“What about you?” he asked Silas.
“What about me?”
“Well, you aren’t alive. And you go around and do things.”
“I,” said Silas, “am precisely what I am, and nothing more. I am, as you say, not alive. But if I am ended, I shall simply cease to be. My kind are, or we are not. If you see what I mean.”
“Not really.”
Silas sighed. The rain was done and the cloudy gloaming had become true twilight. “Bod,” he said, “there are many reasons why it is important that we keep you safe.”
Bod said, “The person who hurt my family. The one who wants to kill me. You are certain that he’s still out there?” It was something he had been thinking about for a while now, and he knew what he wanted.
“Yes. He’s still out there.”
“Then,” said Bod, and said the unsayable, “I want to go to school.”
Silas was imperturbable. The world could have ended, and he would not have turned a hair. But now his mouth opened and his brow furrowed, and he said only,
“What?”
“I’ve learned a lot in this graveyard,” said Bod. “I can Fade and I can Haunt. I can open a ghoul-gate and I know the constellations. But there’s a world out there, with the sea in it, and islands, and shipwrecks and pigs. I mean, it’s filled with things I don’t know. And the teachers here have taught me lots of things, but I need more. If I’m going to survive out there, one day.”
Silas seemed unimpressed. “Out of the question. Here we can keep you safe. How could we keep you safe, out there? Outside, anything could happen.”
“Yes,” agreed Bod. “That’s the potential thing you were talking about.” He fell silent. Then, “Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.”
“Yes. Someone did.”
“A man?”
“A man.”
“Which means,” said Bod, “you’re asking the wrong question.”
Silas raised an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Well,” said Bod. “If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t ‘who will keep me safe from him?’”
“No?”
“No. It’s ‘who will keep him safe from me?’”
Twigs scratched against the high windows, as if they needed to be let in. Silas flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve with a fingernail as sharp as a blade. He said, “We will need to find you a school.”
No one noticed the boy, not at first. No one even noticed that they hadn’t noticed him. He sat halfway back in class. He didn’t answer much, not unless he was directly asked a question, and even then his answers were short and forgettable, colorless: he faded, in mind and in memory.
“Do you think they’re religious, his family?” asked Mr. Kirby, in the teachers’ staff room. He was marking essays.
“Whose family?” asked Mrs. McKinnon.
“Owens in Eight B,” said Mr. Kirby.
“The tall spotty lad?”
“I don’t think so. Sort of medium height.”
Mrs. McKinnon shrugged. “What about him?”
“Handwrites everything,” said Mr. Kirby. “Lovely handwriting. What they used to call copperplate.”
“And that makes him religious because…?”
“He says they don’t have a computer.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t have a phone.”
“I don’t see why that makes him religious,” said Mrs. McKinnon, who had taken up crocheting when they had banned smoking in the staff room, and was sitting and crocheting a baby blanket for no one in particular.
Mr. Kirby shrugged. “He’s a smart lad,” he said. “There’s just stuff he doesn’t know. And in History he’ll throw in little made-up details, stuff not in the books…”
“What kind of stuff?”
Mr. Kirby finished marking Bod’s essay and put it down on the pile. Without something immediately in front of him the whole matter seemed vague and unimportant. “Stuff,” he said, and forgot about it. Just as he forgot to enter Bod’s name on the roll. Just as Bod’s name was not to be found on the school databases.
The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he spent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.
Even the other kids forgot about him. Not when he was sitting in front of them: they remembered him then. But when that Owens kid was out of sight he was out of mind. They didn’t think about him. They didn’t need to. If someone asked all the kids in Eight B to close their eyes and list the twenty-five boys and girls in the class, that Owens kid wouldn’t have been on the list. His presence was almost ghostly.
It was different if he was there, of course.
Nick Farthing was twelve, but he could pass—and did sometimes—for sixteen: a large boy with a crooked smile, and little imagination. He was practical, in a basic sort of way, an efficient shoplifter, and occasional thug who did not care about being liked as long as the other kids, all smaller, did what he said. Anyway, he had a friend. Her name was Maureen Quilling, but everyone called her Mo, and she was thin and had pale skin and pale yellow hair, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, inquisitive nose. Nick liked to shoplift, but Mo told him what to steal. Nick could hit and hurt and intimidate, but Mo pointed him at the people who needed to be intimidated. They were, as she told him sometimes, a perfect team.
They were sitting in the corner of the library splitting their take of the year sevens’ pocket money. They had eight or nine of the eleven-year-olds trained to hand over their pocket money every week.
“The Singh kid hasn’t coughed up yet,” said Mo. “You’ll have to find him.”
“Yeah,” said Nick, “he’ll pay.”
“What was it he nicked? A CD?”
Nick nodded.
“Just point out the error of his ways,” said Mo, who wanted to sound like the hard cases from the television.
“Easy,” said Nick. “We’re a good team.”
“Like Batman and Robin,” said Mo.
“More like Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde,” said somebody, who had been reading, unnoticed, in a window seat, and he got up and walked out of the room.
Paul Singh was sitting on a windowsill by the changing rooms, his hands deep in his pockets, thinking dark thoughts. He took one hand out of his pocket, opened it, looked at the handful of pound coins, shook his head, closed his hand around the coins once more.
“Is that what Nick and Mo are waiting for?” somebody asked, and Paul jumped, scattering money all over the floor.
The other boy helped him pick the coins up, handed them over. He was an older boy, and Paul thought he had seen him around before, but he could not be certain. Paul said, “Are you with them? Nick and Mo?”
The other boy shook his head. “Nope. I think that they are fairly repulsive.” He hesitated. Then he said, “Actually, I came to give you a bit of advice.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t pay them.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Because they aren’t blackmailing me?”
The boy looked at Paul and Paul looked away, ashamed.
“They hit you or threatened you until you shoplifted a CD for them. Then they told you that unless you handed over your pocket money to them, they’d tell on you. What did they do, film you doing it?”
Paul nodded.
“Just say no,” said the boy. “Don’t do it.”
“They’ll kill me. And they said…”
“Tell them that you think the police and school authorities could be a lot more interested in a couple of kids who are getting younger kids to steal for them and then forcing them to hand over their pocket money than they ever would be in one kid forced to steal a CD against his will. That if they touch you again, you’ll make the call to the police. And that you’ve written it all up, and if anything happens to you, anything at all, if you get a black eye or anything, your friends will automatically send it to the school authorities and the police.”
Paul said, “But. I can’t.”
“Then you’ll pay them your pocket money for the rest of your time in this school. And you’ll stay scared of them.”
Paul thought. “Why don’t I just tell the police anyway?” he asked.
“Can if you like.”
“I’ll try it your way first,” Paul said. He smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was a smile, right enough, his first in three weeks.
So Paul Singh explained to Nick Farthing just how and why he wouldn’t be paying him any longer, and walked away while Nick Farthing just stood and didn’t say anything, clenching and unclenching his fists. And the next day another five eleven-year-olds found Nick Farthing in the playground, and told him they wanted their money back, all the pocket money they’d handed over in the previous month, or they’d be going to the police, and now Nick Farthing was an extremely unhappy young man.
Mo said, “It was him. He started it. If it wasn’t for him…they’d never have thought of it on their own. He’s the one we have to teach a lesson. Then they’ll all behave.”
“Who?” said Nick.
“The one who’s always reading. The one from the library. Bob Owens. Him.”
Nick nodded slowly. Then he said, “Which one is he?”
“I’ll point him out to you,” said Mo.
Bod was used to being ignored, to existing in the shadows. When glances naturally slip from you, you become very aware of eyes upon you, of glances in your direction, of attention. And if you barely exist in people’s minds as another living person then being pointed to, being followed around…these things draw attention to themselves.
They followed him out of the school and up the road, past the corner newsagent, and across the railway bridge. He took his time, making certain that the two who were following him, a burly boy and a fair, sharp-faced girl, did not lose him, then he walked into the tiny churchyard at the end of the road, a miniature graveyard behind the local church and he waited beside the tomb of Roderick Persson and his wife Amabella, and also his second wife, Portunia, (They Sleep to Wake Again).
“You’re that kid,” said a girl’s voice. “Bob Owens. Well, you’re in really big trouble, Bob Owens.”
“It’s Bod, actually,” said Bod, and he looked at them. “With a D. And you’re Jekyll and Hyde.”
“It was you,” said the girl. “You got to the seventh formers.”
“So we’re going to teach you a lesson,” said Nick Farthing, and he smiled without humor.
“I quite like lessons,” said Bod. “If you paid more attention to yours, you wouldn’t have to blackmail younger kids for pocket money.”
Nick’s brow crinkled. Then he said, “You’re dead, Owens.”