh. I can feel its warmth and electricity. The drugs are strong. I feel like we are practically having sex, just sitting here.

  —So what do you want to do? I say finally.

  —Now?

  —With your life.

  —I’m going to be a doctor.

  Not, I want to be a doctor, but I’m going to be a doctor. Just like that.

  —Yeah, right, I say.

  —What’s so funny about that?

  —I want to be ruler of the world, I say.

  I don’t want to be ruler of the world as it happens. I want to go to bed with Becky with no clothes on and feel her and be inside her. But I don’t tell her that.

  —I’m serious, she says.

  We sit in silence again and I’m enjoying being close to her. Then she reaches over to me and kisses me.

  Things blur. Hip flesh, thumping beat. The white hooded, Ashley. Thump thump. Then she’s dragging me away.

  Penguins

  There’s a good argument, and it’s been made before, so I won’t go on about it, for the elimination of pandas. I don’t mean we actually actively all go out now and hunt down a panda, just withdrawing the support we have offered so far and letting nature take its course – in other words, let them die out naturally, as they would do if it wasn’t for us.
It’s a sensitive subject and people get emotional about it, but the history of evolution is full of extinct species. Every day, several hundred species die out. Well, maybe not several hundred – I mean, it might be more, it might be less. I’ve no idea. The point is, no one cares about them. But pandas, people get soft.

  The giant panda I’m talking about, the one with the black eyes. If you are going to restrict your diet to bamboo – which isn’t a bright move – you are signing your own suicide note. Bamboo is not a highly nutritious food, it contains barely any nutrition at all, and this means that the panda needs to spend all of its waking day eating. While it is eating the bamboo, do you ever think it passes a yam or an orange, and thinks, maybe I’ll have a change today, give something new a try? It’s a logical thought – but not to the panda. There are currently 1,590 pandas living in the wild. This number is on the rise because we keep extracting semen from male pandas in captivity and using it to artificially inseminate female pandas.

  Male pandas don’t fancy female pandas. Basically, they don’t want to get it on with them. Taxonomically the panda is classed as a carnivore, it’s a bear after all, let’s not forget that. So why have humans put such effort into sustaining an evolutionary mistake, while all about us thousands of species perish? Simple. The panda, as my mum is fond of telling me, is cute. It looks like a big cuddly baby.

  We have spent so much time and effort encouraging them to mate. This includes, showing them videos of mating pandas and giving male pandas Viagra. That’s right, we’ve brought them into captivity to show them panda porn and give them drugs. On top of this, a female panda is only fertile for two or three days a year. To add to this, a female panda, if she has two cubs, will normally abandon one of them. And the father has no part in helping to raise the cub. From the moment the cub is born, its mum will abandon it for up to four hours a day.

  You don’t get snow leopards behaving like that, or the golden lion tamarind – but no one gives a monkeys about them. But they are both equally as threatened as the giant panda. The pig-footed bandicoot, the giant tree rat, the emperor rat, the bulldog rat – in fact lots of rats, the big eared hopping mouse, the dusky flying fox, the sea mink, the Javan tiger, the Japanese wolf, the Barbary lion – all extinct in recent times. As for birds, since the sixteenth century, 140 bird species have become extinct.

  The penguin, like the panda, should just die. This bird spent millions of years evolving the ability to fly only to spend the next million or so years evolving the ability to not fly – and it has chosen to live on a lump of ice. It spends half the year sitting on an egg in sub-zero temperatures, and the other half of the year abandoning its mate to get food. That’s a pretty stupid way to live your life. I’m not saying sitting on your arse watching Jeremy Kyle while stuffing Doritos down your gullet is any better, but you see my point.

  There’s a film called March of the Penguins. My mum got it out on DVD for us last year. I think it was the last time we sat down and watched something together. It was just before she got with Heather. She’d just broken up with Tanya.

  She came in one day with a KFC family bucket, six tins of lager, and the DVD of March of the Penguins.

  —I’ve had a really tough day at work, she said. —Let’s just veg out.

  So we did. She explained that she’d got us a film about birds to watch, —so you’ll like it, she said. As if that was the final word on the subject. As soon as the film started, I could feel my irritation begin to build. It was the soundtrack, horrible weepy music that kept building up at points of high emotion. Then there was Morgan Freeman’s narration – he spoke about penguins as though they were humans. Penguins are not humans.

  There are basically two reasons the film did so well in America – one, it promoted conservative family values, and two, it made penguins look cute. Oh, and a third reason, Americans are wankers. When the penguin chick died, my mum wept into our KFC bucket. I had to fetch tissues. Uncontrollable weeping. Pathetic. And some of the respect I had for my mother died that day. When Morgan says, ‘in the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way’, I could have kicked my foot through the television. ‘Love’, how can you talk about penguins being in love?

  I suppose at about the same time, last year or thereabouts, I skipped double maths followed by PE to go into town to watch a film. I went on my own. It was a film about grizzly bears. This stupid American bloke had filmed himself getting close to grizzly bears for years. At the end of the film, the bears attack and eat him. The camera goes black and we just hear the sound of bears eating him. At this point, a man sitting in front of me burst out laughing. He thought it was a spoof documentary and was shocked when he realised it was real.

  —What you laughing about, Ashley says, as we approach Becky’s place. It’s dark but there’s a light outside the porch, a sort of lantern. It’s the same type as the one in Larder’s cafe in Salford precinct, although it doesn’t have a big smiley face on it and it doesn’t look out of place here. The house is massive with huge iron gates. Becky has to punch a number into a keypad for the gates to open, like you see in films. It’s a bit like that house in Emmerdale where those posh people live.

  I smile at Ashley. I am very high. We’ve been walking for about half an hour but it could be two minutes or an hour, I’ve really no idea. It doesn’t feel like walking, more like gliding, like a gull coming into land, almost skimming the crust of the earth. I can still hear the thud of the music in my ears even though we are a long way from the squat party now. She leads us through this grand hallway. There’s a large staircase, marble and statues. There are large oil paintings on the wall, blocks of colour and squiggles. Some of them look as if they haven’t been finished, hurried yellow brush strokes and dribbles of loose red paint.

  —You live here?

  —What’s so strange about that? she says.

  —So what does your dad do then?

  —He’s a civil engineer.

  —It must pay well, I say.

  —Actually, mum’s the breadwinner. She’s a barrister.

  Ashley gives me a look. I just shrug. I’ve heard the word before on TV but don’t know what one is.

  —Where are they now? I say.

  —They’re away for a few days.

  Ashley gives me a nod. I smile back. We’re in.

  The living room. The floor is bare wood, no carpets, just a rug, a cream rug. A cream rug, mum wouldn’t like that, she tends to go with patterned carpet, says it hides the sins of the world. There’s this semi-circular cream-coloured leather sofa, a shade darker than the rug, and a huge wood-burning open fire in the middle of the room, although the fire isn’t lit. I sit down on the sofa.

  Ashley walks around, picking up ornaments and turning them round in his hands. He seems impressed by their weight, as if that’s how you measure whether it’s a good ornament or a shit one. Becky enters with two ruby coloured drinks in tall chunky glasses. She hands one to me. Ashley must have told her he didn’t want one because he doesn’t seem to mind being left out. He stares around the room, a bit puzzled. Becky takes a sip of her drink.

  I watch Ashley pace the room, searching round for something. He turns to me, his brow creased in confusion. —Where’s the television? he says. I just shrug, how should I know?

  —Actually, I’m quite tired, Becky says. She yawns, then puts a hand over her mouth. —I’ll show you to your room if that’s ok?

  Ashley shrugs and I nod. She leads us back into the hallway and up the staircase to a room and opens the door. She switches the light on. There’s a single bed in one corner and an armchair. There’s a bookcase stuffed full of books. It’s a small room, I’m thinking, for the both of us. Ashley bags the bed straight away and I’m wondering where I’m going to sleep. He bounces up and down on the mattress looking smug. There’s only really the armchair and I don’t fancy that. It looks quite hard and there are no cushions. I suppose there’s the floor. Then Becky opens up a cupboard and grabs a light bulb. She turns round and lead
s me down the landing.

  We stop about three or four rooms down from Ashley’s and she opens a door. There’s a double bed and a lounge area with a sofa and TV and DVD. There’s even a sink and a toilet and a shower to one side. It’s about the same size as my living room at home plus my mum’s bedroom and mine put together. She puts the bulb in the lamp next to the bed and turns it on.

  —You can sleep here, she says.

  I don’t quite understand why I get such a big room, so I say, —Where are you going to sleep?

  She closes the door behind us and locks it. She takes my drink off me and puts both our drinks on the table. She starts to kiss me. She pulls off her vest top. She unfastens her bra. She throws it in the corner and kisses me again. Becky turns off the big light and the room suddenly feels smaller and warmer. She leads me to the bed, we fall onto it and I feel like I’m lying on a cloud and drifting through the sky.

  Cuckoos

  The chiffchaff is a warbler, very much like a willow warbler only it’s not quite as yellow. I’ve mistaken the chiffchaff for the willow warbler on a number of occasions now. Unless you are quite close up, the only real definite way of telling them apart is through their song. The chiffchaff is named after its song, so that’s easy to remember. But I’ve listened to the song of the chiffchaff many times and I don’t think it sounds like ‘chiffchaff’ at all. I think it sounds like ‘chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chack-chick-chick-chick’. It’s lovely but that would be a very long name for a bird.

  There are a number of birds that have onomatopoeic names. The obvious one is the cuckoo. I’ve never seen a cuckoo, but I have heard one several times. They have quite a sleek body and a long tail. They get a bit of bad press because they are technically parasites. But it makes a lot of sense if you think about it, I mean why spend all that effort making your own nest and catching your own food to feed your young when you can get someone else to do it? I actually find myself admiring them. The adult cuckoos should be arriving back from Africa around this time, they stop here for the summer, so I might even see one in Cumbria if I’m lucky.