The Red Road

by Stephen Sweeney

  Charlie Smith and Simmons looked to one another before the two got into bed and Darren Smith made his way over to the door, to turn the main lights off. The dormitory door opened a minute amount at the same moment he reached it, a black hand snaking in through the gap, and groping around until it located the switch.

  “Go to sleep, boys,” Father Thomas’ voice came before he clicked the light off.

  Darren quickly returned to bed, and through the darkness, I could see all eyes on me.

  Told you so, my own answered them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “What did he say?” Baz asked as I returned to the third year dorm.

  “He said no,” I grated.

  “He’s still going to make you do it?” Sam asked incredulously.

  “Yeah, the bastard,” I said.

  “Make you do what?” Brian Donald, an uninvited member of the Tudor House Clique, asked. He was sitting at Simmons’ desk, copying some of Simmons’ CDs onto tape.

  “Father Thomas put me on the Murga List for being out of bed on Monday night, and Mr Somers is refusing to let me off,” I told him.

  “He put you on the List for being out of bed?” he asked.

  “Yeah, apparently we’re not allowed any more.”

  “Shit,” Brian said, stopping the CD from playing so he could turn the tape over and resume copying onto the other side. “Why didn’t you tell him you were just going to the toilet?”

  “I was outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Long story,” I said dismissively.

  “Because he went to watch Oldman’s porno tape,” Baz chuckled.

  I shot him an annoyed look. I didn’t want that conversation to start up all over again.

  “How have you got it?” Donald wanted to know. “I heard that Goodman confiscated it off some of the second years, who he caught watching it.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  Donald nodded. “They’re all going to get gated for it, apparently. They want Oldman to fess up, but he just keeps laughing about it. He says it’s not his.”

  “They’d have a hard time proving it, I guess.” I looked at Baz, whose bed and desk area was a complete mess, drawers, binders and textbooks all over the place. “Still not found your Tricolore, then?” I asked.

  “No,” Baz said, a little angrily. “I think someone’s nicked it.”

  “Did you put your name in the front?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, but they’ll probably just rip the front page off. I wanted to start writing that essay on La Rochelle, too.”

  “You can borrow mine,” I said. “You’ll probably find it later on.”

  “Is La Rochelle a real place?” Sam wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s just been invented for the book.”

  And at that time, I didn’t particularly care, either. I was still seething from Mr Somers’ refusal to drop my punishment. The dormitory door then opened and Simmons came walking in. He stared at the person at his desk for a moment, appearing quite offended that someone was in his seat.

  “Alright, Ant?” Donald said, looking around.

  “Oi!” Simmons said. “What are you doing? Are you copying my CDs?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t think you’d mind,” Donald said, without so much as a care.

  Simmons picked up the CDs and cases off his bed, where Donald had discarded them a little carelessly. “For fuck’s sake put them back in their cases when you’re done, or you’ll scratch them! What are you copying?”

  “Guns and Roses, and Nirvana. Use Your Illusion I and II,” he clarified.

  “So, what have you got that I can copy?”

  “Nothing you haven’t already got, just some tapes.”

  “I don’t want to copy off tapes,” Simmons growled. “It’ll sound shit.”

  “Have you already done your geography coursework?” I asked Baz, turning away from Donald’s musical dilemmas and focusing on my schoolwork-related ones.

  “Finished it ages ago,” Baz smiled proudly. “I wanted to get it over and done with. I hate geography; it’s so boring.”

  “Which one did you do?”

  “The study of the local shops versus the town centre.”

  “Can I see your results?” I asked.

  Baz hesitated. “To copy them?”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Sam immediately jumped in. “There were two guys who did that last year, and they were caught cheating. They were then banned from taking the geography GCSE.”

  “Woah! Seriously?” both Baz and I exclaimed.

  “Seriously,” Sam nodded. “You can get banned from taking French, too, because it’s the same exam board.”

  I tried to speak, almost choking as I both gasped and too many words tried to force themselves out of my mouth at the same time.

  “What happened? Weren’t they just told to do it again?” I said, finding my voice. I noticed that both Donald and Simmons were paying close attention to our conversation.

  “No, they were just automatically failed for attempting to cheat. Mr Finn and Mr Hancock said that they couldn’t be sure of how much of their coursework was also fabricated, and so they were booted out of the classes.”

  “That’s not good,” I said. I imagined myself being accused of doing something like that. I could kiss goodbye to my sixth form college dreams for sure. It would probably impact my choice of university, too, as well as my future career aspirations. I had been told they checked up on all that sort of stuff for the top jobs.

  “Yeah, but that only matters if you get caught,” Simmons said.

  “Have you copied yours?” Baz said.

  “I just used my older brother’s results from a couple of years back. They won’t bother to check that,” Simmons said with a shrug.

  “Ant, that is probably the first place they’ll check to see if you’ve copied anything,” I said.

  “Fuck,” Donald said, looking very concerned. “I’m going to have to do mine again.”

  “What? No, don’t listen to Crotty. They won’t check,” Simmons scowled at him angrily.

  “Did you copy yours, too?” I said to Donald.

  “Just changed some of Ant’s results,” Donald said, looking between me and Simmons.

  I glanced to Baz and Sam. “Do them again,” all three of us chorused.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually going to do it properly,” Simmons chastised Donald. “Anyway, move. I have some work to do. You can come back and copy these later.”

  “Hey, wait,” Donald said, as Simmons stopped the CD playback and made to eject the tape. He did so a little too fast and the tape reel unwound, a long black trail leading back into the cassette deck. “Oh, fucking hell!” Donald said.

  “Well it was your own fault for not asking me first,” Simmons said, without a care.

  Donald carefully freed the tape from the cassette deck, getting up and standing aside as Simmons took his seat at the desk. As I watched Donald starting to make use of a pencil to wind the tape back into the cassette, I had to wonder how people such as that could remain friends. They seemed to treat each other pretty badly a lot of the time.

  “Bollocks,” Donald tutted as he found kinks.

  “Sorry,” Simmons said, looking over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure he really meant it.

  “When are you going to do them?” Baz asked, returning to the subject of our GCSE Geography coursework.

  “The next weekend I’m home,” I said. “I’ll just spend the Saturday in town. I don’t think I’ll get many responses from the corner shops near home, though.”

  “No, you probably won’t,” Baz said. “I think I talked to one hundred times more people in the city centre than I did the shops near where I live.”

  I nodded, forming a plan to follow Baz’s lead and get the coursework done and dusted as soon as I could. I had something more immediate to worry about before that, though – Friday’s Murga. With the winter winds having returned, I just hop
ed that between now and then it wasn’t going to snow.

  It did.

  ~ ~ ~

  The day of the punishment gradually approached, and the Murga List itself, several handwritten pages of A4 paper, appeared on the school’s main noticeboard on Thursday night, just before dinner.

  Some would judge the severity of the misbehaviour throughout the school on just how many pieces of A4 were present, the number of names extending across two or three pages, sometimes even four. My years at St Christopher’s had taught me otherwise. The length of the List was always directly proportional to the conditions of the season – the worse the weather, the longer the list.

  I only checked out the List briefly, hoping that I had received an eleventh-hour reprieve and not be on it. I saw ‘Joe Crosthwaite’ listed towards the bottom and huffed off back to my dorm, a number of first and second years quite bemused to see a third year’s name there.

  That night’s sleep was broken and uncomfortable, but at least I didn’t receive a visit from the goblins. Still, that might have gotten me out of the punishment had I suffered a freak out and gone rampaging around the school, screaming at the top of my lungs. Social consequences be damned.

  As in the past, I had no alarm clock to get me out of bed, so woke up every few hours, checking my watch to see the time. I had to be down at the main gates of the school at five, an obscene hour at any time of year, but even worse in the winter. At four forty-five I got out of bed, leaving the dorm quietly and making my way to the changing rooms to put on my rugby kit, putting my tracksuit on over the top of it for good measure. I had decided to double layer, as I knew at this hour it was going to be bitterly cold. It always was when I was walking to the classroom block in the morning.

  I saw as I opened the front door of Butcher that a great quantity of snow had been dumped on the school grounds. I commenced the journey towards the front gate, finding the snow easily covering my shoes and climbing well above my ankles. In places it was threatening to make its way up my calves. That wasn’t even the deepest point, I knew. There would be areas of the school, most likely the playing fields, where it was truly deep, coming close to your knees. Falling down in any of this would mean soaking wet clothes in moments, and the need to go and take a hot shower as soon as possible. If there was any hot water, that was.

  I passed a mound of snow that had built itself up around a car. I wished the owner luck getting that started later. Likely it belonged to one of the teachers who was staying at the school overnight, to act as duty master.

  I considered what I might be in for as I walked. The punishments doled out on the Murga largely depended on the sixth former leading it. It was almost as much of a punishment for them as it was for us, the boy having to also drag himself out of bed at some ungodly hour, to fulfil the duty. If the guy was one of the few decent prefects that might be charged with ‘supervising’, then we might not actually start until six. Even better, the morning might involve nothing more than a game of football. That had happened to me once. The Murga’s participants had been split directly down the middle, leading to a ridiculous twenty players per side. We had then just played a football match until seven-thirty, when the punishment had concluded and we had been sent back to our houses for a shower. Some boys had been sent back early for scoring a goal, performing a commendable tackle, or otherwise playing a good game up until that point. I had failed to do either, football not being my strongest sport at all. Rugby was where it was at for me. Still, that had been a good morning and actually worked a lot better to encourage positive behaviour and respect (as opposed to fear) in the younger boys. The only annoying part of that Murga had been the need to get up for it. Yes, Peter Nurse (unfortunate name) had been well-liked for showing such solidarity to those he was charged with taking care of on Friday mornings.

  Most others weren’t.

  In the main, the punishments ran like this: assembling wherever the notice board had designated, we would be met either by one, two, or perhaps even three prefects, depending on how much they despised the unfortunates that had been placed on the List. To begin with, we would be ordered to sprint (not jog, not run) several hundred meters, being made to do it again and again if we weren’t fast enough. Which, of course, we never were.

  After this, push-ups would follow, usually with one of the prefects standing on your back and demanding you raise him several inches off the ground before anyone else was allowed to stop. Being told to take a punch in the stomach without crying or else a group of others would be handed a secondary punishment was something grossly unpleasant that I had only been made to witness once. I had heard a rumour how, on one summer morning, a prefect had marched the group all the way to a pond and forced many to swim lengths. He himself had been punished by the teachers for that one, after most of the boys became ill. He hadn’t cared; he had found it very funny.

  The Murga punishment itself was something that actually never happened. Originating from South Asia, I had heard that it was a sitting position that was quite painful after a few minutes and had been used at St Christopher’s many years ago, during breaks between classes. The offending group of boys would be made to carry out the punishment for the satisfaction of the teachers, to enforce correct behaviour. After either finding it too out of date or dissatisfactory, the punishment had evolved into what it was today, and it only retained the name because no one could be bothered to conjure up a new one.

  ~ ~ ~

  Arriving at the main gates, I saw a great number of other boys standing around, looking cold, tired, and quite scared. I knew that a few of them had suffered this punishment before, some of whom had been in the dormitory I had been prefect of the previous term. To my surprise, I saw I wasn’t the only third year boy present – two others were also in attendance. I wondered what the others had done to earn their place on the List.

  My wandering eyes then came to rest on a figure, standing there in a thick coat and gloves, drinking a cup of something hot. Michael Lawrence, one of the prefects from Enfield. Of all the prefects, why did it have to be him? The guy was a complete idiot, the sort that relished this type of sadistic punishment. Everyone was beneath him, even some of those that he counted as friends. From what I understood, he had always been one to demand nothing less than an A+ or an A in every piece of work he delivered. An A- was the lowest he would tolerate. I once saw him throw a tantrum over receiving a B for an essay he had written during his GCSEs. He was on his way to becoming a doctor or a surgeon or something, definitely something to do with medicine. Being the only one in the school currently destined for such a career, he had a massive chip on his shoulder about it. I dreaded to think what he might have in store for us on this freezing morning.

  “Are all you little cocksuckers here?” he asked, producing a copy of the List from an inside pocket. “I’m going to read off your names, and I want you to answer. If anyone is missing then you’re all going to start with a roll down the hill, without shirts on. Got it?”

  No one answered, and so Lawrence started reading out names.

  “Timpson,” he said, as he reached that part of the list. He looked around as no one answered, as did many others. I couldn’t see the second year anywhere.

  “Timpson?” Lawrence repeated. “Where the fuck is Timpson? Does anyone know?”

  “I think he’s been let off,” a voice squeaked up, one of the second years from Butcher.

  Typical, I thought. He had probably bribed Kenji Suzuki, Butcher’s head of house, to pull some strings. That sort of thing had never worked for me in the past. It showed what having access to a vast fortune and being able to pass brown envelopes around could do for you.

  “Fuck that!” Lawrence said angrily. “I never gave the little prick permission! Someone go and get him—”

  “Good morning, boys,” a voice then interrupted him.

  I turned to see Father Thomas approaching. He was wrapped in his signature long, black cloak against the chill of the morning, his hands hidden somew
here within. Damn, that cloak looked warm.

  “I’m guessing that none of you have failed to notice the snow on your way over; it’s rather hard to miss,” he said somewhat cheerily. “We’ve had a lot more than the forecast said there was going to be, and so we’re not going to run the usual schedule this morning.” He cast his eyes along the road defined by the snow, the snowfall there lying a little shallower than that on the grass verges framing it.

  “We need to get it all cleared, otherwise the delivery vans, cars, staff, and other visitors to the school won’t be able to get in,” he finished.

  I felt my spirits lift. There wouldn’t be any torturous punishments to be had this morning. All we were going to be made to do would be to act as snowploughs, to clear the roads and paths. It would be hard work, sure, and probably quite tedious, but it was preferable to rolling down a snow-covered hill without a shirt on, as Lawrence was eager for us to do. The first and second years were still standing gloomily about, shivering and looking thoroughly miserable. They had no idea of how lucky they actually were.

  “So, if you all want to come with me, we’re going to go to the gardeners’ lodge and get some brooms and shovels,” Father Thomas said, starting off.

  “Father,” Lawrence called, “I think they could all do with a run before we start, to warm them up. A couple of times around the main drive.”

  Shut the hell up, you prick! I immediately wanted to shout at him. He was clearly already bitter that he wouldn’t be able to order us to act out all the little schemes he had planned. I wondered if he had sat up the previous night with a few others, plotting out precisely what he was going to make us do. The sight of Father Thomas approaching must have really ruined his morning.

  “No, no, Michael, there’s no time for that,” Father Thomas replied with a shake of his head. “We need to get started immediately, as there’s a lot to do. Even starting now, it could take us until seven-thirty at least, and the boys will need to get back to their houses, shower, and have breakfast before getting to class.”