Rust

“C’mon,” Mick said, pulling at Billy’s arm.

“I don’t think…” Billy began; he was panting from the effort.

Mick ignored the protest and pulled harder, forcing Billy to follow him. They scrambled across the patch of waste ground on the edge of the woods, as far as a rusting chain-link fence that stretched into the distance, left and right.

“You hold it up and I’ll crawl through,” Mick said. He showed Billy what he meant by grabbing the bottom of the fence, where it wasn’t pegged into the ground, and lifting. It made a gap big enough for a boy to wriggle through.

Billy took the wire and pulled. Mick got on his stomach and used his elbows to drag himself to the other side. Billy dropped the fence and faced Mick, now on his feet.

“Your go,” Mick said. He bent down to lift the fence on his side.

Billy shook his head.

“You better get over here!” Mick hissed, raising a fist.

Billy’s lower lip quivered, his eyes beginning to glisten.

“Ah, bloody hell!” Mick dropped the fence and laced his fingers through it, bringing his face closer to Billy’s. “Is mummy’s little boy gonna start cryin’?”

“Nah!” Billy said, lying. “It’s just … well, look at that.”

He pointed to a grubby red and white sign hanging nearby, nibbled by rust at the edges. He read it out loud.

“Danger. Entry strictly forbidden.”

“So you obey every sign you see, do you?” Mick snarled.

Billy shook his head again, though if he’d had time to think about it, the answer would most certainly have been ‘yes’.

“Listen, tubs.” The word made Billy flinch. “I didn’t want to be paired up with you from the word ‘go’, but here we are. Now, Danny or the others are gonna be comin’ out of them woods any minute, and if they see us, it’s game over. We’ve lost. And I don’t like losin’, geddit? So if you don’t get you fat arse under this fence, you know what’s gonna happen?”

Billy shook his head a third time.

“Somethin’s gonna get broken, that’s what. So, you comin’ or not?”

Mick lifted the fence again. Billy looked gloomily at him, at the sign, at the woods, at the gap between the fence and the dirt.

Taking a deep breath, he knelt, then dropped to his stomach. He copied Mick’s action, using his elbows to propel himself forward. The fence scraped his back and got caught on his belt, covering him in a mini-shower of rust.

“You should lay off the doughnuts, fatty,” Mick sneered. He gave the fence an extra yank to clear Billy’s behind and he was through.

Billy got to his feet and brushed the dirt from his white T-shirt as best as he could.

“There!” Mick said and started jogging towards a dilapidated wooden shed, thirty yards or so away. Billy waddled after him.

Every few paces, Mick glanced behind him at the woods. Billy kept his eyes on Mick and the bumpy terrain of dirt and hummocks of grass, with bushes dotted here and there. He looked over his shoulder just once himself – there was no sign of Danny or the others – but he turned back the moment he heard the loud CRUNCH-CRASH and stopped dead.

Mick had disappeared.

Billy gazed at the space ahead. Nothing. Then he heard it: a groaning.

He followed the sound to a point around ten yards away: a hole, framed by dirt and splintered wood.

“Hey!” a weak, muffled voice called out.

Billy approached the hole slowly, testing the ground before each full step.

“Lard-arse?!” the disembodied voice cried. “Go and get help! I think I … I might’ve broken my – aargh! – my leg.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Billy spotted two figures emerging from the woods. He ducked behind a bush and peered through it. The boys stood surveying the waste ground beyond the treeline but were soon swallowed up again as they turned back.

“Are you there, fatso?”

There was no sound now apart from Billy’s breathing, the cawing of distant crows, and the voice again.

“Billy?!”

Billy straightened, thinking. Then he went into action.

He conducted a quick search and found a dead branch with dry leaves lying under one of the bushes. Using it as a broom, he edged backwards, sweeping away the two sets of footprints. As he retreated, the voice from the hole got fainter and fainter, until, by the time he reached the fence, he couldn’t hear it at all.

He examined the spot where they’d entered and decided it would be difficult – if not impossible – to get under the fence on his own, without someone to lift it. He started following the line of the fence to the left, hopping clumsily between grassy hummocks so as not to leave footprints in the dirt.

Eventually, he found what he’d been hoping for: someone had been there before and had obviously climbed over the fence, flattening it so that it bowed from the top. Holding on to a post for support, and after several attempts, he managed to straddle the fence and found himself on the other side. Keeping to the grass, he made his way to the point where they’d crawled through, and continued with the sweeping until he was back at the edge of the woods. He dropped the branch, brushed himself down, and with the briefest of glances towards the shed in the fenced-off area, stepped into the woods.

*****

“Where you been?” Danny wanted to know when Billy appeared in the clearing. Half a dozen other boys were sitting on the ground and on tree stumps.

“I … I got lost,” Billy said.

“And Mick?”

Billy shrugged his shoulders and frowned.

“Ain’t he here?”

“No, he ain’t. He was with you!”

“Oh, he got bored. He said it was too slow with me – on account of me bein’…” Billy gestured to his paunch. “… y’know. So he went on ahead. What about the game?”

“Ah, that finished ages ago. Ned and Harry won.”

“Okay.”

“Now I s’pose we’ll have to wait for Mick ‘fore we head off home.”

“S’pose.”

Billy set about finding a stump to sit on.

“Hey, what’s that?” Danny asked, pointing at Billy’s back.

“What’s what?” Billy said, reaching a hand round to feel the back of his T-shirt.

“Dunno,” Danny said. “Looks like rust. Where’s that from?”