died. That’s the only other thing I’ve learnt in music this term.) I polished Beethoven off in forty minutes, long before the rest of the class.
Moonlight Sonata, the poshest voice on earth told us, is one of the best-loved pieces in any pianist’s repertoire. Composed in 1782, the sonata evokes the moon over calm, peaceful waters after the passing of a storm.
A poem nagged as moonlight Sonata played. Its title’s ‘Souvenirs’. Wished I could’ve netted the lines in my rough book, but I daredn’t, not in class, not on a day like today. (And now it’s all gone ’cept for ‘Sunlight on waves, drowsy tinsel’. Don’t write it down and you’re doomed.)
‘Jason Taylor.’ Mr Kempsey’d noticed my attention’d left the textbook. ‘An errand for you.’
School corridors’re sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces’re now the silentest. Like a neutron bomb’s vaporized human life but left all the buildings standing. These drowned voices you hear aren’t coming from classrooms, but through the partitions between life and death. The shortest route to the staffroom was the Quad, but I took the longer way, via the Old Gym. Teachers’ errands’re in-between times where no one can hassle you, like Free Parking in Monopoly. I wanted to spin this space out. My feet clomped over the same worn boards boys did somersaults on before they went off to the First World War to be gassed. Stacked chairs block off one wall of the Old Gym, but the other wall’s got a wooden frame you can climb. For some reason, I wanted to peer out through the window at the top. It was a minor risk. If I heard footsteps I’d just jump down.
Once you’re up there, mind, it’s higher than it looks.
Years of muck’d greyed the glass.
The afternoon’d turned to heavy grey.
Too heavy and too grey to not turn into rain. Moonlight Sonata orbited out past the tenth planet. Rooks huddled on a drainpipe, watching the school buses lumber into the big front yard. Bolshy, bored and bargey, those rooks, like the Upton Punks hanging out by their war memorial.
Once a Maggot, mocked Unborn Twin, always a Maggot.
Points behind my eyes ached with the coming rain.
Friday’d come round, sure. But the moment I get home, the weekend’ll begin to die and Monday’ll creep nearer, minute by minute. Then it’ll be back to five more days like today, worse than today, far worse than today.
Hang yourself.
‘Lucky for you,’ a girl’s voice said, and I nearly fell fifteen feet to a nest of fractured bones, ‘I’m not a teacher on patrol, Taylor.’
I peered down at Holly Deblin peering up. ‘S’pose so.’
‘What’re you doing out of class?’
‘Kempsey sent me to get his whistle.’ I clambered down. Holly Deblin’s only a girl but she’s as tall as me. She throws the javelin farther than anyone. ‘He’s doing the bus queues today. Are you feeling better?’
‘Just needed to lie down for a bit. How about you? Giving you a hard time, aren’t they? Wilcox, Drake and Brose and them.’
No point denying it, but admitting it made it realer.
‘They’re dickheads, Taylor.’
Darkness in the Old Gym smoothed away Holly Deblin’s edges.
‘Yeah.’ They are dickheads, but how does that help me?
Was it then that I heard the first tappings of rain?
‘You’re not a maggot. Don’t let dickheads decide what you are.’
Past the clock where bad kids’re made to stand, past the secretary’s office where form captains fetch the registers, past the storeroom, a long passageway leads to the staffroom. My footsteps got slower as I got nearer. Its steel door was half open today. Low chairs, I saw. Mr Whitlock’s black wellingtons. Cigarette smoke billowed out like fog in Jack the Ripper’s London. But just this side of the door, there’s a hive of cubby-holes where the more important teachers’ve got their own desks.
‘Yes?’ Mr Dunwoody blinked at me, dragonishly. A going-brown chrysanthemum leant over his shoulder. The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you about?’
‘Mr Kempsey asked me to come and get his whistle, sir.’
‘As in, “Whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad”?’
‘I s’pose so, sir. He told me it’s on his desk. On a paper of interest.’
‘Or perhaps,’ Mr Dunwoody stuck a Vick’s nasal inhaler up his large red nose and took an almighty sniff, ‘Mr Kempsey’s getting out of teaching while his ticker is not yet dicky. Off to Snowdonia,