The Knife That Killed Me

by Anthony McGowan

  Everyone was embarrassed then, and went away. I went away too, but I looked back, and I thought I’d just see Compson lying on the ground by himself, because you’re never so alone as when you lose a fight. And he was still there, but he wasn’t alone. Bates and Miller were with him, kicking him, and stamping on him, and spitting on him, and I wanted to do something about it, but I was frightened, and I went home, and anyway it wasn’t my business.

  And that’s what I was remembering when Roth took my pathetic weapon away from me, the way he’d take sweets from a baby. And I thought some of those things might happen to me now.

  But none of those things happened. What happened was that Roth sort of put his big hand against my cheek. I don’t know what you’d call it. It was softer than a slap, harder than a touch. And he smiled at me. His teeth were weird. I mean, really weird. They didn’t seem to come in different kinds—you know, the front ones different to the back ones; they were all the same, and each one was separate, with a space in between. They were like the unevolved teeth of some ancient animal.

  “Look at that,” he said, his voice almost warm, almost affectionate. “Will you look at that.”

  I didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what to say.

  “Smack him,” said Bates. He was bobbing and shuffling like someone needing to go to the toilet.

  Roth turned on him. “What?”

  Bates was moving even quicker now, foot to foot, up and down, side to side.

  “’It ’im. His face, his guts. Make him shit himsen.”

  Roth waited. A breath, two breaths. His face as bland as putty.

  At last: “I think he’s all right.”

  “What? But you saw him … saw what he did.”

  “Shut it.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  And then Roth reached over and grabbed Bates by the scruff of his neck and pulled him closer, giving him a little shake as he did so. Exactly the way you would with a cat. Bates made a high-pitched noise, a sort of squeal.

  “Yeah, but what?”

  “Nothing, Roth, I was only saying—”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.”

  “What do you reckon, Miller?”

  “I reckon he’s all right.”

  “I think he’ll do. What do you think, eh?”

  Roth was looking at me closely. Not smiling, his face gray putty again. I was so frightened of him I still couldn’t say anything.

  He wasn’t like the other nutters. He was clever and shrewd. It should have meant that you’d be able to understand him better. The others had a kind of unpredictability. Like cats, you didn’t know which way they’d turn. But deeper down you could understand them. You could see what they wanted. They were like beasts, and their cravings were the cravings of beasts, and they cowered like beasts cower when they come up against something stronger than them. But Roth was completely incomprehensible. Unlike the beasts, he did everything for a reason, but there were no rules for understanding him. Maybe there was a logic there—in fact I’m sure there was—but it was an alien logic. It was like the Spaniards coming up against the Aztecs. The Aztecs went to war to catch people so they could cut out their hearts to appease their gods, so they’d make it rain and help the crops grow. According to their rules this was all rational. But to the Spaniards it was evil and mad.

  I’m not really getting this across. The thing about Roth is that as well as being stronger and harder than anyone else, there was also the fact, the terrible fact, that he was cleverer too. Not clever meaning good at maths or English, but clever meaning that he knew what was happening inside you.

  And now he put his heavy arm around my shoulders and drew me away from the others. The weight on me was hard to bear—he was pressing down and squeezing me.

  “Don’t mind them, they’re all right. Just a bit thick,” he said, his voice now oddly musical. “You’re not thick, though, are you?”

  It was funny. The second time today someone had said that.

  “Depends what you mean by thick.”

  Roth smiled more broadly now, showing me those inhuman, wide-apart teeth.

  “That’s what I’m getting at. These jokers would never think like that. You see, I said thick, and you wanted to know what I meant by it. That’s ’cos you’re thinking”—he pointed to his head—“using this.”

  And now I’m ashamed to say this part, but I don’t want to leave out anything important. When he said that, his voice made soft, intimate, just for me, I felt a glow inside me, a kind of happiness, warmth, peace.

  Roth was someone I hated, should have hated, more than any other person. Hated because he was a bad kid, cruel and vindictive. The kind of kid who would beat another to a pulp and then piss in his face. The kind of kid who would get his thicko mates to throw chewing gum in my hair to help pass the time in a boring geography lesson.

  But all he had to do was say those simple words to me, and I was happy.

  What I felt toward him then, for those few seconds, was love.

  “We’ll have a chat sometime,” said Roth, and then he wandered away, and the others followed him, because they had no idea what else to do with their lives.

  That left me standing alone, no more able to think for myself than Bates or Miller. So I gazed into the distance. And across the playground I saw the group of weird kids, and I noticed that they were looking over in my direction. I didn’t intend it, but my eyes met those of Shane, and he nodded to me. It was a tiny gesture, one you’d hardly notice, but it was there. I don’t know what he meant by it. Then I took in some of the others in the group, and for just a second I caught the eyes of Maddy Bray, and she might have smiled at me, but then another kid gave her a sort of shove from the side, which I think was meant to be friendly, but which seemed wrong for Shane’s gang, as they didn’t go in much for that kind of physical kidding around.

  And then a bell was ringing and it was time to go.

  No one admits to being afraid of death. In books and stories people mock death, and pretend that to die is a small thing. Well, I am afraid of death. Of the death of my body. Of the death of my soul. Of the death coming to find me now, on the gypsy field.

  SEVEN

  My dad went to my school. Twenty years ago. When he’s had a few drinks he tells me what it was like in the olden days. I’ve made it sound like a rough school now, but back then it was worse. The biggest difference was that the teachers used to hit the kids. All the time. There were three ways of getting hit, my dad said. The basic way was just to get slapped, hard, on the face. Dad said it was OK if they just came up and slapped you, but sometimes you’d be mucking about and a teacher would be behind you, and so you couldn’t see the slap coming and it would hit you out of the blue.

  The next step up was being hit with the edge of a ruler on the back of the hand. Dad said there was a special ruler in each class and it had a steel edge and was as heavy as a wrench. You had to hold your hand out, knuckles up, and the teachers, if they were cruel, would leave you waiting for a minute, for two minutes, until your hand started to shake. You couldn’t stop it, he said. Didn’t matter how hard you were. He said sometimes they’d make do with that—the teachers, I mean. Making you tremble. And that was quite bad, but not as bad as when they went through with it, and really let you have it. He said it hurt so much the world would go black for a couple of seconds, and sometimes a kid would wet his pants, but my dad said he never did. It would leave a row of blue lumps, topped by a spot of blood, across your fingers, near where they joined onto your hand. Dad said that you could get it for virtually nothing—for forgetting to bring something to school, for not being in a straight line, for smiling when you should have a face of stone. For having a face of stone when you should be smiling.

  But the top of the range was the cane—a long whippy stick of bamboo. Even then there were variations. Backside or hand. Dad said that getting the cane on the hand actually hurt the most, but it somehow wasn’t half as bad as
having to bend over a chair, feeling as helpless as a worm on the pavement, and taking it on the arse. Dad said that kids always boasted when they got caned on the hand, but when it was the arse, they just shut up, and nothing could get them to talk about it.

  They can’t hit you now. The teachers, I mean. You can tell that some of them want to, some of them really want to. You can see their jaws working in little circles with the effort of not hitting you.

  But they can do other things. One of the things they do is humiliate you. If you shame and degrade a kid, you know the other kids will do the rest for you. For some reason the teachers never seem to bother much with the hard kids, the troublemakers. The ones they hate are the quiet ones. Not just any of the quiet ones, but the quiet ones who aren’t interested in them, the ones who are always looking into themselves.

  The lost kids. The freaks. Yeah, you got it: Shane and his gang.

  I never quite got why the teachers hated them. Maybe it’s because people don’t like it when they aren’t in on the secret, and the freaks went around like they had it—I mean, the Big Secret, the one we all want to know.

  The best example of a teacher who loved humiliation, who relished and ate it like some sickly delicacy—Turkish delight, or marzipan—was Mrs. Eel. After break, after my talk with Roth, I had French with her. Mrs. Eel taught French to the kids who weren’t very good at French, and I think that pissed her off.

  You learned pretty quick to be careful around her.

  A big mistake was calling her Miss—rather than Mrs.—Eel. The way she’d react, well, you’d think you’d called her Mad Bitch or something. Another mistake was to find whatever exercise she had set too easy or too hard. If you made a mistake like that, she would talk quietly to begin with, so you strained to hear what she was saying, and then suddenly she’d scream, and her eyes would be insane, and sometimes a little bit of spit would fly out.

  Other days she’d just be bored, and then she’d pick on someone for no reason at all, some pathetic loner, some harmless wisp of a boy, or a shy girl struggling to come to terms with her body, or a fat kid, or one raddled with acne.

  Having found herself a victim, she would spend the entire lesson mauling him or her with a feline grace it was hard not to admire. And the worst thing was that she would draw the rest of us into it.

  I went into the class with my head down. Mrs. Eel was sitting behind her desk with her back to the class and her feet up on the windowsill. That was bad news.

  The class was all right, meaning there weren’t any kids there to be scared of, just Mrs. Eel. But there was one thing about the class. I sort of said it earlier. That girl was in it, the one who got hit by the football.

  Getting hit by the ball was typical of Maddy Bray. She was unlucky. The most unlucky thing about her was how she looked. I mean, how she looked combined with her name. Bray isn’t a beautiful name, and maybe someone called Bray is always going to get some stick. But if you’re called Bray and you have a long, horsy face, well, then you’re in trouble.

  You know that thing you can do, when you have to put everyone you know, or everyone who comes through a door, into one of two groups—currant bun or horse. Currant bun means round face. Horse means long face. Well, Maddy was definitely horse.

  But that makes her sound worse than she was. Because horse can go either way. I mean, sometimes horse can be bad, but sometimes it can be good. Currant bun is usually in the middle somewhere. I don’t think you could say that Maddy was beautiful to look at. But there was something about her face that made you want to look at it, that made you want to stare. And I don’t mean the way you would at something terrible, some really bad birthmark. It was just the feeling that you could never quite get to the bottom of her face. Sorry, that sounds stupid. I don’t know what I mean, really, except that her face was something I found it hard not to look at.

  Like I said, Maddy was in the Shane gang, but she wasn’t that good at it—being a freak, that is. She never got the look quite right. She was tight where she should have been baggy, and baggy where she should have been tight. And she knew this—knew that she wasn’t there—but didn’t know enough to put it right. She was so conscious of her failings that she spoke to almost no one, and moved silently, like a shadow, through the school, looking at nothing but her own big feet.

  Maddy was clever, or at least she was in the top set for most things, so I don’t know how she ended up in Eel’s class with me. I suppose you can’t be good at everything. But the trouble was that even if she wasn’t great at French, she was better than the rest of us, and that was a dangerous thing with Mrs. Eel. And so Mrs. Eel loathed her. Someone who knew all about what goes on inside other people’s heads might say that she hated her because she feared that she might be a little bit like her, and that can be reason enough for hating if you’re afraid of what you might be. And someone with a simpler view of things might say that she hated her because she was a hating person, and that asking why Mrs. Eel hated Maddy Bray was like asking why a kid likes the taste of sugar.

  All year I’d winced and squirmed as Mrs. Eel tormented Maddy. She’d make her read out the most difficult passages, things that no one else in the class would have got anywhere with. And Maddy would struggle through, with Mrs. Eel not just correcting her every word, but actually laughing at her, laughing in her face.

  And there were other, slyer tricks.

  There was a kid in the class called Mark Hampson who stank of piss. I don’t know why he stank of piss. He didn’t look dirty. Usually looked quite smart, in fact. Maybe he was a bed wetter or something. Mrs. Eel made us sit in alphabetical order. Quite a few teachers did it, as a way of making sure you couldn’t sit next to your friends. About halfway through the first term, by which time she’d worked out both that Hampson stank and that she hated Maddy Bray, she changed the system so that it was based on your first name, which meant Maddy and Mark were together. It was little touches like this that made Mrs. Eel special. Attention to detail, I suppose you’d call it.

  I was sitting at the back of the class, keeping my profile low. Mrs. Eel had written up an exercise on the white board. She hadn’t even spoken to us, but just waved at the board. My mind wasn’t on the class—it never was. But now I had more to think about than usual. The chewing gum in my hair; the strange talk with Roth.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Mrs. Eel was starting to fidget, leaning her chin first on her right hand, then on her left. I guessed that this meant trouble, and I slipped further down in my chair. And then I saw Mrs. Eel fix her gaze on Maddy Bray. Maddy had finished the exercise, and had made the mistake of putting her pen down.

  A little smile flickered across Mrs. Eel’s mouth, like a cockroach skittering across the lino.

  “So, finished already, Maddy,” she said, her words hardly a whisper. But she’d managed to make the word Maddy sound like something you’d scrape off your shoe.

  “Yes, Miss … Mrs. Eel.”

  That was lucky. Sort of.

  “It would seem we’re not really stretching you in this class, are we?”

  “No, Mrs…. I mean, yes, Mrs. Eel.”

  “Perhaps we’re boring you?”

  The rest of the class were alert now, aware that something was happening. And I sensed the general relief that it was happening to this outsider, this half-emo girl.

  “Bray?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Eel?”

  “Do you know the French for ‘donkey’?”

  “No, Mrs. Eel.”

  “Do you know the French word for the sound a donkey makes?”

  “No, Mrs. Eel.”

  “Can you make a sound like a donkey?”

  “No, Mrs. Eel.”

  “Yes you can, Bray.”

  “Please, Mrs. Eel, don’t.”

  “Make a sound like a donkey, Bray.”

  “Please …”

  “Bray, Bray. What does a donkey look like, Bray?”

  “Don’t know, Mrs. Eel.”

  “Lo
ok in the mirror, Bray.”

  All sounds a bit lame? You forget the power of humiliation. You don’t realize what a gift this was to the class arseholes. But more than that, all of us were sucked in by the teacher’s dominance and contempt. The class was half loving it. It was a Christian thrown to the lions, and we were the people of Rome, cheering on each bite. Except there wasn’t any cheering, just silent glee.

  I couldn’t stand it. There were kids in the class who might have deserved that kind of treatment, but not poor long-faced Maddy Bray. And I think I still had some leftover anger from what had happened to me earlier. Anger mixed up with the embarrassment of not having done anything about it, and then of feeling overpowered by Roth.

  If I’d been a different kind of person, I might have been able to say something funny or clever to make it stop. But that’s not me. I’m not funny or clever. So I did something else. I didn’t know what it was going to be until I started doing it, although the truth is it was something I’d day-dreamed about before, as a way of escaping. I’d even looked it up on the Internet, seen some photos and even a couple of short video sequences.

  So I fell off my chair. Then I started shaking. Really shaking. I didn’t have any way of making my mouth foam, and drooling seemed way too gross, so I kept my mouth clamped shut, like that was part of it. My arms were rigid by my sides, and I tried to make the shaking seem like some terrible irresistible force that I was fighting against.

  I sensed the commotion all around me. There were screams and shouts and the noises people make when they’re faintly disgusted but also fascinated. I heard Mrs. Eel, her voice high with indignation and anger. I’d ruined it for her, ruined her fun with Maddy Bray.