Harry staggered backward from the other’s shoving, dropping the shells he’d collected. Big Stanley gave a whoop, jumped forward, crushed them to dust under his shoes and ground them into the sand. Harry swayed, looked sick, began to turn away. His eyes were suddenly misty behind his spectacles; his face, which wasn’t tanned like the faces of the rest, turned even paler.
‘Shitty little cowardly teacher’s pet!’ Green crowed maliciously. ‘Old Man Jamieson’s little “Favourite”, eh, Speccy? And is that you crying, then? Tears, is it? Wetting ourself, are we? You four-eyed little – ‘
‘Shut it, shithead!’ Harry growled, turning back and facing the bully. ‘You’re ugly enough without me making it worse!’
‘Wha-?’ Green couldn’t believe his ears. What was that Keogh had said? No, it couldn’t have been. Why, it hadn’t even sounded like him. He must have a frog in his throat, or he was all choked up with fear.
‘Whyn’t you leave him alone?’ said Jimmy Collins, pushing through the crowd. Three or four of them grabbed him, held him back.
‘Stay out of it, Jimmy,’ said Harry in his new, gritty voice. ‘I’m all right.’
‘All right, is it?’ cried Big Stanley. I’ll say you’re not, Speccy my son. I’ll say you’re – in – the – shit!’-
With his last word he swung his fist for the smaller boy’s head. Harry ducked easily, stepped forward, jabbed with a straight arm, fingers straight and stiff. Big Stanley folded in the middle, jack-knifed, his face coming down on Harry’s knee – which was coming up! The crack was like a pistol shot. Green straightened up and flew backward, his arms straight out from his shoulders. And down he crashed on the sand.
Harry stepped close. Seconds passed but Green just lay there. Then he sat up, shook his head groggily. His nose was the wrong shape, bleeding profusely; his eyes were glassy behind welling tears of pain. ‘You . . . you . . . you!’ he spat blood.
Harry bent over him, showed him a white, knobbly fist. ‘You what?’ he growled, the corner of his mouth lifting from his teeth. ‘Go on, Bully, say something. Give me a reason to hit you again.’
Green said nothing, reached up a trembling hand to touch his broken nose, his split mouth. Then he started to cry real tears.
But Harry wasn’t finished with him. He wanted him to remember. ‘Listen, shithead,’ he said. ‘If ever – if you ever once – call me Speccy or Favourite or any other bloody funny name again – if you even speak to me, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll be shitting teeth for a month! Have you got that, shithead?’
Big Stanley turned on his side in the sand and cried even harder.
Harry looked up, glared at the rest of them. He took off his spectacles, put them in a pocket, scowled. He didn’t squint, didn’t look as though he’d needed the glasses at all. His eyes were bright as marbles, full of sparks. ‘What I said to this shit goes for the rest of you. Or if any one of you fancies his chances here and now – ?’
Jimmy Collins stepped beside him. ‘Or any two of you?’ he said. The crowd was silent. As a man, all their mouths were wide, their eyes even wider. Slowly they turned away, began talking, nervously laughing, fooling about as if nothing had happened. It was over – and strangely, they were all glad it was over.
‘Harry,’ said Jimmy quietly out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I never seen anything like that! Not ever. Why, you did it like – like – like a man! Like a grown man! Like old ‘Sergeant’ when he used to shadow-fight in the gym. Unarmed combat, he called it.’ He elbowed his pal in the ribs – but gingerly. ‘Hey, you know something?’
‘What?’ Harry asked, trembling all over, his voice his own again.
‘You’re weird, you are, Harry Keogh. You’re really weird!’
Harry Keogh sat his examination a fortnight later.
The weather had changed in the first week of September, since when it had grown progressively worse until the sky seemed permanently filled with rain. It rained on the day of the examination, too, a downpour which washed the windows of the head’s study where Harry sat at a huge desk with his papers and pens.