Spoticus

  Schools would be converted into boarding schools with dormitories and canteens to house and feed the pupils (now referred to as “cadets”) for the whole summer.

  There would be a lot of marching up and down, a lot of saluting and a lot of polishing of boots. There would be running over logs and jumping off things and lots of little fatties would be losing lots of weight. There would be respect for authority and order and responsibility. And, if they were good, there might even be some guns to play with.

  Finally, Jackman himself appeared before the cameras in Downing Street. He looked jolly pleased with himself. ‘We’re going to get a bit of backbone into the nation’s youth and the Army is just the organisation to do it,’ he beamed.

  A representative from a teachers’ union came on and welcomed the news that most teachers wouldn’t be required for the long break and those who did have to stay behind would be getting double pay. A couple of parents in Wisbech said it was a good idea to give the kids some discipline. There was nothing wrong with the plan, so long as their kids were properly looked after, and, besides which, they hadn’t had a break on their own for fifteen years.

  Lewis slid his tie up to his collar and slunk out the door. His parents were still in the kitchen, talking quietly with their heads together. They seemed to be excited about something.

  All over the country it was dawning on parents that if they played their cards right they wouldn’t have to see their kids for seven whole weeks.

  * * * * *

  ‘That is well random,’ said Push.

  ‘That is harsh, man,’ said Parker.

  ‘That is super harsh,’ said Lewis.

  They were sitting on the low wall behind the science block. The usual break time knock-about with a tennis ball had been abandoned by mutual consent and without a word being spoken – no-one was in the mood. Bands of shell-shocked kids stood around in twos and threes with their heads down. An atmosphere of despair as thick as squid’s ink had descended on the school.

  Even the teachers noticed the depressed mood of the pupils (not the PE teachers, of course) and went a bit easy with them – at least for the morning, anyway. There was no laughing or sniggering or pushing or running. Children just shuffled from lesson to lesson.

  To make matters worse, the end-of-term disco had been cancelled, since there wasn’t going to be an end-of-term. And some of the parents said they didn’t think it was appropriate to let teenagers of the opposite sex “rive around to loud music” in the same room together.

  Lewis could see groups of sixth-formers gathering by the fence and staring at teachers as they went past. They were talking with their heads close and there was quite a lot of angry faces and quite a lot of waving and pointing. The Head sent some of the student teachers out to break up the little gangs and send them back to their classrooms. Something nasty was brewing.

  At lunch time a lorry turned up and some men started unloading what looked like bunk beds. An army jeep arrived and an officer in a beret started pacing around the school yard. Two soldiers (Lewis assumed they were privates) followed him around with tape measures and stripy poles.

  They had their form teacher for the next class and he announced that there would be an outdoors assembly the following morning. Apparently the school hall was out-of-bounds. Something to do with the builders who had just pulled up outside the main entrance.

  * * * * *

  Mr and Mrs Spottiswood were not insensitive people. They could tell that their children were not happy; although they couldn’t quite work out the reason. Didn’t they moan every summer that they had nothing to do and that they were bored? Weren’t they always secretly relieved to get back to school after the long break? Well, now they would have a whole summer of fun things to do with soldiers and tanks etc. They would absolutely love it.

  But, in order to lift their spirits in the short term, Mr S suggested a trip to the cinema and maybe a burger afterwards. Come the Saturday, they all piled into the little Yaris and headed for the multiplex.

  On the way they passed several curious advertising hoardings. There was a giant one outside Sainsburys with a picture of a skinny kid, wearing an MP3 player and blowing bubble gum. The caption said “THE ENEMY WITHIN” in two-foot letters. Another poster had a picture of a pretty girl sitting in front of a dressing table mirror and applying lipstick. This one said “TOMORROW’S PROBLEM FAMILY”.

  ‘Who’s putting these posters up?’ asked Bev, but none of them could make out the small print from the car.

  At the cinema there was a new disappointment. ‘Eighteen! How can Harry Potter have an eighteen certificate?’ gawped Lewis, looking up at the poster in the foyer.

  ‘Must be all that sex and violence,’ said Mrs Spottiswood as she joined them from the popcorn queue. There seemed to be some kind of scrabble behind them - one of the ushers had just put up a sign which said, “Last Popcorn Ever”.

  ‘No, look,’ said Mr Spottiswood, reading from the poster. “Contains scenes of rebellious children and teenagers with attitude”. Must be a new rule.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said their mum. ‘We’ll just have to watch Sleeping Beauty instead.’

  ‘It just gets better and better,’ muttered Lewis. His sister dug him in the ribs with her elbow.

  After the film they went next door to Scilly Burgers. There was an unusually large number of stroppy and scowling kids leaving the place. It didn’t take them long to discover the reason why.

  ‘I’ll have a cheese burger and fries and a shake please,’ said Lewis. He was starving.

  ‘No burgers,’ said the man. ‘Read the signs,’ and he pointed at the large notices plastered around the serving area.

  THE SALE OF THE FOLLOWING FOOD ITEMS IS PROHIBITED TO PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS:

  BURGERS

  CHEESE BURGERS

  ANY OTHER KIND OF BURGER

  NUGGETS OF ANY DESCRIPTION

  FRENCH FRIES (FORMERLY KNOWN AS “CHIPS”)

  MILKSHAKES, SLUSHIES AND OTHER SWEET BEVERAGES

  BY ORDER OF HM GOVERNMENT.

  ‘So what can I have?’ asked Lewis, plaintively.

  ‘We got Carrot Rissoles or Sprout Surprise for the kiddies. And milk.’ said the young man. ‘Or water. And rice pudding for afters. Now ‘urry up, I got a queue ‘ere.’

  Mr and Mrs Spottiswood were sensitive people so they ate their burger and fries quickly. Bev and Lewis elected for “nothing”, rather than the menu on offer so they sat and watched with their chins in their hands and their elbows on the table. Lewis tried not to drool.

  ‘The end of a perfect day,’ he thought.

  * * * * *

  When he got home Lewis discovered that some kind of virus had been eating the memory on his game console. All his saved games had disappeared and there were some weird messages on the screen. He couldn’t figure out how it could have happened – his machine wasn’t hooked up to the internet or anything dodgy like that. In fact it wasn’t connected to anything else (except the electricity of course).

  As he watched, the virus started having a go at the operating system. The screen started zooming in and out and then going all fuzzy. Dinosaurs started appearing on Formula One racing tracks and knights in armour started challenging space death squads to a duel. One by one, the pixels on the display blinked and went out until the whole console looked like a ragged curtain. Then the words ‘BYE BYE’ popped up for a few brief seconds before the screen faded to black for ever.

  Somewhere under some hills near Swindon, Benson put his head round the door of a laboratory full of electrical equipment and an extremely scruffy technician. He had his trainers on the bench and was scooping the insides out of a bag of Hoola Hoops.

  ‘Did it work?’ asked Benson softly.

  ‘Worked a treat, Mr Benson, worked a treat. Can I turn it off now?’

  * * * * *

  Lewis sat on the end of Bev’s bed.

  ‘All I said was I can’t see why you’re getting all weepy-eyed about
it.’

  Bev slammed a pile of clothes into her suitcase. ‘Just shut up, will you?’

  ‘I mean, it’s not like you can do anything about it. You just have to accept the inevitable. Be fatalistic, like me.’

  ‘Why don’t you just get out of my room?’

  ‘Unless you’re worried about Slick Harry, or whatever his name is. Now you can spend the whole summer with him. Oh no, I’ve just remembered; he goes to my school, not yours.’

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed. Lewis retreated to the door.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know what you think a sixth-former like him is going to see in a munter like you. I’m sure he’ll have forgotten about you by next term.’

  A pair of trainers hit the door just as Lewis pulled it shut behind him. He could hear Bev crying. ‘Well, she was asking for that,’ he told himself. ‘She’s not the only one who’s had her summer ruined.’

  Chapter Five

  The first day of Flintwick Summer School wasn’t so bad. If you didn’t mind being shouted at and pushed into lines and dressed up and dressed down in silly clothes and marched around a bit and fed from a tin plate of mashed potato and something brown and shouted at a bit more.

  It started with a tearful goodbye to his family (his mum’s tears, mainly). Bev had already left for her school – she went to the Technology College on the ring road. Lewis had intended to try and smooth things over before she went but somehow he never found the right time.

  His dad was long gone with the car so Lewis had to struggle to school with his suitcase. It had wheels so you could pull it along but it was nearly as big as him. It bulged with enough underpants to last until September. There was also a secret compartment with a bar of chocolate in it – don’t know how that got in there.

  At the school gates he was greeted by a drill sergeant. He was dressed in green (khaki, Pushpa called it), a wide white belt and shiny boots. On his beret he had a silver badge. You could just make out the words “National Youth Service”, but only when he was leaning into your face and bawling insults at you, which was something he did quite a lot, Lewis discovered.

  ‘Youyouanyou, over there. You, get your ‘ands out of your pockets. You, pick your heels up! You’re not at school now.’

  A banner hung over the main entrance saying, “WELCOME CADETS”.

  Lewis joined a queue. Somebody recognisable as one of their old teachers shepherded them and their luggage into the school hall. It had been divided into hundreds of tiny cubicles, each containing two or three bunk beds and a locker. Lewis got allocated to Cubicle 47b with a couple of boys he didn’t know.

  Next stop was the shower block where two lines (one boys and one girls) were shuffling in through steam-shrouded entrances and two lines of shivering children clad only in towels and clutching their underwear were emerging from the other side.

  From there to the Gym where lines of trestle tables were piled high with uniforms and boots. A gang of soldiers was barking orders and pushing bewildered children up against height charts and onto scales. Lewis was informed that he was now NYC506b12977 (977 for short) and he was to proceed to Table 11 for a medium-sized uniform and Table 24 for small boots “double quick”. His uniform fitted in some places but not others.

  There followed an “orientation lecture”, in which some officer with an accent that nobody could understand stood on a chair on the playing fields and spoke to the whole school. It was something about “finding your role in life” and “being a useful member of society” and he assured them that they would all feel they had benefited from the experience by the time they had finished the course. There was quite a lot of coughing and spluttering from his audience by the time he had finished.

  Haircuts were checked by a corporal with greasy skin but since most of the pupils had seen “The Butcher” only a few weeks earlier there wasn’t much need for any remedial work. Still, a few of the boys were yanked out of the line and sent off to a makeshift barber shop and came back with shiny scalps. The girls got the regulation shoulder-length cut and were issued with ugly brown hair nets.

  Lunch was served from a hatch newly cut into the wall of the canteen. There were large cauldrons of something-or-other and soldiers were slopping big ladles of it into tin plates which had fold up handles. You had to lean against a wall and eat it with a spoon. Parker said it was a kind of stew but Push insisted it was spaghetti with meat balls. There were plenty of other theories as well.

  They were allowed 15 minutes of “association” which apparently meant standing around with your mates but not actually doing anything other than talking quietly. Then it was off to their first drill session.

  * * * * *

  Regimental Sergeant Major McCabe was tall even for a drill instructor. He was seven foot easy and impressively broad in the chest. But it was also quite obvious that he was a bit old to be playing at soldiers. ‘He’ll have been brought out of retirement just to make up the numbers,’ whispered Parker until he was swiped by a corporal. ‘I’m watching you, laddie,’ the corporal snarled.

  The sergeant had a stick tucked neatly under his armpit and he occasionally extracted it and waved it around in a menacing way. It was a couple of feet long, highly polished and capped off with a bit of shiny silver. He called it his “pace stick”.

  The session started with The Basics. They were arranged into lines and rows, boys and girls together, and addressed from the front by RSM McCabe. He used a method of communication called bellowing.

  ‘Right then,’ he shouted and the second word came out as a high pitched squeak. ‘We are going to teach you miserable cretins how to stand properly.’ Again, the last word of his sentence sounded like a parrot who had been breathing helium. Lewis laughed.

  The sergeant’s eyes narrowed as he looked around, as though sniffing the air. He looked up and down the ranks but, detecting nothing but serious faces, decided to carry on.

  ‘We are going to teach you to walk.’ The word ‘walk’ was so squeaky that it was almost inaudible. A dog started to bark. Lewis laughed again. This time, the sergeant was on him.

  He bounded across the parade ground and landed with his toecaps almost touching Lewis’s boots.

  ‘Do you think I’m funny, cadet?’ “Cadet” came out as a strangulated whine.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you think I have a sense of humour?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘WELL I DON’T! I ain’t never had a sense of humour and I ain’t never going to get one!’

  Something went wrong inside Lewis’s head. He knew he shouldn’t say it but he went ahead and said it anyway. ‘That’s a double double negative.’

  ‘YOU WHAT!’

  ‘If you say, “I ain’t never had a sense of humour”, it means you’ve always had a sense humour. If you say “I ain’t never going to...’’’

  ‘SHHUUDDDUPPP!’

  His stick swung round in a great arc and came to a dead stop a millimetre from the end of Lewis’s nose. He jabbed it forward, jerking Lewis’s head back, until the silver cap was jammed up against Lewis’s left nostril. The sergeant appeared to grow several inches. His back bent forwards until his face was level with Lewis’s.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of snot at the end of my stick!’

  The next 1.5 seconds took several minutes. Lewis saw the sweat running from under the sergeant’s cap and down behind his ear. He smelt fish paste sandwiches and stale tea. He heard the slight shuffling of a hundred feet. He felt fifty pairs of eyes watching the back of his neck. He breathed in.

  ‘Which end, Sarge?’

  The silence crackled. Birds stopped singing.

  The sergeant was completely motionless but Lewis could see a lot going on in his eyes. They started off with utter loathing. Then they passed briefly through confusion and doubt. Next came puzzlement. His body said nothing but his eyes were screaming it out.

  I’ve got a piece... Which end... Snot... Bit of snot... End of my stick... Which end, Sarge...
r />   The sergeant’s brain was very small but, even so, it took a long time for The Thought to pass from one end to the other, searching for the place with the answers. The Thought was, “Have I just been insulted?” Bit of snot... Stick... Not my end. His eyes told the whole story. Suddenly The Thought lodged in the right place and he got it. He Had Been Insulted.

  At the same moment, Trisha Bengrave laughed. Toby Snell snickered. Della Ali giggled.

  The sergeant leaped back a full eighteen inches and landed bolt upright.

  ‘Shut Up, you bastards. SHUT YOUR FACES.’

  But it was too late. The front two rows were bent double. The middle row was on the floor and holding their bellies. The back two rows were crying hysterically. Corporals were marching up and down, shouting and trying to drag children to their feet, pushing them with their boots, shaking them. But nothing would stop the laughter.

  Lewis was still at attention, his eyes staring straight forward.

  The sergeant was bawling in some strange language.

  ‘YoooYoooanYooostopthatbloodyracketyoolittlebastardsIwillavyourgutsforgartersyoooscumyoooslags...’

  and eventually, ‘Take that piece of snot to THE COOLER!’

  Two corporals grabbed Lewis by the shoulders and started to drag him off the playing fields. But Lewis was having none of it. He shook them off, stood up straight and marched towards the school buildings, arms swinging. The corporals shrugged and fell in behind him.

  The laughter turned to cheers.

  Chapter Six

  Lewis was led away to Holding Cell B (which looked remarkably like Mr Williams’ PE equipment cupboard). The light bulb had been removed and, as the door was locked behind him, he had little choice but to hunker down on the play mats and wait.

  By the time the last dribble of light had faded from under the door it was clear to Lewis that supper wasn’t on the menu this evening. He pulled together some of the hessian mats, forming a sort of nest to try and keep warm, snuggled down into his new home and waited. Little scurrying noises kept him awake for a while but he imagined they were pixies come to keep an eye on him. Or possibly rats.

  Around 6 a.m. (he hadn’t been relieved of his wrist watch) he could hear people shuffling around on the other side of the door. At seven, the door was flung open and Corporal Smith stood there with his hands on his hips.