ever learned his name. We just called him Drooler. The three of us weren’t allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer’s Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler who would just eat the glue. Mr Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. ‘And what is this ?’ he would say, seizing some mangled block of wood on which I had been labouring for the last twenty-seven weeks and holding it aloft for the class to titter at. ‘I’ve been teaching shop for sixteen years, Mr Bryson, and I have to say that this is the worst bevelled edge I’ve ever seen.’ He held up a birdhouse of mine once and it just collapsed in his hands. The class roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked. He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn’t stop it I would bevel his testicles.
The waitress brought my beer and I became uncomfortably aware that I had spent the last ten minutes adrift in a little universe of my own, very possibly chuckling quietly and murmuring to myself in the manner of people who live in bus stations. I looked around and was relieved to see that no one appeared to have noticed. The man at the next table was too busy boasting to his wife/mistress how he had sold 2,000 Jason King video tapes, 170 Sinclair electric cars and the last 68,000 copies of the American edition of The Lost Continent to the Romanians for loft insulation. His companion meanwhile was making love with her eyes to a man dining alone across the room – or rather masturbating with her eyes, since the man was too busy struggling with three-foot-long strands of tangled spaghetti to notice that he was being used as a sex aid.
I took a big draught of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly jubilant at the thought that my schooldays were for ever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me.
On the other hand, never again would I experience the uniquely satisfying sensation of driving a fist into the pillow-like softness of Tubby Tucker’s abdomen. I don’t wish to suggest that I was a bully, but Tubby was different. God put Tubby on earth for no other reason than to give other kids someone to beat up. Girls beat him up. Kids four years younger than him beat him up. It sounds cruel – it was cruel – but the thing is he deserved it. He never learned to keep his mouth shut. He would say to the toughest kid in the school, ‘God, Buckley, where’d you get that hair-cut? I didn’t know the Salvation Army offered a hair-styling service,’ or ‘Hey, Simpson, was that your mom I saw cleaning the toilets at the bus station? You ought to tell her those cigarette butts would smoke better if she dried them out first.’
So every time you saw him he was being given a Chinese burn or having his wobbly pink butt mercilessly zinged with damp towels in the locker-room or standing in his underpants beneath a school-yard oak endeavouring with a long stick to get his trousers down from one of the branches, where they had recently been deposited by a crowd of up to four hundred people, which sometimes included passing motorists and the residents of nearby houses. There was just something about him that brought out the worst in everyone. You used to see pre-school kids chasing him down the street. I bet even now strangers come up to him on the street and for no reason smash his hot dog in his face. I would.
In the morning I went to the station to catch a train to Cologne. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered into the station café. It was a little one-woman operation. The woman running it saw me take a seat, but ignored me and instead busied herself tidying the shelves
The waitress brought my beer and I became uncomfortably aware that I had spent the last ten minutes adrift in a little universe of my own, very possibly chuckling quietly and murmuring to myself in the manner of people who live in bus stations. I looked around and was relieved to see that no one appeared to have noticed. The man at the next table was too busy boasting to his wife/mistress how he had sold 2,000 Jason King video tapes, 170 Sinclair electric cars and the last 68,000 copies of the American edition of The Lost Continent to the Romanians for loft insulation. His companion meanwhile was making love with her eyes to a man dining alone across the room – or rather masturbating with her eyes, since the man was too busy struggling with three-foot-long strands of tangled spaghetti to notice that he was being used as a sex aid.
I took a big draught of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly jubilant at the thought that my schooldays were for ever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me.
On the other hand, never again would I experience the uniquely satisfying sensation of driving a fist into the pillow-like softness of Tubby Tucker’s abdomen. I don’t wish to suggest that I was a bully, but Tubby was different. God put Tubby on earth for no other reason than to give other kids someone to beat up. Girls beat him up. Kids four years younger than him beat him up. It sounds cruel – it was cruel – but the thing is he deserved it. He never learned to keep his mouth shut. He would say to the toughest kid in the school, ‘God, Buckley, where’d you get that hair-cut? I didn’t know the Salvation Army offered a hair-styling service,’ or ‘Hey, Simpson, was that your mom I saw cleaning the toilets at the bus station? You ought to tell her those cigarette butts would smoke better if she dried them out first.’
So every time you saw him he was being given a Chinese burn or having his wobbly pink butt mercilessly zinged with damp towels in the locker-room or standing in his underpants beneath a school-yard oak endeavouring with a long stick to get his trousers down from one of the branches, where they had recently been deposited by a crowd of up to four hundred people, which sometimes included passing motorists and the residents of nearby houses. There was just something about him that brought out the worst in everyone. You used to see pre-school kids chasing him down the street. I bet even now strangers come up to him on the street and for no reason smash his hot dog in his face. I would.
In the morning I went to the station to catch a train to Cologne. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered into the station café. It was a little one-woman operation. The woman running it saw me take a seat, but ignored me and instead busied herself tidying the shelves
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