Free Stone Kingdoms by David Park

of gangs, of street cool, of survival.
    â€˜I was ten or eleven and there was me and Gerry Lavery – Lav, he was called. We used to hang about together before we moved away. One winter – it was coming up to Christmas and it was really cold – we were living in Ligoniel then and there was this quarry up behind us on the mountain.’
    Daniel was the first pupil I met on my first day, met before I had even taught my first lesson. I had parked my car at some shops on the road about a mile from the school, intending to buy a paper to hide behind in the staff-room. As I headed towards the newsagent’s I read the headlines on the billboards hanging from the wire grilles on the windows, the raw abbreviations of atrocity, a blackened shorthand of some far-off tribal war. As I looked away the traffic suddenly slewed to a halt in a whining lurch and jerk of brakes.
    â€˜We used to go up there a lot and sit on the diggers, or clod stones at cans. We had this stupid game we used to play where we climbed these mountains of loose stones and started landslides. And there was this pit which was always full of water – it was about waist deep and sometimes we used to float wood across it. Well, this Saturday afternoon when we went up it was frozen over, and when we threw stones the ice didn’t break.’
    Through the curse of horns ran a boy, his schoolbag slapping his back, his red hair an exclamation mark in the dullness of the morning. Weaving in and out of the cars and behind four or five other blazers of a different colour. Only then I realized it was a chase; saw that one of the pursuers, unrestricted by bag or uniform, was running parallel to the quarry on the pavement opposite and that soon he would cross over and cut off escape.
    â€˜So Lav dared me to walk across it and I wouldn’t at first, and I dared him but he wouldn’t either, and then he kept calling me chicken and flapping his arms like wings. So eventually I said I would if he did it after me.’
    In that moment too I realized the quarry was wearing a blazer that marked him as one of mine and I ran too, mindful of the startled faces of passers-by and the renewed flow of the indifferent traffic. I could see them now, the boy with no uniform hanging on, trying to pull the other down, to hold him long enough for the rest of the pack to arrive. And as it did a welter of voices and kicks broke over the boy on the pavement. As I reached them, he had managed to roll himself into a ball in the urine-splashed doorway of a boarded-up shop, the narrowness of the entrance restricting them as they pushed and jostled each other to deliver their blows. Their voices were guttural, rabid, synchronized with the smack and slither of their feet.
    â€˜It was OK at the start and the ice seemed really thick, so I got a bit cocky and started like I was marching, and I was halfway across when there was this friggin’ crack and I fell through. Lav was laughing and calling me the Titanic. My feet were on the bottom, but it wasn’t flat and my feet were slipping, and when I tried to climb out the ice kept breaking and wasn’t strong enough to take my weight and it was cold and then I cut my hand and I was really bricking it and Lav wasn’t laughing any more. And I started to think that I’d fall – it was stupid, but I started to think that I’d get trapped under the ice. The more I got scared the more I panicked, and then Lav threw this bit of wood and I started to use it like a hammer and broke a path back to the edge. And when we got home me da scalped the arse off me for getting wet.’
    And now I was close enough to smell the fear, the sweet stench of self-hate, and I felt my own fear tumbling over and over in the hollow of my stomach and I knew that what was happening was stronger than any voice my pathetic training had given me, stronger than any appeals. And then I screamed and thumped backs, pulling hair when that