Excerpt from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So I took off my goalie gloves and reached out to touch the kitten.

Squelch lobbed the kitten at me. "It's yours now!"

Taken by surprise, I caught the kitten.

"Yours!" Squelch ran off laughing back to the village. "Yours!"

The kitten was cold and stiff as a pack of meat from the fridge. Only now did I realize it was dead. I dropped it. It thudded.

"Finders," Squelch called, his voice dying off, "keepers!"

Using two sticks, I lifted the kitten into a clump of nervy snowdrops. So still, so dignified. Died in the frost last night, I s'pose. Dead things show you what you'll be too one day.

 

Nobody'd be out on the frozen lake, I'd suspected, and there wasn't a soul. Superman II was on TV. I'd seen it at Malvern Cinema about two years ago on Neal Brose's birthday. It wasn't bad but not worth sacrificing my own private frozen lake for. Clark Kent gives up his powers just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed. Who'd make such a stupid swap? If you could fly? Deflect nuclear missiles into space? Turn back time by spinning the planet in reverse? Sexual intercourse can't be that good.

I sat on the empty bench to eat a slab of Jamaican Ginger Cake, then went out on the ice. Without other kids watching, I didn't fall once. Round and around in swoopy anticlockwise loops I looped, a stone on the end of a string. Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers. Rooks craw . . . craw . . . crawed, like old people who've forgotten why they've come upstairs. A sort of trance.

 

The afternoon'd gone and the sky was turning to outer space when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake. So if I was at twelve o'clock, he was at six. When I got to eleven, he was at five, and so on, always across from me. My first thought was he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew 'cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sort of swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he'd gone home. But after another half loop of the lake, he'd be back. Just at the edge of my vision. Once I skated across the lake to intercept him, but he vanished before I got to the island in the middle. When I carried on orbiting the pond, he was back.

Go home, urged the nervy Maggot in me. What if he's a ghost?

My Unborn Twin can't stand Maggot. What if he is a ghost?

"Nick?" I called out. My voice sounded indoors. "Nick Yew?"

The kid carried on skating.

I called out, "Ralph Bredon?"

His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.

Butcher's boy.

If a doctor'd told me the kid across the lake was my imagination, and that his voice was only words I thought, I wouldn't've argued. If Julia'd told me I was convincing myself Ralph Bredon was there to make myself feel more special than I am, I wouldn't've argued. If a mystic'd told me that one exact moment in one exact place can act as an antenna that picks up faint traces of lost people, I wouldn't've argued.

"What's it like?" I called out. "Isn't it cold?"

The answer took another orbit to reach me.

You get used to the cold.

Do the kids who'd drowned in the lake down the years mind me trespassing on their roof? Do they want new kids to fall through? For company? Do they envy the living? Even me?

Excerpted from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell Copyright © 2006 by David Mitchell. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.