The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly Page B

when the teacher was talking he didn’t open his notebook but just doodled. In French, he wrote his name on the front of his exercise book, forming the letters as deliberately and laboriously as a primary school child, but after that seemed to lose interest. In History, they were given a spot test. The class cried their protests; Daniel, who had more reason to complain than most – he could hardly be expected to complete a test based on a syllabus he had never studied – remained silent, merely adjusting his posture and flinging his legs out in front of him. They were so long he could hook his feet onto the chair of the boy in front of him, a nasty piece of work called Hash, who had bright red hair and a lunar complexion and went nuts if you called him by his real name, Hamish. Hash turned to glare at Daniel, immediately identified a higher authority and squared his shoulders to the front again. Daniel made no attempt to answer a single question. As they were read out, Paul soon got lost in the test, quietly confident of all the answers except for the first one, about why the Nuremberg trials were held there instead of in Berlin.
    ‘Nuremberg was the only prison in Germany that wasn’t bombed out in the war,’ said Daniel under his breath. ‘Berlin was all rubble. I’m right, go on, put it down.’ Paul shrugged, wrote the answer and watched for Daniel to do the same. But he didn’t, just scowled at the blank page before him. Paul remembered the effort it had taken Daniel to inscribe his French book and understood suddenly that he couldn’t read or write properly. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d leaned across and started to jot the correct answers on his neighbour’s page. The look Daniel gave him made Paul wish that he had never been born. Daniel didn’t turn up to Maths, the last lesson of the day, and during it Paul resigned himself to the fact that the list of people who might give him a kicking on the way home had just got one name longer.
    He could not avoid the underpass that connected school and home without jumping across live train tracks. (Sometimes he had been tempted to do that.) The urine-scented tunnel was a further example of the Grays Reach architects’ unwavering commitment to fear and brutality. The most hazardous obstacle was a concrete island thick with municipal shrubbery. It usually screened at least one person intent on causing him pain. Tonight it was Simeon and Lewis, two of his regular bullies. Not for the first time, he wondered how come rival thugs never turned up on the same patch. Did they have a rota? Did they meet at the mouth of the underpass after school, saying if you hurt him tonight we’ll just go for a bit of verbal abuse tomorrow? They didn’t even bother to goad him any more, just got straight down to the violence. Paul knew that the more tense he was, the more it would hurt, but he couldn’t make his muscles relax. Simeon smacked the side of his head, a ring catching Paul at the point where his jaw met his ear. The pain was deafening. He tried to walk on but felt his upper body jerk backwards as Lewis stuck out his foot and brought Paul onto the pissy concrete in a pratfall. They both bent down. Tears already on their way, Paul prepared his ribs for the boots.
    The third figure came up behind them like a gust of wind, it was so fast and so silent. There was an elegance to Daniel’s movements as his hands encircled both their necks and forced their heads together, once at the forehead and the second time bringing Lewis’s nose down hard on Simeon’s mouth. Paul recognised the sound of a split lip, quieter when it wasn’t his, and closed his eyes.
    ‘Fuck off, the pair of you. Pick on him again and I’ll kill you, do’you get me?’ It was a man’s voice, not a boy’s, and Simeon and Lewis ran away like children. Daniel crouched down to where Paul lay. His voice droned in and out of intelligibility due to the throbbing in Paul’s ear. ‘Man, what is