2007 - A tale etched in blood and hard black pencel (19 page)

It would be quicker to walk upright, but he can see into the girls’ part of the playground from up here and doesn’t want to be noticed by a tell-tale like Fat Joanne, so Jamesy proceeds on all fours, staying between the rows of pyramids for cover. He gets the ball and kneels up so he can give it a decent throw and make sure it gets down first time. It does, bouncing once on the bitumen before disappearing over the edge to where someone will be waiting for it. He just hopes they’ve got the decency to wait for him before taking the corner. And if there’s a penalty, he definitely deserves to be taking it. He turns to make his way back, and as he does so takes a wee swatch down through the pyramid the ball was resting against.

He sees more carpet, a table, a teapot, a plate of biscuits, six or seven mugs, two newspapers. And several adult faces staring right back at him.

“Aw, naw.”

§

Martin is walking home with Helen. They’re going round the outside and are just passing the rebuilt Infant Building. They often walk home together because they live on the same street. Folk say they’re going with each other, because that’s usually the only way a boy and a girl would be walking and talking, but they’re not. Helen’s nice but Martin doesn’t think about going with her. He thinks Michelle’s pretty, as does everybody else, but the truth is he’s never really thought much about going with anybody. Not until today. He’d really like to go with Karen now.

Helen’s talking about Karen and everything that happened, but she’s not talking about the important stuff like Karen getting the belt: she’s filling him in at length about all sorts of other mince to do with Chinese ropes. Girls witter on about this kind of guff all the time: who said what to who, who’s fallen out with who, who’s best friends with who. It’s so endless and trivial, going on like a budgie. That’s probably why he’s never given much thought to going with any of them. It would be different with Karen, though. He could tell her about
Jaws
, because he’s seen it at the cinema, and they could talk about that. Or
Top of the Pops
.

It’s hard to think about Karen while Helen is wittering on about Fat Joanne, so Martin finds himself thinking instead about Jamesy getting the belt, which makes him sad and a bit angry, too. Jamesy saved him, and look what happened. It wasn’t right. He had been relieved when Jamesy said he would go, but anxious at the same time because it was dangerous and unnecessary. You couldn’t blame O’Connor this time for giving the belt, but that just underlined why nobody should have demanded that somebody go up after the ball. He knows fine if Paddy had booted the ball up there without a deflection, or Stephen Rennie, or Richie, nobody would have suggested going after it, not even Graham, the Primary Six whose ball it was.

Helen reels him back from his contemplation by mentioning Karen’s first-hand response to getting the belt. “She said it was quite sore, but not sore enough to make her cry. She said it was being out in front of everybody that—”

Martin hears Helen make a weird spluttering noise and is suddenly aware of something rushing past him. He turns to look at her and sees that there is brown stuff coming out of her mouth, more of it smeared around her nose and chin. She wobbles dizzily for a moment then bends over and spits. Martin hears laughter and looks ahead. He sees one of Robbie’s big brothers—Brian, he thinks his name is, though he is always known as Boma—and another Primary Seven, both standing a few yards away and laughing. Boma’s right hand is filthy, dripping mud from his fingers.

Martin has some hankies in his pocket. He hands them to Helen, who bats him away at first because she’s still trembling with shock. Then she takes one tentatively and begins wiping away the mess, spitting more dirt as she does so.

Boma and his mate are still standing there, pissing themselves.

Martin feels an anger like nothing he has ever experienced before, something that needs to be vented or his head will explode. “Ya fuckin dirty fuckin evil fuckin bastards,” he screams at them. Martin seldom—almost never—swears, because it’s a sin and you have to tell the priest at confession, but he needs these words, knows nothing else will express the depths of his fury.

They both keep laughing; all the more, in fact.

“Ya fuckin pricks,” he yells again. “Fuckin big hard men daein that tae a wee lassie. Fuckin
wanks!
” This last he bellows so hard it seems to scrape his throat on the way out.

It has an impact on Boma, too. His laughter subsides and he walks towards Martin. He looks huge. He has a face like a skull: hollow and gaunt, with his hair cut really short, almost down to the roots like Slade in that poster on Uncle Tommy’s bedroom wall. Martin always thought he was the scariest-looking of the big boys, even when Boma was only in Primary Six and there were bigger hard-men in the year above. He looks even scarier than Joe, the oldest of Robbie’s brothers. And now he’s walking towards Martin with his teeth bared and nostrils flaring.

Martin knows he’s in trouble, but the rage inside still has him in a kind of oblivion. He throws himself at Boma, his fists balled and swinging. He then feels an explosion of pain in his stomach and doubles over, his useless hands now drawn into his middle. From the edge of his blurred vision he sees Boma’s shoe drive towards him, then a flash of white as it connects with his face.

He feels his nose burst, too. He’s not crying yet; like Helen, he’s still too much in shock.

“An you better no grass, ya wee cunt,” says a voice.

Martin hasn’t heard this insult before, but he knows instinctively that it is a swear-word. He can tell by the viciousness with which it is issued.

He wouldn’t have told anyway. The teachers never care about things like that, even less if it happens after school hours.

§

He tells his mum he got hit by the ball. He is able to embellish convincingly about the praise he received for stopping a goal, before comfortably heading off the subject by relating how Jamesy got the belt for going up on the roof.

By bedtime the pain is far less and his nose all cleaned up, but around his eye is starting to swell. He can’t get to sleep for ages because he starts worrying that Helen will tell Harris or somebody what happened, and if there’s any follow-up, Boma will think he grassed. He worries about getting a keeker too, because everyone will notice and it’ll get talked about, and it would be just his luck if this was the one time a teacher decided to investigate.

By morning, he does indeed have a big keeker, swollen and starting to discolour. Everybody asks about it. Everybody except O’Connor. He’s relieved, but he hates her for it, and he knows he’s right to hate her for it.

Beta Hydri

I
t’s bucketing down with rain, so they’re having what the teachers call a ‘wet playtime’, which means they all have to stay in class. They can talk and sit at different tables and they can eat their sweets and stuff, but ‘shite playtime’ would be a far better way to describe it, Martin reckons. The windows are all steamed up, so you can’t see outside, and the whole place stinks from the damp jackets placed on radiators because everybody got drookit coming in this morning. Last year, the jackets would have been soaking. Now they’re drookit. Same as things don’t get dirty or manky any more, but mockit. Mockit is even more recent. Things were still manky when Martin got the flu and had to stay off for a week and a half. They were mockit upon his return: Many, many things were mockit, in fact; you could tell a treasured new word had entered the playground lexicon because folk were liberal to the point of incontinent when using it. Perhaps it was a case of practising in order to get into the habit, because some new words became not so much alternatives as outright replacements, and using the outmoded version was asking for a slagging. Stating ‘Is it dick’, for example, having been state-of-the-art scorn in Primary Five, would now finger you as out-of-touch and a pure wean, not to mention a snobby poof for baulking at the swear-word required in the new Primary Seven vintage: ‘Is it fuck’. State the utterly prehistoric ‘Is it chook’ and you’d be best asking for a transfer to another school.

Martin was increasingly aware that the longer Primary Seven went on, the more everybody seemed to seize upon anything that could single you out. It used to be you had to endure some kind of memorable embarrassment before anyone reckoned they had slagging rights, but these days they were getting like piranha, snapping desperately at the merest morsel. Such thoughts always caused St Grace’s to loom forebodingly in his future. He had heard it was far worse up there, and it wasn’t all the shite you heard about folk getting their heads flushed down the lawy by Second Years that scared him. Scotty’s big sister Heather had told him, for instance, that simply taking a sealed Tupperware cup of juice along with your packed lunch was enough to get you called a poofy mummy’s boy. This had troubled him not simply because his mum
did
tend to pack precisely such an item with his lunch, but because it would never have occurred to him that it was a potential source of abuse, and thus there must be dozens of other potholes just waiting for him to walk into once he made the big move up the hill. He already knows he’ll get it for being good at his work and seldom in trouble, so starting off in deficit means he can ill afford to concede any other social points.

Harris comes in again and tells them all to pipe down. That’s the second time and she’s threatening punishment if she has to come back a third. They’re only talking, and no way is it that loud. It’s just because the Primary Seven classes are in the Annexe alongside the staff room. Plus, if they all sat there in silence, the old boot would be shattered. She likes nothing better than shouting the odds and making out she’s disappointed in them when inside she’s loving it.

Everybody hates Harris now much more than they hate Momo. They’re still wary of him, but he doesn’t cut the same intimidating figure he did when they were younger. He seemed to get smaller every year, and went gradually from this giant ape to just a strange old man. It took a while, but one day Martin became aware that Momo was actually shorter than quite a few of the other teachers, all of whom were women. And the next thing he noticed, though they tried to disguise it, was that the teachers clearly thought he was an eejit as much as the weans did.

The younger kids still think he’s the bogeyman, and after the bell goes he’ll no doubt be battering lumps out of a few Primary Three or Four noggins on account of their older siblings, but it’s Harris who really casts a cloud over Martin’s year. And that’s not because either she or Momo has changed, only that the kids now see them through older eyes. Momo is mental, which used to make him scary, but they can now see he’s ridiculous, a joke. Harris is no fucking joke, and the only reason they didn’t hate her more earlier was that they didn’t have much to do with her beyond her hymn practices and the occasional crackdown on lining up late. Momo is officially the boss, but Harris is the one who rules the Sixes and Sevens, and ‘rules’ is definitely the word.

Even if it wasn’t raining, they’d be having a shite playtime, because Harris has banned almost everything that they like to do, including football.
She has banned football
. Not completely, only from the playground, but as it’s March right now and the pitch is a swimming pool, it’s the same difference. As is usual when the pitch was flooded, they had returned to playing up on the concrete, until Stephen Rennie sliced a shot on the half-volley and smashed a window. Martin has been playing in the same playground since Primary Four, and in that time, despite anything from one to four games of football taking place simultaneously at every interval, this was the first window breakage. A few near things, granted, but only one smashed pane. One, however, was enough. God, she must have been waiting for it, dying for it. In the winter she banned sliding, as she does every year because once upon a time Helen Dunn’s big sister Nicola broke her ankle; this on top of banning snowballs ‘because you could take someone’s eye out’. Which made for a truly miserable January for anyone not
really
excited by building snowmen.

When it thawed, the pitch became its current quagmire, so the game of choice up on the concrete was pinkies, or bar-the-door, or British bulldog as some folk called it. It’s a great game for this time of year because all the running keeps you warm when it’s so chilly and windy outside. Or rather, it
was
a great game until Jamesy broke his arm and Harris banned it on pain of the belt.

Tig was a wee bit lacking in scope for occupying thirty-odd eleven-year-olds, but they had their resources and thus managed at least temporarily to spice things up. Frisbee-tig: instead of just touching you with his hand, the guy who is ‘Het’ has to hit you with a frisbee. Current status: banned (burst nose, Gary Hawkins). Ball-tig: the guy who is ‘Het’ has to hit you with a tennis ball. Current status: banned (see snowballs re potential eye-loss). Two-man hunt: a large-scale game of tig meets hide-and-seek. Current status: banned (burst nose, James Doon, ran into wall while looking backwards at pursuer).

Which had left the old standby, fitba, until Stephen learnt the downside of a highly polished finish to his shiny new Docs. The pitch will dry out some day soon, but for the time being wet playtime is arguably preferable to plain old dry playtime, because at least you get a seat inside away from the cold.

Martin is scribbling on a piece of scrap paper. He watches Harris depart, guessing she’d prefer to stay and use playtime for some more compulsory hymns. He used to think that leading these practices was part of her duty as deputy head, but this week he’s realised that it’s her obsession. O’Connor is off sick and they’ve got Harris as a stand-in until she comes back.

Most classes get a different teacher every year as they move up through the school. Some, occasionally, get the same one for two. They have somehow ended up with Soorpuss O’Connor from Primary Five right through to the bitter end, and it says a lot for just how horrible O’Connor is that Harris seems an easier shift. She’s distracted, for one thing, always with her head in some folder or other, while O’Connor misses nothing, eyes like a hawk and the screech to match. A change is as good as a rest in as much as it’s a rest from O’Connor, but it’s not without its price, the greater part of which is that the woman can’t go between two school bells without getting everyone to their feet for an enforced rendition of some dirge or other.