Free Stone Kingdoms by David Park Page A

produced no response, and kept on screaming and suddenly there was another woman beside me shouting and pulling them off, until one by one they wheeled away, the whoop of victory in their throats. Only the boy with no uniform remained, trying desperately to inflict some final piece of damage with his feet. As I grabbed the back of his hair he spun round and knocked my hand away and for a second we looked into each other’s eyes and I tried to hide my fear as I waited for his fist. But I was too far beneath his contempt even for that, and he gave me only his spit and a ‘fucking Fenian bitch’ and then he too was gone, his final curse still tainting the air after he had vanished.
    In the doorway the boy hugged himself, his head clamped in the tight vice of his arms, as if unwilling to risk a return of his attackers or perhaps because movement brought too much pain. As I turned towards the other woman – small, older, a pink roller peeping out from under a headscarf – she patted me on the wrist, swore her own orison of despair and wiped away the spittle from my jacket with a shredded tissue, and then she was gone before I’d time to thank her properly. I touched the boy on the back with a shaking hand and felt his muscles tighten, and then as I knelt beside him amidst the silver shards of take-away cartons, he looked up at me through his fingers and smiled. Smiled like he’d been playing a game all along and was pleased that he’d fooled me. Only the blood coming from his nose and the side of his mouth told the truth. I watched him feel his nose first, delicately pinching it to check it wasn’t broken, then spitting out gobs of blood.
    It was a smile I was to become familiar with over the next year, a public message that no matter what the world did to him he was immune to even its most malevolent efforts. As I drove him to school that morning he laughed off my concern for his injuries and when I tried to discover the reason for the attack he merely pointed to the shamrock and Celtic F.C. emblem on his bag. He was embarrassed to be in the car with me and clearly glad to reach the school and escape the patronage of a teacher. Everything he said and the way he spoke suggested that what had happened was just a trivial, run-of-the-mill occurrence. He didn’t thank me but as I locked the car and watched him stroll away he stopped for a moment and called back, ‘You aren’t going to scream like that in class, are you, Miss?’ and then he smiled again but this time there was no defiance, just a simulated innocence which made me smile too.
    A few minutes before I faced my first assembly, I hurried into the staff toilets and emptied the contents of my stomach. While the pupils laboured through the first hymn of the year I heard only the smack and slither of feet on a pavement. As a fidget of boredom rippled through the rows of standing children I remembered another pavement, another time, saw again a shiny black frieze of city and sky, a man’s hand clutching the air like a claw, a voice splintering into swearwords sharp as glass, flailing arms in a black mirror. And then I thought of the boy’s smile, and I looked for him in the body of the hall. Eventually I picked out his red hair – he was close to the back, leaning against the side wall sharing jokes with his companions, his hand occasionally raised to his nose as if to reassure himself that his earlier diagnosis had been correct.
    The next time I saw him was in my fifth period English class. That was also the moment he said his thanks. He said it by not giving me a hard time and by unsubtly ensuring that no one else attempted to. At first he didn’t participate, but sometimes I would look up and catch his curious stare. Sometimes, too, he looked at me as if he couldn’t believe I was true, as if I were some creature from an alien world, but it only made me try the harder, sending me scurrying off to find