The Red Road (28 page)

“Exactly,” Donald leapt back in,
“and I don’t really understand what’s so special about it—”

“I just told you,” Silverman
said, incredulously.

“—which is why I want to borrow
your essay,” Donald said, ignoring him.

“What do I get in return?” I
asked.

The question threw him again. I
wasn’t the sort to bargain with people. I would generally just let
them look at what I had done, as a gesture of good will. Maybe it was
because I now had my mind so firmly set on completing my GCSEs and
getting the hell away from the school that I knew I had little to
lose by offending people.

“You like Coke, don’t you?
You’re always drinking one every day,” Simmons said, looking from
me to Donald. He clearly hadn’t done the work, either.

“I do,” I said.

“Okay, how about this,” Donald
said. “You lend me your essay, and the next time I go home, I’ll
bring you back a bottle of Coke?”

I knew he wouldn’t. He would
conveniently forget until I stopped badgering him about it. I
considered asking him for money, but that seemed a little low and
entering into a territory that I would rather stay well away from. I
tried to think of what else Donald might have that I would want.
Sadly, I could think of nothing.

“How about you lend me your
results from your geography practical?” I suggested. “I didn’t
finish all of it when I was home and just want to shore up my numbers
a bit.”

“Yeah, okay,” Donald answered
immediately.

“Cool.”

“Can I get the essay off you
tonight?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just drop by
my dorm.”

~ ~ ~

“Joe, don’t copy your results
off someone else,” Sam urged me as we walked back to Butcher.
“You’ll get in real shit if you get caught, remember?”

“Exactly, and he’s copied those
off someone else already,” Baz added.

“His older brother,” I reminded
them.

“Anyway, I thought you’d done it
already,” Sam said. “You told us in London that you had.”

“And I did,” I smiled. “I just
wanted to see what I could get off Donald. I’m not going to use
them at all.”

Both Baz and Sam looked a little
baffled by my revelation, but I added nothing.

~ ~ ~

My remaining coursework began to
diminish as the term went on, and I handed more of it in. There would
be a small few bits and pieces that would only be finished in the
first few weeks of the summer term, but I was pleased to get the vast
majority of it out of the way.

I discovered that one of the
security staff that patrolled the grounds with one of the two
Alsatians was an Australian man by the name of Josh. He had lived in
England for several years, coming over on a student visa and finding
employment here. He apparently also had an Irish passport, which
meant that he could stay indefinitely. He was from Darwin originally,
in the north of the country. A party town it was, apparently. All the
backpackers headed there, as the nearby airport provided easy access
to Bali. The dog that Josh usually patrolled with was called Max. He
was bad tempered and didn’t like being touched. Not like Wonka at
all, then.

Though there were no Australian boys
at St Christopher’s, the school had taken on a handful of
antipodeans as temporary teaching staff, though mostly to handle
sport. I had played Aussie rules football on occasion, and could only
describe it as ‘different’.

One evening, both Josh and the
current Australian sports teacher, a man called Stu, were sitting
around in one of Butcher’s lounges, talking about home. There were
a handful of first years there, listening intently. Stu was drinking
a can of beer.

“Alright, Joe? How’s it going?”
Josh said to me as I passed by the door, chewing on a Lion Bar. “Come
in and join us,” he added, indicating one of the empty seats. “Have
you ever been to Australia, Joe?”

“No, never,” I said, swallowing
the chocolate I was chewing. “I’d really like to, though; perhaps
that’s because of an overexposure to
Neighbours
.”

“You Brits don’t travel a lot,
hey?” Stu said. “Not like us Aussies. We’re all over Europe.
England’s a great launch pad for that sort of thing. Though lots of
Brits are emigrating to Australia because it’s so cheap for them
right now. It’s about three dollars to the pound.”

“No kidding?” Josh said.

“Are you going to go back?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty
settled here, to be honest.”

“Could get a lot for your money
right now. A house is just a fraction of the price, and you could get
it right next to the beach.”

“True,” Josh said. He looked as
though he was torn between going and staying. “I’d probably have
a tiny mortgage, too.”

“Or maybe buy a couple of units.”

“A unit?” one of the first years
asked.

“Oh, that’s what we call an
apartment back home,” Josh said.

“A flat you call it here, don’t
you?” Stu asked.

“So, if I went over to Australia
for a couple of weeks, what would I want to do?” I asked.

“A couple of weeks?” Stu
laughed. “You’d barely have gotten off the plane before it was
time to go back. The flight takes about twenty-four hours, and then
you need about a week to get over the jet lag.”

“You’d want to go to Bondi Beach
and get some surfing lessons,” Josh said. “And then head up the
east coast, go to the Great Barrier Reef and stay in Cairns for a
bit. The east coast is great. It’s all beaches and partying and
drinking and surfing.”

“What are the girls like?” asked
another of the first year boys.

“Fucking fit!” Stu said. “Better
looking than the girls over here, that’s for sure. They’re always
on the beach in bikinis and always up for a good party. They’re
nice friendly girls, too.”

“Oh yeah?” the same first year
asked with a cheeky grin.

“Yeah,” Stu said, taking a glug
of beer.

“I thought you’d be drinking
Fosters,” yet another first year said.

“It’s not really for me,” Stu
said. “And it’s not actually that popular back home. Everywhere
else, sure, but we don’t drink it that much over there. Are you
sure you don’t want a beer?” he asked Josh.

“No, I can’t,” Josh said. “I
have to go on duty in twenty minutes, so I can’t drink.”

“What else would I want to do in
Australia?” I asked.

“I’d say explore the outback,”
Josh said. “You can go to the cities, but after you’ve travelled
a bit, a city is a city.”

“Sydney’s the capital, right?”

“Ahhhhhhhh!” Stu said, pointing
to me and laughing evilly. “Wrong!”

“Melbourne ...?” I ventured.

“It’s Canberra,” Josh said.
“Everyone thinks it’s Sydney, but it’s Canberra.”

I had never heard of the place.

“Sydney and Melbourne had a
dispute over which of them would be the capital,” Stu began to
explain, “and when an agreement couldn’t be reached, a city was
simply built between the two of them to end the problem.”

“That’s one way of fixing the
problem,” I chuckled. “A little extreme, though.”

Josh just shrugged. “There’s
lots of interesting things to see in the outback,” he went on, to
another evil chuckle from Stu. “If you don’t mind driving, that
is.”

“There’s almost nothing in the
middle, except desert,” Stu explained to all of us. “Everyone
lives around the coast, and the middle is largely just ... dirt and
sand. You can drive for hours and hours and only ever see one car
coming the other way.”

“Usually a road train,” Josh
pointed out. “That’s a truck with three or more trailers on it.
But don’t worry, there’s still lots to see – The Devil’s
Marbles, Ayers Rock, King’s Canyon ...”

“... Coby Pedy, if you fancy your
luck at opal mining,” Stu said.

“There are also towns out there
with a population of only about seven or eight people. And if you
don’t fancy that, in Sydney you have the Opera House and the
Harbour Bridge. Seriously, you cannot go for just two weeks. You’d
need at least six weeks if you were only going for a bit,” Josh
advised.

“Even that’s not enough. I’ve
known some travellers who were there for a year and never made it
over to Perth. But admittedly that’s because they run out of money
and were forced to live and work in the hostels.”

“Have you been to Ayers Rock?”
one of the first years asked.

“Er ... no,” Stu said, laughing.
“We’re like you – if it’s right next door, we don’t bother.
I bet half of you have probably never even been to Buckingham
Palace.”

We all nodded in agreement. I had
never been anywhere near the it as far as I could remember. I had
been to the British Museum on a day out when I was still in the
junior school, but it wasn’t somewhere I would choose to visit
myself. My weekend up in London to visit Dave and Baz had taken me
nowhere near the palace, either.

“I’ve been to Ayers Rock,”
Josh then said. “Or Uluru, to give it its aboriginal name.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

“Massive,” Josh said, his eyes
growing big, stretching his arms out wide. “It takes about two
hours to walk around the base of it. It was baking hot when I went
there, in December. Absolutely incredible to see, though. I’d
highly recommend it. Don’t take anything from there, though.”

“Don’t take anything?” one of
the first years asked.

“Nothing,” Josh shook his head.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s cursed.”

“Seriously?” Stu asked.

“Yep,” Josh said. “It’s
sacred ground. You shouldn’t take anything from it, or you’ll end
up with loads of bad luck. It happens to people all the time. They
decide to take a rock home with them as a souvenir and all sorts of
things happen to them. They then usually return it sharpish. Some
people have posted them back all the way from America. They’re
known as ‘Sorry Parcels’.”

“No kidding?” Stu said, although
he didn’t seem to be sure whether Josh was being honest or was
winding up his audience.

“It happened to me,” Josh said.

“Woah! Wow! What happened?” all
the first years asked.

“I was out with a tour group and
decided to take one of the stones home. It was only a small thing,”
he made the shape of a pebble with his hand, “but it was enough.
Our bus broke down on the way back to our campsite. Took us two hours
to fix it, and it was forty-seven that afternoon. We were pouring
water all over ourselves and stuff, and our guide had to try and get
under the bus to fix it. It was a nightmare. Then, that night, I was
bitten by a spider. My leg seized up, and I couldn’t walk the whole
of the next day because of the poison. I’m not superstitious or
anything, but I told my tour leader I’d taken the rock, and he went
to return it. The problems stopped after that.”

“Could be a
coincidence,” Stu said.

“I’d rather not have taken the
chance, to be honest.”

“But what if you get a stone stuck
in your shoe?” one of the first years asked.

“It has to be taken with intent,”
Josh said. “Otherwise you’d get cursed simply for treading the
land. Right, I’d better get down to the gate. Have to be extra
vigilant tonight.”

“Why?” Stu asked. “Has the
suspect fought his way out of the police station?”

“Might as well have. The police
have let him go, apparently,” Josh said.

“They have?” I asked.

“It wasn’t him they reckon,”
Josh said.

“Shit,” I mumbled, unable to
help myself. The first years looked a little rattled by the news. I
could well agree. It hadn’t been Quasimodo? I hadn’t seen the man
around the school at all, and had presumed that he had been locked
up. Did that mean that the killer was still out there? Could we
expect a fourth body in the weeks to come?

“Hey, if that’s true, then you
weren’t supposed to tell these guys,” Stu said, indicating us.

“We’d probably find out from our
parents, anyway,” I said. “The school would be letting them
know.”

“All right,” Stu said, looking at
his watch and draining his beer. “It’s nearly time for evening
prayers, so you had all better get into your pyjamas. And don’t say
anything, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the first years
said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep it to
myself,” I echoed. Though I had absolutely no intention of doing
so. The road to freedom had become obstructed once more.

Chapter Nineteen

“
T
hought
I’d find you here,” I said as I entered the Belfry and saw
Carson, Sam and Rory seated around his desk. “What are you talking
about?”

“Ms Walker,” Sam said, grinning.

“Who?” I said, sitting myself
down on Carson’s bed.

“Ms Walker, the new junior school
English teacher.”

I had no idea who they were talking
about. I’d never heard of the woman. “Is she fit?” I asked.
After all, that was probably the only reason why they would be
discussing her.

“Very,” Carson beamed. “She’s
tall, blonde, has fucking massive tits ...”

“I’ve never seen her around.
When did she start?” I asked.

“Last term, I think,” Carson
said. “She apparently went to Oxford.”

“What’s she doing here then?”
I said, everyone laughing along with me. “No, seriously, has anyone
spoken to her?”

“No,” Sam said. “She smiled at
me today, though. Didn’t know who she was until Carson told me. Mr
Sutherland is apparently already perving after her, too.”

“Isn’t he married?” I asked.

“Yeah, but nothing’s going to
happen,” Sam said. “She’s so bloody fit. I’d love to fuck
her.”

“And how many girls have you
fucked, to make a statement like that?” Carson asked.

Sam said nothing.

“Only kidding, Sam,” Carson
laughed. “I’d love to fuck her, too.”

“Guys, seriously, how can you say
that?” Rory then asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“She’s old!”