Jude mocked him once again. Michael threw the ball back and gritted his teeth, saying nothing, hoping to wipe the cocky smile off his cousin’s face. Jude ambled to the top of his run-up for a third time, strutting with confidence. Michael wiped the sweat off his brow with his forearm and tapped the Slazenger on the ground, thinking that if Jude bowled another bouncer he was going to hit it so far Jude was going to get a sun burnt palate watching it pass over his head. Jude steamed in and fired down his fastest ball yet, thundering it straight for the spot between Michael’s eyes. This time Michael saw it coming, and he got into position early. He stepped back, lifting the bat high, and then connected beautifully with a perfect pull shot. He watched the ball sail in a high arc over the backyard fence and out of sight. In baseball terms, it was a homer. In backyard cricket terms, it was six-and-out. But he didn’t care; the stunned look on Jude’s face made it all worthwhile.
Jude mumbled something Michael couldn’t quite hear and stormed over to the corrugated iron fence, pressing his eye against a rusty hole to search for the ball on the other side. The next door neighbor’s house belonged to an old man in his seventies who lived with his wife and retarded son. They had a Great Dane called Belvedere, which roamed their back garden like a sentry but was as harmless as a mouse. Sometimes he escaped by digging a hole beneath the fence and then went charging around the streets of Serena scaring the willies out of little old grannies until his owner managed to recapture him. Michael liked Belvedere. He threw biscuits and chunks of meat over the fence for him whenever he could, but for reasons he never knew, Jude always seemed wary of him.
Over by the fence, Jude was visibly excited by something he could see through the hole. Gesticulating wildly, he shouted for Michael to come over. Michael dropped the bat and rushed over to join him, eager to see what was happening on the other side. Jude peered through the hole again, and then took his eye away from it, looking directly at Michael with an expression of utter disbelief.
“Someth’ns wrong with Billie,” he said, hushed and afraid. Billie was what he called the Great Dane because he couldn’t quite manage to say Belvedere without tripping over his tongue. “I think he’s dyin’, Mikey.”
Not knowing what to expect, Michael quickly peeked through another rusty hole. The midday sun had heated everything it touched like a devilish King Midas, so the act of pressing his cheek to the fence was like laying his face onto a barbeque hotplate. He ignored the pain to see what Jude was raving on about. What he saw made his skin crawl. Belvedere was lying on the ground writhing in agony, foam drooling out of his mouth like washing suds, eyes rolled back and his legs and tail and body shaking feverishly. Billie was dying, that was for sure.
Five minutes later, Michael pulled his eye away from the hole, the skin of his right cheek and eyebrow scalding red. Billie was twitching no more. If this was death, he thought, it was horrible. He suddenly felt dizzy and he had to suppress the violent urge to vomit. His breathing was short and shallow and he desperately needed to sit down.
Jude, on the other hand, was positively joyous. His blue eyes were gleaming and the smile on his face was as broad as the fence. He was jabbering excitedly, as if it were the best thing he had ever seen.
Michael was suddenly furious. With every word Jude uttered, he could feel his head begin to throb. Hitting him over the head with the Slazenger would have had the same result. He clenched his fists and swallowed hard, then did something he had never done before – he punched Jude flush in the face, a right hook that connected with his cousin’s jaw as well as his bat had connected with the ball. He immediately regretted what he’d done. His hand now hurt like hell.
Michael braced himself for the expected retaliation. They were going to have their first punch up and he was not looking forward to it. To his surprise, Jude did nothing at first, just gaped in shock, then gently rubbed his jaw and glared at him. Coldness washed over his face. Michael was about to say something, maybe even apologize, but he saw something in his cousin’s eyes that was as frightening as watching the death of Belvedere – seething hatred. His voice suddenly evaporated like sweat in the midday sun.
“You’ll regret you ever did that,” Jude said, then turned around and sulked away.
Michael watched him disappear around the side of the house, rubbing his jaw. Later that night, Michael lay in his bed tucked beneath the faded yellow sheet, feeling quite lost, feeling quite ashamed at witnessing the agonizing death of an innocent animal. The skin on his scalded cheek had formed into an ugly blister, but at least his hand had stopped throbbing. In fact, he didn’t seem to feel any pain at all, only sadness, horrible sadness.
His dad was sitting at the end of the bed, seemingly at a loss for the right words to say. Billie had apparently been fed a steak laced with rat poison, something called warfarin, but which Michael initially heard as wafin. It had caused a massive bleed inside Billie’s brain called a stroke. That’s why he’d been fitting and drooling.
Whatever the reason, Michael hoped he’d never have to see such a horrible thing in his life again. He recalled the chilling words Jude had said earlier that day: Someth’ns wrong with Billie, I think he’s dyin’, Mikey.
Seeing the Great Dane die wasn’t the only thing that was worrying him, though. He knew Jude wasn’t going to forget this incident. Not for a long while. Not ever.
The school bell sounded the end of the final period, shaking him from his memories. Michael jumped, and for some reason absently rubbed his fist. He turned and faced the class. They were patiently waiting for him to say something, their faces staring up at him like sunflowers tilted toward the sun. He knew what they wanted to hear, so he quickly gave them permission to leave.
The volume in the room immediately turned to full. The children gathered their bags and packed their books away, then began streaming out of the classroom into the corridor and merging with the children exiting the other classrooms. A little girl in a bright floral dress ambled up to him. Her name, for some reason, eluded him. She was a cute kid, a real daddy’s girl – blonde hair, blue eyes, perfect lips. Pointing to the blackboard, she asked him what he’d written.
He turned around, at first quizzical, then wide-eyed and incredulous. On the blackboard, in large white letters, was a message that seemed to have come from beyond the grave, as if it had been spelled out on a ouija board:
Something’s wrong with Angie.
I think she’s dying, Mikey
Michael staggered back, grabbing a steadying hold of his desktop. He read it again, his mind stumbling over the words like a dyslexic. The little girl asked him another question, but he was still too stunned to answer.
Suddenly, a mental image flashed before his eyes, of Angie drooling and twitching on the ground in a fetal position, writhing in agony, one hand clasping her belly, the other her head.
“Just like Billie,” he whispered, horrified at the idea.
He kept staring at the blackboard, running his hand through his hair. He’d never had a premonition before, he didn’t even believe in them, but this felt very much like one now, like déjà vu in reverse, as if he could sense something bad was going to happen before it did.
He heard the little girl’s footsteps running out of the classroom. She was obviously bored with receiving no answer to her questions and wanted to catch up with her friends before it was too late. He watched her leave and waited until she was out of sight before rubbing the offending sentence off the blackboard. As the duster wiped away the words, he caught himself smirking. The stress of the past few months was affecting him a lot more than he realized. He needed to relax. He needed a nice long holiday sitting on the beach reading a good book and drinking beer. Lots of beer.
He finished cleaning the blackboard and glanced outside the dirty windows. The sky was drizzly grey and the