“Um, no, it’s SFX. It just looks like that ’cause the picture’s covering the bottom of the F.”
“So you say. But all I can see is a magazine with a woman in a bikini on the cover and SEX written across the top of it.”
“It’s Princess Leia.”
He rolled up the magazine and whacked me round the head with it as hard as he could.
“I don’t care if it’s Princess bloody Diana, it’s confiscated.”
There was no point protesting.
“So you a geek then, eh? Little spoddy sci-fi fan? Wank off over pictures of Daleks do you?”
So many cutting responses came to mind but I wasn’t stupid enough to deliver any of them. I just stood there, head down, silent.
His punishment was typically creative. I had to stand in a corridor and hold the magazine against the wall with my nose. Simple enough, you might think. But he made me keep my feet a metre away from the wall, with my hands behind my back. I was leaning forward at an angle of about 45 degrees, and all my weight was pushed down onto my nose. Within a minute the pain was excruciating. He made me stand like that for half an hour. I never crossed him again, and he soon forgot who I was.
I was still in junior school when I learnt the secret to dealing with bullies: hit them as hard as you possibly can and make their noses bleed. Always worked for me. But when the bullies were officially sanctioned, when they were prefects (or teachers, come to think of it), then the more you protested, challenged them, fought back, or answered their rhetorical questions, the worse things got. They had authority on their side and any argument, reason or excuse you offered could just be ignored.
So I learned to swallow my pride, to bite back the retorts, to clench my fists but not let them fly. Keep your head down, don’t draw attention to yourself, fly under the radar. Secret to a quiet life; secret to survival.
That instinct was deep ingrained in me by the time The Cull came around. I suppose that’s why I didn’t challenge Mac at the start, why I motioned to Norton to keep quiet when Hammond needed our help, why I decided to try and bring Mac down by infiltration and subterfuge. A lifetime of learning how to survive institutional bullying had taught me how to be sneaky, but I no longer understood the rules of open confrontation.
Mac still had the authority, although now it came from the muzzle of a gun and a cadre of lackeys rather than a fancy blue blazer braid, and I was still locked into the role of submissive victim, seething with resentment but staying silent, fighting the injustice indirectly, with plots and schemes.
But I still remembered the satisfaction of bloodying a bully’s nose, and longed to feel Mac’s cartilage crack beneath my fists.
MY MOUTH FELT dry and sandy, my eyes were gummed shut, and my leg was just a distant ache. I could hear someone moving around in the room, but I couldn’t speak or move for a minute or so. Eventually I was able to manage a croak, and I heard a squeal and what sounded like a glass hitting the floor. I’d made somebody jump.
Then the sound of someone filling a glass of water from a jug, and a hand behind my head lifting it and putting the glass to my lips. I gulped down the liquid gratefully.
“Thanks,” I rasped.
“You’re welcome.” The Dinner Lady.
“What’s... where...”
“Don’t try and speak, just rest your head a minute.”
I heard her dabbing something in water and then a cool flannel wiped my eyes clear of sleep and I cracked them open, wincing at the bright sunlight streaming through the windows. I was still in the San.
“How long?”
“You’ve been unconscious for a week. We weren’t sure you were going to survive, to be honest. Your leg was pretty bad. But your fever broke last night, and the infection seems to have burnt itself out. You are a very, very lucky boy.”
I squinted up at her. My head felt like it was full of rocks.
The San door opened and Green poked his head inside.
“He awake?” he asked.
“Just about.”
“Great, I’ll go get Mac.” He closed the door and I heard him walk off down the corridor.
The Dinner Lady leaned in closer, conspiratorially.
“Now listen, before he gets here, I’ve got a message for you from Matron.”
She saw my agitation and shushed me.
“I stayed behind deliberately that night. What, you thought she’d left me behind? Someone needs to be here to keep an eye on you boys and I thought it might as well be me. But we’ve got a little system and we leave notes for each other. I’m not telling you where; she trusts you but I’m not so sure. Anyway, she’s been telling me what drugs to give you, so it’s thanks to her that you’re still breathing. She wants you to know that she and the girls are all right. They’re not too far away but the place they’re hiding has already been searched by one of Mac’s hunting parties, and they didn’t find them. They’re unlikely to search it again so we think they’re safe for now.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, which probably sounded more like the gasp of a dying man, because she offered me more water. I drank thirstily.
“Mac? Bates?”
She hesitated and looked at me with deep suspicion.
“Mr Bates is dead and buried, God rest his soul. Mac’s spent most of the time searching the area for the girls, and training the boys in drill. He’s had an assault course built down by the river and he makes them do it every day for an hour. You should see the way he treats them. Scandalous. Says he’s preparing them for war. Mad fool will get us all killed, mark my words.
“He’s been very interested in you, though. Thinks highly of you, he does. Wants you fighting fit. Says he doesn’t want to start a fight without you there. So you just take your time getting better. The longer you laze around here feeling sorry for yourself the better off we are.”
She fell silent as we heard Mac and Green arriving outside.
“All right, thank you Limpdick, stay on guard, there’s a good boy,” said Mac, as he entered. He dismissed Mrs Atkins with a glance. She made her exit and Mac took her vacated seat.
“Hi,” I said weakly.
“Hi yourself.” He sniffed and considered my leg. “How’s it feel?”
“Throbbing.”
He nodded.
“Well, I’m told you’re a lucky laddie and you’re gonna be fine. You rest up ’til you’re fit, but don’t take too long coz I’m gonna need you.”
“Why, what’s been going on?” I was barely conscious, disorientated, croaking like a frog, and I was being bombarded with information my brain wasn’t quite ready to process. But I needed to know how things stood.
“We’ve got a traitor. Some fucker shot Batesy. Put him out of his misery and spoiled all our fun. I would’ve had you down for it, but you was semi-conscious and raving here in the San when I came to see where you were. So don’t worry, we know it wasn’t you. But we dunno who it was and that makes me... jumpy. Either one of my officers is going behind my back, or some junior’s got a gun hidden away that we don’t know about. I don’t like either of those possibilities.
“Anyway, the fat lady’ll get you some nosh and we can start sorting you out. I’ll fill you in on my plans when you’re more with it.”
I was grateful; I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.
“You rest up, mate,” said Mac. But I was already half asleep.
DURING MY CONVALESCENCE I had plenty of time to assess the situation.
The school was now a fortified camp. There were patrols of the perimeter twenty-four hours a day, and permanent manned guard posts at the main gate and the school’s front door. As a rule there was one officer in each patrol or guard detail, to keep the boys in line.
The day began with parade and inspection at 8am, followed by breakfast, then drill and exercises all morning. The afternoons were taken up with sports and scavenging hunts. Mac had kept the evening movies going for as long as there was fuel, but it was all gone now, so we had to live withou
t electricity. The only technological toys we had left were battery-powered stereos and torches; we’d scavenged enough batteries to keep us going for a while, so we could at least listen to music. When Mac wasn’t running a night exercise the evenings were free time. Boys played board games; Green organised a theatre group and started rehearsing a production of Our Town; a third-former called Lill started up a band.
Heathcote and Williams had expanded their farm and we now had a few fields of livestock. Petts’ market garden was coming along well. Everywhere there was business, activity and purpose.
But there was no disguising the tension that hung in the air at all times. The officers, united by their shared crime, had become a coherent unit, a tight, loyal gang who held absolute power and weren’t afraid to use it. We were lucky that only one of them, Wylie, was an outright bastard. The others bossed and bullied and threw their weight around but things never threatened to get as violent as I had feared they would. Mac seemed to be restraining himself a bit, and I didn’t know why. I had expected that by now he’d be using thumbscrews on a daily basis, but he mostly just shouted and threw the occasional punch. His punishment of choice was getting miscreants to run laps of the pitches before breakfast.
I think maybe he’d shocked even himself with how he’d behaved towards Bates.
He had stopped searching for Matron and the girls. With all the fuel gone our minibuses were now useless and so our search area was limited to a few miles in every direction. Horses were collected when and wherever they could be found, and Haycox was running riding classes for the officers. I could already ride but it was not until very late in my healing that I could bear the pain of being bounced up and down on top of a galloping quadraped.
All Mac’s efforts seemed to be going into securing our position and training the boys. But training them for what? I asked him and all the cryptic bastard would say was “You’ll see”. I was supposed to be his second-in-command but he wasn’t taking me into his confidence.
And as he made his plans and preparations, so I made mine.
Norton’s attitude towards me changed after I shot Bates. Although he was still jokey and conspiratorial I could sense a wariness about him. He didn’t quite know what to make of me any more. I think my actions had surprised him almost as much as they’d surprised me. I didn’t blame him. I was wary of myself.
My father used to wake screaming at night sometimes. I know something awful happened to him during a tour of duty in Bosnia, but he would never tell me what it was. Now I too was waking up sweating and shouting. In my nightmares Bates would scream into my face from his crucifix and Mac would stand by, applauding, as I carved our old teacher into tiny pieces, all of which grew mouths and joined the chorus of agony.
I had never had nightmares before. All the horror and death I had witnessed during The Cull, all the violence that had been done to me physically and psychologically, had never caused me a single night’s sleeplessness. But the violence I had visited upon others was tormenting me. I had always believed that something awful had been done to my father; now I knew it was something awful that he had done to someone else. I realised that I hardly knew my father at all, or what he was capable of.
I was starting to realise what I was capable of, though. And it terrified me.
Nonetheless I remained focused on my objectives – gain Mac’s trust, find an opportunity to betray him, find Matron and the girls, make the school the sanctuary it should always have been. I was willing to do almost anything to achieve my goals, but I couldn’t do it alone.
“YOU’VE GOT A gun, so why don’t you just shoot the bastard?” asked Norton one day as he was wheeling me around the pitches for my morning constitutional.
“What, you mean just walk up and shoot him dead in cold blood?”
“Well, duh. Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. Why not? Seriously, why not?”
“Not exactly ethical, is it?”
He burst out laughing.
“Ethical? Are you fucking joking? This from the man who shot our history teacher, the man who’s accepted a position as second-in-command to a psychopath, the man who, in any court of law, would be held an accessory in the murder of those TA men? Ethical? Don’t make me laugh. Is it any more ethical to plot his downfall from your hospital bed? At least if you went up and shot him you’d be being honest and direct. There’s some ethics there.”
“I’m not a cold-blooded murderer,” was the only answer I could give him.
“Sorry, mate, but you are.”
We moved past the assault course. It was a collection of netting, rope and wood constructions, and a little bit of barbed wire. There was climbing, crawling, jumping, swinging and all that sort of stuff. A group of the youngest juniors were racing through it under the supervision of Wylie, who was hounding poor Rowles, throwing clods of earth at him, firing his gun off close to the boy’s head to simulate being under fire, screaming at him all the time. The poor boy looked utterly terrified.
“If I shot Mac there’s no telling what the other officers would do,” I said. “They certainly wouldn’t take orders from me. I’m just a fifth-former, remember. I may be second-in-command but I’ve not given a single order yet and when I do it’ll only be because of Mac that they obey it. I need to get to know them, earn their respect and trust before I make a move. Divide and conquer, that’s what we have to do here. I’m just trying to get through this with the fewest possible deaths.”
He didn’t pursue the argument, but I could feel that he and I were on tricky ground. We were still friends and allies, but I’d need to be careful not to alienate him any further. Mac tolerated my friendship with Norton, and I needed him to be my eyes and ears amongst the regular boys.
He wheeled me back to Castle in silence, but despite his reservations the next day we sat down to compare notes.
“Wylie is our biggest problem,” Norton explained. “It’s like he’s trying to out-Mac Mac. The others are mostly content with handing out laps, the occasional slap or chores. But Wylie likes to humiliate people. He made Thackaray do ten rounds of the assault course naked the other day. The kid was a mess of cuts and bruises by the end. And he’s got Vaughan sleeping in the cow shed just ’cause he didn’t finish his breakfast.”
“Okay, so if Mac goes then Wylie is most likely to try and take his place, you think?”
“For sure. The rest of them are much of a muchness except Green, who sits at the other end of the spectrum. He’s the whipping boy, the runt of the litter. They’ve started giving him nicknames.”
“Like?”
“Gayboy. Bender. You know the kind of thing. Limpdick is a popular one.”
He looked at me significantly until the penny dropped.
“Oh man,” I whispered. “You think that...”
He nodded. “Couldn’t get it up is my guess.”
“And that makes him vulnerable. They’ll resent the fact that he’s not as guilty as they are and they’ll hate him for it. Plus, you know, he is kind of a poof.”
“You should see him directing Our Town. I think he wants to play Emily himself. He’s got Petts doing it. Says if boys dressed as girls were good enough for Shakespeare, then it’s good enough for us.”
I considered this intelligence.
“Right then, we attack on two fronts,” I said. “I try and get Mac to see Wylie as a threat, and foster Green’s resentment of the others until he’s ready to turn.”
“And while you’re doing that what do I do?”
“You need to sound out the others, but do it subtly. We need to identify those boys who are coming off worst and use that to get them on side. We need officers of our own who can be ready to move when an opportunity presents itself.”
Norton grinned. “Finally we have a scheme.”
“And a plot.”
We shook hands.
“Marvellous,” said Norton. “I think we just increased our chances of being crucified by about four hundred per cent.”
AFTER
THREE WEEKS of rest I finally took to my pins and started walking with a stick. I would always have a pronounced limp, but I began a programme of exercise designed to help build the leg back up to strength.
On the day I walked again Mac asked me to join him in his quarters. He had moved into the headmaster’s old flat. As I knocked on the door and waited for him to let me in I noticed that he’d added a lot of locks to the door. Just like a leader – caution takes the place of ease and soon, inevitably, paranoia takes the place of caution. I hoped I’d be able to hurry that process along a little.
He opened the door and gestured me inside with a smile.
“Take a seat,” he said. I looked around the living room where I’d fought Jonah and was relieved to see that Mac had replaced the furniture; I didn’t fancy sitting on the stain of half-dissolved headmaster. I slumped into the plush upholstery gratefully. I couldn’t remember when I’d last sat on a sofa; it felt like the height of luxury.
I was expecting to be offered a cup of tea or something, but instead he opened the drinks cabinet and poured a couple of large whiskies. He handed one to me and then sat opposite, regarding me thoughtfully.
“I don’t think you like me very much, Lee,” he said eventually.
Oh.
Fuck.
Play innocent? He’d never buy it.
Make a joke out of it? He’d see straight through that.
Okay. Play it straight. Be serious but not confrontational.
I met his gaze. “What makes you think that?”
He shrugged. “Instinct and observation.”
He sipped his drink. I did the same. I felt like I was playing poker.
I don’t know how to play poker.
“I think Bates was right, you see,” he continued. “I think you think you’re better than this. I catch you, sometimes, looking at me and I think I can see you changing your expression, trying to hide the look of contempt before I notice it.”
“Don’t be daft.” I laughed, all matey. He didn’t smile.
“I’m many things, right? But I’m not daft.” There was an edge of warning in his voice, but he didn’t seem like he was about to get angry. Not unless I said something really stupid. I held up my hands and mimed innocence.
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