The Red Road

by Stephen Sweeney

  “I saw one of the papers, and it didn’t look that hard.”

  “Believe me, when you’re actually doing them, they feel like the hardest thing in the world. You’ll find out next year. Now, seriously, please go to sleep, otherwise I’ll do as Ant already suggested and report you to Mr Somers. It’s only going to be like this for two weeks, guys. I’m sure you can cope. And then both Ant and I won’t be here, so you can do as you like.”

  “All right,” the boys said and fell quiet.

  I looked at my timetable. geography first, then English lit, biology, geography (essay questions), chemistry, English lang, physics, history, French, general studies, history (essay questions), and finally R.E. (or R.S. as some were now starting to call it). Despite my personal tutor being one of the subject teachers, I had always found geography a bit of a pain and a bore, so it was nice to get it out of the way early on so I could concentrate on my more difficult subjects. Physics and chemistry were still the two that I was most bothered about. There were so many equations and constants that needed to be remembered in physics, as well as a whole string of symbols and details about polymers, oxides, bonds, melting points, and acids and bases for chemistry. I had scored a B in each during my mocks, and so hoped that the final exam wouldn’t be too much harder. I had largely gotten over my fear of R.E. It was just essay writing and, as long as you presented your arguments correctly, there was no wrong answer.

  I glanced at the calendar on my wall. In a fortnight this would all be over, and I would be a free man. There would only be two weeks of term left after that. The school had told me that, following the completion of our exams, we were free to leave or stay around for some practice A-Level classes. Though I was keen to get away from St Christopher’s as soon as possible, I was giving those sample classes some serious consideration.

  Economics was one of the subjects on offer, and so I thought it might be worth investigating while I was still here. Of course, whether we were allowed to take the subjects on offer was ultimately at the discretion of the teacher. If they felt that you might struggle with it, or it wasn’t a good fit with the other subjects you might be taking, they could blackball your attempts to enrol. I wouldn’t be taking history, chemistry or French, so I doubted that I would have any problems. I would probably sign up for economics, maths and English, the three subjects that I wanted to study at BSFC. This would help me to ease my way in.

  A little while later, Simmons switched off his lamp and got into bed. I followed suit. Four sleeps until D-Day.

  ~ ~ ~

  On the morning of my first exam I made my way down to the assembly hall, along with all the other boys in my year. We had been brought there the previous week by the headmaster, to show us where we would be sitting some of the most important tests of our lives. As had been promised back then, the hall was now filled with a number of small desks and chairs, about five columns and several rows. There were a lot more than were needed for the third years by my count, and as I waited I saw a handful of sixth formers arriving to join us.

  “Would the sixth formers please come to the front,” Mr Finn, one of the invigilators, asked. They shuffled forward, looking every bit as nervous as the rest of us. Mr Finn seated them, starting in alphabetical order and having them sit one behind the other, consuming a little over half of the first column.

  “How many of you are sitting the Oxbridge paper?” he asked of the eleven or so sixth formers. Two raised their hands, and he made a mental note before coming forward to the rest of us, still clustered by the door.

  “I trust you’ve already been made aware of the seating arrangements?” he asked.

  We nodded that we had, but he repeated them anyway. As with the sixth formers, we were to sit one behind the other, in columns, in alphabetical order. I found my place in the first column, and nervously began to unpack my pencil case, scrabbling to grab one of my pencils as it made a daring leap off the desk.

  “The exam hasn’t started yet, but from here on, until you leave the assembly hall, there is to be no talking,” Mr Finn said. “If you have any questions, please raise your hand. We’re just waiting for Mr Sutherland to arrive, and then we will start handing out the papers.”

  No hands were raised, and Mr Sutherland, the second invigilator, arrived a few minutes later. With both men present, the exam questions and A4 sheets were handed out. DO NOT look at the questions or turn your paper over, we were told. Once all the papers had been handed out, Mr Finn began explaining how the exam would run.

  The sixth formers were sitting history, and their exam was to last two hours. Unlike us, they were allowed to look at their exam questions beforehand, but not start. It made me glad not to be doing A-Level History. It sounded as though they were being given extra time to consider some rather complex questions. My own geography exam was set to last for an hour and forty-five minutes. Despite the fact that we would be done fifteen minutes before the sixth formers, we were told that we wouldn’t be allowed to leave, as it could disturb those sitting their A-Levels. Our papers would be collected up, and we would be required to wait out the last fifteen minutes patiently. I hoped that this wouldn’t become a regular occurrence.

  After a great deal more preparation and ensuring that we were all comfortable with the set-up, Mr Finn looked at his watch, declared that the time was two minutes past ten, that the exam would finish at two minutes past twelve for the A-Level students, and eleven forty-seven for the GCSE paper, and that we should start.

  I opened the booklet, my fingers shaking slightly as I did so, and began thumbing my way through the pages to get a feel for how taxing the more tricky and lengthy parts would be. My eye caught something as I did so, an Ordinance Survey map. It looked familiar. Very familiar. I then looked to the question below –

  A) What is at grid reference 212452?

  B) How high is the highest point at grid reference 2043?

  C) What is the relief at grid reference 2244?

  D) What do grid references 2145 and 2341 tell us about the past activity in the area? Explain your answer.

  I couldn’t believe what I had just seen and turned quickly to the final page to the essay questions.

  1) Discuss the positive and negative impacts of tourism on an area.

  2) Describe the two main types of ecosystem, illustrating your answer with examples.

  Was I dreaming? Aside from a handful of differences, this was the very same paper that I had sat during my mocks and used as a revision template ever since. Had Mr Finn been aware of this when he had slipped it to me? I wondered. Had the exam board made an error, or did they make a regular habit of recycling the papers? I looked to the man seated at the front of the hall, but he didn’t meet my eye.

  I glanced to those seated around me, some nodding quite happily to themselves. Baz met my eye and grinned. We had revised this paper together just a few nights ago. This was going to be terribly easy. I snatched up my pen and commenced writing, answering the multiple choice questions robotically, ticking the boxes that I already knew were correct.

  I finished the entire paper after just an hour and twenty minutes, and despite going over it a couple more times to ensure I hadn’t missed something, I came to the conclusion that I already had geography in the bag.

  ~ ~ ~

  The next two weeks became a roller coaster of stress and emotion, some of the boys in my year claiming to have breezed through everything they had done, whereas others were on the verge of suffering a mental breakdown over what they described as complete and utter screw ups of all their exams. There wasn’t much I could offer in the way of sympathy, other than to say that they had probably done better than they expected, and then invite them to revise some of their other subjects with me.

  When it came to chemistry and physics I found myself cursing the rules that I wasn’t allowed to bring either a periodic table or a set of equations into the exam room with me to help. Physics was the better of the two, and at the end of the day I wouldn’t be sad to
put chemistry behind me. While I found the time tinkering about in the labs with Bunsen burners, test tubes and various acids and bases to be amusing, I didn’t see the subject figuring very much in my future plans. Those involved suits, rather than lab coats; a white-collar job, as opposed to the blue. I did manage to remember all the parts of a flower in biology, though, and I was certain that I had managed to get chloroplasts and chlorophyll the correct way around this time.

  By the first week of June, I had crossed many subjects off my list of exams. It was very satisfying to see a series of red lines on the photocopy. I was feeling more and more like a free man with each passing day. I wouldn’t be totally free until the penultimate week of term or so, after I had completed the A-Level classes, but the end was certainly approaching.

  Something unusual then happened towards the end of my exam period. I was in my dorm one afternoon, studying quietly and listening to the radio at a low volume. Simmons was nowhere to be seen. I guessed that he had gone to study with someone else, in another of the houses. My dormitory door opened and in walked my housemaster.

  “Ah, Joe,” he said. “Good, you’re here. Now, how many exams do you still have left?”

  “Um ... just one,” I said. “R.E.”

  “When is that?”

  “On Thursday.”

  “Good, come with me. I need you to take a prep.”

  “Pardon?” I said, completely thrown by what Mr Somers had just said. “A prep? I’m in the third year.”

  “Yes, I know, but there are no sixth formers available to take it. They’re all revising for their A-Levels.”

  “What about the lower sixth?” I asked, not willing to move. “They don’t have any exams.”

  “The lower sixth and second years are in a meeting with the headmaster this afternoon, about the future of the school,” Mr Somers said very matter-of-factly. “Their futures are hanging in the balance on whether or not the school is able to stay open into the next year, and so they are attending a talk on their options.”

  “Sir, my future is being decided this week by my GCSEs,” I reminded him.

  “You only have one left, Joe, and it’s R.E. We both know you’ll do very well in that. Now, come on, you can continue to study in prep.” He drew back his sleeve and looked at his watch. “You only have to do this for twenty-five minutes.”

  I could tell that there would be no arguing with the man, and so reluctantly picked up my binder containing all my revision notes, photocopies and essays on R.E., and followed Mr Somers to the classroom block.

  Preps were periods set aside by the school during certain times of the day, normally between classes, to enable us to do coursework and other tasks given to us by teachers. The frequency of these periods would vary, but we always had one every night for an hour, after dinner. It was rare for teachers themselves to ever supervise these periods, the duty normally falling to the upper sixth, cascading down to the lower sixth when the A-Levels were in full swing. For a third year to take a prep was extremely rare and unusual.

  Third years and sixth formers did their preps in their dormitories and rooms, whereas the first and second year would do them in their classrooms. My own experiences of preps during those years had been mixed. The prep taker themselves could also usually be filed into three distinct categories.

  The first was the grumpy bastard, who would, to his credit, run the prep as it probably should be run. The miserable sod would lumper in, slam his work down on the desk at the front, and tell us all to shut and get on with it. We would do so, fearful that the slightest drop of a pen might cause the guy to fly off the handle and into a rage that would result in the entire classroom finding themselves standing at the front gates of the school at five on a Friday morning. We would all be very grateful to hear the school bell ring, signalling the end of the prep and allowing us to get the hell away from that classroom as quickly as possible.

  The second was a more passive version of the first. He would come into the classroom and get on with his work, letting a few things like the occasional whispering or short conversations for the most part slide, and occasionally entertain minor gossip and none too personal questions. He would insist on silence when it was needed, or he thought we really should press on. I liked those preps. We could discuss work freely, as well as other school-related things, without fear of getting into trouble.

  Then there was the third kind. These guys were something else. They saw themselves as either the king of the classroom or the circus ringmaster, and that those in the prep had been put there for his own personal entertainment. I remember how, on at least one occasion, someone would be made to snort sherbet up their nose through an empty ballpoint pen case, pretending that they were doing a line of cocaine. Other jocular larks would include going to the library and asking the librarian to locate a book with an obscene title; running up and down the classroom corridor, trying not to get caught by a teacher or duty master; or walking into another prep and insulting the sixth former taking it. Although the insult was being sent by their friend, the recipient would be none too impressed and would generally sign the deliverer up to the Murga List that Friday. The idea of not shooting the messenger certainly did not apply here.

  I knew even before I arrived at the classroom block that I was more of the second type of supervisor.

  ~ ~ ~

  The class that Mr Somers brought me to contained a number of first years. Having now spent two terms at St Christopher’s, most had come out of their shells and weren’t the scared, meek little boys that I had encountered in the autumn term when I had been a dormitory prefect to them.

  “Hurrah, it’s Crotty!” they hollered once Mr Somers left me to it. Most of the textbooks and A4 binders were pushed aside, with copies of FHM and GQ filling their places, as well as an Italian magazine that was basically just a porno dressed up as a fashion publication.

  “All right, guys, settle down and do some work,” I said, as I put my R.E. notes down on the desk and kicked away the stop that was holding the door open. “I need to revise for my exam on Thursday.” I had already been warned by my housemaster that I should ensure that the boys in my care were actually going to work, rather than screw about for the next twenty minutes or so. I wanted them to do so, too.

  “What are you revising?” one of them asked.

  “R.E.,” I said.

  “That’s what we’re doing,” another immediately piped up. “Can you help us with ours? We’ve got to write a two-thousand-word essay on nuclear weapons.”

  “It’s not hard, guys,” I responded, to exasperated looks.

  “It’s two thousand words!” another one said. “That’s about four or five sides of A4. And we’ve got to write it at least twice – a draft and then the actual thing.”

  “Do you have one we could look at, to see what you wrote?” another boy asked, his eyes fixed on my vast collection of notes.

  “I didn’t do that essay,” I said. “I did one on ethics – utilitarianism and that. Besides,” I added as their faces fell at the prospect of having to scribble out legible facts and arguments that they had come up with themselves, “there is lots of information about it in the library, and in the newspapers practically every day. Start with the facts about who has what, what they are used for—”

  “Blowing stuff up,” one chuckled.

  “Deterrents is what they’re really for,” I said. “Firing one would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, the fall out and the retaliation and all that. Think about what happened at the end of War Games, if you’ve ever seen that. Soon as one country fires a missile, everyone else would fire theirs. It won’t take you as long as you think.”

  “I hate R.E.,” one said. “It’s so boring.”

  “I like it,” another added. “There’s never a wrong answer, apart from the dates of things. You just need to put across a good argument and you’ll get the marks.”

  “Right, guys, do some work,” I said, wanting to now focus on my revision and not sp
end the next half an hour entertaining eighteen bored thirteen-year-olds. “Seriously, I want to do this. It’s my last exam, and I want to do well.”

  Even so, it was clear to me that they knew I wouldn’t punish them if they continued to talk. In fact, they knew that I wasn’t the sort to ever punish anyone for anything, anyway. Punishments such as detonations, lines and the dreaded Murga could only be handed out by the upper sixth, and usually only by the prefects. Others had to lodge a complaint with one of the teachers, ideally the housemaster or deputy housemaster, in order for it to go through. I could never be bothered. Just so long as they shut up. To my satisfaction, they did, only occasionally muttering to one another about something. Work-related or not, I didn’t mind, as long as they weren’t disturbing me.

  “Hey, Joe?” one of the boys asked, not five minutes later.

  “Yes,” I said, attempting to hold back my frustration at the interruption. I could see my chances of passing R.E. with the grade I was after beginning to slide out of view.

  “You found all the bodies, didn’t you?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Just the first.”

  “But you were there when they found Craig Priest,” he insisted. His eyes were alight, as though the subject was highly entertaining to him.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Pale,” I said. “Now, get back to ...” I was going to say ‘work’, but he was clearly ogling some bikini-clad lovely in the magazine he had open on his desk. I tried not to stare for too long at the girl’s smooth white skin, slender body, legs, buttocks, breasts, and everything else that my teenage mind was attempting to process all at once. “ ... reading,” I settled on.

  “Do you think they’ve gone to Heaven?” someone asked.

  “Who?” another answered.

  “Craig Priest and the other two from the junior school that were murdered.”