The Red Road (21 page)

“You can borrow mine,” I said.
“You’ll probably find it later on.”

“Is La Rochelle a real place?”
Sam wanted to know.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I
think it’s just been invented for the book.”

And at that time, I
didn’t particularly care, either. I was still seething from Mr
Somers’ refusal to drop my punishment. The dormitory door then
opened and Simmons came walking in. He stared at the person at his
desk for a moment, appearing quite offended that someone was in his
seat.

“Alright, Ant?” Donald said,
looking around.

“Oi!” Simmons said. “What are
you doing? Are you copying my CDs?”

“Sorry, I didn’t think you’d
mind,” Donald said, without so much as a care.

Simmons picked up the CDs and cases
off his bed, where Donald had discarded them a little carelessly.
“For fuck’s sake put them back in their cases when you’re done,
or you’ll scratch them! What are you copying?”

“
Guns
and Roses
, and
Nirvana
.
Use Your Illusion I
and
II
,” he clarified.

“So, what have you got that I can
copy?”

“Nothing you haven’t already
got, just some tapes.”

“I don’t want to copy off
tapes,” Simmons growled. “It’ll sound shit.”

“Have you already done your
geography coursework?” I asked Baz, turning away from Donald’s
musical dilemmas and focusing on my schoolwork-related ones.

“Finished it ages ago,” Baz
smiled proudly. “I wanted to get it over and done with. I hate
geography; it’s so boring.”

“Which one did you do?”

“The study of the local shops
versus the town centre.”

“Can I see your results?” I
asked.

Baz hesitated. “To copy them?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Sam
immediately jumped in. “There were two guys who did that last year,
and they were caught cheating. They were then banned from taking the
geography GCSE.”

“Woah! Seriously?” both Baz and
I exclaimed.

“Seriously,” Sam nodded. “You
can get banned from taking French, too, because it’s the same exam
board.”

I tried to speak, almost choking as
I both gasped and too many words tried to force themselves out of my
mouth at the same time.

“What happened? Weren’t they just told to
do it again?” I said, finding my voice. I noticed that both Donald
and Simmons were paying close attention to our conversation.

“No, they were just automatically
failed for attempting to cheat. Mr Finn and Mr Hancock said that they
couldn’t be sure of how much of their coursework was also
fabricated, and so they were booted out of the classes.”

“That’s not good,” I said. I
imagined myself being accused of doing something like that. I could
kiss goodbye to my sixth form college dreams for sure. It would
probably impact my choice of university, too, as well as my future
career aspirations. I had been told they checked up on all that sort
of stuff for the top jobs.

“Yeah, but that only matters if
you get caught,” Simmons said.

“Have you copied yours?” Baz
said.

“I just used my older brother’s
results from a couple of years back. They won’t bother to check
that,” Simmons said with a shrug.

“Ant, that is probably the
first
place they’ll check to
see if you’ve copied anything,” I said.

“Fuck,” Donald said, looking
very concerned. “I’m going to have to do mine again.”

“What? No, don’t listen to
Crotty. They won’t check,” Simmons scowled at him angrily.

“Did you copy yours, too?” I
said to Donald.

“Just changed some of Ant’s
results,” Donald said, looking between me and Simmons.

I glanced to Baz and Sam. “Do them
again,” all three of us chorused.

“I can’t believe you’re
actually going to do it properly,” Simmons chastised Donald.
“Anyway, move. I have some work to do. You can come back and copy
these later.”

“Hey, wait,” Donald said, as
Simmons stopped the CD playback and made to eject the tape. He did so
a little too fast and the tape reel unwound, a long black trail
leading back into the cassette deck. “Oh, fucking hell!” Donald
said.

“Well it was your own fault for
not asking me first,” Simmons said, without a care.

Donald carefully freed the tape from
the cassette deck, getting up and standing aside as Simmons took his
seat at the desk. As I watched Donald starting to make use of a
pencil to wind the tape back into the cassette, I had to wonder how
people such as that could remain friends. They seemed to treat each
other pretty badly a lot of the time.

“Bollocks,” Donald tutted as he
found kinks.

“Sorry,” Simmons said, looking
over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure he really meant it.

“When are you going to do them?”
Baz asked, returning to the subject of our GCSE Geography coursework.

“The next weekend I’m home,” I
said. “I’ll just spend the Saturday in town. I don’t think I’ll
get many responses from the corner shops near home, though.”

“No, you probably won’t,” Baz
said. “I think I talked to one hundred times more people in the
city centre than I did the shops near where I live.”

I nodded, forming a plan to follow
Baz’s lead and get the coursework done and dusted as soon as I
could. I had something more immediate to worry about before that,
though – Friday’s
Murga
. With the winter winds having
returned, I just hoped that between now and then it wasn’t going to
snow.

It did.

~ ~ ~

The day of the punishment gradually
approached, and the
Murga List
itself, several handwritten
pages of A4 paper, appeared on the school’s main noticeboard on
Thursday night, just before dinner.

Some would judge the severity of
the misbehaviour throughout the school on just how many pieces of A4
were present, the number of names extending across two or three
pages, sometimes even four. My years at St Christopher’s had taught
me otherwise. The length of the
List
was always directly
proportional to the conditions of the season – the worse the weather,
the longer the list.

I only checked out the
List
briefly,
hoping that I had received an eleventh-hour reprieve and not be on
it. I saw ‘Joe Crosthwaite’ listed towards the bottom and huffed
off back to my dorm, a number of first and second years quite bemused
to see a third year’s name there.

That night’s sleep was broken and
uncomfortable, but at least I didn’t receive a visit from the
goblins. Still, that might have gotten me out of the punishment had I
suffered a freak out and gone rampaging around the school, screaming
at the top of my lungs. Social consequences be damned.

As in the past, I had no alarm clock
to get me out of bed, so woke up every few hours, checking my watch
to see the time. I had to be down at the main gates of the school at
five, an obscene hour at any time of year, but even worse in the
winter. At four forty-five I got out of bed, leaving the dorm
quietly and making my way to the changing rooms to put on my rugby
kit, putting my tracksuit on over the top of it for good measure. I
had decided to double layer, as I knew at this hour it was going to
be bitterly cold. It always was when I was walking to the classroom
block in the morning.

I saw as I opened the front door of
Butcher that a great quantity of snow had been dumped on the school
grounds. I commenced the journey towards the front gate, finding the
snow easily covering my shoes and climbing well above my ankles. In
places it was threatening to make its way up my calves. That wasn’t
even the deepest point, I knew. There would be areas of the school,
most likely the playing fields, where it was truly deep, coming close
to your knees. Falling down in any of this would mean soaking wet
clothes in moments, and the need to go and take a hot shower as soon
as possible. If there was any hot water, that was.

I passed a mound of
snow that had built itself up around a car. I wished the owner luck
getting that started later. Likely it belonged to one of the teachers
who was staying at the school overnight, to act as duty master.

I considered what I might be in for
as I walked. The punishments doled out on the
Murga
largely
depended on the sixth former leading it. It was almost as much of a
punishment for them as it was for us, the boy having to also drag
himself out of bed at some ungodly hour, to fulfil the duty. If the
guy was one of the few decent prefects that might be charged with
‘supervising’, then we might not actually start until six.
Even better, the morning might involve nothing more than a game of
football. That had happened to me once. The
Murga
’s
participants had been split directly down the middle, leading to a
ridiculous twenty players per side. We had then just played a
football match until seven-thirty, when the punishment had
concluded and we had been sent back to our houses for a shower. Some
boys had been sent back early for scoring a goal, performing a
commendable tackle, or otherwise playing a good game up until that
point. I had failed to do either, football not being my strongest
sport at all. Rugby was where it was at for me. Still, that had been
a good morning and actually worked a lot better to encourage positive
behaviour and respect (as opposed to fear) in the younger boys. The
only annoying part of that
Murga
had been the need to get up
for it. Yes, Peter Nurse (unfortunate name) had been well-liked for
showing such solidarity to those he was charged with taking care of
on Friday mornings.

Most others weren’t.

In the main, the punishments ran
like this: assembling wherever the notice board had designated, we
would be met either by one, two, or perhaps even three prefects,
depending on how much they despised the unfortunates that had been
placed on the
List
. To begin with, we would be ordered to
sprint (not jog, not run) several hundred meters, being made to do it
again and again if we weren’t fast enough. Which, of course, we
never were.

After this, push-ups would follow, usually with one of
the prefects standing on your back and demanding you raise him
several inches off the ground before anyone else was allowed to stop.
Being told to take a punch in the stomach without crying or else a
group of others would be handed a secondary punishment was something
grossly unpleasant that I had only been made to witness once. I had
heard a rumour how, on one summer morning, a prefect had marched the
group all the way to a pond and forced many to swim lengths. He
himself had been punished by the teachers for that one, after most of
the boys became ill. He hadn’t cared; he had found it very funny.

The Murga punishment itself was
something that actually never happened. Originating from South Asia,
I had heard that it was a sitting position that was quite painful
after a few minutes and had been used at St Christopher’s many
years ago, during breaks between classes. The offending group of boys
would be made to carry out the punishment for the satisfaction of the
teachers, to enforce correct behaviour. After either finding it too
out of date or dissatisfactory, the punishment had evolved into what it
was today, and it only retained the name because no one could be
bothered to conjure up a new one.

~ ~ ~

Arriving at the main gates, I saw a
great number of other boys standing around, looking cold, tired, and
quite scared. I knew that a few of them had suffered this punishment
before, some of whom had been in the dormitory I had been prefect of
the previous term. To my surprise, I saw I wasn’t the only third
year boy present – two others were also in attendance. I wondered
what the others had done to earn their place on the
List
.

My wandering eyes then came to rest
on a figure, standing there in a thick coat and gloves, drinking a
cup of something hot. Michael Lawrence, one of the prefects from
Enfield. Of all the prefects, why did it have to be him? The guy was
a complete idiot, the sort that relished this type of sadistic
punishment. Everyone was beneath him, even some of those that he
counted as friends. From what
I understood, he had always been one to demand nothing less than an
A+ or an A in every piece of work he delivered. An A- was the lowest
he would tolerate. I once saw him throw a tantrum over receiving a B
for an essay he had written during his GCSEs. He was on his way to
becoming a doctor or a surgeon or something, definitely something to
do with medicine. Being the only one in the school currently destined
for such a career, he had a massive chip on his shoulder about it. I
dreaded to think what he might have in store for us on this freezing
morning.

“Are all you little cocksuckers
here?” he asked, producing a copy of the
List
from an inside
pocket. “I’m going to read off your names, and I want you to
answer. If anyone is missing then you’re all going to start with a
roll down the hill, without shirts on. Got it?”

No one answered, and so Lawrence
started reading out names.

“Timpson,” he said, as he
reached that part of the list. He looked around as no one answered,
as did many others. I couldn’t see the second year anywhere.

“Timpson?” Lawrence repeated. “Where the fuck is Timpson? Does
anyone know?”

“I think he’s been let off,” a
voice squeaked up, one of the second years from Butcher.

Typical
, I thought. He had
probably bribed Kenji Suzuki, Butcher’s head of house, to pull some
strings. That sort of thing had never worked for me in the past. It
showed what having access to a vast fortune and being able to pass
brown envelopes around could do for you.

“Fuck that!” Lawrence said
angrily. “I never gave the little prick permission! Someone go and
get him—”

“Good morning, boys,” a voice
then interrupted him.