Hello Darkness

by Anthony McGowan

  Bosola elbowed Funt.

  Funt reached into his pocket and took out a dirty handkerchief. He shook it over the Shank’s desk. A dozen dead bodies fell out, rattling on the polished wood.

  The Shank started back from his desk. His face went blank for a moment, and then weirdly tight, as if it had been suddenly shrink-wrapped.

  Then he said, in a voice hardly more than a whisper, “Explain.”

  I wanted to get my story in first. “I was—” I began, but the Shank cut me off.

  “NOT YOU!” he yelled, his voice now scalpel-sharp. “And sort that collar and tie out!”

  I thought about a sardonic remark on the subject of who had messed up my collar and tie, but this wasn’t a good time for sardonic remarks.

  “Like I said, sir, we found him skiving in the toilets. These things were on the floor, scattered all around him. It looked like he’d just chucked them there the second before we came in.”

  The Shank turned his pale eyes on me again, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I quaked. I was still trying to straighten out my collar, but my fingers felt as thick and clumsy as corncobs.

  The Shank stared on. He prided himself in knowing the name of every kid in the school, though it sometimes took him a while to get there. Not with me, though.

  “Middleton,” he said. “I want an explanation for this, and I want it now.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “OK. Look, I admit I was in the toilets. Chilli last night – you know how it is. So, I heard someone come in. Whoever it was dumped these little guys on the floor. I was just checking them out when Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber came in. That’s all there is to it.”

  Funt tensed next to me. I guessed I was going to pay later for that crack. I considered it money well spent.

  “And why should I believe this … fairy tale of yours?”

  “It’s no fairy tale.”

  “Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor?” said the Shank in a different tone. It was almost friendly.

  “Is that the barber’s shop on the High Street?”

  The Shank’s mouth twitched. He managed to squeeze a lot of meaning into that twitch. The twitch said, You are an idiot, but then it corrected itself, and added, Well, maybe not an idiot; maybe a smart alec. Either way, the twitch said, I don’t like you. Don’t like you at all.

  “Occam’s Razor is the philosophical principle which dictates that where there are two competing explanations for a state of affairs, we should always choose the simpler.”

  “Clever guy, Occam,” I replied. “But sometimes the simplest explanation is wrong. You know, some people think that this school is a dump simply because it’s run by incompetents and crooks. But, personally, I think it’s way more complicated than that.”

  I sensed a conflict raging within the Shank. He wanted to inflict some hurt. He wanted to inflict it personally. But that wasn’t the deal.

  “Bosola, Funt!”

  “Sir?”

  “I do believe our friend Middleton here is a little unwell. Take him along to the sick bay. Get him to lie down for a short while. We’ll see if that improves his … attitude.”

  Right, so now things really had taken a bad turn. The sick bay used to be just that: the place where you went to lie down after you’d puked. At one time there’d been a school nurse who’d take your temperature and paint your gums purple with iodine. Back when I first started to get … ill, I’d hang out there sometimes, and the nurse would talk to me. She had tired eyes and sometimes you’d see her sitting alone in a cafe, smoking. But she was nice. And long gone. Now all that was left in the sick bay was a bucket of sand, and the sad remains of an old dummy used to initiate kids in the arcane rituals of artificial respiration.

  But the sick bay had changed in one other, important way. It was now lined with padded material. In theory it was meant to protect kids who had fits in there, but its true function was, I knew, to make the room more or less soundproof. That meant no one could hear your screams, or the thuds as your head bounced off the walls.

  So, I was to get a beating for my trouble. You could hear the smile spreading across Funt’s face like a crack in a glacier.

  The next thing I knew the big guy bent my arm behind my back and began marching me out of the Shank’s office. He didn’t get far. There was a brief knock, the door opened, and right there before us stood Mr Vole, headmaster of our school.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ON THE CASE

  VOLE had been reading a document as he walked in. Now he looked up. He was tall, but stooped, thereby nicely displaying the shiny top of his bald head. His pate was dimpled like a baby’s bum, and was fringed by a circle of fine, white hair – hair that gave an impression of such infinitely soft downiness that it was impossible not to want to reach out and stroke it.

  “Ah, er, yes, sorry, sorry, my apologies. I didn’t realize that, so to speak, you were, I mean, er, busy. With these, ah, children, I mean pupils, which is to say, young people.”

  That’s the way Vole spoke – he used up a lot of words to say not very much. He was also somewhat in awe of the Shank. No one was in awe of Vole. It would be like being in awe of a filing cabinet or an armchair.

  “Not at all,” said the Shank, grimly.

  Then there was one of those silences for which the adjective awkward might have been invented. Vole looked from the Shank to Funt to Bosola and on to me, hoping that an explanation might emerge. His lips formed various words without committing any of them to the airwaves – I guessed that “er”, “ah”, “that is to say” and “in point of fact” were at least some of them.

  Then Vole saw the brown twigs on the Shank’s desk.

  “Ah,” he said, although this was a different sort of an “ah”, one that had more poignancy and sadness in it. I’d guess, if pushed, you’d have to call it a sigh. He walked across the room and gazed at the tragic remains on the desk. His hands made a cupping motion, as if he were going to lift up the insects in a mute offering to the gods. But he didn’t actually touch them.

  He looked up. His eyes were moist.

  “What … er, how did this … how did this incident … this event come to, ah, pass?”

  “They were killed, sir,” answered Bosola. “Murdered.”

  Vole looked uncomprehendingly at Bosola for a few moments. Then, as the truth sank in, he closed his eyes and brought his hands slowly together in front of his lips, as if in prayer.

  “We try … we try … we try so hard. So very, very hard. We provide every and, ah, indeed any, opportunity to you young people, to the youth of … ah, we give you every chance to flourish, to spread your legs, erm, which is to say, wings. And this is how you, ah, repay us. Truancy, theft, vandalism, destruction of school property … animal cruelty. I wonder sometimes why we indeed, ah, bother.” He opened his eyes again and looked at the Shank. “Why was I not informed of this?”

  “I was just dealing with it,” replied the Shank.

  “But the death of … the demise … as you know, the school pet programme, well, it was important … important to us all.”

  “Which is why I was giving it top priority.”

  “So who or what is, ah, responsible?”

  The Shank raised his chin in my direction. “The finger points to this boy, Middleton. Two of my prefects caught him red-handed.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I blurted out. “I’m just the patsy, the fall guy. Wrong time, wrong place.”

  Vole’s lips were wet. The rest of him was dry as a mummy’s jock strap, but his lips were always moist, as if he’d been sucking the juice out of a watermelon. He licked them now.

  “Mr Shankley seems to think that you were to blame. And these two boys appear to have witnessed, in the sense of, er, having seen the occurrence as it, ah, occurred.”

  “Sir, these two jokers didn’t see a thing. They came in after the real killer had dumped the bodies. And,” I added, letting a neat little pause hang in the air, “I think I know who it wa
s.”

  “You’re a liar, Middleton,” said Bosola, menacingly. “You killed the bugs and you know it.” He turned again to the Shank. “Just give us five minutes with him, sir. He’ll confess, I guarantee you.”

  That threat turned out to be my lucky break. Vole wasn’t much of a head teacher, but you couldn’t call him brutal. He didn’t turn a blind eye to all the violence in the place: he genuinely didn’t see it. But even he couldn’t miss Bosola’s threat. Nor did he like the fact that a kid had just appealed over his head to someone who was supposed to be his deputy.

  “I will not have that language in my, er, or anyone’s office. In this, er, school, no man or woman, for that matter, let alone child, is guilty until it is proven that they are, which is to say that they are not, er, innocent. You, young man, Mandelson, was it…?”

  “Middleton, sir.”

  “Right, Middlebum, you say you know who actually committed this appalling act of, ah, appallingness.”

  “I think I do, sir.”

  “Kindly name the, ah, culprit.”

  I paused. The truth was that I had not the faintest idea who had killed the insects. I knew it wasn’t me, but so far that was all the narrowing-down I’d done.

  “I’ve no proof. I don’t want to give you a name without hard evidence.”

  “The boy’s bluffing. And wasting our time,” snapped the Shank. “I suggest immediate suspension, followed, once we’ve established exactly what happened, by permanent exclusion.”

  “That seems to rather prejudge the, ah, issue…”

  The Shank gave an exasperated sigh. “I wonder if we could discuss this for a moment in your office?”

  “Well, naturally, you mean in private, of course, yes, yes.”

  The two of them went out into the corridor. Funt, Bosola and yours truly were left to puff and blow and look at the ceiling. After a minute or so, Funt aimed a casual kick at me. I caught his foot and held it, with the big dumb bozo tottering and yet frozen, like a photo of a tower block just after the demolition charges have gone off.

  The Shank came back in and I let go of Funt’s foot. I was expecting Vole to follow him, but he never showed.

  That was a bad sign.

  “You’re a lucky boy,” said the Shank. His face and his voice were neutral, unreadable. “Mr Vole seems to think that we haven’t got the evidence to suspend you for this. Plus there is the issue of your ongoing … problems, and the fact that you’ve only recently returned from your period of … recuperation.”

  It should have been good news. Somehow I knew it wasn’t.

  “And so we’re giving you four days – until Friday – to come back to us with a name.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then we cancel the school play. What one might term a collective punishment.”

  I tried to work out the angle. I failed. “That’s a shame, heck, it’s a tragedy. But I don’t act, can’t sing, so why…?”

  “And we let … them know that it’s been cancelled because of you.”

  Them. That could only mean one thing.

  The Queens.

  Suddenly the room was very quiet. Quiet, that is, until Funt filled it with a bass guffaw, and Bosola with a falsetto giggle.

  “You’ll wish you’d been expelled,” tittered Bosola.

  That was the biggest case of stating the obvious since the lookout on the Titanic yelled to mind the iceburg.

  “We’re done here, Middleton,” said the Shank, and waved us to the door, his eyes already on the papers on his desk.

  I was still too stunned to have a snappy answer ready, and I was halfway out the door before I remembered that there was something I would need if I were to stand a chance of pulling my ass out of the fire.

  “I’ll need a Warrant.”

  The Warrant was the official piece of paper issued to prefects and other kids on special duties. It gave you permission to go anywhere in the school any time you wanted.

  “Don’t push your luck, sonny,” the Shank growled back. He used “sonny” in the same way as the Greek god Cronus used it, and he ate his kids alive.

  “If you want the truth, then I need the paper.”

  The Shank thought for a moment, then opened a drawer and took out a neat stack of pre-printed A5 pages. He signed one with a fancy fountain pen and handed it to me.

  “Don’t make me regret this,” he said, icily.

  I was out of there just in time to hear the buzzer go for the end of the morning. Yeah, I’d been bluffing when I told Vole that I knew who’d done the deed on the sticks, but I meant to convert that bluff into a straight flush. And I knew exactly where to start looking.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GOD SAVE THE QUEENS

  THE walk back to the toilets gave me the chance to think about the Shank’s threat. It was bad. It was really bad. I was like a cow with a cut leg in the Amazon river, just waiting for the first piranha to get a sniff of the blood.

  The Queens, or rather the Drama Queens, to give them their proper title, were the most powerful gang in the school. Their reach was longer, their grip tighter even than the prefects’. Their origins lay in the drama club that put on the twice-yearly school plays, but they’d grown beyond that. Way beyond.

  To begin with, the Drama Queens had been a force for good. A refuge for all those out of step with the brutalities of everyday life in our school. For every star milking the lights out in front of the audience, there were twenty back-stage toilers: mousey, timid, but proud to play their part, however small, in the creation of something beautiful.

  But then the drama club had been allocated a budget, and where there is money, corruption will grow, like mushrooms on a dung heap. Yeah, the Queens got greedy. Greedy first for the sake of their art and the prestige it brought them. But then just plain greedy.

  The productions became more and more lavish. Stage sets began to grow, aping New York skylines or Indian jungles or Parisian ghettos as the show demanded. The orchestra swelled – we’re not talking about three kazoos and a triangle here, but something big enough to put on Wagner’s Ring Cycle with a side order of Bizet’s Carmen. The costumes bloomed in gaudy extravagance. The stage was filled with light and glitter.

  All very pretty, but it was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the Queens. They looked after their own. If you messed with one Queen, you messed with them all. And if you got in the way of the juggernaut, then you were going to get crushed.

  The Queens had fought a long turf war with the other main gang in the school, the Lardies. The Lardies were a sort of overweight mafia, and they controlled the supply of junk food to the kids who couldn’t swallow the “healthy option” menu that the New Regime slopped onto their plates. The war between the Queens and the Lardies ended in a sort of compromise, with each gang finding a niche. But nobody doubted that the Queens had inflicted the deepest wounds. For now Hercule Paine, the leader of the Lardies, was content to lick those wounds. But revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold, and then rammed down your enemy’s throat so it chokes them to death.

  Even though the Queens were now about much more than drama, drama was still at the centre of their world. Except that something rather strange had happened. Back in their glory days, the Drama Queens had put on two fresh shows every year. But now it was always the same two. The Christmas panto was Cinderella, and the summer show was The Wizard of Oz.

  Oz, in particular, had become a kind of totem, a symbol. More than that, it was like those blood sacrifices performed by the Aztecs and other Mesoamericans. Without the offerings of hearts, the sun would not rise, the rains would not come, and the world would be lost to chaos and darkness. And without Oz, said the irrational beast that ravened in the school’s subconscious, there would be equally terrible consequences. There would be a Ragnarok, the war at the end of time, and all kinds of bad shit would go down. That kind of thing.

  Everyone knew that Shankley wanted the Drama Queens gone. The money and the power had put th
em out of his control. They needed to be destroyed. So far he hadn’t had a good enough reason to close them down, but the death of the stick insects was just the pretext he needed.

  And now I realized I was stuck in a web that a black widow would have been proud of. Funt and Bosola were sure to put the word around that I was the main suspect for the killing. The Shank had set this all up so that he couldn’t lose. Either I found the perp, and he’d get the credit for solving the crime, or I failed, which would give him the excuse he wanted to fatally weaken the Queens by nixing the play. And nobody would blame him for zapping The Oz; it’d be me the Queens tied upside-down on the school gates, wearing nothing but a tutu and a feather boa, with a big “Q” drawn on my chest in pink lipstick.

  Well, so far, the Queens and I hadn’t had much to do with each other, but that was going to change.

  First, though, I needed something to go on. A clue. And that meant returning to the crime scene.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CSI

  THE toilets at lunchtime weren’t quite as civilized as they were during lessons. The cubicles were all occupied. Some held Year Seven midgets, sobbing for their mothers. In some, grim rites were being performed: the ancient tortures of dunking and flushing. Others contained clandestine scoffers of the forbidden digestive biscuit or Mars bar. One cubicle had smoke pluming over it, although whether it was a furtive fag, or some kid setting himself on fire rather than face the school lunch, I couldn’t say. Perhaps some of the cubicles were even being used for the purposes for which they were designed.

  But my business wasn’t with the cubicles, or the sad wretches they contained. Nor was it with the urinals – although I did briefly want to push a kid’s face into the stinking bowl when I saw him spit his gum in there.

  No, this wasn’t the time for random acts of vigilantism. I was here because I remembered that metallic rattle, which meant that something had been dumped in the bin at the end of the row of sinks. I went straight to it and picked through the paper towels newly deposited there.