“What the hell did you think you were playing at?”
The closed door did little to muffle McHale’s rage, and his words came through loud and clear.
We clustered around the little safety-glass window in the door. McHale was looming over Flaherty, his beige safari suit flapping about him like the wings of a very unfashionable bat.
I don’t know what Flaherty said next, but whatever it was it tipped McHale over the edge. He made a grab for Flaherty, but the boy was too quick for him, and he ducked under the lunging arms and raced towards the door. He reached it a millisecond before McHale, pulled it open, and burst out like a ball of phlegm shot from a footballer’s nose. McHale was right behind him, a red-faced avenging angel. Whoosh went Flaherty, and whoosh went McHale, scattering the kids in the corridor.
It was fantastic, the sort of scene that gets talked about for years afterwards.
Only one kid hadn’t been watching what was going on. She was lining up for another room on the floor, and she had her back to the excitement, her straight, strawberry blonde hair reaching down almost to the waistband of her skirt. I don’t know if she had deliberately turned her back to the action in a not-wanting-to-follow-the-herd kind of way, or if she was simply lost in her thoughts. But as the two figures raced down the corridor towards her she began to turn, stepping further from the wall to do so.
Agile little Flaherty easily swerved around her, his feet dancer-quick. But McHale caught her with his hip and spun her backwards onto the floor. Her schoolbag skittered away behind her and, as it went, it spilled one item of its cargo: a small box of tampons.
McHale was so focused on his target that he didn’t notice what he’d done, and carried on after Flaherty. The two of them disappeared down the stairs, the teacher still shouting and straining to lay hands on the imp. And as the shouts and footsteps from the stairwell grew faint, so attention shifted to the girl.
Someone, a little Year Six brat, shouted out, “Jamrags! She’s got jamrags!” and then there was a general jeering and cruel laughter, as if having a period was some terrible mistake she’d made that ought to be punished.
Amanda Something was still on her back, but now she turned onto all fours, and I was glad that I could not see her face, because even having to imagine it caused me pain.
Over the past few days I’d found myself doing things without meaning to, without trying to, without wanting to. But now the opposite was happening. I made myself walk, made myself act against some knotty internal resistance.
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?
I walked, slowly at first, between the lines of jeering kids; walked past Amanda, who was still on the floor, her face in her hands. The little brat and his mates had begun kicking the box of tampons about like a football.
STOP!
I went up to the one in possession and pushed him back out of the way. I felt the corridor become quiet.
“Hey!” said the kid. He looked about six years old, but he must have been twelve or thirteen.
“Back off,” I said, and I guess I must have sounded pretty mean, because he did.
Jack had been trying to stop me from moving, but he couldn’t, and now he was talking rapidly.
DON’T IGNORE ME. THIS IS A BIG MISTAKE. THERE’S A TIME TO STAND OUT, AND A TIME TO TUCK IN. YOU’RE GOING TO TAINT YOURSELF. DON’T HELP THIS ONE. SHE’S WEAK. SHE’S ONE OF THE DAMNED. STAY AWAY. STEER CLEAR. SOMETIMES THE MOB UNDERSTANDS BEST. YOU’LL BE DRAGGED BACK INTO THEM. THE STINK WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU. HER TOUCH IS DEATH. BURN THE WITCH.
Jack had become shrill and birdlike. He was squawking, his rage making him incoherent. And that made it not harder, but easier, to ignore him.
I bent and picked up the box, resisting the urge to look at it. A gasp came from the corridor—and that’s how it felt, as if it were the walls and floor that were shocked. I walked back to Amanda, and then I got a bit stuck. She looked up at me, still helpless. It was one of the days when she had makeup over her birthmark, but it had become flaky and worn.
I’d never been this close to her. Her eyes were a green so pale they seemed almost colorless. There was a little mole no bigger than a full stop above her lip. Should I give her my hand to help her up?
It would mean touching her.
I think I wanted to touch her.
Touching wasn’t the right thing to do.
I held the box out to her. She was kneeling. She took the box, her eyes on mine, and put it back in her bag. Her lips formed a “thank you” but I don’t think any noise came out.
“Hey, Brunty’s got a bird!”
I’m not sure who shouted it out, but it should have been the beginning of a raucous jabber. There must have been forty kids in the corridor, and I expected to get some grief. Grief was a given.
But the cry was not taken up. No one joined in or added anything or came up and slapped me on the head. I was lucky in that there weren’t any of my enemies around, just the younger kids and a load of others who didn’t care about me one way or the other. But there was more to it than that; some weird . . . I don’t know, spell or something that stopped them taking the piss. Maybe it was that the thing I’d done—picking up the girl’s box of tampons and giving them back to her—was so transgressive it had sailed clear out of their gun sights. Or maybe they all felt a bit sorry for laughing at the girl with the birthmark, guilty about her loneliness, guilty about the years of pain they had done nothing to assuage, and this gave them a chance to redeem themselves. Redeem themselves above all for the fear and disgust her face brought them.
Maybe not.
And then McHale was back, without the wretched Flaherty, growling and muttering, and Mrs. Plenty, who teaches biology, appeared from another room, looking suspiciously about her. Mr. Curlew beckoned us in, we all started to move to our desks, and when I looked around Amanda Something wasn’t there.
Some
Art History
I was walking out of the gates that afternoon with Gonad, and although we were talking about who’d be better at snogging, Hawkgirl or Catwoman, I was really thinking about Amanda Something, but not in a snogging way, more just having her face hover around in my head. I was trying to work out what I thought about the whole thing, but this was a problem that you couldn’t fix with thought. The thought couldn’t get at it. It was like trying to get full on soup. Then I noticed the little crowd, maybe twenty or twenty-five kids, clustered around the social club wall.
I’d forgotten about the strange fresco.
When we got closer I saw that there was a teacher at the front of the crowd. It was the deputy headmaster, Mr. Mordred. Mordred had only just taken over from Mr. Kerr, who was an old-fashioned psychopath, an ogre with the traditional ogre’s job of frightening children—a job he had accomplished with, if not finesse, then at least a certain brutal efficiency. In his later years, however, Kerr had become a bit of a joke. He had an artificial leg that creaked when he walked, and he was known to pine unrequitedly for Mrs. Eldridge, the French teacher. He was given early retirement after an incident in the school snack shop, although no one knew what happened, only that a packet of pickled-onion-flavor Monster Munch crisps was involved, and that it wasn’t pretty.
Mordred was brought in from a reform school in Doncaster or Halifax or somewhere exotic like that, and tried to introduce an element of science to the job of intimidating the kids, and he soon succeeded in making himself the most feared and hated of all the members of the staff. Unlike Mr. Kerr, he possessed all his limbs, but he was short and bald and spoke with supernatural clarity, and he had these creepy rimless glasses, which made him look like a concentration-camp doctor, the sort that did experiments on twins, and you just knew that for him humiliating kids was a poor substitute for applying electrodes to their genitals or pulling out their toenails with hot tongs.
Me and Smurf came late into a school assembly once—late only because we were carrying the overhead projector—and Mordred said with that voice of his that cut like a Stanley
box-cutter, “When you and your girlfriend have finished discussing your makeup, we’d like to get on with the assembly.”
Of course the whole school exploded into laughter. It wasn’t witty, but it was brilliantly designed to whip the mob into a frenzy, and we were still feeling the heat from it a month later, and for us heat took the form of being spat on, thumped, dead-legged, and so on. And if you don’t know what that means, then you’ve never been to a school like the Body . . .
So, as you gather, I had no very high regard for Mr. Mordred.
I could hear his voice now—high-pitched, cruel, the hint of barely suppressed hysteria—passing through the crowd as easily as a neutrino slides through matter (and that’s actually very easily, in case you aren’t good at physics).
“This will not be tolerated. I want to know who did this. I want names. I want to tear the entrails from whoever was responsible and eat them raw, and then defecate in the cavity.”
Well, not the last bit.
The trouble was that, despite the natural fear that Mordred could generate, there were two major factors working to undermine his authority. The first was that he was outside the school gates, and as the darkness was to orcs, so the school grounds were to Mordred.
The second was that he was standing in front of what could now without equivocation, doubt, or uncertainty be described as a Colossal Knob.
Yes, the shape emerging from the wall had now clarified itself into the unmistakable outline of a ginormous willy. It was like when you see someone coming towards you from miles off, and at first they’re just a smudge, but then they become human, and then you begin to recognize them, or at least begin to find something familiar, even if you can’t say for sure who they are, and then you think you know who they are, and then you definitely know them. And okay, so sometimes then you realize that it’s not who you thought it was, and you have to take the stupid grin off your face, or freeze that wave halfway through, or pretend you were looking at someone else behind the baffled stranger who’s now staring back at you, or perhaps you try to pass off the gesture as something else altogether, say maybe that you’re cleaning a huge sheet of glass which happens to be propped across the footpath, or you pretend that you’re just doing a bit of stretching, that’s it, reach to the left and reach to the right, one two, one two.
Where was I? Yeah, the knob. We were all used to seeing them scattered around the place: kids would scrawl them on your exercise books or etch them with compasses onto the cubicles in the bogs. They would turn up in odd places, like on the ceiling in the library or drawn in lipstick on the security-glass panel in the headmaster’s office door.
And the interesting thing about all of these cocks—well, actually the boring thing about them—is that they all looked exactly the same. Short stubby cylinders aimed upwards at the stars like a 1940s comic-book vision of a rocket, complete with the two side boosters.
But this one was different. It was, in all, about two meters long, and painted about three meters from the ground, so whoever it was must have had a stepladder. Or a brush on a stick. Or very long arms. The medium appeared to be white emulsion, although the delicacy of the shading created the illusion that other colors had been used. The most striking aspect was the clever employment of perspective to give a lifelike three-dimensionality to the phallus. It seemed to curve out at an angle from the wall, as if its owner had half turned to face the viewer.
And rather than the cold, metallic lines of the traditional knob, this one was soft and yielding and organic. Almost vulnerable, in fact, despite its heroic dimensions. So in a world filled with pricks (and I don’t just mean of the illustrated variety), this one truly stood out.
Yes, it was a masterpiece.
MOrDred, the
GlaSses, the Girl
And it was this masterpiece that confronted Mordred now, making his usual Nazi act entirely ineffective.
Someone started to giggle. There was some jeering, which gathered force as it turned into a cascade of laughter and jokes, and then the pushing started, but not in a vicious way, more a way of getting someone else to lurch into Mordred, and then suddenly all you had was a mass ruck with everyone diving on top of each other, and I saw Mordred crawling away, but without his rimless specs. And then he stopped crawling and turned around to look for them, feeling about like some kind of cave creature because he was blind without them.
That’s when Jack Tumor said, NOW, and I knew what he meant, and I started to move.
Somehow I’d already made my way to the front of the crowd, where Mordred was crawling and feeling. I saw the glasses there, just out of his reach. And then, without pausing, I walked up to them and . . .
Crunch.
It was a satisfying feeling, and a satisfying sound. It felt like a large bit of machinery sliding into place, notch clunking into groove.
Instantly Mordred froze, and the noise of the crunching glasses even penetrated the mind of the mob, and a silence fell.
“What was that? You, boy!”
I wasn’t really in charge of any of this. I should have been crapping myself, but all I felt was mildly perturbed, but also interested about what would happen. It was as if I was a spectator on my own life.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” I said dreamily. “I was trying to help . . . with your glasses, and I . . . I seem to have stepped on them.”
“Give them here.” He held out his hand. There was the tiniest hint of a tremble.
I stooped, scooped up the broken bits, and passed them to him. Mordred tried to fit the mangled specs on his face. It was a pleasingly Lord of the Flies moment.
I guess that Mordred felt that his authority had been diluted, or else he’d surely have dragged me back into school where he could devise some form of torture for me, but all he said then was, “My office. Tomorrow morning.”
There was something deeply wonderful about his helplessness. Like I said, this wasn’t a nice man, or a well-meaning one, or even a rough diamond.
“Sir,” I said, noncommittally.
He peered through the cracked lenses. He was probably seeing about seven of me. I, on the other hand, was seeing him with a weird clarity. I could see the dry skin on his thin lips. I could see his tiny white teeth, like the ones you see when there’s a whole fish, head and all, in the fish bit of the supermarket. I could see the dimple on top of his baldy head. It looked like someone had dropped a ball bearing on him from an upstairs window. I could see the signet ring on his little finger, and I could see two black hairs peeping out from the space between the buttons of his crisp white shirt.
“Name, boy.”
“Ness, sir.”
He changed the angle of his head, trying to see me through a bigger segment of the broken lens.
“Initials.”
“A. P., sir.”
“Remember then, my office, before registration.”
The threat was there, but it was a feeble one. The roar of a toothless lion, a eunuch’s come-hither. And by now one or two of the bright sparks had got my little joke, which isn’t surprising as it was as old as language itself.
Mordred had begun to walk primly back towards the school when the first voice shouted out: “Mordred wants to see A. P. Ness.”
“Another one. He can’t get enough of them.”
By the time he’d spun back, the crowd had started to scatter. His mouth opened. A kind of high-pitched wail came out. Aieeeeaillah! Something like that. More despair than rage. Oh, it was good, it was very, very good.
I ran too. There were bodies around me, and my back was clapped, and my hair was ruffled, and voices said “nice one” and “genius” and other things I never expected to hear. And then I stopped and there was a little group around me, and Gonad was there, puffed and flushed and happy.
But someone else too.
It was Uma Upshaw. The love of Smurf’s life.
“That was good,” she said. “Really good.”
I hadn’t noticed her before in the crowd.
> YOU’RE IN, OLD SON.
“Ah, it was nothing.”
I was worried I was going to blush. Blushing would probably have been bad.
I’M WORKING HERE FOR YOU, BOY, said Jack, straining. GOT A GRIP ON THOSE FACIAL ARTERIES, HOLDING BACK THE BLOOD. TEAMWORK.
“Something,” said Uma.
“Okay. Maybe something.”
She was smiling at me. Right at me. I thought of Smurf. I tried not to think of Smurf. I succeeded.
And then she walked away with a couple of her handmaid-ens. After a few steps she half turned, and smiled again. I went weak at the knees. Going weak at the knees is one of those clichés based on the truth—it’s exactly what happens to you. But this time there was more—hell, I went weak at the everythings.
A Parting ShOt
So that was all great, or I should say, really great, but with a bit of mild panic about what tomorrow might bring. And then, as I was heading home, still with Gonad and a couple of other kids from my year, I felt a hot pain as someone grabbed the hair at the back of my neck.
I thought for a second that Mordred had come to wreak his revenge, and I turned, expecting the worst, cringing and twisting with the pain.
It wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t good either. Tierney was behind me. He let go of my hair.
“Funny boy,” he said. “Think you’re clever?”
Bit hard answering that. So I didn’t say anything.
“Fancy Uma Upshaw, don’t you?”
“What’s it to you?”
I knew what it was to him. Like I’d said to Smurf, he’d gone out with Uma a couple of times, before she dumped him for an older boy who had a moped. We weren’t really supposed to know all that, but nothing stays a secret for long at the Body.
“She’s my bird,” he said, jutting his chin out.
Big mistake.
“No she isn’t.”
Jack Tumor Page 6
