The Night House

1

‘Y- y-y-you’re crazy,’ Tom said, and I could tell he was scared, seeing as he stammered one more time than he usually does.

I was still holding the Luke Skywalker figure above my head, ready to throw it upstream, against the current. A scream echoed from within the dense forest that surrounded the river on both sides, as if in warning. It sounded like a crow. But I wasn’t about to let myself be deterred, by either Toms or crows, I wanted to see if Luke Skywalker could swim. So now he was flying through the air. The spring sun had sunk towards the tops of the trees that had just come into leaf, and every now and then the light glinted off the slowly rotating figure.

Luke hit the water with a small plop, so he definitely couldn’t fly. We couldn’t see him, just the rippling circles on the surface of the river, which was running high with meltwater and made me think of a thick boa constrictor, an anaconda, slithering towards us.

I had moved to live with my relatives in this little shithole last year, just after my fourteenth birthday, and I had no idea what shitty little kids in shitholes like Ballantyne did to stop themselves from being bored to death. But seeing as Tom had told me that now, in the sp-sp-spring, the river was scary and dangerous and that he had been given strict orders at home to stay away, that gave me somewhere to start, at least. It hadn’t been particularly hard to persuade Tom, because he was like me, friendless and a member of the pariah caste in class. During a break earlier today Fatso told me about castes, only he said I was in the piranha caste, and that made me think of those fish that look like they have sawblades for teeth and can strip the flesh from an ox in a matter of minutes, so I couldn’t help thinking it sounded like a pretty cool caste. It wasn’t until Fatso said that I and my caste were lower than him, the big lard-arse,that I was obliged to hit him. Unfortunately he told our teacher, Miss Birdsong, as I call her, and she gave the class a long lecture about being kind and what happened to people who weren’t kind– the short version is that they end up losers– and after that there was basically no doubt that the new bully from the city belonged in the piranha caste.

After school, Tom and I had gone down to the river and out onto the little wooden bridge in the forest. When I got Luke Skywalker out of my bag, Tom’s eyes opened wide.

‘W- w-wheredid you get that?’

‘Where do think, meathead?’

‘Y- y-youdidn’t buy it at Oscar’s. They’ve sold out.’

‘Oscar’s? That little rathole?’ I laughed. ‘Maybe I bought it inthe city before I moved here, from a proper toyshop.’

‘No, because that one’s this year’s model.’

I looked at Luke more closely. Was it true that the same figure had been issued in a new version? Wasn’t Luke Skywalker the same stupid hero Luke Skywalker the whole time, forever and ever, amen? I’d never thought about that. That things could change. That Darth and Luke could change places, for instance.

‘Maybe I got hold of a p-p-prototype,’I said.