Hello Darkness (2 page)

“Pick ’em up,” said Bosola, looking me in the eye.

“Pick ’em up yourself,” I said amiably back, though amiable is not quite the right word for the thoughts in my head. I knew that the second I bent to pick up the insects, I’d get a boot in the face. “If you don’t mind standing aside, I’ve got to get back to class – I’ve a hot date with a really sexy quadratic equation.”

Suddenly Bosola’s soft, feminine face hardened.

“Oh, so he doesn’t want to pick ’em up! Doesn’t he know that we’re prefects, and that as he’s just a Year-Ten zero, he’s got to do what we say?”

Funt grunted.

I still didn’t move.

“So, in that case it’s back to plan A,” said Bosola.

Funt looked at him uncertainly.

Bosola gave a little groan. “The stamping!”

“Oh, yeah.”

Now, Funt was slow, but only in the sense of being thick. When it came to using his body rather than his mind, he was anything but sluggish. He reached me in two quick, boxer’s steps. I put my left up to parry his right, but it didn’t come. Instead he grabbed my throat and shoved me back against the wall, keeping a hold on my neck. Now he drew back his fist, going for a straight right to the middle of my face. It’s the sort of punch you use on little kids. A nose buster or lip burster. It won’t put down a real fighter – you need a nice clean hit to the chin to do that – but it’ll make a kid cry.

The trouble was, I now didn’t have the time to parry, or even duck, not with Funt’s speed of hand. So I rolled my face to the right, and the punch slid off the side of my skull, like a rock bouncing down a mountain, and smashed into the wall behind me.

Funt yowled and let go of my neck. He was still in close, so I gave him a back-handed slap with my left to make some room. The slap made a good noise as my knuckles rapped against his hard bones. I stepped out from his shadow and drew back my arm, going for the thinnest part of the jaw. I gave myself a 50–50 chance of cracking it.

But halfway there, my fist sort of died. It took me a second to realize that I’d been sapped. I found that I was down on my knees. I looked up. Bosola was holding something. Something soft with something hard inside it. Then he swung it again and the world went supernova.

“WHAT
d’ya sock him with?”

“A sock.”

“A sock?”

“A sock with a spud in it.”

“How d’ya find a sock with a spud in it?”

“I put the spud in the sock.”

“Oh. Why d’ya put the spud in the sock?”

“Jeez. Look, a spud in a sock makes a good cosh. It takes a guy down. But if you get pulled in, what have you got? Just a sock and a spud. You put the sock on, you eat the spud. Right?”

“Right.”

Well, that was the quality of entertainment I had on the trip, once I came round. The two of them were half dragging, half carrying me along. One of them had hold of my shirt collar, choking the air out of me. I think that’s what brought me round, dying being one of the things I’ll gladly wake up to avoid. I tried to get my feet to take some of the weight, but they slipped and slid on the polished floor of the corridor.

“Looks like the baby woke up.”

They held me low and hard, so I had to trot along bent double. We went up a flight of stairs, along another corridor. Twice I stumbled, and twice they hauled me up by the collar, each time yanking it tighter.

And then we were outside the Shank’s office.

I should give you some geography. And maybe a bit of history. We were in the section of the school called the teachers’ corridor. You’d know it with your eyes closed: it was the only part of the school that didn’t smell of disinfectant and urine. First, you came to the school office, where the secretary, a spinster called Miss Bickersniff lived, then the staff room, then the Shank’s office with a sign saying Chief Executive on the door, and then the Principal’s office.

The Principal, Mr Vole, was a sweet old guy, smelling faintly of pipe smoke and peppermint, with a whiff of fruitcake. His milky eyes peered benignly over the top of a pair of half-moon glasses, and his only desire, so far as anyone could tell, was to get through to his retirement with as little bother as possible.

Before the Shank came along, most of the work fell on the shoulders of the old Deputy, a fuzzy-haired guy called Mr Bathgate. Bathgate was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen, and after yet another disastrous school inspection he had a total collapse. Miss Bickersniff found him sitting on the wastepaper bin in his office, with his pants shucked down around his ankles, shouting for his mummy.

So, Shankley was brought in as the new broom, and everything changed. The old sweet chaos was replaced by fastened top buttons and lots of shouting. The thinking behind it all was to run the place like a business, which was why Shankley had that Chief Executive nameplate put up on his door. Much to his obvious bemusement, Vole found himself described as the “Managing Director”. But the truth was, the school was now more like a military dictatorship than either a corporation or an institution of learning.

Bosola knocked on Shankley’s door. A bark came from inside. Then the door was open, and I was facing the Shank across a wooden desk as big as an aircraft carrier.

Facing Mr Shankley wasn’t something you’d choose to do for entertainment. His eyes were a weird pale-green – so pale, in fact, that sometimes it seemed that there was no line between the white of the eye and the iris. He wore his sparse, gun-metal-grey hair slicked back, and his mouth was twisted into a near-perpetual snarl, which only occasionally softened itself into a sneer. If he could have got away with it, he’d have gone full-on Gestapo and added a monocle and leather gloves.

The Shank’s narrow lips pursed. He had a wart like a rice crispy on the side of his nose.

“What is this?”

“Sir, we found this slimeball in the bogs. I mean toilets, sir. And not just that, sir, but he had
these
.”

Bosola elbowed Funt.

Funt reached into his pocket and took out a dirty handkerchief. He shook it over the Shank’s desk. A dozen dead bodies fell out, rattling on the polished wood.

The Shank started back from his desk. His face went blank for a moment, and then weirdly tight, as if it had been suddenly shrink-wrapped.

Then he said, in a voice hardly more than a whisper, “Explain.”

I wanted to get my story in first. “I was—” I began, but the Shank cut me off.

“NOT YOU!” he yelled, his voice now scalpel-sharp. “And sort that collar and tie out!”

I thought about a sardonic remark on the subject of who had messed up my collar and tie, but this wasn’t a good time for sardonic remarks.

“Like I said, sir, we found him skiving in the toilets. These things were on the floor, scattered all around him. It looked like he’d just chucked them there the second before we came in.”

The Shank turned his pale eyes on me again, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I quaked. I was still trying to straighten out my collar, but my fingers felt as thick and clumsy as corncobs.

The Shank stared on. He prided himself in knowing the name of every kid in the school, though it sometimes took him a while to get there. Not with me, though.

“Middleton,” he said. “I want an explanation for this, and I want it now.”

I cleared my throat.

“OK. Look, I admit I was in the toilets. Chilli last night – you know how it is. So, I heard someone come in. Whoever it was dumped these little guys on the floor. I was just checking them out when Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber came in. That’s all there is to it.”

Funt tensed next to me. I guessed I was going to pay later for that crack. I considered it money well spent.

“And why should I believe this …
fairy tale
of yours?”

“It’s no fairy tale.”

“Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor?” said the Shank in a different tone. It was almost friendly.

“Is that the barber’s shop on the High Street?”

The Shank’s mouth twitched. He managed to squeeze a lot of meaning into that twitch. The twitch said,
You are an idiot
, but then it corrected itself, and added,
Well
,
maybe not an idiot; maybe a smart
alec
.
Either way
, the twitch said,
I don’t like you. Don’t like you at all
.

“Occam’s Razor is the philosophical principle which dictates that where there are two competing explanations for a state of affairs, we should always choose the simpler.”

“Clever guy, Occam,” I replied. “But sometimes the simplest explanation is wrong. You know, some people think that this school is a dump simply because it’s run by incompetents and crooks. But, personally, I think it’s
way
more complicated than that.”

I sensed a conflict raging within the Shank. He wanted to inflict some hurt. He wanted to inflict it
personally
. But that wasn’t the deal.

“Bosola, Funt!”

“Sir?”

“I do believe our friend Middleton here is a little unwell. Take him along to the sick bay. Get him to lie down for a short while. We’ll see if that improves his … attitude.”

Right, so now things really had taken a bad turn. The sick bay used to be just that: the place where you went to lie down after you’d puked. At one time there’d been a school nurse who’d take your temperature and paint your gums purple with iodine. Back when I first started to get …
ill
, I’d hang out there sometimes, and the nurse would talk to me. She had tired eyes and sometimes you’d see her sitting alone in a cafe, smoking. But she was nice. And long gone. Now all that was left in the sick bay was a bucket of sand, and the sad remains of an old dummy used to initiate kids in the arcane rituals of artificial respiration.

But the sick bay had changed in one other, important way. It was now lined with padded material. In theory it was meant to protect kids who had fits in there, but its true function was, I knew, to make the room more or less soundproof. That meant no one could hear your screams, or the thuds as your head bounced off the walls.

So, I was to get a beating for my trouble. You could hear the smile spreading across Funt’s face like a crack in a glacier.

The next thing I knew the big guy bent my arm behind my back and began marching me out of the Shank’s office. He didn’t get far. There was a brief knock, the door opened, and right there before us stood Mr Vole, headmaster of our school.

VOLE
had been reading a document as he walked in. Now he looked up. He was tall, but stooped, thereby nicely displaying the shiny top of his bald head. His pate was dimpled like a baby’s bum, and was fringed by a circle of fine, white hair – hair that gave an impression of such infinitely soft downiness that it was impossible not to want to reach out and stroke it.

“Ah, er, yes, sorry, sorry, my apologies. I didn’t realize that, so to speak, you were, I mean, er, busy. With these, ah, children, I mean pupils, which is to say, young people.”

That’s the way Vole spoke – he used up a lot of words to say not very much. He was also somewhat in awe of the Shank. No one was in awe of Vole. It would be like being in awe of a filing cabinet or an armchair.

“Not at all,” said the Shank, grimly.

Then there was one of those silences for which the adjective
awkward
might have been invented. Vole looked from the Shank to Funt to Bosola and on to me, hoping that an explanation might emerge. His lips formed various words without committing any of them to the airwaves – I guessed that “er”, “ah”, “that is to say” and “in point of fact” were at least some of them.

Then Vole saw the brown twigs on the Shank’s desk.

“Ah,” he said, although this was a different sort of an “ah”, one that had more poignancy and sadness in it. I’d guess, if pushed, you’d have to call it a sigh. He walked across the room and gazed at the tragic remains on the desk. His hands made a cupping motion, as if he were going to lift up the insects in a mute offering to the gods. But he didn’t actually touch them.

He looked up. His eyes were moist.

“What … er, how did this … how did this
incident
 … this
event
come to, ah, pass?”

“They were killed, sir,” answered Bosola. “Murdered.”

Vole looked uncomprehendingly at Bosola for a few moments. Then, as the truth sank in, he closed his eyes and brought his hands slowly together in front of his lips, as if in prayer.

“We try … we try … we try so hard. So very, very hard. We provide every and, ah, indeed any, opportunity to you young people, to the youth of … ah, we give you every chance to flourish, to spread your legs, erm, which is to say, wings. And this is how you, ah, repay us. Truancy, theft, vandalism, destruction of school property … animal cruelty. I wonder sometimes why we indeed, ah, bother.” He opened his eyes again and looked at the Shank. “Why was I not informed of this?”

“I was just dealing with it,” replied the Shank.

“But the death of … the
demise
… as you know, the school pet programme, well, it was
important
… important to us all.”