HEROES
By Jamie Horncastle
PART ONE
“We can be heroes
We’re nothing, and nothing can help us.”
– David Bowie
1
Like everything else, it started because of a girl. Other things helped set it in motion, but these things wouldn’t have happened if not for her. It was because of her that the first stand was taken; that they first acknowledged that something had to be done.
They were Year Eleven’s, so for them it was the last day of school term. While the rest of the school would sweat out another two months of the baking spring in their classrooms, the Year Elevens were given study leave in order to fully prepare themselves for their upcoming GCSEs. The four of them – even Mike – expected to pass their exams and return for their A-levels, but it wasn’t something they’d begin thinking about until their exams, and then the longest summer of their lives, was over. It was only May, but summer had already arrived as far as they were concerned. Spring had been bypassed that year – there had been no revitalising rain; only an ebbing heatwave that seemed to beat down on them all day every day. The four of them were sat on a small flight of stone steps outside the main school building, waiting for the bell that signified the end of lunch. The rest of the school had bundled out onto the field – the boys so they could play football, the girls so they could sunbathe. There was no desire for any of these particular four boys to play, not in such intense heat. Ralph was the only one of them who was any good, but he couldn’t see the point of such exertion in this heat. Instead, he sat at the bottom of the steps, his tie loosened and his shirt unbuttoned to the very limit the school permitted. A couple of steps above him sat Don and Mike. They had known each other since primary school, and chattered constantly when they were together. They nattered now but Ralph paid no attention. Leo sat at the top of the stairs, his gangly frame sprawled across the concrete. He hadn’t just loosened his tie but taken it off. It snaked around his fist and across the floor. His fingers twiddled with it as if it was a beloved pet, and he listened idly to Mike and Don without much enthusiasm. His eyes flicked from Ralph, at the bottom of the stairs, to the field, where Ralph’s glassy stare was fixed.
‘You still with us, Bignose?’
Ralph jerked as Mike spoke to him, prodding a finger into his ribs to ensure he got his attention. Mike was constantly prodding and poking his friends – he enjoyed their discomfort – and he was always addressing them as ‘Bignose’ – at least three times a day since he had first watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the start of the year. It was no good to argue that none of them had big noses – none of them but Mike, as it happened. Mike would continue calling them by that name, his grin widening an inch every time he managed to slip a line from the film into the exchange. In the beginning it had been amusing, and then it quickly became irritating. Nowadays none of them even noticed. Somehow this happened with all of Mike’s annoying habits. They became manageable, even acquiring their own strange charm. As Ralph turned to him now, he simply asked him to repeat the question.
‘We were discussing the new Spiderman film,’ Don explained, leaning forward, and now Ralph switched his eyes to him. Don and Mike had been friends for so long, it wasn’t unusual for one of them to answer a question addressed to the other. Ralph had once had twin girls living along his street, and they had done the same thing. It wasn’t right to compare Don and Mike to twins – there were considerable differences between them, in both physical appearance and mental attitude. Mike was chubby and Don stick-thin, like an insect. Mike neglected his studies while Don was the most scholarly of the group. Don was the only one of them taking his A-levels because he actually wanted to; for the others it was merely the next logical step. Don had his career path planned already: he was going to take his A-levels, then go to university and get a degree in criminology, and then go on to do something in the police force. ‘We were discussing whether it will be as good as the first film,’ Don continued. He then went on to offer his own opinion. He mentioned the screenwriter four times, the director twice, and assessed the suitability of the actors to their roles, based on their past performances and what he remembered of the comic strip.
Mike leaned forward as Don finished. His opinion was that the new film would be ‘cooler’ than the first, and that he was hoping to see another good shot of Kirsten Dunst’s nipples. They looked at Ralph expectantly, and he mumbled that sequels were never as good as the originals.
As Leo leaned forward to offer his opinion – an opinion which would have been valued above everyone else’s, even Don’s much-informed and clearly thought-out one – the air was filled with a piercing scream. The four heads snapped to the direction of the scream in apparent unison, but if anyone could have slowed the picture they would have seen that it had been Ralph who had been first to react. He had recognised the voice, even in the contortions of shrieking. The voice had belonged to Jenny Goldstone.
Before he had joined the discussion of the new Spiderman film, Ralph had been gazing out at the school field. His gaze had not, however much it seemed, been vacant or directionless. He had been looking at Jenny Goldstone. His eyes had strayed and fixed on her as they usually did when she was around. As far as Ralph Halladay was concerned – and there were considerably few boys in the school who would have disagreed – Jenny Goldstone was the most beautiful girl at the school. Every boy had a different opinion as to what it was about her that was so alluring, but Ralph had always loved her hair – the fiery red hair that spilled around her shoulders. Ever since the day he had met her, Ralph had spend most of his time fantasizing about her…about what it would be like to kiss her, to touch her, to plunge his hands into that red hair of hers…even to speak more than two words to her would be special enough, he often thought. He might have asked advice from his friends – they were very close, and he would have asked them advice on any other subject – but for some reason he had withheld his infatuation with Jenny from them. He supposed they could have helped in some way. Don wasn’t good with women at all, but Leo was the sort of guy all the girls fell for. Mike always did okay with girls, even though he had none of Leo’s good looks. Mike chattered a lot, and women seemed to like that. Ralph often wondered if perhaps Mike spoke so fast they got lost in him, and ended up liking him through some sort of strange hypnosis. Ralph knew he could never find a way to attain Leo’s good looks, even if he managed to shake the ferocious acne problem that had dogged him for most of his teenage years, and he couldn’t learn any of Mike’s chatter. The nearest he’d come to revealing his feelings for Jenny Goldstone was two years ago, when he had managed to pluck up the courage to send her a Valentine’s Day card, although he obviously hadn’t dared reveal his identity. She sat close to him in several classes, and whenever he’d heard her giggling with her friends and discussing who’d sent the card, he had shivered all over. He heard a rumour – a rumour he desperately hoped wasn’t true – that Bradley Matthews, the school’s notorious bully and Jenny’s current boyfriend, had taken the credit for Ralph’s card and the sweet ditty composed within – and that that had been when she’d first agreed to go out with him.
As he turned towards her shout now he saw Bradley Matthews standing by her, and the whole lot came flooding back to him. He winced; first at the idea that he had set in motion the romance between the unlikeliest couple in the school, and then again as his brain processed the rest of the scene. Jenny Goldstone had been sunbathing, but as she lay on the floor now it was obvious that the sun was the last thing on her mind. Her hands were clasped over her face, and even at this distance Ralph could hear her sobbing. The football players on the field slowed and then stopped, their eyes fixed on the crying girl. None of them would have wanted Bradley Matthews to see their interest in his business, but it was obvious they were unable to look away. Bradley Matthews paid no attention to them, however; his eyes burned down at the crying girl. Brad was tall and ugly. He was one of the few people in the year who Ralph considered to have an acne problem worse than his own. Ralph’s spots were bad – very bad – but Bradley Matthews’s entire face was scarred with them. His acne seemed like no other. Te pus-and-blood-filled pustules didn’t seem to merely cover his face but dig into it, as if they had roots which had buried deep into his flesh and clung to the bone. The acne seemed to throb and pulse like a live creature that had taken over his face, his cheeks and jaws and nose and forehead seemed to twist in every direction. Brad didn’t care about his acne problem though, and why should he? Ralph thought. It didn’t stop him going out with Jenny Goldstone. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the repulsive growth on his face. When he was ordered into silence in classes, he would sit and pick and scratch at his spots, flicking pus and blood from his fingers every few seconds.
As he stood over his crying girlfriend, the sun glistened over the twisted surface of his face. The remnants of oozing blood and pus twinkled as if a hundred slugs had slithered across his face and left their slimy trail upon him. ‘Get up,’ he told Jenny, and his cheeks throbbed around his deep voice. He didn’t speak loud, but forcefully, and all four of them heard what he’d said even from the other side of the field.
‘What happened?’ Mike asked from beside him. It was one of the rare occasions when there was absolutely no humour in his voice. ‘Did he hit her?’
‘Leave her alone, Brad,’ another girl barked, putting herself between the hulking bully and the girl on the floor. ‘You broke up, and she’s not going out with you again.’
But Bradley Matthews was not the kind of boy to follow orders. He sneered at the girl and then pushed her away, sending her crashing to the floor. The girl hit the grass and bounced. She rolled, righted herself, adjusted her skirt, and managed to control her tears. Brad leered at her once more, then turned away, knowing she would do nothing more than sit and watch the rest of it.
‘We should get a teacher or something,’ Ralph breathed to the others. His voice shrunk with every word, as if he was reminding himself who he was talking about and becoming more worried he would somehow be overheard. If Bradley Matthews caught you telling on him…the consequences weren’t worth pondering.
He ordered Jenny to her feet again but she didn’t move. Then he bent down next to her and said something which no-one else heard. She remained on the ground with her eyes turned away from him, one delicate arm over her face to muffle the sound of her tears. Brad reached down and gripped her arm. The ends of his fingers pressed deep into the flesh and she cried out and squirmed under his grip. But Brad held firm, and even squeezed a little harder. She squealed. Ralph winced.
Before any of them had time to say anything more, Leo was on his feet and bounding towards the scene. He had covered half the distance before any of them realized that he wasn’t, as they had first assumed, going to get help. The three boys stared after him with their mouths wide. There was a reason why nobody else on the field had stood up to him already, there was a reason he was the most feared boy at the school. When he had been thirteen a boy from the final year – a boy who was nearly sixteen – had taunted Brad about something or other, and Brad had turned on the older boy like a trained attack dog given the command to kill. He had beaten the older boy so ferociously that the boy had never had the courage to return to Grants. A couple of other boys – but only a couple – had tried to taunt and then fight Brad over the years, and they had been dealt with in the same vicious way. Brad hardly ever got into fights at school, but he spent most of his evenings and weekends loitering along the High Street, with the boys – either from school or the estate on which he lived – who comprised his gang. Most of the boys were banned form the shops along the High Street – even the McDonalds, where they had once gotten into an argument with the manager and Brad had thrown and splatted several pots of ketchup on his face – but it didn’t stop them finding something to do. The lounged along benches, smoking cigarettes, whistling at the girls, and taunting kids from other schools. Sometimes an adult would stand up to them, and was always surprised to find that Brad – still only a teenager – was more than willing to fight them. Against these adults, he sometimes won and sometimes lost, but he didn’t seem to care. If anyone got the better of him he’d always find a way to get back at them. And when he got his revenge, to show his friends (and anyone who doubted him), he would film the return beating on his mobile phone’s video camera. He had been one of the first to attain a mobile phone with a camera on it, and he had done so expressly for this reason. There were several videos stored there, it was said, of people who had once crossed Brad begging for his mercy. Nobody in their right mind messed around with Bradley Matthews.
Beside him now, Mike’s face broke into a massive grin. ‘Yeah!’ he whispered, and then said it again, firmer: ‘Yeah!’ He stood up, and Don stood up next to him.
