park full of skips, crushers and enormous freight containers. The sky is concrete grey. I can smell beer slops, vinegar and soil.
I’m high-fiving wine bottles through stiff brush. It is a bit like a mass grave and all the green bottles are Jews. There are brown bottles and clear bottles too but not nearly as many. With Gestapic efficiency, I pick out another green bottle from the crate.
All the bodies will be crushed, recycled and used in building motorways.
‘Oliver, we’ve got something to tell you,’ Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad-green mangler.
Unlike the doctor, when Dad says ‘we’, he means ‘we’, because Mum is omnipotent.
‘Who’s dead?’ I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg.
‘No one’s dead.’
‘You’re getting a divorce?’
‘Oliver.’
‘Mum’s preggers?’
‘No, we –’
‘I’m adopted.’
‘Oliver! Please, shit up!’
I can’t believe he just said that. I yelp with laughter. He looks flustered and red, cradling a slush of Sunday newspaper supplements. I keep laughing long after it has ceased to be funny.
But what Dad says next cuts my chortling short. Nothing could have prepared me:
‘Your mother and I decided: we need a holiday. We’ve booked for us all to go at Easter. To Italy,’ he says.
Flagitious
In assembly, Mr Checker announced that these are the best years of our lives. He said that most of our defining memories will be formed during school.
At the end of the assembly, Mr Checker held up an article from the Evening Post. He explained:
‘Zoe Preece’s mother’s beagle has beaten off eight thousand other dogs to win Best in Show at Crufts.’
Mr Checker made Zoe stand while we applauded, cheered, laughed.
Zoe is not the fattest girl in our school; Martina Freeman is much fatter. If you call Martina fat, she will push you against a wall and grab your balls. For this reason, Zoe has been appointed fattest girl. When she gets called Fat, she scurries away and writes about it in her diary. She has a short dark bob and excellent skin, the colour of full-fat milk. Her lips are always wet.
The best kind of bullying is topical. My friend Chips is a topical bully.
It is a well-known fact that on the last day of school before a holiday, even a half term, there are absolutely no rules.
The path to the school pond runs through a scrubland of ill trees, nettles and punctured footballs.
Chips adopts the pompous trot of the Crufts dog-trainer as he leads Zoe down the path, dropping the contents of her pencil case at intervals like dog chews.
‘Good girl,’ Chips says, tossing Zoe’s highlighter pen over his head.
Chips has a grade-two all over; you can see the contours of his skull, bulging and ridged.
Jordana, Abby and I bring up the rear, watching Zoe’s bum when she leans down to retrieve her stationery. She is wearing trousers.
‘Come on, girl,’ Chips encourages, dropping a Niceday rubber that bounces out of Zoe’s grasp.
Zoe calls out, ‘Stop it!’ as she stoops. Victims lack creativity.
A protractor clatters on to the paving stones. I see Zoe’s dairy skin where her shirt has turned transparent with sweat.
‘That’s it, Fat, almost there.’ Chips lets a palette of coloured pencils fall from the pencil case.
We reach the small, stagnant school pond. It is covered in green algae. A sunken tennis ball, mossy but luminous, glows beneath the surface like a globule of phlegm. The pond is bordered with paving stones; tall brambles encroach on all sides, leaving hardly enough room to walk around the edge. Chips stands on the far side, his mouth slightly open, his tongue bright red. I can see the small dark scar, like an almost-healed scratch, on his upper lip. With her left hand, Zoe clutches the retrieved stationery to her chest. Her right hand reaches out as Chips dangles her pencil case over the water.
‘Give it back!’ she shouts.
‘Good girl. Now, roll over.’
Bullying is about solidarity.
I don’t know which of us puts a hand to Zoe’s back first – we are all capable – but once one person commits then the rest must follow: a basic rule of bullying.
I feel the ridge of Zoe’s bra strap and the warmth coming off her skin as my hand – our hands – push. She falls, not in the traditional style, belly-flopping, but with a foot outstretched as if the algae might hold her up. The Reebok on her right foot finds the bottom of the pond, which is only eight inches deep. For a moment, I imagine that she might just balance there, fat-ballerina on