Magnificent Joe Read Free Page A

with no busybodies who might call out after him, ‘How, Jim lad! What’s in the bag?’ Jim especially didn’t want to run into his father. Jim’s father thought that Jim was indoors, revising for the exams he desperately wanted Jim to pass because he never got the chance to take them himself. Jim was the only chance, because Jim was an only child.
    He walked faster, and with each step his rucksack jogged and made a dull clunk. His T-shirt darkened at the armpits. The rucksack chafed his shoulders. Jim stuffed his thumbs under the straps to take off some of the weight, then leaned forward for a moment of relief. The rucksack slid up and smacked him in the back of the head.
    â€˜Fucking hell,’ Jim hissed, and shook his head. ‘The bastards had better be grateful for this.’ He put his hands on his knees and stayed still, just breathing. Then a movement in the hedgerow entered his periphery and he turned his head to look.
    There was a crane fly caught in a fragment of cobweb. Its legs were trapped, pulled together like those of a roped animal. Its wings were free, though, and they beat hard. The insect strained so much that Jim wondered if its legs would tear off. No spider came. The web must be old, Jim thought.
    Jim looked between his legs, back down the road, to check that no one was watching him like this: bent double, staring into the hedge. The upside-down street was empty, except for some younger kids on roller skates trying to play street hockey with bamboo canes and an empty can. They weren’t looking at him. Jim raised his head again to watch the crane fly; it struggled on. It would probably keep going until it dropped dead and twisted there in the breeze. Jim briefly considered freeing it, but why should he?
    The hedgerow teemed with life: flies of different shapes and sizes, the odd bumblebee, caterpillars, butterflies, and wasps. There were a lot of wasps; perhaps there was a nest nearby. Jim hated wasps, hated the noise they made, their colour, their shape, and their bad-tempered sharpness. To be so close to them made his spine tingle. He chose to stay, though. He felt none of the blind panic that made his world blur and his body burst ahead of his thoughts when one buzzed him at head height or landed on his arm. Jim thought of a B-feature he saw at the pictures in which people dived with sharks. He felt like that.
    One of the wasps floated closer to the crane fly and hovered there as if it too was a spectator. Suddenly, the wasp darted at the crane fly and mounted its back. The crane fly kept beating its wings and pulling against the web back and forth and side to side, so that the wasp seemed to be riding it in a desperate rodeo. Then the wasp arched its body into a crescent shape and jabbed its stinger into the crane fly over and over again. Jim held his breath. The crane fly was still fighting, but the wasp curled itself tighter, brought its hard black mandibles over the crane fly’s head and chewed. The crane fly dropped, and for a moment both it and the wasp dangled on the end of the broken web. Then the wasp flew away.
    â€˜Predation,’ Jim whispered to himself. ‘Predation is the word.’ He stood up. A car rattled past. Jim shuddered and walked on.
    â€”
    Geoff stood at the edge of the beck, where the water ran slow and green, and formed a long pool bedded with silt and rocks and clotted with pondweed. He turned a flat stone in the fingers of his right hand and looked across the water. Jim said that this pool was manmade, the header of an old millrace. Geoff didn’t know what a millrace was, but he liked the sound of the word and the way the little fact nestled in his brain. He felt good under the sun, and as he wound back his arm, he knew that this would be a great throw.
    â€˜Are you watching?’ he called out.
    â€˜Gerron with it, you fucking pansy,’ Barry answered from behind him.
    Geoff narrowed his eyes, breathed in, and whipped