A quarter mile inland from the crusty shore, and Ted Berry stands inside what looks like the concrete entrance to a nuclear bunker; the subway tunnel under a busy road.
Cars flit flit along the deadly dual carriageway overhead.
It’s nice and cool in here against the shiny concrete wall.
Flit flit. Flit flit.
People always rushing somewhere - there’d been body-shaped yellow marks up there on that road for years before the council had dug this hole last year. It took half-a-dozen deaths to spur the bores into action.
Flit flit.
Berry stands with one foot against the cold wall watching his best friend work on his hobby out there in the sunshine halfway up the cracked-earth of the verge.
‘Weird fuckin freak,’ he says.
Wedge holds the magnifying glass keyring he’d stolen yesterday from Maynards stationery store and is focusing hot light at a discarded copy of The Sun newspaper.
Page three.
The laser beam focuses on an unfeasibly-breasted woman’s left nipple. A wisp of black smoke rises and the yellow pin prick turns orange and opens out into a perfect little black hole with a glowing orange rim. The circle expanding with, at first, no obvious flame. Her tits flare away from her chest and fire eats her face.
And she’s gone.
‘Wedge?’ KP says, arriving at the top of the verge.
Jason Wujkowski nods a ‘what?’
‘Y’not right in the fuckin heed mate. What y’burnin that bird’s tits for?’
Brian ‘KP’ Kelly had decided to copy Berry and Wedge’s early leap over the school wall, simply rising from his desk and leaving the Retard class when he’d seen the top of Wedge’s oversized cranium pass by his window.
‘Shut the door after you, Brian,’ the bored teacher had said as he left.
So he did.
KP may as well be sewing mail bags or hammering out number plates, for all the use school is to him.
He scuffs down the bank and stops beside the trainee pyromaniac.
KP’s small little peanut-shaped head next to Wedge’s massive napper. They should join the circus, steady work if you can get it.
Wedge crumples up another piece of paper and lovingly offers it up to the dying flame.
It barks into life.
He rips off a bit of cardboard from a box he’d taken from behind The Pheasant pub on the other side of the park that leads to the subway - a sturdier, slower fuel. He sits on the soil and stares into the flames, cigarette in his mouth. He leans forward, puckering his lips, and lights it from his fire.
Coughs.
KP reaches the path, bends down and picks up a stone and throws it at Berry - it clatters around behind him in the subway.
‘Alreet fuckheed?’ KP says. ‘How’s y’arse for warts?’
‘Not bad. Y’been out suckin cocks?’
‘Aye, y’dad’s. For baccy.’
Berry picks up a stone, throws it at the peanut.
Misses.
The council had only just got around to lining the path to the new subway with a solid surface, going for the cheap option of scattered grey stones on top of a thin bed of sand - arming a platoon of little bastards. Many an adult bound for the subway had felt the sharp smack of a stone on the back of their head to the sound of laughing feet running the opposite way up the path. A red five bar gate of ‘kills’ there beside Berry’s head.
A game that’d only ever wear off when the stones were gone.
One day they’d take the hint and finish the job, Tarmac the fucker properly.
KP reaches one of two facing benches on either side of the path and opens his school bag. He pulls out a big bottle of warm Tizer and sits on the dry mud verge instead of the bench with the dead old man’s name inscribed on a brass plaque.
‘Fuck?’ Berry says, thirst raging.
He steps out into the firestorm, feet crunching on the thinning stones and sits next to KP on the bank. He drags up a yellow slab from the back of his throat and – thwock - fires it across the open crusty soil like an aboriginee’s dart.
Slap.
It lands complete and intact on a rock of dry mud like a fetus.
It crawls away.
Thwock.
Slap.
Twins.
Ted Berry had mastered the art of Cool Spitting at an early age.
Glug, pop, glug.
KP’s mouth hasn’t left the bottle’s red teat.
‘Y’greedy bastard,’ Berry says. ‘Giz some.’
He reaches down and grabs the bottle and tilts it to his head.
‘Baaaaarp,’ KP releases an operatic blast of gas. ‘Brrrrrp. Baaaaarp! Ah.’
A brief splash of Tizer blesses Berry’s tongue. But the bottle collapses in on itself with a plastic pop.
Empty.
‘Cunt!?’ Berry says. ‘Y'greedy fuck. Y’necked it all?’
‘Baaaaarp.’
Berry swings a foot at the peanut.
Misses.
‘Cunt.’
He throws the bottle.
Misses.
‘Wedge?’ KP says.
No answer.
‘Hey, Wedge? Wedge man?’ KP shouts across the path. ‘Wedge man? Hey? Hey man, Wedge?’
He throws one of the council’s stones at what should be an easy target, Wedge’s head.
Misses.
‘Wedge? Wedge man? Wedge-ski? Wedge man?’
The Head rotates.
‘Go to the shops and get some pop man.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Go on man. I'll pay if you go.’
‘Nah.’
Wedge feathers the flames with a branch.
‘Fuck this,’ Berry says, rising. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ KP says. ‘I’m comin. It’s too fuckin hot here.’
He gets up, turns to Wedge.
‘You comin melonhead-ski?’
‘Nah.’
They leave Wedge staring at the dancing cackling shapes and crunch up the path.