The Undertow by Jo Baker

a custardy crust on top. Billy blinks away, but it’s too late—Tim looks round, right at them. The movement must make the boil really hurt, brushing the crust against the collar and at the same time making it twist with the skin. There is no real colour to Tim’s face, Billy thinks: pale hair,pale eyebrows, pale eyes. The only colour is the rhubarb-and-custard of that boil.
    They have to keep walking towards him, because it’s the only way into school.
    Tim pushes himself up, away from the wall. He nudges Charlie with an elbow, shoves his hands into the pockets of his shorts. Billy and his friends falter, stop.
    “Aye aye, pipsqueaks,” Tim says. Charlie is moving into place with that uneven rickety gait of his, blocking their way.
    This is how it starts: something said, and something said back, and the two big bony bodies closing in. And it ends in getting hurt. They’ll just cut you off with a smack if you get clever and try to talk yourself out of it. You can’t even run, because Tim’s got legs like a lurcher’s and can outrun anyone; and anyway school is starting. You could try and make a dash for the classroom, but then it’s just waiting for you when you get out, and you’ve got a whole day ahead of you knowing what’s coming at the end of it. Billy knows, now, for the first time, why they choose him in particular to poke at, prod, provoke. The boil on Tim Proctor’s neck gives it away. It’s because Billy has a clean shirt for school, and jam on his porridge and the new toy car that cost more than she can really afford and must have made a hole in the housekeeping—a hole from which everything could unravel into hunger and cold and dirt if it wasn’t for her carefulness and watching and curbing and holding back, and stitching the hole back together for him, so that everything is safe.
    Next time he will keep the Chelsea bun for her.
    “Can we just come past?” Billy tries.
    “
Can we just come past
?” Charlie mocks.
    They are caught on the brink of it. Tim plus Charlie plus him and Francie and Mickey equals—getting hurt.
    “Aren’t we the proper little gent?”
    “Whatcher got there, Billy-boy?” Tim asks, nodding at Billy’s bunched hand.
    Billy’s hand tightens round the car. Rubbery wheels and silvery underbelly, cool as a stickleback. He can’t let Tim take it.
    He doesn’t think it any further. He launches himself at Tim’s middle. Skull into belly, the big boy crumples over him, and the smell of dirty wool and unwashed skin is like an old brown blanket round him. Billy flails, blurred, banging his fists into the skinny sides, the bony back,and for that stunned moment it all seems to be going pretty well. Then Tim hits Billy. Bang. On the cheekbone. Everything whacked out of line. One eye blurred. Head jangling. And then another, an up-cut to the chin. The taste of blood. Someone has him by the belt and is dragging at him, and he lets himself be pulled away. He can hear the shouts and chants of the other boys, but everything is dizzy, swimming. Blood in his mouth. She will be disappointed. Blood on his shirt. She will cry. He wants to cry too. But he has his car. He still has his car. And he stood up to the bully; she should be proud of that. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
    His cheek still throbs, and is tender to the touch, but the skin is unbroken. His lip, however, is split open and tastes stingy. If he tucks his chin in and squints down, he can see the dark blood stain on his shirt, just below the collar. He glances sidelong at Tim Proctor. The big boy is upright, soldierish, stiffly staring at the sage-green wall, his skin grey in the indoors light. His kneecaps stick out like doorknobs. Tim’s dad died somewhere in the mud. Probably. They mostly did.
    Billy wants to say sorry, but he knows it’s better not to.
    The door opens, and the headmaster half leans out.
    “Ah, boys,” he says, as if he’d forgotten them. “You’d better come in.”
    The headmaster is