‘It was a lot of shite,’ said Rab Morrison.
Wendy his sister agreed.
I wasn’t sure, especially as Wendy thought she was a better fighter than me. But she wasn’t. She just thought she was. I could definitely beat her, if she didn’t cheat, and force her smelly fingers into my mouth. That was cheating. So it didn’t count. And anyway, she was a girl, I didn’t fight girls.
Bill Bowers said it was true. He knew somebody at the high school that had lit a black candle and said The Lord’s Prayer backwards and the Devil appeared in a mirror. And the guy went mad and ended up in the loony-bin.
I wasn’t sure. But I kept away from mirrors for a few days. It was made more difficult because the old brown chest of drawers in our room had a mirror. It was one of those with wings on each side, like ears, so the mirror seemed to be looking at itself. The kind of mirror that the Devil liked to hide in. It was made worse because it was beside the window. And when I went to sleep I lay on that side with the blankets looped over my head, like a hat, so that vampires couldn’t bite me. I couldn’t turn the other way, because then I’d be looking at the unlocked cupboard, with old clothes barging out of it.
Everybody knew vampires didn’t exist, but sometimes the curtains at the window moved. I knew it was the wind blowing through the windows. They were steel frames and all rusted. I could practically poke my finger through, but that didn’t matter. I’d already thought about it. The best thing would be to wear jim-jams to bed that were covered in crosses instead of elephants and stupid whorls of colour. And you could wear a collar with big crosses on it. And even if a vampire hypnotised you he wouldn’t be able to bite you.
But sometimes I thought it wouldn’t be that bad being a vampire. I mean, obviously, it would be scary at first. But after a while it would be ok. Most of the other vampires had big tits. That ruled out my two sisters in the next room. They were certainly not vampire material. And you didn’t see any cross-eyed vampires. That ruled our Mo out on two counts. She’d just need to be a bat, or something, without the vampire part.
And you could always get your own back on people you didn’t like. I’d need to keep an eye out for my teacher Mrs Rodgers. But she was always wearing gold chains with dangly crosses, glinting in and out of her perfumed freckly boobs. Maybe, she’d hypnotise me if I were a vampire and not the other way around. And she’d ask me stuff about going to mass and if I’d been to communion. And she probably slept with jim-jams with crosses on them to show how holy she was. So if there was an accident, she’d go straight to heaven. The bad thing was if I bit her and she turned into a vampire she’d probably have me sitting on a tombstone doing long division for all eternity, or until I got it right.
No. The best thing was not to be a vampire. And since I didn’t have any jim-jams with crosses on them I sneaked into my little brother’s bed. I pushed him to the edge of the bed, nearest the window. The vampires could get him first. And if he looked up and saw the devil in the mirror, he wouldn’t really know who it was. And if he started screaming mum would rush in. And I could just say that I had to get in beside him because he asked me to, because he was scared.
When it was daylight I nipped my wee brother because it was really his fault for being scared, ‘cause I was only kidding. I didn’t want the little stink bomb screaming like a banshee, because that might bring dad in and he was even scarier than a vampire. So I got his dummy out from under the pillow and gave it to him, even though he was far too old for dummies. His solemn eyes scrutinized me as I gradually pushed him out of bed. As soon as his feet hit the concrete floor he scurried away like a wind-up toy. And while he was getting mum and my sisters up, I snatched the last bit of sleep and sucked in the last of the warmth from the blankets.
Usually, we played heidy-kicks against Chalmer’s gate and Summie’s hedge. We had to be careful because Summie’s dad’s car was parked just down hill from our goals. Any time we hit it Fat Wilkie chapped his window, as if it was his car getting hit. We gave up and went down beside the back of the garages, because with our tops off, our back and necks were getting burnt to a frazzle. And because Rab was rubbish at football and always getting put out first, even though he was the oldest, with a feather cut and Adidas Samba.
‘Twos,’ said Wendy, before Rab had even got the fags out of his denim pockets, before we had even got behind the garages. That meant Rab had to pass the fag to his sister when he was finished with it.
Bill got twos off Wendy.
‘Bastard,’ Bill said, as he burnt his hand and his lips. His cadging fingers were already jobby brown with nicotine and he was quite proud of that.
Me and Summie didn’t smoke yet. I’d tried it, choked and had the dry boak. But it was good. Summie was just a shitebag.
Bill was into all that kind of making spells and stuff. He had the kind of thin little pointy witch face and pimply nose so that you might just have thought it was true. But nobody really knew what he meant. He’d also said he’d slept in the graveyard at Glendevon one night, but nobody really believed that either.
‘He might have,’ Rab said, with his fake little yodelling laugh, adding as a punch line, ‘because he was just daft enough’.
‘He might have,’ Rab said again, his nostrils flaring, looking at Summie and me until we looked away.
It was Bill’s idea that we try the Ouija board. We all knew what a Ouija board was because of the girl in the The Exorcist whose head turned completely around on her neck, when she was looking at the priest, spewed green bile all over him and poked herself in the fanny with a crucifix. We hadn’t seen the film, of course, but we knew all about it. People were running from the cinemas, spewing up on themselves, or even becoming possessed. Playing with a Ouija board wasn’t a good idea, but it was something we had to do, like smoking and drinking and shagging non-Wendy type women.
‘I can’t do it,’ I said immediately, ‘I’m an altar boy’. I didn’t want to say that it was a mortal sin, because then I’d needed to try and explain. And I’d become red faced and tongue-twisted. And that would make them take the piss out of me even more. Being an altar boy was accepted, especially as you got money for weddings and funerals.
‘Don’t talk shite,’ said Rab.
‘Aye, don’t talk shite,’ said Wendy.
They were both looking at me as if I had just been scraped off their Sambas. I glanced at Summie, but he looked as if he wanted to be an altar boy too.
‘No, that might be better,’ said Bill looking me over carefully, as if I was a manikin, ‘that way the spirits ‘ill need to come and get you’.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, ‘I’m no doin’ it’. I picked up my ball, put it under my arm and walked up the hill.
I was watching Scooby Doo when the door went. Dad peered through the Venetian blinds.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘there’s a wee boy at the door for you’.
Wendy’s bucktoothed smile was waiting for me.
‘Comin’ out?’ she said.
‘No,’ I replied, but then changed my mind. She wasnae going to get the better of me.
I followed her through the gap in the hedge and around Summie’s back, to the pishy coal cellar. They were all squeezed into the dark, with a glass on a makeshift table, with scrawled letters all around it.
Rab squinted as he ducked down through the door and up into the sunlight. ‘That’s your seat there,’ he said, his foot clanking against an old bucket near the door.
‘Nah, I’m no doin’ it,’ I said, looking up at him.
Rab quickly closed the distance between us. His head moved a touch to the side, as if it was pausing, waiting. I’d seen him doing that before, when he stuck- the- heid and bloodied Maffie’s nose. But then he blew out a deep breath, shaking his head and echoed out his yodelly laugh. ‘That’s it then, if he’s no doin’ it, there’s no point, I’m no doin’ it’.
