Free Hello Darkness by Anthony McGowan Page A

message. She said there’s a hit. A hit on—”
    But that was it. I never got any more. The class was moving. Miss Budbe was shouting, although she had that quality of voice that gets harder to listen to the louder it becomes. I heard “Beanbags” and “Hoops”.
    I looked at my hand and flicked away the tuft of wiry toe-hairs. Rat was gone, and it seemed that we were about to begin the dreaded indoor games.
    The girls were dressed in tight black leotards and unforgiving yellow gym skirts. The boys were wearing purple tops and black shorts. For the next twenty minutes we ran around more or less randomly, sometimes with beanbags on our heads, sometimes without. The hoops made a brief appearance, though I’m not sure to what end, as my mind was occupied with what Rat had said. The questions came at me like the quick-fire round on a game show.
    A hit.
    On me?
    Who was the Lady?
    What had she told Rat?
    When I resurfaced, things had moved on. It was time for dodge ball. Dodge ball had been imported into the school by Mr Pick, who liked seeing kids get smashed in the face by fast-moving circular objects.
    Miss Budbe split us up into two mixed packs of boys and girls, all resplendent in black and purple and gold. I didn’t care much for the game, so I took up my position at the end of the line, and got ready to fall in front of some gently arcing ball so I could sit out of the mayhem and dream my dreams.
    Then I noticed who was standing opposite me.
    Big Donna had the build of a sumo wrestler and the short black hair and small black eyes to go with it. She didn’t say much to anyone, but there was a rumour that she had taken part in Gypsy knife-fighting tournaments, and it was a definite fact that she had killed with her bare hands the Rottweiler that ate her Barbie. Personally, I’d always thought that maybe there was a delicate soul inside all that muscle, yearning for a fleeting moment of human contact. But as for actually making that contact, I was happy to leave that up to some other chump.
    Now I thought there was something
unhealthy
in the way that Donna was looking at me. She wasn’t a person you could read easily, but I sensed that there were seismic events stirring beneath the heavy tectonic plates of her unlovely visage. Like what? Lust? Rage? Irritation?
    Miss Budbe blew her whistle and balls started to fly. Tough kids threw hard, aiming to hurt. The face was supposed to be off-limits, but once the dodge ball beast was unleashed, the rules were ignored like a fat girl at the disco. The air was filled first with hurtling projectiles, and then with the cries of the wounded and winded.
    Next to me a kid caught one in the crotch and went down like he’d been tasered. I was about to take one safely on the shoulder, when again I caught sight of Donna. There was something odd about the ball she was holding. It was far larger than the typical dodge ball. It wasn’t made of orange rubber. It was the dull brown of aged leather. In fact, the leather was so old and worn it almost looked like suede. But that wasn’t all. I could tell from the strain on Donna’s face that this thing was heavy. She looked like she was carrying a piano.
    That could mean only one thing. She was holding the fabled medicine ball. The medicine ball lived in the corner of the gym equipment cupboard and had never been used for anything by anyone. It was just too heavy. It might have been filled with depleted uranium or some such. No one even knew what you were supposed to do with it. Fire it from a cannon was the best guess.
    But now it was out in the open, held in the burly arms of Big Donna.
    I suppose I knew at some level what was going to happen, but I was caught, mesmerized by the spectacle of Donna raising the great ball above her head, drawing it back, taking aim, hurling. It was a prodigious feat of strength and sent the medicine ball not in a gentle arc, but with Euclidean directness straight at me.
    Normally I’m the kind of kid who