Free Different Class by Joanne Harris Page A

understand the boys? How can he understand the staff ?
    ‘I don’t know about that,’ Kitty said. ‘Everything’s moving so fast now. We need someone to take control, to help us compete in a changing market. I think he’ll be good for all of us, Roy. St Oswald’s needs a human face.’
    A human face? Johnny Harrington? Gods, am I the only one he hasn’t managed to seduce?
    I noticed Kitty was wearing a suit for the first time since I’ve known her. That’s what promotion does, I suppose. I shouldn’t hold it against her. Kitty, at thirty-five, is still young, with a promising future ahead. Chances are she knows nothing of what happened here twenty-four years ago. Dr Devine is different. I expected more of him. And Eric – he was there from the first, much as he would like to forget, and those who will not remember the past must be condemned to repeat it.
    But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on my colleagues, or on myself. None of us saw the crisis approaching, back in that autumn of ’81. None of us guessed how everything would spring from that first, improbable seed, like a chain of paper flowers pulled from a circus-master’s hat and blooming gaudily over the years to flower again on a dead man’s grave . . .

7

    Michaelmas Term, 1981
    Dear Mousey,
    It wasn’t always like this, you know. I didn’t always have to pretend. My dad wasn’t always this pompous, and sometimes my mother used to smile. But then we had Tribulation. That’s what they call it, Mousey, with the capital letter. Tribulation is what God sends when He thinks you’re not paying attention. It can be cancer; or locusts; or boils. It can be an accident. Or he can take something away. A precious possession; the use of a limb; even, in some cases, a life.
    What God took was my brother.
    His name was Edward, but Mum and Dad always called him Bunny. I was seven years old when he died. In fact, he was the reason I got sent to school in the first place. Till then, Mum had looked after me at home, but after my brother was born, she decided that she couldn’t look after two children at once. And so I was sent to Netherton Green, while Mum looked after Bunny.
    I didn’t want to go to school. Netherton Green was noisy, and big, and filled with other children. I didn’t like other children much. They frightened me a little. So when I arrived, I didn’t speak. I barked like a dog for the first three days. I figured people liked dogs. I thought it would make them like me. Turns out it made me a weirdo. I’ve been a weirdo ever since.
    They never told me exactly what happened to Bunny. Perhaps they thought I was too young. All they said was: God took him . Other people told me the rest. Bunny had been having his bath. My mother had gone to answer the phone. She’d only been gone a minute. Bunny was nearly two by then. He drowned in six inches of water.
    I think that’s when I first started to really be afraid of God. If He could take Bunny, then He could take me. And worse, my parents talked about it like it was a kind of treat, like maybe going to Disneyland. Except that sometimes, I could hear Mum crying in her room, and at Church I heard Mrs Plum say to Mrs Constable that Mum was no better than she should be, and that maybe now she’d understand that God doesn’t play favourites.
    Mrs Constable didn’t like my parents, because Dad had told some people at Church that Mrs Constable’s daughter was living in sin with a woman in Leeds. After that, Mrs Constable didn’t talk to my parents at all, and Mr Constable started a Gay Families Support Group, which Dad said was a gateway to approving immorality. I was a bit young to understand, but Dad explained that being gay was wrong; that it was in the Bible. Of course, that was in the olden days. Now it’s not even illegal. How can that be? Did the rules change? And if they did, what happened to the people who went to Hell for being gay? Do they get a free pardon? Or do they just have to stay