Hello Darkness (3 page)

“Which is why I was giving it top priority.”

“So who or what is, ah, responsible?”

The Shank raised his chin in my direction. “The finger points to this boy, Middleton. Two of my prefects caught him red-handed.”

“It wasn’t me,” I blurted out. “I’m just the patsy, the fall guy. Wrong time, wrong place.”

Vole’s lips were wet. The rest of him was dry as a mummy’s jock strap, but his lips were always moist, as if he’d been sucking the juice out of a watermelon. He licked them now.

“Mr Shankley seems to think that you were to blame. And these two boys appear to have witnessed, in the sense of, er, having seen the occurrence as it, ah, occurred.”

“Sir, these two jokers didn’t see a thing. They came in after the real killer had dumped the bodies. And,” I added, letting a neat little pause hang in the air, “I think I know who it was.”

“You’re a liar, Middleton,” said Bosola, menacingly. “You killed the bugs and you know it.” He turned again to the Shank. “Just give us five minutes with him, sir. He’ll confess, I guarantee you.”

That threat turned out to be my lucky break. Vole wasn’t much of a head teacher, but you couldn’t call him brutal. He didn’t turn a blind eye to all the violence in the place: he genuinely didn’t see it. But even he couldn’t miss Bosola’s threat. Nor did he like the fact that a kid had just appealed over his head to someone who was supposed to be his deputy.

“I will not have that language in my, er, or anyone’s office. In this, er, school, no man or woman, for that matter, let alone child, is guilty until it is proven that they are, which is to say that they are not, er,
innocent
. You, young man, Mandelson, was it…?”

“Middleton, sir.”

“Right, Middlebum, you say you know who actually committed this appalling act of, ah,
appallingness
.”

“I think I do, sir.”

“Kindly name the, ah, culprit.”

I paused. The truth was that I had not the faintest idea who had killed the insects. I knew it wasn’t me, but so far that was all the narrowing-down I’d done.

“I’ve no proof. I don’t want to give you a name without hard evidence.”

“The boy’s bluffing. And wasting our time,” snapped the Shank. “I suggest immediate suspension, followed, once we’ve established exactly what happened, by permanent exclusion.”

“That seems to rather prejudge the, ah, issue…”

The Shank gave an exasperated sigh. “I wonder if we could discuss this for a moment in your office?”

“Well, naturally, you mean in private, of course, yes, yes.”

The two of them went out into the corridor. Funt, Bosola and yours truly were left to puff and blow and look at the ceiling. After a minute or so, Funt aimed a casual kick at me. I caught his foot and held it, with the big dumb bozo tottering and yet frozen, like a photo of a tower block just after the demolition charges have gone off.

The Shank came back in and I let go of Funt’s foot. I was expecting Vole to follow him, but he never showed.

That was a bad sign.

“You’re a lucky boy,” said the Shank. His face and his voice were neutral, unreadable. “Mr Vole seems to think that we haven’t got the evidence to suspend you for this. Plus there is the issue of your ongoing …
problems
, and the fact that you’ve only recently returned from your period of …
recuperation
.”

It should have been good news. Somehow I knew it wasn’t.

“And so we’re giving you four days – until Friday – to come back to us with a name.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we cancel the school play. What one might term a collective punishment.”

I tried to work out the angle. I failed. “That’s a shame, heck, it’s a tragedy. But I don’t act, can’t sing, so why…?”

“And we let …
them
know that it’s been cancelled because of you.”

Them
. That could only mean one thing.

The Queens.

Suddenly the room was very quiet. Quiet, that is, until Funt filled it with a bass guffaw, and Bosola with a falsetto giggle.

“You’ll wish you’d been expelled,” tittered Bosola.

That was the biggest case of stating the obvious since the lookout on the Titanic yelled to mind the iceburg.

“We’re done here, Middleton,” said the Shank, and waved us to the door, his eyes already on the papers on his desk.

I was still too stunned to have a snappy answer ready, and I was halfway out the door before I remembered that there was something I would need if I were to stand a chance of pulling my ass out of the fire.

“I’ll need a Warrant.”

The Warrant was the official piece of paper issued to prefects and other kids on special duties. It gave you permission to go anywhere in the school any time you wanted.

“Don’t push your luck, sonny,” the Shank growled back. He used “sonny” in the same way as the Greek god Cronus used it, and he ate his kids alive.

“If you want the truth, then I need the paper.”

The Shank thought for a moment, then opened a drawer and took out a neat stack of pre-printed A5 pages. He signed one with a fancy fountain pen and handed it to me.

“Don’t make me regret this,” he said, icily.

I was out of there just in time to hear the buzzer go for the end of the morning. Yeah, I’d been bluffing when I told Vole that I knew who’d done the deed on the sticks, but I meant to convert that bluff into a straight flush. And I knew exactly where to start looking.

THE
walk back to the toilets gave me the chance to think about the Shank’s threat. It was bad. It was really bad. I was like a cow with a cut leg in the Amazon river, just waiting for the first piranha to get a sniff of the blood.

The Queens, or rather the Drama Queens, to give them their proper title, were the most powerful gang in the school. Their reach was longer, their grip tighter even than the prefects’. Their origins lay in the drama club that put on the twice-yearly school plays, but they’d grown beyond that. Way beyond.

To begin with, the Drama Queens had been a force for good. A refuge for all those out of step with the brutalities of everyday life in our school. For every star milking the lights out in front of the audience, there were twenty back-stage toilers: mousey, timid, but proud to play their part, however small, in the creation of something beautiful.

But then the drama club had been allocated a budget, and where there is money, corruption will grow, like mushrooms on a dung heap. Yeah, the Queens got greedy. Greedy first for the sake of their art and the prestige it brought them. But then just plain greedy.

The productions became more and more lavish. Stage sets began to grow, aping New York skylines or Indian jungles or Parisian ghettos as the show demanded. The orchestra swelled – we’re not talking about three kazoos and a triangle here, but something big enough to put on Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
with a side order of Bizet’s
Carmen
. The costumes bloomed in gaudy extravagance. The stage was filled with light and glitter.

All very pretty, but it was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the Queens. They looked after their own. If you messed with one Queen, you messed with them all. And if you got in the way of the juggernaut, then you were going to get crushed.

The Queens had fought a long turf war with the other main gang in the school, the Lardies. The Lardies were a sort of overweight mafia, and they controlled the supply of junk food to the kids who couldn’t swallow the “healthy option” menu that the New Regime slopped onto their plates. The war between the Queens and the Lardies ended in a sort of compromise, with each gang finding a niche. But nobody doubted that the Queens had inflicted the deepest wounds. For now Hercule Paine, the leader of the Lardies, was content to lick those wounds. But revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold, and then rammed down your enemy’s throat so it chokes them to death.

Even though the Queens were now about much more than drama, drama was still at the centre of their world. Except that something rather strange had happened. Back in their glory days, the Drama Queens had put on two fresh shows every year. But now it was always the same two. The Christmas panto was
Cinderella
, and the summer show was
The Wizard of Oz
.

Oz
, in particular, had become a kind of totem, a symbol. More than that, it was like those blood sacrifices performed by the Aztecs and other Mesoamericans. Without the offerings of hearts, the sun would not rise, the rains would not come, and the world would be lost to chaos and darkness. And without
Oz
, said the irrational beast that ravened in the school’s subconscious, there would be equally terrible consequences. There would be a Ragnarok, the war at the end of time, and all kinds of bad shit would go down. That kind of thing.

Everyone knew that Shankley wanted the Drama Queens gone. The money and the power had put them out of his control. They needed to be destroyed. So far he hadn’t had a good enough reason to close them down, but the death of the stick insects was just the pretext he needed.

And now I realized I was stuck in a web that a black widow would have been proud of. Funt and Bosola were sure to put the word around that I was the main suspect for the killing. The Shank had set this all up so that he couldn’t lose. Either I found the perp, and he’d get the credit for solving the crime, or I failed, which would give him the excuse he wanted to fatally weaken the Queens by nixing the play. And nobody would blame him for zapping
The Oz
; it’d be me the Queens tied upside-down on the school gates, wearing nothing but a tutu and a feather boa, with a big “Q” drawn on my chest in pink lipstick.

Well, so far, the Queens and I hadn’t had much to do with each other, but that was going to change.

First, though, I needed something to go on. A clue. And that meant returning to the crime scene.

THE
toilets at lunchtime weren’t quite as civilized as they were during lessons. The cubicles were all occupied. Some held Year Seven midgets, sobbing for their mothers. In some, grim rites were being performed: the ancient tortures of dunking and flushing. Others contained clandestine scoffers of the forbidden digestive biscuit or Mars bar. One cubicle had smoke pluming over it, although whether it was a furtive fag, or some kid setting himself on fire rather than face the school lunch, I couldn’t say. Perhaps some of the cubicles were even being used for the purposes for which they were designed.

But my business wasn’t with the cubicles, or the sad wretches they contained. Nor was it with the urinals – although I did briefly want to push a kid’s face into the stinking bowl when I saw him spit his gum in there.

No, this wasn’t the time for random acts of vigilantism. I was here because I remembered that metallic rattle, which meant that something had been dumped in the bin at the end of the row of sinks. I went straight to it and picked through the paper towels newly deposited there.

“Hey, psycho-boy, lost your pills?”

I looked up, but still fished around with my left hand. A couple of kids from my year loomed over me. Steve Wilson was one of the cool kids, if by cool you meant vain, shallow and asinine. His hair was greased into a quiff, and his tie-knot was the size of a baby’s head. His friend was called Gamble or Grimble or some such, and he looked the same, with the minor handicap of a spray of acne like a meteor shower across his cheeks.

“I’m looking for your soul. I heard I could find it in the trash.”

Wilson stared at me with a perplexed expression on his handsome, dumb face. “What the hell does that mean? If it’s supposed to be funny, then it’s not, and if it’s supposed to be clever, then it’s not. But if supposed to be lame, then you hit the jackpot.”

Grimble or Gamble or whatever laughed through his nose, squirting a little snot.

On consideration, I thought Wilson was probably right. But I didn’t care, because my fingers touched something hard and thin and long at the bottom of the bin. I reached round, found another and pulled them both out.

“What you got there, weirdo?” said Wilson, though this time there was genuine interest in his voice.

“Text me and I’ll let you know,” I replied as I walked out, hiding what I’d found under my blazer.

“You haven’t even got a phone, nut-job,” Wilson called after me as I swung the door shut in his face.

I went straight out into the Upper School playground. This was the set-up: the front of the school was for years seven–nine, the back of the school was for years ten and eleven. The Sixth Formers could go wherever they wanted, but usually just hung out in their common room. Any Lower School kid who strayed into the Upper School playground would be lucky to escape with nothing worse than a debagging, and any older kid who ventured into the realm of the Lower School would be mobbed and pelted and harried until he got the hell out.

But the side of the school was different. It was called the Interzone. It was a no man’s land, where, in theory, anyone could go. It was also a dark and dangerous place. There were long fissures in between different school buildings where the sun never shone, folds and wrinkles in the school’s skin, where lurkers lurked and shirkers shirked. This was where you’d find the goths and the emos, the psycho kids and the skins, the demented and the tormented. There was the corner where the Lardies ate their pies and currant buns. White-faced kids would gather round a Ouija board, or consult with some fake witch about love charms or wart cures. And deep in the dark heart of the Interzone was the foul and sordid alley where the Bacon-heads sought oblivion in their highly-processed, pig-flavoured drug of choice.

It hadn’t always been like this. Before the New Regime, the Interzone was nothing more and nothing less than the side of the school. But Shankley’s crackdown had forced all the seediest elements – as well as the innocent outsiders, anyone odd or freaky or just plain different – into that murky world. There they were left, boiled and sweated down to a toxic concentration, like tree-frog poison.