Field Trip

Colin needed to catch up to his group. Last year a faulty headcount left Felix behind at Stratford-on-Avon. It was partly his fault because he didn’t listen to instructions about when to be back at the bus and then Ted dared Robbie to yell ‘here’ when Mr Hobson called out Felix’s name. The coach had to turn back after he texted Laura asking where everyone was. You could tell he’d been crying, even though he said it was a joke later. Threats of detentions, extra community outreach, and no more school trips loomed if it happened again.

His class was still in the Upper Gallery. Hands damp from the bathroom, Colin latched on to the boys hanging back who were staring at the knives.

‘Daggers before us,’ Ted said. Ted wasn’t the smartest student or the best looking or the most athletic but he had this magnetism that compelled people to do what he wanted. On field trips, he would slide into a window seat and watch as others squabbled about who would sit next to him. After a few minutes of blocking the aisle, he would make his selection from the boys in his orbit.

Colin never competed for a seat. He sat next to Lewis, a quiet boy in his house whose mother never let him get the school packed lunch because it was full of toxins. Instead, he had a hummus sandwich with bread she’d baked herself. Everything in his bag was homemade but not the good kind of homemade. So no trading Kit Kats for salted chips but at least he wouldn’t elbow him or try to show him stupid TikTok videos all the way there.

Ted never got in trouble. He kept to the periphery. But he didn’t fool everyone. The teachers didn’t make him Head Boy, even though most of the year claimed they voted for him. Head Boy went to Dexter, who was standing at the front next to the museum guide, a stumbling, enthusiastic man in a tweed jacket summoned out of one of the upstairs offices to show them around.

‘The security in here is awful,’ Ted said, motioning to the uniformed guard staring at his fingernails across the way. ‘And, look, the clasp is loose.’

He was right. Cabinet 52 wasn’t locked. ‘I dare you to swipe one of the knives. Look, no CCTV either.’

Colin was sure there were cameras. CCTV lurked everywhere, at the school gates, on the corner of his house, at the entrance to Paddington Station.

‘Come on, everyone. We’re heading to the ground floor exit.’ Mr Hobson shouted.

The group streamed past the exhibits toward the stairs. Colin moved quickly, lifting the display-case top and grabbing something from the slanted felt bottom. The cabinet door fell back with a soft click. He stuffed whatever he had stolen into his blazer pocket, laying it sideways, where the end poked toward the bottom corner.

They gathered in the foyer for another headcount, Mr Hobson resting his hand on Felix’s shoulder. Colin’s heart was pounding like a trapped hummingbird. He made it out without alarm bells or security guards rushing at him. He would present his prize to Ted on the coach.

But he sat next to Lewis on way there so he should keep to that. He could show Ted when they arrived back at school. But when the coach returned to school, it was past dismissal time for day students and Ted and Robbie charged off the bus like thoroughbreds after the gate went up.

Only as he walked home past the large wedding cake houses to the to the smaller terraced ones on his road did it hit him. He had stolen from a museum. Not a chocolate bar from the corner shop, but an artifact, a valuable piece of history.

He looked around, then felt in his blazer pocket. He forced the carefully handwritten label out of the top. Knife, Barotse, Northern Rhodesia. Given in 1919 to Bishop May by Zeta 111, Paramount Chief and son of Cewanika.

When he got home, he bounced around his room figuring out where to hide it. First, his underwear drawer, then under his mattress. Finally, he placed it on his bookshelf behind his Percy Jackson books. He moved all of them forward so it looked uniform.

He tried to settle down, silence his noisy conscience, but the glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling rearranged themselves into prison bars. He envisioned showing Ted the knife and Ted raising his hand, yelling ‘Mr Hobson! Mr Hobson!’ Or he wouldn’t be caught, but the knife carried a curse. He imagined voodoo priests dancing in a frenzy. Ted stabbing him in the back with it. He tried staying frozen still under his covers, like a chameleon camouflaged from predators.

He must have fallen asleep because he was awoken by a loud knock on door. ‘Come on, Colin, you’ll be late.’ He’d left his phone on his desk and slept through the alarm. Rush, rush, rush but he made it out the door by 8 o’clock.

As he rounded the corner to school, Ellie Brooks caught up with him and grabbed his arm. She wore big glasses, her carefully dishevelled blonde hair in a high ponytail. She was wildly popular and had never spoken directly to him before. ‘Hey, didn’t your year go to the Pitt Rivers yesterday?’

‘Yeah, we did.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘Some dinosaur bones, the shrunken heads and stuff.’

‘No, I mean the vandals. Did you see anyone suspicious?’

‘Vandals?’ he croaked. But they had made it past the gates and Ellie ran away to talk to another sixth form girl. His stomach lurched like a washing machine, not even conscious of the cred he’d receive at walking in talking to Ellie. Mobile phones weren’t allowed during the school day so he couldn’t check the news coverage. There wasn’t time to inject anything about the museum into the casual pre and post lesson conversations.

He sat ruler straight all morning, expecting the police to come to school, to call him out of lessons and take him down to the station. It might be worth it to be called out of Math, as Ted smirked while Mr McClure wrote equations on the whiteboard, ‘Someone sure took my dare seriously, didn’t they?’ Colin knew better than to respond.

At breaktime he went to the computer room to check the BBC. The story was the eighth most viewed on the website. Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum vandalised by repatriation group. An organization called Give Them Back hid in the Pitt Rivers yesterday until after closing, then smashed the display glass and graffitied parts of the museum. The movement triggered the alarms, they were joyfully arrested, and awaited arraignment at Oxford police station. Nothing about anything missing.

Colin felt lighter, the way you feel after vomiting. Give Them Back would get the blame. He skated through the rest of the day, almost forgetting until he returned to his bedroom that he actually had the knife.

The parachute had become a knapsack. He had to get rid of it. Mum might discover it in one of her manic cleaning bursts. He could take the train to the museum and claim he found it somewhere. Or he could just put it back in the display case. But what if they found his fingerprints, or traces of the dust that could only have come from his bookshelf in Bedford Park? The museum was temporarily closed to fix the damage, so that solution was out. He entered sleep thinking about radioactive knives, Chief Zeta going crazy with curses.

Colin stuck the knife into his backpack, hidden within his Geography binder. Ted’s study room was two doors away from his in Morse House, the house for day boys, and the study rooms didn’t have locks on the doors. In the Wednesday morning melee before weekly school chapel, he crept into Ted’s room and put it on his desk, then seamlessly blended into the line of students headed for chapel. Ted was always just on time and wouldn’t stop at Morse until morning break.

Colin didn’t feel guilty. Ted dared him to do it, after all. He could pass him the problem like a violent version of hot potato. Would Matron or the cleaners find it first? Would Ted be arrested, led out in handcuffs, no longer smirking, with a face like Felix’s after Mr Hobson yelled at him on the Stratford trip?

He waited. Nothing after break time. Ted must have seen it by now. At lunch Colin sat at the cafeteria table unofficially designated to the fifth form boys. ‘Where’s Lewis?’ Kevin asked.

‘I saw him with Matron going to the Head’s office,’ Jim said.

‘Bit much for a sick note,’ Ted said. Colin watched him without seeming to watch him. Still nothing.

News finally came at afternoon football practice. ‘Did you hear? Lewis found a knife in his study room,’ Matthew said, running backwards to deliver the message to as many people as possible.

Colin didn’t need to fake surprise at first. ‘What?’

‘Yeah, he went to drop his stuff off before lunch. There was this knife on his desk. So he took it to Matron.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t really know. Lewis’ mom came to get him and we’re having a special assembly tomorrow.’

Colin missed several passes and scored no goals. On the way to the changing rooms, Robbie asked, ‘Why would Lewis have a knife?’

‘To cut that awful bread his mother makes,’ replied Ted.

‘Still she’s kind of hot,’ Robbie said.

‘Perv much?’ Ted snickered. That’s why Ted annoyed Colin. Not because he mocked his new trainers because they weren’t the right shade of white or called him Creepy Colin when he caught him staring at Julia last month. It was because Ted had said the exact same thing at Parents Evening about Lewis’ mom. She used to be a runway model, now she ran an art gallery in Fulham. Lewis had her eyelashes, giving him an innocent expression. Putting the knife in Lewis' study was a genius move on Ted’s part. Sweet face and chunky knit sweaters, Lewis involved in anything brutal was like a fluffy kitten waving a shotgun.

Ted caught up with him on his way home. Normally, he would be thrilled that Ted wanted to walk home with him, that itchy feeling of trying to impress someone you dislike. But not today.

‘That’s so weird about the knife, huh?’

‘Yeah, what’s going on there?’ Colin replied, looking straight ahead.

‘What would a knife from the Pitt Rivers be doing on Lewis’ desk?’

‘Wait, what? It was from the Pitt Rivers? I hadn’t heard that.’ And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to Colin for Ted’s Interrogation.

Ted shrugged. ‘I think I heard it from Matthew.’

Did Ted slip up or was it a trap? If the latter, Colin avoided it. Ted might dismiss him as a potential culprit and move on to someone else.

‘That’s my corner,’ Ted turned to cross the street. ‘Later.’

After dinner, he tried to focus on his Biology homework as his mind ping ponged from the parts of a plant cell to why Lewis was sent home and what the special assembly would be about. The evils of knife crime, theft, threats. The idea of Lewis seeing the knife as some sort of mafia warning made him giggle. Teachers were always getting it wrong. Last year, the Deputy Head found a giant Haribo on the floor in Great School. She was certain it was an edible because it looked too sinister to be a gummy bear, so she arranged a special assembly about the dangers of mind altering drugs.

He planned some assembly-based banter while a small voice deep in his gut wondered if he would ever get it right.