Clay Read Free

doctor saying to Mouldy’s mother, “There’s no way we can save it, Mrs. Mould. The foot has to come off.” I thought of Mouldy hobbling around Pelaw for the rest of his life. I bent the point over, blunted it, but I didn’t let Geordie see.
    “She said we should call on him,” I said.
    “She’s joking.”
    “She said put yourself in his shoes.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I said nowt. I said we would if we had the time. She said we had all the time in the world.”
    “Huh.”
    Geordie picked another stick up.
    “We should set up nooses as well,” he said. “Hang them down from them hawthorns so they run straight into them and get strangled. And we should definitely set trip wires to send them into the pond.”
    We had a laugh, thinking about them hanging in the trees and flopping in the pond.
    Then I leaned back on the stone. It was all stupid. Mouldy was the only really evil one. His mates were ordinary kids just like us. They were playing, just like us, they were scared and excited, just like us. The only reason we battled with them was because they came from Pelaw and we came from Felling. We pretended we hated them because they were Proddies and they pretended they hated us because we were Catholics but that was really nothing to do with it. It was just the Felling-Pelaw thing. It had gone on forever, even in my dad’s day. He used to laugh when he heard about it, still going on, and when my mam tried to get worried he told her it was nowt, it was just a game. But Mouldy. He was different. When he’d had his hands around my throat that day, his own mates’d had to help Geordie pull him off. When he’d kicked me in the face he hadn’t held back. When he’d snarled in my face it had seemed full of real hatred, real evil. “Catholic bastard,” he’d snarled. “Felling Catholic bastard.” And I’d carried the bruises and the fright for days.
    “Do you think he’s scary?” said Geordie.
    “Mouldy?”
    “Of course Mouldy’s scary. But I mean Stephen Rose. Do you think
he’s
scary?”
    “Dunno. He’s just a kid, just like us.”
    “Just like us? Bliddy Hell, man. Howling in the shed, carrying lumps of muck in the bliddy graveyard…”
    “Clay.”
    “Whatever. Living with Crazy Mary. Mother crackers, father dead, granddad wild.”
    “Suppose he might be scary if you put it like that.”
    “Might be? He might be bliddy terrifying, man.”
    He laughed.
    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said.
    “Dunno,” I said.
    “Well, you should be,” he said. “A lad like Stephen Rose might be just what we need.”
    He stabbed his stick hard into the ground.
    “Howay,” he said. “Let’s go and rattle Crazy’s door.”

five
    Crazy’s door was green and the paint was peeling off. The knocker was rusty and it squealed when Geordie lifted it. He had to shove it down to make it knock. There was no answer. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned around to leave.
    “Howay,” I said. “They must be out.”
    But Geordie knocked again, and then again.
    “Geordie, man,” I said.
    Then there were footsteps at the other side of the door and Crazy peeped out through the skinny letter box.
    “Who’s there?” she said.
    “We’ve come to see Stephen Rose,” said Geordie.
    He leaned close to the door. He pulled me close as well.
    “Look,” he said. “It’s just us, Missus—”
    “Miss Doonan,” I whispered to him.
    “Just us, Miss Doonan. You’ve seen us on the altar. We thought Stephen might want to come out for a bit.”
    Her eyes rolled. She blinked. The door creaked open a few inches and her waxy face appeared.
    “On the altar?” she said.
    “Aye,” I said.
    “So you’re good boys?” she said.
    “Aye,” said Geordie.
    “You know our mams and dads, Miss Doonan,” I said.
    Her eyes were still for a moment while she regarded me.
    “I can see your mother’s face in you,” she said to me.
    She opened the door a bit wider and stuck her skinny arm out. She pulled