Hangman punches back harder the word gets stuck and that’s when you turn into the classic stuttering flid. ‘Jack held out his hands for the conch and,’ suffocating in plastic, ‘ssstood up, holding the delicate thing carefully in his’ – my earlobes buzzed with stress – ‘sssooty hands. “I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have these rules and obey them. After all, we’re not – we’re not—” Sorry, sir…’ I had no choice. ‘What’s that word?’
‘“Savages”?’
‘Thanks, sir.’ (Wished I had the guts to press my two Ball Pentels against my eyeballs and head-slam the desk. Anything to get away.) ‘“We’re English; and the English are best at everything.” Er…“Ssso we’ve got to do the right things.”’
Miss Lippetts walked in and saw what’d happened. ‘Thank you, Jason.’
No ‘How come he gets off so lightly?’ rippled round the class.
‘Please, miss?’ Gary Drake stuck up his hand.
‘Gary?’
‘This part’s brill. Honest, I’m on the edge of my seat. Mind if I read?’
‘Glad you’re enjoying it, Gary. Go ahead.’
Gary Drake cleared his throat. ‘“Ralph – I’ll split up the choir – my hunters, that is – into groups, and we’ll be responsible for keeping the fire going—”’ Gary Drake read with exaggerated polish, just to contrast with how he read next. ‘This generosssity brought a ssss-SSS-patter—’ (He got me. Boys were sniggering. Girls were looking round at me. My head burst into flames of shame.) ‘– of applause from the boys, s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-so—’
‘Gary Drake!’
He was all innocent. ‘Miss?’
Kids turned round to stare at Gary Drake, then me. Is Taylor the School Stutterer going to cry? A label’d been stuck on me that I’ll never peel off.
‘Do you believe you are being amusing, Gary Drake?’
‘Sorry, miss.’ Gary Drake smiled without smiling. ‘Must’ve picked up a nasty stutter from somewhere…’
Christopher Twyford and Leon Cutler shook with stifled laughter.
‘You two can shut up!’ They did. Miss Lippetts’s no idiot. Sending Gary Drake to Mr Nixon’d’ve turned his joke into today’s main headline. If it isn’t already. ‘That is despicably, fatuously, ignorantly weak of you, Gary Drake.’ The rest of the words on page forty-one of Lord of the Flies swarmed off the page and buried my face in bees.
Seventh and eighth periods were music with Mr Kempsey, our form teacher. Alastair Nurton’d taken my usual seat next to Mark Badbury so without a word I sat with Carl Norrest, Lord of Lepers. Nicholas Briar and Floyd Chaceley’ve been lepers together so long they’re almost married. Mr Kempsey was still furious with us for the McNamara affair. After we’d chanted, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Kempsey,’ he just wanged us our exercise books like Oddjob throwing his hat in Goldfinger. ‘I quite fail to see what is “good” about this afternoon, when you have rubbished the founding principle of the comprehensive school. Namely, that the putative crème de la crème impart their enrichening essence to the milkier orders. Avril Bredon, distribute the textbooks. Chapter three. It is Ludwig van Beethoven’s turn to be hanged, drawn and quartered.’ (We don’t actually make music in music. All we’ve done this term is copy out chunks from Lives of the Great Composers. While we’re doing this, Mr Kempsey unlocks the record player and puts on an LP of that week’s composer. The poshest voice on earth introduces that composer’s greatest hits.) ‘Remember,’ warned Mr Kempsey, ‘to rewrite the biography in your own words.’ Teachers’re always using that ‘in your own words’. I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It’s their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put then back together more shonkily? How’re you s’posed to say capelmeister if you can’t say capelmeister?
Nobody messes about much in Mr Kempsey’s class, but today the mood was like somebody’d died. The only minor distraction was Holly Deblin, the new girl, asking if she could go to the sickbay for a bit. Mr Kempsey just pointed at the door and mouthed, ‘Go.’ Third-year girls’re allowed to go to the sickbay or toilets much more freely than boys. Duncan Priest says it’s to do with periods. Periods’re pretty mysterious. Girls don’t talk about them when boys’re around. Boys don’t joke about them much, in case we give away how little we know.
Beethoven going deaf was the high point of his chapter in Lives of the Great Composers. Composers spent half their lives walking across Germany to work for different archbishops and archdukes. The other half must’ve been lost in church. (Bach’s choirboys used his original manuscripts to wrap their sandwiches in for years after he’d