on it: a fairly accurate representation of a male penis, heading towards a Y shape, intended to represent the female genitalia.
The door downstairs banged, and someone ran up the stairs. “Grey, you spazmo, what’re you doing up here? We’re meant to be down on the Lower Acre. You’re playing football today.”
“We are? I am?”
“It was announced at assembly this morning. And the list is up on the games notice board.” J.B.C. MacBride was sandy-haired, bespectacled, only marginally more organized than Richard Grey. There were two J. MacBrides, which was how he ranked a full set of initials.
“Oh.”
Grey picked up a book (Tarzan at the Earth’s Core) and headed off after him. The clouds were dark gray, promising rain or snow.
People were forever announcing things he didn’t notice. He would arrive in empty classes, miss organized games, arrive at school on days when everyone else had gone home. Sometimes he felt as if he lived in a different world to everyone else.
He went off to play football, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core shoved down the back of his scratchy blue football shorts.
He hated the showers and the baths. He couldn’t understand why they had to use both, but that was just the way it was.
He was freezing, and no good at games. It was beginning to become a matter of perverse pride with him that in his years at the school so far, he hadn’t scored a goal, or hit a run, or bowled anyone out, or done anything much except be the last person to be picked when choosing sides.
Elric, proud pale prince of the Melniboneans, would never have had to stand around on a football pitch in the middle of winter, wishing the game would be over.
Steam from the shower room, and his inner thighs were chapped and red. The boys stood naked and shivering in a line, waiting to get under the showers and then to get into the baths.
Mr. Murchison, eyes wild and face leathery and wrinkled, old and almost bald, stood in the changing rooms directing naked boys into the shower, then out of the shower and into the baths. “You boy. Silly little boy. Jamieson. Into the shower, Jamieson. Atkinson, you baby, get under it properly. Smiggins, into the bath. Goring, take his place in the shower . . . ” The showers were too hot. The baths were freezing cold and muddy.
When Mr. Murchison wasn’t around, boys would flick each other with towels, joke about each others’ penises, about who had pubic hair, who didn’t.
“Don’t be an idiot,” hissed someone near Richard. “What if the Murch comes back. He’ll kill you.” There was some nervous giggling.
Richard turned and looked. An older boy had an erection, was rubbing his hand up and down it slowly under the shower, displaying it proudly to the room.
Richard turned away.
Forgery was too easy.
Richard could do a passable imitation of the Murch’s signature, for example, and an excellent version of his housemaster’s handwriting and signature. His housemaster was a tall, bald, dry man named Trellis. They had disliked each other for years.
Richard used the signatures to get blank exercise books from the stationery office, which dispensed paper, pencils, pens, and rulers on the production of a note signed by a teacher.
Richard wrote stories and poems and drew pictures in the exercise books.
After the bath, Richard toweled himself off and dressed hurriedly; he had a book to get back to, a lost world to return to.
He walked out of the building slowly, tie askew, shirttail flapping, reading about Lord Greystoke, wondering whether there really was a world inside the world where dinosaurs flew and it was never night.
The daylight was beginning to go, but there were still a number of boys outside the school, playing with tennis balls: a couple played conkers by the bench. Richard leaned against the redbrick wall and read, the outside world closed off, the indignities of changing rooms forgotten.
“You’re a disgrace, Grey.”
Me?
“Look at you. Your tie’s all crooked. You’re a disgrace to the school. That’s what you are.”
The boy’s name was Lindfield, two school years above him, but already as big as an adult. “Look at your tie. I mean, look at it.” Lindfield pulled at Richard’s green tie, pulled it tight into a hard little knot. “Pathetic.”
Lindfield and his friends wandered off.
Elric of Melnibone was standing by the redbrick walls of the school building, staring at him. Richard pulled at the knot in his tie, trying to loosen it. It was cutting into his throat.
His