Читать книгу Feather Boy онлайн | страница 21

“Norbert,” Niker said at Break. “Did anyone ever tell you, you stink?” He was sitting on the playground wall next to Kate, who was swinging her legs and eating a cheesestring. “You should take a bath.” He jumped off the wall into a puddle, soaking me, but also himself.

“E-jit,” Kate said and laughed.

As soon as I got home that afternoon I changed and stuffed my shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. But Mum has a nose like a bloodhound.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I fell over.”

“On your back?”

“Yes.”

“In a pile of dog muck?”

“Yes.”

“Robert?”

“Yes, Mum, I fell over on my back. In a pile of dog muck. People do, you know.”

As I bathed, I thought about what Kate meant by “E-jit”. Or rather – who she meant. I decided she meant Niker and that’s why I didn’t stop using The Dog Leg. Not then anyway. No. I walked through it every day. Right up until the Grape Incident.

I’m not saying I wasn’t scared. The Dog Leg’s a spooky place anyway. Mum says it’s not mortar that holds the walls together but graffiti. And the more often our neighbours creosote their back gates the more elaborate the spray painting gets. It makes the houses looked marked, as if all the victims from the Great Plague ended up with homes backing on to the Cut. And then there’s the broken glass and the smell of urine – and I don’t mean dog urine either. Because dog urine doesn’t smell, does it? And even though the passage is a perfectly ordinary path made of perfectly ordinary concrete, footfalls really echo there. There always seems to be someone behind you, or coming towards you. It’s difficult to locate exactly where someone else is in the passage until you’re right on them. Or they’re on you. But then it should be safe because so many people use it: dog-walkers, shoppers, business people on their way to the sandwich shop, everyday grown-ups going about their everyday business. So maybe it is only me that smells fear there.

The apple-throwing happened in the autumn. And it wasn’t until the summer that Niker devised the grape thing. There were two new boys in class that term, Jon Pinkman and Shane Perkiss, Pinky and Perky, and he did it to them too. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one. Pinky only stayed one term.