Mrs. McKinnon shrugged. “What about him?”
“Handwrites everything,” said Mr. Kirby. “Lovely handwriting. What they used to call copperplate.”
“And that makes him religious because…?”
“He says they don’t have a computer.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t have a phone.”
“I don’t see why that makes him religious,” said Mrs. McKinnon, who had taken up crocheting when they had banned smoking in the staff room, and was sitting and crocheting a baby blanket for no one in particular.
Mr. Kirby shrugged. “He’s a smart lad,” he said. “There’s just stuff he doesn’t know. And in History he’ll throw in little made-up details, stuff not in the books…”
“What kind of stuff?”
Mr. Kirby finished marking Bod’s essay and put it down on the pile. Without something immediately in front of him the whole matter seemed vague and unimportant. “Stuff,” he said, and forgot about it. Just as he forgot to enter Bod’s name on the roll. Just as Bod’s name was not to be found on the school databases.
The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he spent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.
Even the other kids forgot about him. Not when he was sitting in front of them: they remembered him then. But when that Owens kid was out of sight he was out of mind. They didn’t think about him. They didn’t need to. If someone asked all the kids in Eight B to close their eyes and list the twenty-five boys and girls in the class, that Owens kid wouldn’t have been on the list. His presence was almost ghostly.
It was different if he was there, of course.
Nick Farthing was twelve, but he could pass—and did sometimes—for sixteen: a large boy with a crooked smile, and little imagination. He was practical, in a basic sort of way, an efficient shoplifter, and occasional thug who did not care about being liked as long as the other kids, all smaller, did what he said. Anyway, he had a friend. Her name was Maureen Quilling, but everyone called her Mo, and she was thin and had pale skin and pale yellow hair, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, inquisitive nose. Nick liked to shoplift, but Mo told him what to steal. Nick could hit and hurt and intimidate, but Mo pointed him at the people who needed to be intimidated. They were, as she told him sometimes, a perfect team.
They were sitting in the corner of the library splitting their take of the year sevens’ pocket money. They had eight or nine of the eleven-year-olds trained to hand over their pocket money every week.
“The Singh kid hasn’t coughed up yet,” said Mo. “You’ll have to find him.”
“Yeah,” said Nick, “he’ll pay.”
“What was it he nicked? A CD?”
Nick nodded.
“Just point out the error of his ways,” said Mo, who wanted to sound like the hard cases from the television.
“Easy,” said Nick. “We’re a good team.”
“Like Batman and Robin,” said Mo.
“More like Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde,” said somebody, who had been reading, unnoticed, in a window seat, and he got up and walked out of the room.
Paul Singh was sitting on a windowsill by the changing rooms, his hands deep in his pockets, thinking dark thoughts. He took one hand out of his pocket, opened it, looked at the handful of pound coins, shook his head, closed his hand around the coins once more.
“Is that what Nick and Mo are waiting for?” somebody asked, and Paul jumped, scattering money all over the floor.
The other boy helped him pick the coins up, handed them over. He was an older boy, and Paul thought he had seen him around before, but he could not be certain. Paul said, “Are you with them? Nick and Mo?”
The other boy shook his head. “Nope. I think that they are fairly repulsive.” He hesitated. Then he said, “Actually, I came to give you a bit of advice.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t pay them.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Because they aren’t blackmailing me?”
The boy looked at Paul and Paul looked away, ashamed.
“They hit you or threatened you until you shoplifted a CD for them. Then they told you that unless you handed over your pocket money to them, they’d tell on you. What did they do, film you doing it?”
Paul nodded.
“Just say no,” said the boy. “Don’t do it.”