Being Billy

by Phil Earle

  ‘Right, then,’ I barked. ‘Get your stuff together. And quickly, if you know what’s good for you.’

  Naturally, we were back in the van in minutes, quiet and shocked, hoping Ronnie and Charlie wouldn’t be far behind us.

  CHAPTER 13

  Days at school didn’t pass any quicker with Daisy around, but they were more bearable, I suppose. Maybe it was reassuring to know that someone else found it as useless as me. Maybe it was to do with not being the only lifer there. I don’t know. Can’t say I really analysed it.

  To be honest, despite Daisy’s weird choice in clothes, I was still the stand-out loser in our year. She had this annoying habit of blending in. She didn’t walk down corridors, she ghosted down them. When she entered the room, I swear sometimes the door didn’t open before she came through it. She was anonymous, and that was the way she liked it.

  That didn’t mean she was an airhead, though. She took everything in. She was a real people-watcher and, man, was she brutal at picking them apart.

  I started looking forward to breaks in lessons. In the past, I’d skulk around the yard, looking for someone to start something with, but now, with Daisy in tow, we’d plonk ourselves in the middle of them all and laugh our tits off at how shallow they were.

  For the girls, it was all boys, clothes and, for the wilder ones among them, the clubs they were getting into that weekend. As for the lads, it was football or talent. Nothing more. In their words, ‘What else is there?’

  It was alien to me. The way they spoke, the families they talked about. I couldn’t imagine them having to plot ways of keeping their brother and sister away from their alcoholic mother. But I wasn’t jealous or envious. I just didn’t know any different.

  Sometimes I’d watch Daisy’s reactions to it all. She’d sit and stare, her mouth snaking into a smile as some dizzy bird mouthed off about the new dress Mummy was going to buy her that weekend. She’d stare so hard, it was as if she was trying to take in every second, storing them all up in her head like an endless stream of photos.

  ‘Why do you find people so interesting?’

  She shrugged, although she knew the answer off by heart.

  ‘Suppose it’s a bit like watching a film.’

  ‘That’s your thing, is it? Films and that?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said, her eyes sparking for a second. ‘I’d be in the cinema every day if I could. Doesn’t matter what’s on, I’ll watch it.’

  ‘I’ve never got it really. I don’t want to go and watch a comedy, cos most of the time I haven’t got a clue what they’re all howling at. And it just reminds me how little laughing there is at home. And as for action stuff, well, they’re a right load of old bollocks. They’re not realistic at all, are they? It never makes that noise when I smack someone in the face.’

  ‘Use your imagination, Bill. It’s good to escape inside something else for a couple of hours.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ I smiled. ‘By the time it had finished, someone would have been in my room and nicked everything.’

  She pushed me away with a grin and told me she’d show me the light if I wanted, but before I could answer the bell rang and we slumped our way to the next lesson.

  We didn’t have every class together, due to the fact that she was smarter than me. It wasn’t that she kissed up in class or worked dead hard or anything either. She just seemed to know what she had to do to make people leave her alone.

  It suited the teachers perfectly. The quiet kid among thirty gobby ones was hardly going to get picked on, were they? As I said before, she wanted to ghost through school, and she was succeeding.

  Or rather she was until she was late for one of Carrick’s classes. Carrick ran his classroom like Ronnie ran the house. For years I thought they must be related, or have been grown in the same test tube or something. They were anal beyond belief and loved to inflict as much pain on their kids as possible.

  Carrick was the only teacher who had his own classroom. All the other teaching scum moved around the school to teach the different years, but not him. His room sat next to the Deputy Head’s office and was the only one in the school that was locked between lessons.

  When you had geography with him you had to line up along the wall outside and wait for the door to be unlocked, then he’d announce, ‘Good afternoon, everyone. Please take your seats. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that your desks are numbered and are, as always, spotlessly clean. Sit yourselves in your usual position and leave the classroom in the same state in which you find it.’

  The room was always tidy. Freakily so. There was never anything in the bin, any posters on the wall and certainly no chewing gum stuck under the desks. Carrick caught a kid trying once and had him in detention for ages, until he’d scraped the gum off every desk in the school. I think the kid was about twenty-five when he finally finished.

  At the start of each term, he allocated you a desk, with the class sat strictly in alphabetical order. This meant I’d struck gold, as I got landed next to Daisy, and we sat halfway back in the class, our desks and chairs numbered identically.

  He seemed to take an instant dislike to Daisy, probably because she arrived mid-term, meaning he had to rearrange his seating plan. He couldn’t possibly sit someone whose surname began with an ‘H’ next to Pete Tanner. That would mess his head up completely.

  Whether Daisy picked up on his dislike, I don’t know. She just turned up and went through the motions as usual, until the day she came in fifteen minutes late.

  I’d been wondering where she’d got to. She’d been there to register in the morning, but then we’d sloped off to different classes. When she didn’t show I just presumed she’d gone to the dentist or something, and cursed my luck as I wondered who I could blag the answers off for the rest of the lesson.

  When she arrived she looked more like she’d been on the operating table than in the dentist’s chair. Her face was completely white and her steps were small and uncertain, like she was having to concentrate on every move she made.

  She didn’t look in Carrick’s direction as she picked her way to our desk and he waited until she reached her chair before piping up.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Houghton. Thank you for joining us. Would you kindly come out to the front of the class please?’

  I could see her flinch at his words. This was her idea of hell. Thirty pairs of eyes fixed on her, all of them grateful not to be on the end of whatever was coming next.

  Slowly she traced her way back to the front of the class and faced him, her back to the rest of us.

  ‘Turn round please.’

  ‘Sorry?’ she whispered, her voice only just reaching me.

  ‘I said, turn round and face the class please.’

  She wheeled round, her head falling as soon as it came into view, her hair masking what bit of her face we could see.

  Carrick leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain to the rest of the class why you have arrived late. After all, twenty-nine of them, thirty including me, managed to arrive punctually.’

  His words hung in the air as Daisy’s head remained pointed at the floor.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘There must be a reason. You can’t now, after – what? – six weeks here, have suddenly forgotten where to go. And as the rest of the class will have to remain with you after this class ends, to make up the time you’ve missed, I think the least you could do is explain it to them.’

  A twenty-eight-strong groan rang around the walls and I could feel my face burning up. She was the centre of attention, the focus of the whole room, and I didn’t have a clue how she was going to react.

  And what did she do?

  She did nothing. She just stood there and didn’t move. Seconds became minutes and I could feel the heat in the room begin to rise with the tension of it all. Daggers were being drawn and all of t
hem were pointed straight at Daisy.

  Carrick seemed hell-bent on humiliating her to the max and leapt to his feet, before pacing up and down behind her, lingering over her shoulder as he spoke.

  ‘That’s three minutes, Miss Houghton. Added on to your initial fifteen minutes, of course. Are you ready to explain yourself now?’

  When nothing passed her lips, I could see the first wave of irritation waft over him and he stepped it up a gear.

  ‘If you’re so loath to give us a reason, then perhaps you can tell us why the rules should be different for you?’ He fixed her with a stare and, just for a second, I saw his eyes flick up and down at what she was wearing. ‘Are you any different from the rest of the class?’

  Nobody bothered stifling their sniggers, despite the evil glances I was throwing in their direction. Now Carrick was in full flow, they were more than happy to join his pack, and he lapped it up greedily.

  My blood was threatening to boil over, when I caught a glance from Daisy. It was brief and masked by the hair hanging over her face, but I could see it was telling me to cool it. That me strangling him wasn’t going to help. So, much as I didn’t want to, I followed her plea.

  I reckon a good five minutes passed before Carrick finally sent her to her chair, telling everyone they would stay behind for twenty minutes once the bell had rung.

  ‘Let this be a warning to you all. I will not tolerate tardiness. When you arrive in this classroom it is always prepared for work. I expect nothing less from you. The day you arrive in this room and it is not ready for you, the lesson will be over, and frankly you can all go home!’

  Sermon over, he fell back into his chair and returned to his marking.

  Detention over, the rest of the class sped out of the room, the majority of them flicking evil glances or snide comments in Daisy’s direction.

  The chair clattered down behind me as I leapt from my seat, and had old man Carrick not jumped down my throat, someone would have been in deep trouble.

  ‘Whatever it is you’re about to do, Mr Finn, take it outside this room and outside the gates. I will not tolerate fighting.’

  With a little help from Daisy, we left in peace and saw the other kids beat a hasty exit for the streets around school. I was in no rush, though. There was something I needed to do before heading home.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ I asked Daisy, her face still empty of colour.

  She nodded slowly. ‘Just feeling a bit crappy, that’s all.’

  ‘No need for him to lay into you, was there? He’s such a control freak.’

  We walked slowly towards the gate and, as we passed the teachers’ car park, I felt the devil rise in me.

  ‘Listen. Keep your eyes peeled, will you? I’ll only be a sec.’

  Crouching low, I ducked between the first row of cars. I always made a note of which car belonged to which teacher. Why? For moments like this, when a little bit of payback was in order. It didn’t take me long to find Carrick’s car. It was the cleanest in the school obviously, but by no means the newest, and my eyes skipped over it to see what I could get stuck into. The aerial was the first thing and it bent easily. I took care not to snap it off completely, using just enough force to leave it knackered. I wondered if I had time to let a couple of the tyres down, but with teachers as desperate to leave as the other kids, I settled for a long scratch down the driver’s wing. I smiled as I scampered back towards Daisy, picking the yellow paint out from the grooves in my key.

  My hero bit didn’t seem to improve her mood, though, and to be honest it didn’t really set the score straight either. He’d gone out to humiliate her in front of the whole class and nobody would see the state of his car except him. No, this was going to need some thought, and with the end of term only a couple of days away, I knew I had to do some fast thinking.

  As it turned out, the school holiday played right into my hands, although I had my work cut out to get things sorted in time. But when Daisy and I left school on the Friday afternoon, I had a smile and a half on my face. And it had nothing to do with a break from the place.

  By the time we lined up outside Carrick’s room at nine thirty on the first Monday back, there was already a sense of confusion in the corridor. Everyone was stood, single file as always, but asking the same question: ‘What is that smell?’

  Carrick was definitely asking it as he breezed down the corridor, but it wasn’t enough to stop him launching into his usual speech.

  ‘Good morning, everyone. I trust you all had a restful break and are ready to apply yourselves. You all know where your seats are, so take them quickly please and apply yourselves to your work.’

  With that, he jammed his key into the lock, but he stopped as his nostrils flared and he turned to face us.

  ‘What is that smell? If the offending article is in one of your bags, make sure it does not come through the classroom door. Am I understood?’

  As he turned his attentions to the door handle, I couldn’t resist whispering to Daisy, ‘Listen. Things are about to kick off. Just follow my lead, all right?’

  ‘What?’ she mouthed, but it was too late as we filed in, Carrick counting heads as we moved past him.

  By the time half the class were inside, the queue stopped moving and the smell was suddenly overpoweringly minging.

  I could see the panic on Carrick’s face as he scoured the queue, trying to work out just who was responsible for it.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he yelled. ‘Can you please get yourselves inside? You can’t have forgotten where you are meant to be sitting already.’

  But when nobody moved, he lost his rag and pushed his way into the room. And that’s went things got really interesting, because instead of the neatly arranged rows of numbered desks and chairs, there was just this pyramid mess of wood and metal in the middle of the room. Every desk, every chair, except for two, had been pushed into the middle of the room and they’d all been stacked randomly on top of each other. I had to admit it looked even more impressive than I remembered. There was no order to it, no symmetry or reasoning behind what went where. It was just this big sprawling mess of legs and numbers.

  The rest of the class had spread out around it, mouths flapping open. There would have been more laughter had the smell in the room not been so appalling. Kids were glancing around the room, noses upturned, as they tried to fathom out just what it was and where it was coming from.

  I wish I could have snapped Carrick’s face as he clocked his precious room. At first he looked shocked at the mess, but no sooner had he seen it than the smell really invaded his nostrils. His head flicked from side to side as his focus zoomed from smell to desks and back again, and I could practically hear his stress levels rise as his ordered little world crashed around him.

  Daisy beamed from ear to ear at the carnage.

  ‘Genius, Billy Finn, genius,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘When you said things were going to kick off, I didn’t expect this.’

  ‘I’m a man of hidden depths, me.’ I laughed. ‘What did you think I’d done? Just spat on the door handle or something?’

  ‘Probably, yeah.’

  ‘Well, I did that as well, obviously.’ It wasn’t easy stifling the laughter swelling in my chest. ‘But I thought we owed him a bit more than that. Look. Follow me.’

  Walking slowly around our classmates, who were still giggling and retching in equal measure, I led her to the two desks and chairs that sat in their usual places. Desks and chairs that just happened to be ours.

  Sitting quietly, we unzipped our bags and took out our exercise books and pens, arranging them neatly on the desk.

  ‘Tell me that smell is your handiwork as well, will you?’ she muttered.

  ‘Yup,’ I answered. ‘See that ventilation grille on the wall by his desk? There’s been half a dozen mackerel fillets rotting in there since –’ I glanced at my watch theatrically – ‘ooh, since the last Friday o
f term.’

  I thought she was going to fall off her chair when she heard that. ‘You’re kidding me? How did you even get in here? Carrick guards it like Fort Knox.’

  ‘Managed to nick the keys from the secretary’s office on the last day of term, didn’t I? Spun her some sob story about needing extra lunch vouchers, and while her back was turned, bingo.’

  ‘I love it,’ she said, giggling. ‘Did moving all the tables and chairs take long?’

  ‘Not really. I waited till everyone had gone for the day and the cleaners had done their bit. Didn’t matter if I made a racket then.’

  We sat back like a couple of angels and watched the chaos brewing around us.

  Carrick didn’t know what to do with himself. At first he thought he could sort it out and started pulling at various table legs. But when that started an avalanche, he thought better of it and bellowed at the rest of the class to move to the edges of the room.

  I pitied the poor kid who ended up stood next to the air vent by Carrick’s desk, but his reaction was priceless.

  ‘Bloody hell, sir,’ he wailed. ‘Smells like something’s died in your drawer or something.’

  Carrick dashed to his desk. He looked in danger of losing the contents of his stomach by the time he got there, and certainly seemed relieved when he opened his drawers to find them empty.

  By now his face was reddened and sweaty, and he was out of ideas, until his eyes met us, sat bolt upright at our desks, textbooks open in front of us.

  ‘Houghton, Finn,’ he boomed. ‘I want a word with you outside now!’

  I rose slowly from my desk and started packing my stuff into my bag.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but as the room obviously isn’t ready for us, I can only presume that this lesson is over for today. Shall we leave you to tidy up? I can’t imagine your next class will be too happy to work here either.’