by ALAN TONER
David looked at his sister and gave a cynical laugh. “You’re joking, aren’t you? If there is anybody I am going to pester for some cool Christmas presents this year, it’s going to be Dad, not Santa.”
And he certainly had a point, for their father had just got promoted at work to quite a senior position, and with that promotion came quite a handsome increase in his salary. Thus, not only David but his little sister too were expecting some real special presents this year.
“Wasn’t it lucky for us all,” Mandy said, “Dad getting promoted like that? Just in time for Christmas.” She smiled at the thought and emitted a long, contented sigh. She was already imagining vividly all the expensive presents that they both could possibly be waking up to on Christmas morning, courtesy of their now Big Boss Dad.
“I’ll say,” David said, sharing her smile at the thought.
It was now approaching 9.00 a.m. as the two children walked through the school gates and into the playground, which was full of laughing, boisterous pupils as they prepared to line up in their respective class groups in preparation for another week of school work.
“Hi, you two,” came the cheerful voice of a cute little blonde girl, around Mandy’s age, who was standing with two of her female pals just a few feet away from the school gates. In her thick-quilted blue parka and equally thick woollen mittens, she looked well wrapped up against the biting chill of the December morning. “Just in time for the bell.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Mandy said, rolling her eyes unenthusiastically. “Another long, boring week stuck in this place.”
The blonde girl just laughed at Mandy’s scowling expression. She full well how much Mandy and her brother hated school, and so always derived a little cruel pleasure from winding them up about it.
“Cheer up, guys,” Mandy said. “It’ll soon be Christmas.”
Then, right on the dot, the school bell went, and all the children broke off from their chatting, laughing groups and assembled in their respective class lines. The icy December wind was growing stronger, blowing through the school playground and causing the gathered pupils to shiver uncomfortably, in spite of their generally thick winter clothing. Even the two teachers on assembly duty seemed to be feeling the cold, buttoning up their overcoats and tightening their scarves around their necks.
As David broke away from his sister and took his place alongside his best friend and classmate Billy Johnson, he pulled a long, miserable face as he thought of the first lesson in store for them that morning. “Bloody Maths,” he said. “I hate it.”
“You’re not the only one, mate,” Billy replied. “I hate it too. Wish it was Art first period instead.” Billy especially loved Art because he was such an excellent illustrator for his young age. In fact, he was so good that quite often he would be approached by a couple of his classmates to “do a drawing” for them in return for some sweets or some football cards. Billy had apparently inherited his talent for drawing from his rather eccentric father, who had made a fair amount of money from his paintings. Occasionally, Billy had certainly thought about emulating his father and maybe pursuing a career as an artist when he left school. However, at the same time, he really didn’t have any solid idea of just what he wanted to do when he grew up. Bit too early to be thinking so far ahead, for he had all the years of secondary school to go through yet once he’d left this boring hole of a primary school.
“Did you watch The X Factor over the weekend?” David asked Billy.
“Nah,” Billy shook his head. “I’ve gone off that rubbish. My dad says it’s fixed. We had Strictly Come Dancing on. Much better.”
David nodded. “Right.” Then his face broke out into a reflective grin as he went on: “Hey, is that fat news reporter still in it? You know, the old bloke who makes a fool of – OWW!“
The grin was suddenly wiped from David’s face as he felt the hard impact of some unknown missile hit the back of his head.
Billy shot him a questioning look. “What’s up?”
David’s expression was now a mixture of pain and fury as he pressed his hand against the back of his head where the offending object had hit him. Then a sudden burst of tittering from somewhere behind caused both boys to whirl around. And when David saw who the culprit was - the guilty party who was now quickly slipping what looked like a catapult back into his coat pocket - his cheeks flushed with anger.
“You!” he retorted. “I might have known.”
The boy at whom David was venting his indignation was a fat, freckled, mischievous looking kid, aged 10, with a black pudding-bowl haircut (modelled after The Beatles, both his and his father’s favourite pop group), called Gary O’Neil. Standing there in his class line, hand pressed against his mouth as he attempted to suppress another burst of mirth, he presented a pathetic, annoying figure. The archetypal school bully.
“Aw, come on, Four Eyes, calm down,” cut in one of O’Neil’s cronies, a skinny, long-nosed lad around O’Neil’s age. “Can’t you take a joke? Gary was only having a bit of fun with you, that’s all.”
“I don’t call THAT fun,” David snarled through clenched teeth. He looked as if he wanted to go back there and murder the two sneering boys on the spot. “I call it bullying.”
“I agree,” said Billy, looking just as angry as his friend was, as if he too had been a victim of the rogue missile. “Bloody idiot.”
“Now, now, boys,” came the authoritative voice of Mrs Edwards, who was the form teacher of David and Billy’s class. “Settle down now. We’ll have no bickering and shouting first thing on a Monday morning, thank you.” Although Mrs Edwards was a nice, friendly, likeable teacher, she was hopeless when it came to properly tackling classroom bullies like O’Neil. Her inadequacy in this respect was a constant source of frustration to both David and Billy, both of whom would have secretly loved to see O’Neil birched to within an inch of his miserable life. Both boys always agreed that the trouble with this school was that discipline was far too lax, thus giving objectionable troublemakers like O’Neil a golden opportunity to flourish and, in so doing, make their lives an utter misery.
As the line of pupils all filed into the school building, more sniggers came from behind David and Billy, exacerbating David’s anger. Why was this brainless clown O’Neil always picking on him and his friend? What was his problem? David was fed up with this loathsome bully, totally and utterly fed up. He didn’t think he could take much more of this daily persecution.
And one day, David decided, it was all going to stop. Oh yes, it was.
Because David was going to get even.
And if he himself didn’t get even, then perhaps his good friend Billy would.
Sometime.
Some day.
David hoped it would be sooner rather than later.
It wasn’t only in school that Gary O’Neil was an incorrigible nuisance, for his bad behaviour even extended out onto the streets too. He was the ringleader of a gang of six local boys, aged between 7 and 11, whose constant anti-social behaviour knew no bounds when it came to vandalising things and making decent people’s lives a general misery.
And it wasn’t as if Gary came from a broken home, which was (well, according to the do-gooder sociologists) a usual contributory factor to the bad behaviour of children. Oh no, because both his parents were in good jobs and, as such, were quite comfortable. Moreover, there was certainly no drug taking in the household, and neither was there any alcoholism. So, to coin a phrase, Gary O’Neil was what you might call a “well-off bully.”
So why was the boy behaving so badly towards his bookish, inoffensive classmate David Hawkins? Well, perhaps it could all be attributed to jealousy. Gary seemed to loathe David’s noticeable intelligence, his good relationship with all the teachers, and even his friendship with one or two of the pretty little girls in his class.
On the other hand, O’Neil was the kind of kid who liked to rebel, to get up to all kinds of mischief, even to the extent of anti-social behaviour, both in and ou
t of school. Perhaps his constant aggression and scant regard for authority were just inherent traits of his personality.
Whatever the reasons were, O’Neil’s offensive behaviour certainly showed no signs of abating; indeed, it only seemed to be getting worse, especially in regard to the merciless bullying of poor David Hawkins and his friend Billy.
There was no doubt that this young yob needed to be taught a lesson. And certainly not the kind of conventional lesson that the teacher taught you in the classroom. Oh no.
He needed to be taught another kind of lesson, one that he would never forget, one that would make him curb his bullying behaviour once and for all.
Perhaps that ‘lesson’ wouldn’t be all that far away now.
That afternoon, after school dinnertime, the first lesson of the period was Art. Naturally, budding Picasso Billy was delighted.
As the pupils prepared to get out their pencils, paints and crayons, Miss Davenport, their pretty red-haired art teacher, stood in front of the class and addressed them all about the subject matter for that lesson.
“Right, children,” she said. “As Christmas is fast approaching, I want you all to draw me a picture of anything to do with the festive season. It could be a Christmas tree, a snowy scene, a Nativity image, or even Santa Claus himself.” She paused as she assessed all the faces of the pupils as they immediately lit up with enthusiasm. Much to her satisfaction, she saw that the task she had set them had instantly met with their approval. There was nothing more disappointing to a teacher than assigning her pupils a task that they all found boring.
She gave a quick clap of her hands. “Okay, guys, off you go.”
As her class set about their drawings, she walked back to her well-burnished desk, sat down, and proceeded to some marking of a pile of previous class work.
“What you gonna draw then, Four Eyes?” came that familiar irritating voice from behind David’s row. David’s face creased into that same expression of profound irritation that always registered whenever he became the target of yet another taunt by O’Neil, the big-mouthed bully.
“None of your business,” David snapped, trying to put as much steel in his voice as possible, not even turning around to face his tormentor.
O’Neil let out a scornful snigger. “S’pose it’ll be something crap, like a stick man or a stupid fairy.”
This elicited a titter from a boy sitting next to him, one of his cohorts, who chipped in: “He’s a bloody fairy himself.”
This additional insult tried David’s patience, and he whirled around in his seat, his eyes glaring reproachfully behind his thick square-framed glasses. “Shut it!”
Hearing the heated exchange of words between the boys, Miss Davenport looked up at them. “Now, now, boys, behave. I’ve set you a nice little task for Christmas, so I expect you all to concentrate and draw me a good picture. Knuckle down now.” She then returned her attention to her marking.
David heaved a heavy, weary sigh as he turned back around and looked down at the large white piece of art paper on the desk before him. Just like old Mrs Edwards, Miss Davenport was hardly the Super Teacher to tackle bullying adequately. David thought that this crappy school in general needed a real good upheaval, one that would get rid of all these softly-softly teachers and bring in ones that would be more strict with troublemakers like O’Neil. Huh, wishful thinking, David thought with a pang of depression as he picked up his pencil and pondered on what to draw.
“So what you gonna draw then, Dave?” his friend Billy, who was sitting next to him, asked, as he started to sketch an outline of his own with his pencil.
David just shrugged. “Dunno yet, mate.” But secretly, he knew what he would LIKE to draw: a bloody big hammer hitting that swine O’Neil right over the head. Of course, he knew all too well that if he did venture to draw such an extreme, unChristmassy image, Miss Davenport would probably tell him off in front of the whole class, and he certainly didn’t want that. He was getting enough humiliation from the bully O’Neil as it is. Pity she couldn’t adopt the same no-nonsense attitude towards his tormentor, David thought with a pang of regret.
All the class was now deeply engrossed in sketching out the initial structures of their Christmas pictures. There was the occasional murmur of approval or burst of amusement as some of the pupils took a glance at what their neighbour was drawing, depending on the quality of the illustration. Despite his unvoiced longing to paint a picture of his bully boy getting his just deserts in the form of a hammer over the head, David had eventually settled on a drawing of a more subdued, more Christmas-themed type: a snowman. OK, it would probably be nowhere near as good as whatever his artistic pal Billy would come up with, but at least he was making an effort.
In the middle of drawing his snowman, David couldn’t resist pausing his pencil for a moment to snatch a glance at what his friend was drawing. And when he saw the image on Billy’s paper, his brow furrowed in puzzlement.
“What is THAT?” he asked.
Billy stopped sketching for a moment and looked sideways at David. “Oh, it’s Krampus,” he said, quite matter-of-factly.
David’s bemused, questioning expression increased as he continued to stare at the strange drawing, on which Billy was working with his usual careful, consummate skill. “Who, or what, is Krampus?”
Billy frowned, seemingly surprised at his friend’s ignorance. “Haven’t you ever heard of Krampus?”
David looked at Billy blankly and shook his head. “No, can’t say I have.” As he stared back down at the drawing, he began to feel a mounting sense of unease. He didn’t know why, but perhaps it was because of the . . . well, rather monstrous look of the creature (because creature was exactly what that drawing seemed to be) that Billy had sketched out. And if Billy’s drawing was anything to go by, this Krampus thing seemed anything but Christmassy. In fact, in David’s eyes, it looked like something that had . . . well, just crawled out of Hell itself.
From what David could make out, the thing that his friend was drawing looked like a cross between a goat and a bear. It had a pair of large horns sprouting from its head, and its whole body was completely covered in thick hair. It had cloven hooves. Its eyes were large and glaring. And the tongue. Yes, the tongue was the worst thing about it. It protruded from the creature’s mouth like some hideous, slippery snake, and it was so long that the tip virtually touched the thing’s stomach.
In one of its clawed hands, it gripped what at first looked like a stream of Christmas decorations, the end trailing on the ground behind it. But then something told David that this was no length of Christmas decoration, but a chain, a metal chain, and a chain that was being held in such a troubling, sinister fashion by this snarling goat-thing that it was almost as if it was about to swing it aggressively at somebody, with a view to smashing their head in, just like David had joyfully envisaged smashing in the head of the bully who had been causing him so much grief.
David let out a gasp of mild horror as he continued to stare mutely at the monster of a drawing that his friend was so zealously working away at. Finally, he spoke. “So . . . er . . . what is this Krampus thing then?”
Billy shot him a glance of disapproval. “Hey, I wouldn’t exactly call him a ‘thing’. Being a bit harsh there, mate.”
“Well it LOOKS like a thing. It’s horrible. And anyway, just what does a creature like that have to do with Christmas? Remember what Miss Davenport said? We should be drawing CHRISTMAS things, not things that look as if they belong in horror stories.”
“I know what Miss Davenport said,” Dave replied, giving a nod as he added some more layers of hair to his devilish drawing. “But what some people I could mention – including probably Miss Davenport herself – may not realise is that Krampus is as just a part of Christmas as Santa Claus himself is.”
“Oh yeah? In what way then?”
Billy shrugged. “Well, Krampus is as old as Father Christmas himself. Legend has it that he could even be older.”
“
Really?”
“Yep.”
David frowned again. “But I still don’t understand what Krampus has to do with Christmas.”
“Well, according to my dad, who told me all about Krampus, as he has loads of books on things like this, Krampus is supposed to be a friend of Saint Nicholas.”
David’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Really?” He thought distastefully that Saint Nicholas must have been mad to have a thing like THAT as friend.
“Yep. And not only that, but when it comes to dealing with naughty kids who don’t deserve any presents from Santa on Christmas Eve, Krampus – “ Billy paused abruptly, as if checking himself in time before he blurted out something really bad, something that young boys should never dare utter to each other. Then he became more euphemistic as he said: “Well, let’s just say he takes care of them.”
David frowned. “He ‘takes care of them’? What do you mean by that?”
Before Billy could reply, a voice cut in from behind them. That familiar, detestable voice of the incessant nuisance Gary O’Neil. “What the heck are you two going on about now?”
Both friends turned around in their seats and shot O’Neil a look of utter venom. “None of your business,” David said.
O’Neil grinned. “Aw, come on, lads, don’t be like that.” Then the legs of his chair screeched harshly on the tiled floor of the classroom as he rose to his feet and walked around his desk, bound for where the two friends were sitting. “Let’s have a little look at what you two have been drawing there. Bet it’s rubbish.” This provocative remark generated a ripple of amusement among O’Neil’s seated cronies. He always liked to make himself sound big whenever all his mates were present.
O’Neil stepped behind the two friends and threw his gaze over David’s drawing first. Immediately he let out a pathetic snort of derision. “What the bloody hell do you call THAT?”
David’s indignant expression grew more acute as he stared up at the ever-arrogant bane of his school life. “It’s a snowman, for your information.”
