Free Hello Darkness by Anthony McGowan

with honey while ants slowly eat their eyeballs out. It’s not even that I don’t like sports. It’s just that standing in a muddy field while the mentally unstable, and genuinely terrifying, PE teacher Mr Pick screams at you, and a wind like a samurai sword slices into your bare legs, hardly counts as a sport, unless you also reckon that bear-baiting, cockfighting and Russian roulette should be in the Olympics.
    But today we had some good news. The steady drizzle had turned into hard rain. That meant indoor games.
    As we all filed into the gym, I noticed straight away that Pick wasn’t there. You could tell by the eerie absence of screaming. The “we”, by the way, was my form class, plus one other. So, 68 kids altogether. That could be a handful. Not a handful for Pick, with whom you messed at your peril. But certainly for Miss Budbe.
    Miss Budbe was Pick’s second in command, and she was as sweet and sane as he was sour and mad. It was her job to teach the girls about netball, intimate hygiene and socially transmitted diseases. She wasn’t like the other teachers. Most of them looked like members of some completely different species of mammal altogether, you know,
Homo educatus
. You looked at the kids, then looked at them, and you just couldn’t see how you could make the transition from one to the other.
    But with Miss Budbe the connection was there. I’m not saying you’d mistake her for a teenager, but at least she looked like she might actually have been one, and not very long ago. She was as pretty as magnolia flowers before they go brown and turn to sludge on the pavement. One day Miss Budbe would wilt, but for now she was still fresh and pink and fragrant.
    Fragrance she had, but not really much in the way of natural authority, by which I mean the ability that some teachers have to make you do what they want by scaring the living
merde
out of you. The couple of times that Miss B. had taken a gym class all on her own, things had pretty quickly descended into chaos.
    We sat down on the benches and she started talking. I don’t know what she was talking about, because everyone else had begun to talk as well.
    Then I heard a voice in my ear:
    “Don’t turn round.”
    Of course, someone saying to you, “Don’t turn round”, is roughly equivalent to them saying, “Turn round or I’ll kill you.”
    So I turned round and looked into the furtive face of Rat Zermatt.
    Rat was one of the Bacon-heads. He paid for his dope by thieving, lying, smuggling and snitching. He was forever picking at the scabs around his nose, and like the other ’heads, he was followed wherever he went by a cloud smelling of dead pig and sulphur, like the devil’s own barbeque.
    “I said don’t turn round,” he hissed, blowing the smell of old meat into my face. “They’ll see me talking to you.”
    I turned to the front again. I didn’t want to spend any more time looking at Rat than I had to.
    “Go soak your scabs, Rat.”
    “I’m trying to do you a favour, schmuck.”
    “Brushing your teeth is the best favour you could do me. Follow it up with a bath and I’ll take you bowling.”
    Rat made a frustrated chittering sort of a noise, like something mean caught in a cage. “Fine, he doesn’t want to know. The Lady said to tell him, but he won’t listen. Rat did his job. Rat get paid.”
    “Stop speaking like Gollum, Rat. Just say what you’ve got to say.” This time I didn’t turn round. I’d sooner have picked fleas out of a tramp’s vest than look at that face again.
    “
Now
he wants to know. But maybe Rat don’t want to say. Or maybe he gives Rat a little something as well…”
    I looked down. I could see one of Rat’s bare, pasty feet. He’d sold his gym shoes for a bag of junk. There was a clump of black hairs on his big toe. I gripped those hairs between my finger and thumb, and yanked. Rat made a gulping screech.
    “Talk.”
    “Please, no…
Ow! Ow! Ow!
”
    “Talk.”
    “The Lady, she give me a