Free Engleby by Sebastian Faulks Page B

they’re not that sort of porter.’
    Francis and McCain laughed nervously along with Mr Talbot; Batley looked confused.
    I lugged my trunk over the front quad and up the stairs; the boys going up and down swore at me for being in the way. When I pulled it into Collingham, an older boy, perhaps a ‘prefect’, told me to lift it up and not drag it on the wooden floor.
    ‘It’s too heavy.’
    ‘Then you’ll have to unpack it here and carry the stuff to your room till it’s lighter, won’t you?’ He spoke as though explaining something obvious to an idiot.
    As I carried down the corridor the armfuls of grey shirts, football socks and vests my mother had got from the school second-hand shop, some boys took them from my arms and threw them over the partitions into random cubicles.
    My ‘fagmaster’ was a small, nervous boy called Ridgeway. ‘If you hear a prefect call “Fag”,’ he said, ‘run like hell. The last one there does the job. There’s a fag test in two weeks’ time. You need to know all the initials of all the masters, all the school offices, like who’s captain of fives, all the rules and all the school geography. Read these.’ He put the rule book, the annual calendar and ‘call list’ on my table.
    ‘Where’s Troughton’s?’ I asked.
    ‘Down Dock Walk, behind Greville.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Keep your head down. Don’t speak. Don’t be nervy.’
    ‘Nervy?’
    ‘Pushy. Don’t show off. Be invisible.’
    ‘Thank you, Ridgeway.’
    I had spent a week in Bexhill once, but apart from that had never slept outside my parents’ house, so I was interested to know how it would feel. I didn’t know where I was meant to go to clean my teeth or what time I was meant to turn my light out, so I brushed them in the room and spat out of the window. I turned the light off early, wondering if Batley had yet figured out what the metal switch inside the door was for.
    I can’t remember much of the first few days. I think I expected that at some time someone would explain what it was all about, but gradually it became clear that not explaining was the Chatfield way. It was a sign of weakness to ask a question; ‘initiative’ was shown by not making a fuss. You were meant to know what to do. How? Instinct? Tarot? Sortilege? No, just by being a good crew member, by not making a fuss, by just knowing .
    ‘Keep your head down.’ It was Ridgeway’s hunted look more than his actual words that stayed with me.
    Being the holder of the Romney Open meant that I was placed in classes with boys a year or two older. They responded to my impertinence by not talking to me – ever. Not in all the time I was at that school.
    The lessons were given by masters who all looked alike. They wore black gowns over tweed jackets and baggy grey trousers; they had lace-up tan shoes with enormous welts, so they rolled along the cloisters as though on brown tyres. They all had flat grey hair and similar, one-word nicknames – ‘stalky’ Read, ‘Mug’ Benson, ‘Tubby’ Lyneham, ‘Bingo’ Maxwell; it was hard to tell them apart, to feel anything for them or about them, and this indifference was reciprocated.
    Stalky Read did have a particular phrase of his own, now I come to think of it: ‘Take the first bus to the Prewett.’ What the hell did that mean? Park Prewett, it was eventually explained to me, was a famous loony bin, near Basingstoke. If you made an elementary mistake in geography, Stalky’s advice never varied: ‘First bus to the Prewett. Leaves at two.’
    When I was returning to my cubicle after lessons on perhaps my third day at Chatfield, I found that two-thirds of the way down the corridor, barring my path, stood a large boy, about seventeen, with his hands stuck in his belt. He glared at me as I got close, his face set in a sneer. I couldn’t take cover in any of the rooms en route because I didn’t know any of the boys in them. When eventually I reached him, he sidestepped to prevent me