Watching You(64)

Sam was sitting on a bench some way into the schoolyard, and he took out the little radio he had got for Christmas and tried to find the new station. He had actually been hoping for a Sony Discman – it would have been brilliant to be able to take your CDs with you – but his parents had given him a radio. He pretended to be more annoyed than he was, because he actually quite liked listening to the radio. He adjusted the dial but kept getting it wrong and didn’t even notice when someone sat down on the bench beside him. He only turned round when he heard someone clear their throat. Even though a couple of months had passed, he was taken aback. He had never stopped being astonished, would never stop being astonished. And he had probably never seen William’s jagged face this close before.

‘Radio?’ William said.

‘P4 is starting to broadcast today,’ Sam managed to say. ‘I don’t really know which frequency.’

William nodded. ‘You like technical things, don’t you?’ And then he held something out to Sam.

It was a circle, almost ten centimetres in diameter, and inside a large number of cogs and pinions were moving in remarkable patterns. Instinctively, Sam put the radio down on the snowy bench and looked closer. It was a magical feeling, seeing all those little wheels spin at different speeds.

‘What it is?’ he asked.

‘A pocket watch from the turn of the century,’ William said. ‘I’ve taken the back off. Do you want to hold it?’

Sam nodded.

William carefully placed the watch in his frozen hands. ‘It’s American,’ he said. ‘An Elgin. Otherwise all the best watchmakers are from Switzerland.’

Sam just stared.

William went on: ‘I’ve got lots.’

‘How the hell can you afford that?’

‘I buy broken ones and repair them. You just need to understand how they work.’

‘Cool,’ Sam said. ‘Why me?’

‘I heard you were interested in technical stuff, electronics.’

‘I’ve given that up,’ Sam said sullenly.

‘This was before electronics. You have to wind this watch, but there are also self-winding watches.’ Sam looked up from the hypnotic cogs and for the first time met William’s gaze in that jagged face.

‘OK,’ William said, instinctively retreating. ‘That’s not the only reason I showed you this.’

‘OK. Why, then?’

‘Because you’ve never been mean to me.’

Sam sat motionless for a while. Then something happened; he didn’t understand what. The watch flew from his hand, and he was left holding nothing but snow. He heard giggling and saw several of the tiny cogs roll across the snow before being swallowed up by it. He looked up and saw a gang of girls scattering. He recognised the girl at the front, the one who appeared to have thrown the snowball. She was one of the toughest in Year 8; he thought her name might be Linda. Before she ran off she shouted: ‘Why don’t you give the abortion a blow job instead?’ Sam shook his head and saw William sink to his knees, searching the snow for the vanished cogs. Their eyes met. Sam had never seen such a black look in all his life. Then they hunted through the snow together.

Molly was sitting by herself on the bench near the door, trying to skim her geography textbook. She had forgotten they were having a test. She tried to make sense of the west coast of Africa beyond the dodgy bit that was Western Sahara. Was it Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia – Gambia was sort of squeezed inside Senegal – and then Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia? Then Ivory Coast, Ghana … Then a snowball hit the west coast of Africa and quickly melted, ruining the whole page. Molly looked up and saw Linda hurrying to form another snowball. She tucked her book away in her bag and made a snowball as fast as she could. She threw it, but it missed Linda and hit Maria behind her. Maria screamed and rushed forward to rub Molly’s face in the snow, but by then Molly had already taken cover behind the bench with Layla. Alma in turn attacked Maria from behind while Linda turned on Salma instead, with some pretty useless snowballs. In the end they were just laughing.

Then Salma stiffened and pointed: ‘Look over there. Isn’t that Samuel from Year 9? Sexy Sam?’ Their voices wove together, triggering each other: ‘What the shit, is that really the abortion next to him? What are they doing? Doesn’t he know ugliness is catching? That’s disgusting, being that close. Imagine having to touch that face. So fucking disgusting.’ By the time they crept towards them there were seven of them. Molly went with them but kept in the background. It didn’t feel good. But Sam and William didn’t notice a thing; they were just staring at something that looked like a little tub of chewing tobacco. Was that all they were doing, chewing tobacco for the first time? In the end the gang was close enough to launch a snowball. Everyone looked at Linda, their unofficial leader. Slowly and carefully she shaped a snowball, and in the background Molly heard some muffled giggling, though she couldn’t claim to be entirely innocent of that herself. But when Linda’s snowball struck and something that clearly wasn’t chewing tobacco rolled away from the tub – and both William and Sam started searching the snow – Molly suddenly saw an image of the Lucia celebrations, saw the chemistry teacher lead William from the stage, where, with the help of the school cleaner, he eventually had to cut off his long blond hair, his pride and joy, hacking off great clumps of it from his deformed head. Admittedly, she was running from the scene faster than all the other girls, but unlike them she couldn’t bring herself to laugh.