Free Kindergarten by Peter Rushforth Page B

children spaced out in different rooms. Imagine it in school here. Even if they got to one group in time, the other terrorists would have time to kill the children with them. They’ve got four whole classes. Nearly a half of the school. Could the army attack all the different rooms simultaneously?”
    “Something’s going to happen before long. Everyone seems to be co-operating. The Russians and East Germans haven’t made any objections about all the troops being there. They’ve offered to help.”
    “They’ve already killed five people. They’ve just been holding on to all those children for all this time.”
    Jo flicked at the mobile hanging above his bed, a quick, angry action. “They found somewhere to fly to when they’d killed Mum.”
    Something cold brushed against Corrie’s lips. It was one of the figures from the mobile. The eight silvery-metallic sea-gulls swooped and soared in the slightest current of air. He moved back, rubbing at his mouth.
    Their newspaper,
The Guardian
, had said “17 K ILLED IN A IRPORT A TTACK .” A more popular tabloid had had the headline “G OOD F RIDAY M ASSACRE ,” adding “O NE B RITON B ELIEVED D EAD .” That had been Mum. She had been returning from a conference in Rome, a discussion of recent research into cancer. There was still hope of a breakthrough in finding a cure. She had gone even though she was pregnant.
    He had stared at the photographs in
The Guardian
: a man swabbing at a floor with a mop, two men carrying something in a blanket between them. When he was watching the news report of the shooting at the school that afternoon, he had leaned forward to see the body of the woman in more detail. He had wanted to see her face.
    The usual clutter of extraordinarily assorted books lay on the carpet beside Jo’s bed, around Corrie’s feet: The Little Prince, Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, an American photographic magazine, The Mouse and His Child, a paperback edition of Small Is Beautiful (“There’s a book here about us,” he had said to Corrie when he bought it), an old school edition of Emil and the Detectives. His changes of subject-matter from day to day were unpredictable.
    His school rough-work book was lying clipped to his drawing-board. It was covered with his tiny neat printing: Open only in case of earthquakes, tornadoes (gale force, assorted debris zooming about), custard pouring from volcanoes, Martians turning into cheese (Camembert), giant bats chewing gum in discothèques, the bus population going green (with ivy, not envy), celebration of annual haircut of Cato Levi, Saturnalia getting divorced from Copernicus, undulations in oscillating rhythm on British Rail track (1st class only)…A length of wood, club-shaped, lay alongside the drawing-board, next to his flute, with the same printing on it in black felt-tip pen at the thinner end. YOB BASHER. HOLD THIS END. Groin: 10 points. Legs: 3 points. Head: 25 points. Arse: 4 points. At one end of it a black circle was labelled Self-destruction button.
    Corrie looked at it, then picked it up, waving it at Jo, and spoke in his most refined and sophisticated voice.
    “I say, how frightfully childish!”
    “Well, we are children,” Jo said, quoting from Emil and the Detectives. He reached over the other side of the bed, away from Corrie, and pulled up his Winnie-the-Pooh, clutching it to him and sucking his thumb noisily. In one sudden movement, he slid beneath the bedclothes, until only his eyes were visible above the sheets.
    The ceiling had been entirely covered with Charlie Brown strip cartoons, clipped from a Sunday newspaper colour magazine, bright primary colours of red, blue, and yellow. Corrie thought of the reproduction of Breughel’s “Children’s Games” hanging in the school sanatorium. He had seen it when he had gone to visit Cato, after his appendicitis operation. Mechanically, joylessly, like troops drilled in some repetitive movement, the swarming children filling the streets