The Knife That Killed Me (2 page)

Mr. Boyle was still talking, still fiddling with his crooked glasses. He was saying, “… and the Great Lakes of North America—that’s Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Superior—contain more fresh water than all the,
ah
, other lakes, all of them, in the world …,” and his eyes seemed so far away they were actually looking at the Great Lakes. He certainly wasn’t seeing what was happening right here in front of him.

I put my hand to the back of my head. I knew instantly that something was wrong, wronger even than I thought. There were lumps. Stuck in my hair. Sticky lumps. Paper-and-spit balls wouldn’t have stayed in my hair like that. And the tackiness went onto my fingers, but the stuff wouldn’t come out of my hair. I smelled my fingers. There was a sickly smell, half sour spit, half mint, and I realized it was chewing gum. They’d thrown little bits of chewing gum in my hair.

I turned round.

Roth in the middle. On one side there was a kid called Miller and on the other a kid called Bates. Roth’s face was
completely blank. You had to be frightened of Roth. It was almost funny how much he looked like a Stone Age man—I mean, like a cartoon of one. You half expected to see him wearing animal furs and carrying a big wooden club, maybe dragging a mammoth behind him. His jaw stuck out and his head sloped back and his arms seemed to reach right down to the ground.

He looked thick, but he wasn’t thick. He knew where you were weak, and would use it to hurt you.

Like my hair.

He only had two expressions. There was his wolfish, laughing face, which he used when he was hitting someone, or there was his completely blank look, unblinking, emotionless.

That was the look you got when he was about to hit you.

He was blank now, and his black eyes stared straight into mine. It was like being stabbed.

But it wasn’t Roth who’d been throwing bits of stinking chewing gum into my hair.

Nor was it Miller. I felt a bit sorry for Miller. There weren’t many black kids at our school, because black kids are usually Protestant, and this was a Catholic school, and his way of fitting in was to suck up to the hardest kid in the year. I’d probably have done the same, if I’d had a choice. I don’t think he had any natural evil in him, but there was nothing he wouldn’t do if Roth gave him the nod. Miller was smiling, a sort of cringing smile, nodding his head up and down, and
when I looked at him, he looked away out of the window for a second, and then at Roth, and then out of the window again, still smiling.

It was Bates who was doing most of the sniggering. Bates really
was
thick. His fringe went straight across his forehead, which made him look sort of mental. When he smiled, thick lines of spittle crisscrossed his lips. His nails were bitten down to ragged stumps, oozing blood. It made you wince to look at his nails, almost as if you could feel him gnawing and biting at them. He still had a piece of rolled-up chewing gum in his fingers.

The anger burned and bubbled inside me like lava in a volcano. My jaws were clamped together, and I could feel my lips tight across my teeth. Bates stopped sniggering. He tried to do a version of the hard Roth stare. But he couldn’t stop his lips from curling into that spit-thick grin. I wanted to hit him. Really wanted to hit him. And I hated him enough, in that moment, not to care what happened to me afterward. Getting my head kicked in mattered to me less, just then, than having chewing gum in my hair.

But there was something else, something stronger than the rage. The embarrassment. I was still embarrassed—worse, humiliated—about being the one who was picked out. I knew the whole class was aware of this. Aware of the fact that I was the weak one they’d found. It turned my muscles to jelly. I had nothing to hit him with.

“Will you give over.”

That was it. That was all I said.

Bates looked at me in mock seriousness for a second, as if I’d made a reasonable suggestion that he was considering.

“Paul Varderman, will you turn round, please.”

It was Mr. Boyle, who’d finally noticed something. The back of my head.

I turned round, thinking that now it would stop. That was stupid. Less than a minute passed, and then another piece of stinking gum landed in my hair.

That did it. The shame and rage all came together in a hot rush to my face. I stood up quickly, so quickly that the chair fell back with a clatter to the floor. Now everyone was watching, not just me thinking they were. Mr. Boyle’s mouth was open, stopped somewhere in the middle of the Great Lakes.

I spun round to face Bates again.

“Filthy dog,” I spat out. I wanted to hit him, but I was still weak, still burning with the humiliation.

“Varderman, sit …”

The class were laughing now, enjoying it. This was great. Some drama, some spectacle. Much better than the Great Lakes and all that boring water. Bates laughed like an ape. Miller laughed. Even Roth seemed to smile.

“… down, I said sit …”

I couldn’t stand having the eyes of the class on me, their laughter in my ears.

“… down.”

But Mr. Boyle had lost control. The laughter of the class became insane, mixed with mad shouts. Other kids had
stood up. Other chairs were thrown across the floor. Mr. Boyle looked around frantically, not knowing what to do. And then his eyes came back to me, the cause of it all. And he came wading toward me, barging aside kids and desks.

“Right, have it your way,” he was shouting. “Get straight to—”

And the next thing I knew I was flying, looking down on the scene. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. Mr. Boyle was shouting in my ear. He’d picked me up. He was stronger than he looked. I don’t know what he was shouting—it was just noise. And then, instead of carrying me, he was dragging me. And jumbled up with the meaningless noise I heard the dreaded words “Mr. Mordred’s office.” Mr. Boyle threw me out into the corridor, and I staggered a few steps. I looked back. Mr. Boyle’s face was red. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. They must have fallen off. He looked naked without them.

“Wait outside Mr. Mordred’s office,” he yelled at me. “And you tell him exactly why I sent you.”

FOUR

I didn’t
go straight to Mordred’s office. First I went to the toilets. I couldn’t see the balls of chewing gum, but I felt for them with my fingers, and tried to tease them out.
Filthy dog. I said filthy dog. It was so stupid. I should have said something better
. The foul stuff had become so tangled up in my hair that pulling at it just seemed to make things worse.
Why did I say filthy dog?
So I went to the art block, found an empty room and took some scissors from a desk.
Something better. I should have said something funny, something that made him feel small
. Then I went back to the toilets and hacked at the hair
wherever it was smeared with the gum. It took ten minutes, and at the end the sink was full of knotted clumps of hair.
Or hit him. Right in the face. Made him eat his teeth
. Then I washed my hands in water as hot as I could stand it, rubbing in the grimy soap, trying to get the rank stench of spit and mint off my fingers.
Filthy dog
. I didn’t have time to take the scissors back to the art room, so I slipped them in my pocket.
But it was me who looked stupid. Godgodgodgodgodgod
.

I thought about going home. But if I went home after being sent to Mordred’s office, I’d be in bad trouble. That was a definite suspension. Almost funny. You play truant and they punish you by kicking you out of school. But that wouldn’t be the real punishment. The real punishment would be what my dad would do to me.

But it might all still be OK. What I’d done wasn’t that bad. I couldn’t tell Mordred or Boyle about Bates and the chewing gum, because that would be squealing, but even so, all I’d done was stand up in class and shout, “Filthy dog.” I wish I hadn’t said
filthy dog
. I wish I’d said something better or nothing at all.

So I went to Mordred’s office, running back through the empty corridors. I could see into the classrooms through the little square windows. There were threads of wire running through the middle of the glass so you couldn’t smash it. Some of the classrooms were full of the brainy kids, the ones who did their work, and I liked the look of the orderly rows and the way the kids listened and the way the teachers taught them things and didn’t just try to stop them from fighting.

When I started school, I just got put into a class with the thick kids, and so I was one. Or at least no one ever told me I wasn’t. I think things would have been different if they’d just said,
Here, go in this class
, and it was a good class. Because I wanted to learn things, not just about war. But once you’re in a place you just can’t get to another place.

And then I reached the part of the school with the staff room and the offices. It goes like this. You turn right at the end of the corridor, then the staff room is on your left, and the general office is opposite, on the right. Ahead there are some double doors. You go through there and you get to Mr. Mordred’s room and, beyond that, the headmaster’s office.

I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been in the headmaster’s office. The headmaster was called Mr. O’Tool. We don’t often see Mr. O’Tool. Sometimes he walks around the school, taking a sort of black cloud of doom with him. He usually says something at the weekly assembly, but even when he’s reading out the sports results and we’ve won at rounders or football, he’ll sound like he’s reading the casualty lists from the Battle of the Somme. Everyone thought that Mr. Mordred was after his job, and Mr. O’Tool looked like he thought there was nothing he could do about it.

There were two comfy chairs outside Mr. O’Tool’s office, but only a row of hard chairs outside Mordred’s door. Two boys and a girl were already sitting there. The girl looked like she’d been crying, and there were leaves and bits of twig in the back of her hair. I didn’t know her name, but I’d seen her around. I thought she might have been caught, you
know, in the bushes. But not with either of the ones sitting here. They were little Year Eight scruffs, spiky-haired, cheeky, but frightened. They’d probably gone too far in some prank, and now they were staring vacantly into space, the way you do when you’re waiting to be punished.

I felt a bit calmer now I’d got that filth out of my hair, and the rage and the disgust and the humiliation of the whole thing had eased up, the way a toothache sometimes goes away after a while. But, as I waited, other feelings floated to the surface. The unfairness of everything, of me being here, while Roth and his lot got away with it. And the fear of what Mordred was going to do. And what if I did get permanently expelled? Dad would kill me for definite. Except you can only die once, and that pleasure would wait for me at Temple Moor High School. Because the only place that would take you if you got expelled from our school was Temple Moor, and Temple Moor kids hated us because of the war that had been going on for years. And any of our kids who washed up at the Temple would get massacred. Every day.

The bell went for the end of the lesson. It meant break was beginning, which meant that Mordred would be here to tear our heads off.

I heard a clomping sound coming down the corridor. For a second I thought it was Mordred, but then I remembered that Mordred had little feet and took little steps and made a tippy-tap sound when he walked. I looked up and saw Mr. Boyle. His glasses were even more skewed than usual. I
thought he’d come to tell Mordred all about how bad I’d been. But he sort of loomed over me, breathing heavily, and then he took me by the shoulder and stood me up and pushed me in front of him back down the corridor.