Dark Companions Read Free

in the trees. I wished I’d persuaded my father to tell the police.
    As the car halted, I saw the grey bulk in the shelter. The driver strode, stiff with dignity, to peer at it. “My God,” I heard him say in disgust.
    Did he know Mackintosh Willy? Perhaps, but that wasn’t the point. “Look at this,” he said to his colleague. “Ever see a corpse with pennies on the eyes? Just look at this, then. See what someone thought was a joke.”
    He looked shocked, sickened. He was blocking my view as he demanded “Did you do this?”
    His white-faced anger, and my incomprehension, made me speechless: But his colleague said “It wouldn’t be him. He wouldn’t come and tell us afterwards, would he?”
    As I tried to peer past them he said “Go on home, now. Go on.” His gentleness seemed threatening. Suddenly frightened, I ran home through the park.
    For a while I avoided the shelter. I had no reason to go near, except on the way home from school. Sometimes I’d used to see schoolmates tormenting Mackintosh Willy; sometimes, at a distance, I had joined them. Now the shelter yawned emptily, baring its dim bench. The dark pool stirred, disturbing the green beards of the stone margin. My main reason for avoiding the park was that there was nobody with whom to go.
    Living on a main road was the trouble. I belonged to none of the side streets, where they played football among parked cars or chased through the back alleys. I was never invited to street parties. I felt like an outsider, particularly when I had to pass the groups of teenagers who sat on the railings above the pedestrian subway, lazily swinging their legs, waiting to pounce. I stayed at home, in the flat above the newsagent’s, when I could, and read everything in the shop. But I grew frustrated: I did enough reading at school. All this was why I welcomed Mark. He could save me from my isolation.
    Not that we became friends immediately. He was my parents’ latest paper boy. For several days we examined each other warily. He was taller than me, which was intimidating, but seemed unsure how to arrange his lankiness. Eventually he said “What’re you reading?”
    He sounded as though reading was a waste of time. “A book,” I retorted.
    At last, when I’d let him see that it was Mickey Spillane, he said “Can I read it after you?”
    ‘‘It isn’t mine. It’s the shop’s.”
    “All right, so I’ll buy it.” He did so at once, paying my father. He was certainly wealthier than me. When my resentment of his gesture had cooled somewhat, I realised that he was letting me finish what was now his book. I dawdled over it to make him complain, but he never did. Perhaps he might be worth knowing.
    My instinct was accurate: he proved to be generous—not only with money, though his father made plenty of that in home improvements, but also in introducing me to his friends. Quite soon I had my place in the tribe at the top of the pedestrian subway, though secretly I was glad that we never exchanged more than ritual insults with the other gangs. Perhaps the police station, looming in the background, restrained hostilities.
    Mark was generous too with his ideas. Although Ben, a burly lad, was nominal leader of the gang, it was Mark who suggested most of our activities. Had he taken to delivering papers to save himself from boredom—or, as I wondered afterwards, to distract himself from his thoughts?
    It was Mark who brought his skates so that we could brave the slope of the pedestrian subway, who let us ride his bicycle around the side streets, who found ways into derelict houses, who brought his transistor radio so that we could hear the first Beatles records as the traffic passed unheeding on West Derby Road. But was all this a means of distracting us from the park?
    No doubt it was inevitable that Ben resented his supremacy. Perhaps he deduced, in his slow and stolid way, that Mark disliked the park. Certainly he hit upon the ideal method to challenge him.
    It