Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992
The Man Who Ate People
by Peter Lovesey
1991’s EQMM Readers Award winner, Peter Lovesey, is the author of eighteen novels, including the historical series featuring Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian sleuth whose further adventures were chronicled in a television series shown in the U.S. on PBS’s Mystery. The author is also adept at capturing the social milieu of our own day, as we can see in this story of a group of school children with a summer vacation before them and a restless need for adventure...
No one knew the girl. She turned up at the rec one Friday morning in the summer holiday when the hard lads from Class 5 were doing nothing except keeping the younger kids from using the swings. Gary and Clive were taking turns at smoking a cigarette. Podge Mahoney was trying to mend a faulty wheel on his skateboard. Daley Hughes and his brother Morgan were on the swings — not using them in the conventional way, which would have been soft, but twisting them so that the chains entwined. The rest of the bunch, including Mitch — by common consent the most mature — lounged on the grass talking about the bikes they wanted to possess.
None of the girls from Class 5 ventured anywhere near. This incautious miss strolled up to the unoccupied swing, backed against it to push off and started swinging, her eyes focussed far ahead, excluding the lads from her vision. Thin, pale-skinned, with a straw-coloured ponytail, she was in black jeans and a white T-shirt.
Several heads turned towards Mitch for a lead. Mitch possessed the coveted first floss of a moustache and he generally spoke for all of them if required. He leaned back on his elbows and said, “Someone wants a swing. Give ’em some help.”
Paul, the boy Mitch had addressed, said, “Come on,” to Clive. The pair got behind the girl on the swing, waited for it to come to them, tucked their fingers over the seat and heaved it forward. When it had soared high and swung back, they gave it another push, straining high to catch it at the peak. The rest of the lads chorused support with a rising “Wooooo!”
Against expectations, the girl didn’t scream. Indeed, as the swing soared to the high point of its arc, almost level with the crossbar, she brought her knees up to her chest to secure a footing. Then she braced and stood upright — an acrobatic feat that few, if any, of the watchers would have essayed.
The ironwork groaned. Paul and Clive stepped out of range, for the girl was imparting her own momentum to the swing, hoisting it still higher by getting leverage bending her knees and virtually kicking the seat upwards. She looked capable of going right over the top. She was fearless. The mocking chorus had already died in the throats of the watchers. The girl kept the display going for long enough to demonstrate that she was doing it from choice. When at length she signalled the end of the ride by straightening on the swing, making herself a dead weight, there was an awed silence. After the swing was still again, she remained standing on the seat, arms folded, only her left shoulder lodged against the chain to keep her balanced.
“What’s your name?” Podge Mahoney asked. He’d given up fiddling with his skateboard.
“Danny.”
“That’s a boy’s name.”
“Danielle.” She made it sound like Daniel.
“What school?”
“Grantley.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a private boarding school.”
Roger, who was a good mimic, repeated the statement in the accent of the private boarding school.
The girl was undeterred. “What are your plans for today? What are you going to do?”
“Nothing much,” said Podge.
“That’s our business,” Mitch said, sensing that the girl was trying to gatecrash.
“Mind if I join in?” Danny asked.
“Course we mind,” said Mitch. “Piss off.”
“I can get cigarettes.”
“Fags?” said Clive. “You can get fags?”
“We wouldn’t take bribes,” said Mitch, and several faces fell.
“What are you, a gang, or something?”
“No,” said Mitch, who was known, and respected, for the honesty of his statements.
“I want to join.”
“Don’t be so dumb.”
Clive added, “Find some girls to play with.”
She shifted her position on the swing just a fraction and braced her legs, imparting a shudder to the structure. “Who’s going to make me?”
No one answered. Podge walked across to his skateboard and started taking an interest in the wheels again.
She was a scrap of a girl really, but her manner unsettled everyone. She said in her elegant voice, “Anyway, you look like a gang to me. If you were a gang, what would one have to do to join?”
All eyes turned in Mitch’s direction. No one else was capable of answering such a hypothetical question. Until now, nobody had thought of the group as a gang. They were just the kids from Class 5, obliged to hang about the rec until they thought of something better to do. At the end of the summer they would go to secondary schools and be dispersed among a number of classes that would be called “forms.” For these few remaining weeks they clung to the familiar.
Mitch pondered the possible entrance requirements of the hypothetical gang. He was sure it wouldn’t be enough to say that girls were excluded. This one was unlikely to accept the logic that she was different.
He had to think of something she wouldn’t contest. At length he said, “If we were a gang, which we aren’t, I’d make a rule that anyone who joined had to show their thing.”
The rest didn’t share his seriousness. There were cackles of amusement. Morgan said, “Girls haven’t got things.”
“Shut up, toerag.”
The laughter stopped, quelled by the force of Mitch’s putdown. Nobody wanted to catch his eye.
The girl Danny said, “If I do, am I in?”
Mitch was finding it difficult to cope with her erratic reasoning. Clinging doggedly to reality, he said, “It isn’t a question of being in or out. We don’t have a gang, okay?”
“Anyway,” added Clive to the girl, “you wouldn’t dare.”
Nobody anticipated that she would take them up on the dare at once, in broad daylight, in the rec, in full view of any grownups who happened to be passing. She unfastened the top button of her jeans and called across to Mitch, “You won’t see from over there.”
She proposed to display herself standing on the swing. For a moment everyone held back in awe. Then Podge Mahoney took a step closer. It was the signal for a general advance. Daley and Morgan disentangled themselves from the other swings. A half-circle formed in front of the girl. Mitch, on his dignity, had to decide how to react. The others had left no doubt of their commitment. If he missed this, he’d be like the kid sent early to bed the night they showed Jaws on TV. He was the last to his feet, but nobody noticed, or cared. The girl Danny had turned an intended humiliation into a show of power.
She gripped the front of her jeans and said, “Ready?”
A couple of heads nodded, but no one spoke.
In a slick movement she slid jeans and knickers down a short way. Most of 5A had been initiated into la difference at some time in their lives; none so publicly, nor with such nonchalance.
“All right,” she said as she drew the jeans up again, “someone else’s turn.” She pointed to Mitch. “Yours.”
The tension broke to howls of laughter, gleeful at Mitch’s discomfiture and relieved that Danny hadn’t pointed to anyone else.
“On the swing, Mitch!”