The Red Road (10 page)

And woe betide anyone who should
attempt to face-off against or tackle any boy whose girlfriend (a
very, very,
very
rare thing indeed) happened to turn up for
the afternoon, to watch their other half play. Glory Boys were bad
enough at any time during inter-school matches; with a girl watching,
the effects could be felt for a full ninety minutes.

Pass the
ball? Not me, I’m the fly-half! I can charge straight through this
line of six forwards, no bother
. I would see the girl in question
walking the sideline, clapping daintily whenever the team they were
supporting either scored a try, performed a particularly noteworthy
tackle, or successfully converted a kick. In the main, however, women
(other than boys’ mothers and sisters) were largely absent from the
flock of parents and local people who would come to watch the match.

Except, of course, whenever we were
playing against Mayfield College, a mixed-sex boarding school in
Sussex. The boys there were good.
Very good
. They were our
nemesis, our archrivals, both in terms of sport and grades. I use the
term
archrivals
loosely, as I’m not sure it counts if you
never actually beat them.

~ ~ ~

“How are your fingers?” I asked
Sam as I towelled off from the shower. They were nicer showers than
the ones I endured at St Christopher’s, the changing rooms here
being part of a dedicated sports complex that Mayfield had
constructed some two years previous. It made my own school’s
offerings look truly pathetic. Then again, Mayfield’s fees were
around one-and-a-half times those of St Christopher’s.

“They still hurt,” Sam said,
awkwardly trying to use just his left hand to dry himself. “I think
I might have broken the little one.”

A few of our team-mates looked over
as he held it up. I couldn’t tell myself. It looked okay, other
than Sam’s hand quivering slightly. Even so, he didn’t look as though he
was able to flex his fingers very easily. That would make it awkward
to hold a pen or do anything else come Monday, if they hadn’t
mended by then.

“I think that guy did it on
purpose,” Rory said. “They were trying to make sure we were
playing with one less man on the field.”

“Those twats were cheating like
mad today,” Ben Wild, part of the Tudor House Clique, frothed. “And
what the fuck was with the ref? I had the ball down over the fucking
line. That was a try! We’d have won if he hadn’t disallowed it!”

“That was a rather convenient
penalty next to our try line just before the whistle, wasn’t it?”
I added.

“But they do that all the time;
that’s why they win,” Emilio Baxter, our captain, said, stuffing
his boots back into his bag, along with his shorts and shirt, all of
which were so muddy that the original colours were largely lost.

Mine were in no better state. A
light rain shower had been enough to transform much of the pitch into
a mud bath. Usually, it was the forwards that came off the worst
following matches, the backs far cleaner by comparison. Today, it had
made little difference. The air in the changing room was thick and
heavy with the stink of mud and sweat, the spraying of various
deodorants doing little to mask it. I had looked forward to washing
after the game had concluded, though despite using a generous amount
of shower gel, I still felt dirty. Perhaps it was because I could
still smell the mud. It would dirty up the base of my trousers
between now and my return to St Christopher’s, as it always did,
and I would tread the caked-on dirt back into my dormitory for sure.

I looked back to Sam as he yelped,
cradling his hand.

“You’d better tell Mr Hill when
you see him,” I said, as Sam continued attempting to dress without
dirtying up his school uniform in the process. “If it’s broken,
he’ll have to take you to hospital.”

“Everything all right in here?”
a voice came.

I looked around to see that the
captain of opposing team had entered our changing room. He had a deep
voice and was quite a tall guy, looking more like he was eighteen
than sixteen. I swore that I could make out the hint of a five
o’clock shadow on his chin.

“All good, thank you,” Baxter
said in his practised diplomatic tone.

“Good, good. Are you guys all
nearly ready to go to tea?” the opposing captain enquired, looking
around.

I looked about the changing room as
Baxter did. The last of the team was out of the shower, most of the
others having already dressed and were now sitting around on the
benches lining the wall. The derogatory remarks about the other
team’s performance on the pitch had stopped abruptly at its
captain’s appearance, and everyone was now waiting for the prompt
to leave.

“Yes, we’re all ready. Just a
few still changing,” Baxter confirmed, his eyes flickering to Sam
and a couple of others.

“Good. When you’re ready, I’ll
be waiting for you just out the front,” the opposing captain said,
before departing.

“Um, Joe,” Sam said. “Could
you help me with my tie?” He held it out to me to fasten, unable to
do it himself with one hand.

“I’d leave it off if I were
you,” I said. Tying someone else’s tie felt weird to me for some
reason, and I preferred to avoid doing it. “But let me get that for
you,” I offered, picking up his bag.

“Thanks,” he said. “What do
you think they’ll give us for tea?”

“Judging by the cost of this
place, I’d be hoping for either a steak or a big rack of ribs, with
all the trimmings. But they’ll probably just give us hamburgers and
chips,” I smirked.

We started off away from the sports
complex, across the grounds of Mayfield College, a couple of members
of the opposing team joining us and engaging in friendly
conversation. I saw Ben Wild fall to the back of the line, walking
with Rupert Daniels, one of the boys on the fringe of belonging to
the Clique, where he continued to chew on the bone of our defeat. I
made no comment. The game was done, and it mattered little to me
whether or not we won or lost. Winning was always good, of course,
and there was a great feeling of returning to St Christopher’s and
telling everyone that you beat your opponents on their home turf, but
it wasn’t the end of the world if we didn’t. Instead, I listened
to what the other boys were saying, as well as taking the opportunity
to look around the grounds and see how everything differed from what
I was used to.

There were certain aspects that
always remained consistent at other boys’ schools – the division
in the junior and senior school, the ten, eleven and twelve-year-olds
living and studying in separate buildings to those in the senior
school, including their classrooms and dormitories. Our escorts to
the post-match tea would usually answer questions that we had about
the campus and the lifestyle, posing their own about what it was like
studying at St Christopher’s.

Today, however, my attention was on
something else all together, as was everyone else’s – the girls.

I passed several groups as we made
our way to the coach, to offload our kit, before heading to the huge
dining hall to eat. This wasn’t my first time at Mayfield, and I
knew what to expect. I would often hear the girls before I saw them,
their giggles and voices catching my ear well before they came into
view. None of them were ugly; all goddesses in my eyes. Not even the
act of regularly indulging myself in the beauties that adorned the
pages of
FHM
,
GQ
,
Club International
,
Penthouse
, or
Playboy
had raised my expectations
unduly. I tried not to stare. Failed. But there again, so did
everyone else.

Some of the girls waved and said
hello to us as we passed them, the captain of the team we had played
(and lost to) receiving the most attention. He was being earmarked
to become a prefect when he moved to the sixth form, that much was
clear to me, most likely also being considered for either head of
house or head boy. I generally cared little for the power and
purported grandeur that usually came with such a position. Here, however,
I could appreciate the attention it would bring with it. To wear that
scarf and badge that were presented to the head boy would surely
prove a tremendous draw to the opposite sex.

But there again, I intended on
having my own attention-grabbing item once I left school – a car.

~ ~ ~

“Are there only sixth form girls
here?” Jeff Armitage, our fly-half, asked as we tucked into the
hamburgers, chips, and beans that we had been served for tea. I saw
too late that there were cheese slices available. Halfway through my
burger, I would just go without.

“No,” Tim, a redheaded Mayfield
boy sitting opposite, said. “They’re here from the same ages as
the boys – six till eighteen.”

It was usual for us to sit mixed in
with the team we had just played against, the teachers likely
expecting us to talk about our studies and what we were aspiring to
become when we eventually completed our education and embarked on a
career. Talking shop, basically.

“You start here at six?” I
asked.

“Yep,” Tim replied.

“Damn, that’s a long time,” I
said.

“Some of the parents send their
children here when they’re still only five,” Roland, a blonde,
chubby-faced Mayfield boy, added with a chuckle. “Can’t wait to
get rid of them, apparently. No, it’s mainly because of if their
parents are in the army, who actually pay most of the fees.”

I appreciated what was being said.
There were several boys at St Christopher’s whose parents were in
the army. The fees were paid in full by the service every term,
leaving the family with but a small bill for any optional extras.
Such as the World Film Club.

“But some just send their children
here early, so they can get back to work,” Tim said.

I nodded at that. That had been my
parents’ own reasoning.

“What’s happened to your
fingers?” Tim asked, looking at Sam, who was attempting to eat and
cradle his hand at the same time.

I glanced at Sam, and then to the
boy who had apparently carried out the deed, a thick, stocky-looking
guy. He was sitting on another table, with his back to me. I could
hear his booming chuckles from across the spacious dining hall. I got
the impression that he had almost certainly done it on purpose. He
looked the type.

“Oh, I think they might just be
badly bruised,” Sam said, sounding reluctantly dismissive of the
injury. “Just got bent in the scrum.”

“Look broken to me,” Tim said.
“Do you want me to take you to the nurse?”

“No, it’s okay,” Sam said. “I
showed it to our coach, and he said it wasn’t anything bad.”

“If he’s anything like ours,
then he probably hasn’t got a clue,” Roland commented. “Show it
to your nurse or sister or whoever when you get back. They’ll
probably have more of an idea.”

“Thanks,” said Sam.

Tim saw me once again glance in the
direction of the apparent perpetrator. A few others on the table who
had been paying attention to Sam’s injury also looked in that
direction, Wild included.

“Yeah, Bullock does that,” Tim
said. “Doesn’t care as he normally gets away with it. Openly
punched a guy in the face the other week, caused a nosebleed and
everything. Said he was going for the ball.”

“While playing against another
school?” Wild asked.

“No,” Tim shook his head.
“During training.”

“Jesus, what a twat.”

“Are there more girls here than
boys?” I asked, deciding to change the subject in case it should
unexpectedly become heated. Wild could sometimes be true to his name
and was something of a hothead. I had known him in the past to quite
happily seize on the chance to start something.

“A few more,” Roland answered.
“There used to be more boys, but I think it’s about fifty-five to
forty-five in the girls’ favour now. All the parents want to send
their girls here now, and some of the boys’ dorms have become
girls’ dorms as a result.”

I saw the intrigue in my fellow
team-mates’ eyes. Likely, they were thinking the same as me –
more choice. While the idea of being in the presence of so many girls
was novel to us, our hosts spoke as if it were quite normal. They
seemed almost quite indifferent to be studying with girls. With all
the questions we had been asking so far, we must have seemed quite
desperate by comparison.

“Do you all have girlfriends and
that?” Wild wanted to know.

“Some of us do,” Tim said.

“Are you dating one of them?”

“Sort of,” Tim said, again with
the same air of nonchalance. “But it’s not really going anywhere.
I’m leaving next year, too, so it’s sort of pointless.”

“Why?” Wild asked, a little
aggressively. “Why on earth would you leave here?”

“I’ve been here since I was
eight, and I want to go somewhere else. Oh, don’t get me wrong –
it’s a good school, a very good school, but I just don’t want to
be here any more,” Tim said with a shrug.

I nodded again. I could tell that he
and I would probably get along quite well if I had been at Mayfield.

“What benefits do you get when you
move into the sixth form?” I asked.

“Probably the same as you,”
Roland said. “Separate room, later bedtimes, an exclusive social
centre, use the computers, that sort of thing.” He looked to my
team-mates, who nodded.

“The dormitories aren—”
Armitage started.

“HA HA! HO HO
HO!” came the sound of Bullock’s booming laughter from the
other table, drowning out what he was saying.

“Sorry,” Armitage said. “So,
are the dormi—”

“HA HA HA HA
HA!” Bullock’s laughter came suddenly again, the already
loud noise added to by the boy slamming his hand down hard on the
table he sat at, drawing the attention of all.

Tim rolled his eyes. “No, the
dormitories aren’t mixed,” he said, correctly guessing at what it
was that Armitage wanted to know. “Girls and boys sleep separately.
Although they’re mixed at Stormbridge ... have you heard of
Stormbridge? Well, anyway, they’re mixed there until they’re
twelve.”