Chapter 6:
DARK CLOUDS GATHERING
Vicky sat and stared at the screen. She had never been able to understand what was going on there. She was at one end of a row of computers. She always tried to get this place because then there would be only one person sitting next to her instead of one on either side. If she was really unlucky she might end up with someone like Janice on one side of her, probably poking her in the ribs all through the lesson, and maybe Mishal on the other side, whispering horrible things and sniggering at her failure to make any headway with the day’s project.
Andrew was upstairs with the other half of the class, doing Geography. Vicky missed the feeling of knowing he was in the same classroom with her, even if they were powerless to help one another. There were hardly any gaps between the computers, so there was no escape from her neighbours until the bell rang for the lunch hour to begin.
Today, though, she was lucky. Albert was sitting next to her. People usually avoided sitting next to Albert because he was so huge that he took up quite a bit of their own narrow seating space. On one famous occasion the pressed-out metal chair had collapsed under him and the IT lesson had exploded into an uproar of jeers and mocking laughter. It had soon stopped, though, when Albert levered himself up off the floor. He had walked down the row to Jonathan, who had been one of the loudest of the jeerers, and had squeezed his nose until the tears ran down his face. “Don’t you ever laugh at me again, see?” was all that Albert had said, and the IT room fell into a sheepish silence. Albert was huge and he was also very strong. Nobody messed with Albert.
Vicky wished she was able to look after herself like that. She felt safe with Albert sitting next to her, and he was kind, too. After Andrew, he was the one she liked best in the class. He knew how hard IT was for her and from time to time he would lean over, almost smothering Vicky in the process, and do a bit of typing on her keyboard. He seemed to know more about IT than Mr Brant, their IT teacher. If Mr Brant came for a stroll past the computers – something he very rarely did because he was usually too busy checking his e-mails – he would see that Vicky had made some progress. He had even written “Making good progress” on her last IT report, and it was all down to Albert’s kindly interventions.
The lesson was nearing its end and everyone was beginning to get fidgety. Long ago, Vicky’s mum had wheeled her in her pushchair into a park. Vicky could not remember why they had gone there. It was not the sort of thing her mum usually did. Perhaps they were waiting for the Family Support Centre to open, or something like that. Vicky had a clear memory of the layout of the park, the little slope down into the play area with bushes on one side, and a slide towering up above her. She had climbed up the steps and had sat down on the little platform at the top. It had seemed a terribly long way down to the bottom. She had wanted very much to climb back down the ladder, but some other children had come up behind her and were shouting at her to hurry up. Then a big boy had given her a sharp push in the middle of her back and she was hurtling down the slide with the dreadful feeling of something started that she could not stop. She had grazed the side of her leg at the bottom of the slide and her back hurt from where the boy had pushed her. Her mum had not noticed because she was busy reading her newspaper.
She had that same feeling of an unstoppable downward slide as the lunch break drew near. The first ten minutes would probably be all right and then she would be out among the dangers of the playground. There were physical dangers, with crowds of kids hurtling across the tarmac and not minding at all if they knocked someone over. The nastier ones did this deliberately and laughed mockingly when it happened. They knew that the worst that could happen would be a mild suggestion from a teacher that they should try to be more careful. If the teacher became angry with them they would tell their dads and then one of the dads might complain about the teacher to Mrs Faighly. Something like this had happened to Mrs Warbloff yesterday, had Vicky but known it.
The mocking laughter was the second kind of danger. Vicky had had scrapes and bruises in the playground on a number of occasions. One or two of them had hurt quite badly, but there was the compensation of being taken indoors to see the nice motherly first aid lady. Her treatment sometimes stung a bit, but then she would give Vicky an enormous tissue and say: “Blow your nose!” And then she would give Vicky’s shoulder a little squeeze or stroke her cheek with the back of one finger – something that brought tears to Vicky’s eyes, though she didn’t know why – and utter the magic words: “I think you’d better go to the library for the rest of break.” Vicky liked the library: nothing too awful could happen there. She wished she could spend every break in the library, but time there was strictly rationed. She wished, too, that she could be taken to the first aid lady – Vicky didn’t know her name – for the inside hurt the jeers and mocking laughter caused her.
Once, when Vicky was really upset about something her mum had said to her, her dad had quoted: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” He meant well, Vicky knew, but he was simply wrong. Sticks and stones could break her bones, of course, but the sting of unkind words could go on hurting for days and months and years.
And then the bell did ring. Because she was in a day-dreamy sort of state, it gave Vicky a bigger shock than usual. Chairs crashed and scraped, screwed-up worksheets were thrown around and the class surged out of the IT room. Most of the kids went off to line up outside the dining room, but Vicky and a few others had sandwiches. Vicky walked along the corridor past some other classrooms, down some concrete steps then turned right along another corridor which was lined on both sides with lockers. She kept her locker key on a string round her neck to stop it getting lost or stolen. Number 419. The locker was rather high up, but by standing on tiptoe she was able to open the green metal door and take out the plastic box with her lunch in it.
She went on down the corridor and into classroom 21 where the younger children had their sandwich lunches. A teacher was sitting at the teacher’s desk marking books. Sometimes the teacher did not turn up and that could mean trouble, but today she knew she would be safe while she spun out sandwich-eating time as long as possible. She levered off the lid to see what her mum had given her. A bag of crisps, a packet of cheese flavoured biscuits, a bar of chocolate and a chocolate drink in a carton. She knew it was called junk food. She wished her mum knew something about what sort of food was good for you.
Four other girls came in. They were from the next class up but for some reason they had taken note of Vicky in a way she didn’t like.
“Hallo, Vicky!” they said in chorus.
It was the way they said it, a mixture of a taunt and a challenge, that produced that quivering pang in Vicky’s stomach.
“Hallo,” said Vicky quietly.
“What have we got for lunch today, then?” said the one called Monica, and picked up Vicky’s lunch box. “Crisps again, I see,” and she pulled out the packet. The teacher looked up from her marking and Monica quickly crammed the crisp packet back into the lunch box. Vicky heard the crisps break into little pieces as she did so. The girls went and sat down right in front of the teacher’s desk to make it clear what law-abiding pupils they were.
Just then Andrew came in. Vicky put her chocolate bar at the front of the desk she was sitting at. Andrew walked past her desk and sat down further along the row. Where the chocolate had been, there was now an apple. They regularly did a swap like this. Andrew found his mum a little too keen on raw fruit and vegetables, quite the opposite of Vicky’s mum.
Andrew and Vicky ate their food in silence while the four girls giggled and whispered and made it very hard for Miss French to concentrate on her work. It had to be finished and ready for her class immediately after the lunch hour. “Hurry up, please!” she said sharply. Andrew reckoned this gave them about another three minutes before they would have to go out into the playground.
Vicky left first
and Andrew followed soon after. Although the corridor was empty, they did not speak to one another as they stowed away their lunch boxes. Vicky walked on ahead and out through the double doors that led into the playground. A cold wind whipped dust into her face.
She spotted Carry over by the high wire fence. Carry would talk for hours about last night’s TV. This, together with her bossy manner, kept others away. Vicky knew from experience that if she hung out with Carry other kids would probably not bother her, so she edged her way round the outside of the playground till she got to the fence.
Just then Gillian arrived with the buggy. It was the high point of Gillian’s day, the only time she did not feel miserable and depressed. When the girls and some of the boys crowded up to the fence to see her baby, she felt for a little while that her life had some sort of meaning. She lived in a tiny flat with baby Thomas who cried every night. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Thomas was looked after in a crèche and Gillian came to school. As today was Friday she could walk him past the playground and pretend to be happy. She was going to be fifteen in four days’ time, but there was no one who would give her any presents or say “Happy Birthday!”
One of the two teachers on duty in the playground came over to break up the crowd of baby watchers and tell Gillian to move on. Vicky sidled over to Carry.
“Hallo, Carry.”
“Did you watch ITV after the news?” and without waiting for a reply she began to retell the story of a play she and her mum had watched until nearly midnight. As Carry went into more and more detail, jumping from one part of the play to another, Vicky wondered what it had been about and began to imagine other stories of her own. It did not seem to matter if she paid attention or not. Carry was happy to have someone to tell things to and Vicky was happy to appear occupied in a way that did not attract anyone’s notice.
Andrew was having a harder time than Vicky. He knew that three older boys were homing in on him. They had been trying for several days to get him to meet them in the evening, after school. He did not know why, only that it was bound to be something bad and that he should avoid it at all costs. He kept moving away from them to other parts of the playground, trying to be near one of the teachers or mingling with one of the sudden surges of movement, but then the others melted away and he saw them making straight for him. He started to walk quickly towards a cluster of boys who were playing some sort of pushing and shoving game. Normally he kept well away from such activities.
“Trying to get away, are we?” jeered the one called J. Andrew did not know if the J stood for some name like Jacob or if it was Jay, like the bird in Mum’s ‘Book of British Birds’ that they sometimes looked at together in the evening. He wished he was back home right now, sitting at the kitchen table with her and chatting about the pictures of the birds and their eggs and nests.
“You can’t get away from us forever, you know.” This was the one called Cart, short for his surname, which was Cartwright. Andrew was aware of Vicky staring in his direction from near the fence. It somehow comforted him that she knew he was having trouble. Just then one of the teachers, Mr Gaarten, decided to stroll over to calm the pushing and shoving game down a bit, and Andrew gave a sigh of relief. By edging a little closer to the scuffle he should be safe for a while.
Just before Mr Gaarten came into hearing range, Paulus, the third of the three, hissed: “We’ve got knives, remember, and we know where you live.” Andrew knew some of the kids did carry knives, even managing to smuggle them into school, while others picked them up afterwards, before going off into the streets and alleyways as darkness fell.
On schooldays Andrew did not wear the watch his dad had given him. He was afraid it might get broken or stolen. He went over to Mr Gaarten. He could be safe next to the teacher for a few minutes. Mr Gaarten sometimes even chatted to you. “What’s the time, Mr Gaarten, please?”
Mr Gaarten peered at his own watch. “Twelve minutes to.” He peered at it more closely and pretended to tap it, like tapping an old-fashioned barometer. “Now it’s eleven minutes and fifty one seconds to – almost time for the bell.” And then the bell did ring and the unruly playground mob slowly shuffled and squabbled themselves into their classes in crooked, heaving lines. Lunch break was finally over. Andrew felt some of the tension lift, but he had a feeling that the danger from those three boys had just got one step worse. Did they really know where he lived? It was a sickening thought.
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