Free The Knife That Killed Me by Anthony McGowan Page B

thing about my dad is that he’s obsessed with war and everything to do with it. All kinds of war. The Greeks and Romans, knights, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Wellington, ships, guns, the Battle of Britain, Lancaster bombers, Stalingrad. He’s got loads of war books, as well as a whole shelf of videos we can’t play because the machine’s bust. He says there’s no point getting it fixed because everything just comes out on DVD now. But he won’t throw the videos or the machine out, and we don’t have a DVD player yet. I read the books too, because they’re the only books in the house. Except for Mum’s books, which are all about sad ladies falling in love with dark strangers. Actually she doesn’t even read those now, because she’s too tired.
    Mum is the opposite of Dad. She’s small and quiet and she looks nice, and she
is
nice when she’s not too tired. Although she’s the opposite of him, she never disagrees with Dad. Or if she does disagree with him, then it’s only in her head and never makes it as far as her mouth. She works really hard. She’s a cleaner at the hospital, and she sometimes takes on extra jobs doing offices in town.
    But I’m back in the kitchen now, with Dad.
    He started looking at me in a funny way. “What happened to your face?” he said suspiciously. “Have you been fighting?”
    I don’t think he’d have minded that much if I’d said yes. In fact I think he’d have loved it if I had been, and I’d made a joke of it, saying,
You should see the other guy
, or something like that.
    “No, Dad. Not really.”
    “Well, how did you get that on your face then, lad? Did it happen up at Temple Moor?” He sounded more … I don’t know …
disgusted
than concerned. “It looks like a bite or something.”
    “It’s nothing, Dad.”
    I think I know what he was getting at, what he was worried about. I’m pretty sure my dad was worried that I might be gay, and my face was something to do with that. I really hated him thinking I was gay. It made my insides churn. My dad still thought that there was something dirty about being gay, and that if I was gay then I was dirty. And the thing is, he was so frightened about it that he could never ask me. All he could do was make remarks.
    I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I didn’t want the rest of my sandwich.
    “I’m off to bed,” I said. I felt sick and angry inside, but also so tired I could hardly get my mouth to work.
    “But I’ve made you some tea. Two sugars.”
    I thought that maybe I should storm off and slam the door. It was what any decent teenager would have done. But, like I said, my dad wasn’t so bad. It was just that he had no idea. It was just that everything had been easy for him. And I was too tired for storming anywhere.
    “OK, Dad,” I said, my face a mask, “I’ll take it up with me.”
    “Don’t spill it on the stairs, son. That carpet’s—”
    I think he was going to say “new,” but then he must have remembered that it was ten years old if it was a day.

FOURTEEN
    I’m good
at not thinking about things. I feel them rising up in me and then I push them down, the way you do with rubbish in the bin. Some people might say that not thinking about things is a bad idea. But what’s the point? What am I supposed to do about someone like Roth, or Goddo, or any of them?
    On the way to school I wasn’t thinking about anything, except the scrunched Coke can I was kicking. I knew there’d be a gang of kids at the school gates, but I always just walked through them and I hardly ever got bothered. All you haveto do is keep looking down, making sure you don’t catch an eye.
    So I was doing that, my attention on the ground. It’s amazing how interesting tarmac can be. Then I felt a hand on my chest.
    “Should watch where you’re going. Might bump into something. Might do yourself some damage.”
    Bates.
    Then a deeper voice.
    “Paul, come here.”
    Roth.
    I looked up. Roth was leaning against the open school gate.