The Red Road (40 page)

Preps were periods set aside by the
school during certain times of the day, normally between classes, to
enable us to do coursework and other tasks given to us by teachers. The
frequency of these periods would vary, but we always had one every
night for an hour, after dinner. It was rare for teachers themselves
to ever supervise these periods, the duty normally falling to the
upper sixth, cascading down to the lower sixth when the A-Levels were
in full swing. For a third year to take a prep was extremely rare and
unusual.

Third years and sixth formers did
their preps in their dormitories and rooms, whereas the first and
second year would do them in their classrooms. My own experiences of
preps during those years had been mixed. The prep taker themselves
could also usually be filed into three distinct categories.

The first was the grumpy bastard,
who would, to his credit, run the prep as it probably should be run.
The miserable sod would lumper in, slam his work down on the desk at
the front, and tell us all to shut and get on with it. We would do
so, fearful that the slightest drop of a pen might cause the guy to
fly off the handle and into a rage that would result in the entire
classroom finding themselves standing at the front gates of the
school at five on a Friday morning. We would all be very
grateful to hear the school bell ring, signalling the end of the prep
and allowing us to get the hell away from that classroom as quickly
as possible.

The second was a more passive
version of the first. He would come into the classroom and get on
with his work, letting a few things like the occasional whispering or
short conversations for the most part slide, and occasionally
entertain minor gossip and none too personal questions. He would
insist on silence when it was needed, or he thought we really should
press on. I liked those preps. We could discuss work freely, as well
as other school-related things, without fear of getting into trouble.

Then there was the third kind. These
guys were something else. They saw themselves as either the king of
the classroom or the circus ringmaster, and that those in the prep
had been put there for his own personal entertainment. I remember
how, on at least one occasion, someone would be made to snort sherbet
up their nose through an empty ballpoint pen case, pretending that
they were doing a line of cocaine. Other jocular larks would include
going to the library and asking the librarian to locate a book with
an obscene title; running up and down the classroom corridor, trying
not to get caught by a teacher or duty master; or walking into
another prep and insulting the sixth former taking it. Although the
insult was being sent by their friend, the recipient would be none
too impressed and would generally sign the deliverer up to the
Murga
List
that Friday. The idea of not shooting
the messenger certainly did not apply here.

I knew even before I arrived at the
classroom block that I was more of the second type of supervisor.

~ ~ ~

The class that Mr Somers brought me
to contained a number of first years. Having now spent two terms at
St Christopher’s, most had come out of their shells and weren’t
the scared, meek little boys that I had encountered in the autumn
term when I had been a dormitory prefect to them.

“Hurrah, it’s Crotty!” they
hollered once Mr Somers left me to it. Most of the textbooks and A4
binders were pushed aside, with copies of
FHM
and
GQ
filling their places, as well as an Italian magazine that was
basically just a porno dressed up as a fashion publication.

“All right, guys, settle down and do
some work,” I said, as I put my R.E. notes down on the desk and
kicked away the stop that was holding the door open. “I need to
revise for my exam on Thursday.” I had already been warned by my
housemaster that I should ensure that the boys in my care were
actually going to work, rather than screw about for the next twenty
minutes or so. I wanted them to do so, too.

“What are you revising?” one of
them asked.

“R.E.,” I said.

“That’s what we’re doing,”
another immediately piped up. “Can you help us with ours? We’ve
got to write a two-thousand-word essay on nuclear weapons.”

“It’s not hard, guys,” I
responded, to exasperated looks.

“It’s two thousand words!”
another one said. “That’s about four or five sides of A4. And
we’ve got to write it at least twice – a draft and then the
actual thing.”

“Do you have one we could look at,
to see what you wrote?” another boy asked, his eyes fixed on my
vast collection of notes.

“I didn’t do that essay,” I
said. “I did one on ethics – utilitarianism and that. Besides,”
I added as their faces fell at the prospect of having to scribble out
legible facts and arguments that they had come up with themselves,
“there is lots of information about it in the library, and in the
newspapers practically every day. Start with the facts about who has
what, what they are used for—”

“Blowing stuff up,” one
chuckled.

“Deterrents is what they’re
really for,” I said. “Firing one would be an incredibly stupid
thing to do, the fall out and the retaliation and all that. Think
about what happened at the end of
War Games,
if you’ve ever
seen that. Soon as one country fires a missile, everyone else would
fire theirs. It won’t take you as long as you think.”

“I hate R.E.,” one said. “It’s
so boring.”

“I like it,” another added.
“There’s never a wrong answer, apart from the dates of things.
You just need to put across a good argument and you’ll get the
marks.”

“Right, guys, do some work,” I
said, wanting to now focus on my revision and not spend the next half
an hour entertaining eighteen bored thirteen-year-olds. “Seriously,
I want to do this. It’s my last exam, and I want to do well.”

Even so, it was clear to me that
they knew I wouldn’t punish them if they continued to talk. In
fact, they knew that I wasn’t the sort to ever punish anyone for
anything, anyway. Punishments such as detonations, lines and the
dreaded
Murga
could only be handed out by the upper sixth, and
usually only by the prefects. Others had to lodge a complaint with
one of the teachers, ideally the housemaster or deputy housemaster,
in order for it to go through. I could never be bothered. Just so
long as they shut up. To my satisfaction, they did, only occasionally
muttering to one another about something. Work-related or not, I
didn’t mind, as long as they weren’t disturbing me.

“Hey, Joe?” one of the boys
asked, not five minutes later.

“Yes,” I said, attempting to
hold back my frustration at the interruption. I could see my chances
of passing R.E. with the grade I was after beginning to slide out of
view.

“You found all the bodies, didn’t
you?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Just the
first.”

“But you were there when they
found Craig Priest,” he insisted. His eyes were alight, as though
the subject was highly entertaining to him.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What did he look like?”

“Pale,” I said. “Now, get back
to ...” I was going to say ‘work’, but he was clearly ogling
some bikini-clad lovely in the magazine he had open on his desk. I
tried not to stare for too long at the girl’s smooth white skin,
slender body, legs, buttocks, breasts, and everything else that my
teenage mind was attempting to process all at once. “ ... reading,”
I settled on.

“Do you think they’ve gone to
Heaven?” someone asked.

“Who?” another answered.

“Craig Priest and the other two
from the junior school that were murdered.”

“I don’t see why not. You’re
more likely to if you’re a virgin, right?”

“Really?” another boy asked. “In
that case, Pete’s sister’s definitely not going there, then.”
He turned to the boy named Pete, smirking.

“Fuck off,” Pete responded
angrily.

“Doesn’t she work as the admin
for your local football team?” another boy pitched in.

“Yeah, and we all know why she
picked that job,” yet another chuckled.

“Will you fuck off?” Pete said
again. “She’s only been doing it a month.”

“Probably been through all of
them already, too,” another boy snorted.

“Well, at least she’s getting
some!” Pete shot back, his face red from his anger. “How many
people have you had sex with?”

The comment, though quite absurd
given that we were all boys in a single-sex boarding school and of
the ages thirteen through sixteen, was met with silence. Though one
could say that, aside from a small handful of the upper sixth, no one
had ever slept with a girl, and none were willing to either admit or
liked being reminded of it. Inexperience with women was a grand
source of ridicule for a reason I was still unable to total fathom.

“Virgin,” Pete finished.

“Oh, and you’re not?” one of
the other boys shot back.

“Guys, be quiet,” I said, seeing
the fun-poking in danger of boiling over into either a shouting or
throwing match. The boys feel silent, though sadly only for a few
seconds. An A in R.E? Maybe a B+ now.

“Are you a virgin, Crotty?”

I saw
that all eyes were suddenly on me, and I felt myself flush, despite
all attempts not to. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt very
self-conscious, as if I were contaminated or possessed some sort of
undesirable quality. I shouldn’t have felt ashamed; I was sixteen
at an all-boys boarding school. It was perfectly understandable that
I had never had sex. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time in
the past nine months that I had even spoken to a woman that wasn’t
either my or someone else’s mother (seriously, go back and check,
you’ll see I’m right). Yes, I might be a virgin now, but I would
make sure that I wouldn’t be by this time next year.

“Do some work,” was all I said,
pointing to the essay I could see him still attempting to write. He
had so far managed to fill only about five lines since the prep had
started.

“Okay, seriously,” one started.

I suppressed a sigh. A B grade,
then. “What?” I snarled, without raising my eyes from my notes.

“What do you think happens when we
die? Do you think we go to Heaven and Hell?”

“I ... don’t know,” I answered
honestly, but without much of a care. It wasn’t relevant to my own
revision.

“Because, do you think that if
you’re actually just evil and do bad things, like murder or rape
people, then you’ll go to Hell?”

“Of course not!” Pete’s
still-angry voice came. “There’s no such thing! All that happens
is you’re either cremated or you rot in the ground. It’s bloody
obvious there’s no such thing as God.”

Pete’s admission jolted me from my
revision, and I looked up from my notes, seeing every face in the
classroom turning to him in shock. I had never heard anyone say such
a thing while they were at St Christopher’s. This was a Catholic
boarding school, built on Christian values. It was why we were made
to attend church every Sunday, without fail, why we had evening
prayers most nights, why the headmaster was a monk, and other little
things such as why we were denied meat on Fridays.

“You don’t believe in God?”
one of the class asked.

“No, of course not,” Pete
scowled. “You speak to Mr Tyler, and he’ll tell you it’s just a
load of crap created to control people and scare them into doing what
you want. People used to worship the Sun, for fuck’s sake. Kings,
rulers and conquerors invented the idea of a god to make people think
that there was someone more powerful than them, and if they didn’t
do as they were told, really bad things would happen to them and
their families. Religion is basically just a load of bollocks. It
causes the biggest number of problems in the world and should just be
banned. Look at the Middle East, for example. They’re always
killing each other over there over some mythical being they think
lives in the sky, but can’t actually prove exists.”

Ah, Mr Tyler. The fiercely atheist
biology teacher. He made no secret of his utter dislike of anything
to do with God or religion. He was a very good teacher, though, and I
had to wonder how the man had landed a job at St Christopher’s.
Perhaps the founders, the school board and even the monks themselves
wanted to give the students perspective and arguments. One couldn’t
fault them for that, I supposed.

The classroom erupted into a small
debate, seventeen boys all aiming questions at Pete, wanting to know
for how long he had felt this way, as well as his arguments for how
the universe and the world came to be.

“Was Jesus not really the
Son of God?” they challenged him.

“No,” he said.

“Of course
he is,” the others retorted, “the Romans have records of what
happened that day and of how he rose from the dead.”

“History can
be altered,” Pete put, simply.

“Why are you even at this school?”
someone asked him.

“My parents sent me here,” Pete
mumbled. He sounded just as fed up with the place as I was.

I became aware of someone moving by
the door. It opened and in walked Mr Wilder, slow and steady, letting
his presence be felt. “Now, what’s going on here?” he asked
with equal calm.

“We’re just having a debate on
the existence of God, for their R.E. coursework,” I fielded after
silence and blank faces met Mr Wilder’s question.

“I see,” the maths teacher
responded. “But I’m not sure all of you are doing R.E., are you?”
His eyes strayed to the various magazines that my prep were rapidly
attempting to push out of their way and conceal. “I’m trying to
teach in the classroom opposite, and I can hear every word you’re
saying. Now, you’ve got ten minutes of this period left and I don’t
want to hear another word out of you until the bell rings, or you’ll
each be punished. Understand?”