Rat's teeth

It was dark under the bridge. My foot slipped on the dead rat, it's thin, sharp, yellow teeth looked up at me. A chilling revulsion welled up inside me, coming to a balled-up halt in my throat, just short of a scream.

Blood was on my Clarke's black leather bar shoe and I suspected guts were ingrained under the sole. I didn't look. I began to run. The rat's teeth chased me down the years and are still never far behind.

Mrs Briggs wouldn't have cared if the rat had leaped up and bitten my six year-old face, gnawing off my little slightly tuned up nose. It seemed to me that something akin to a rat had possessed Mrs Briggs for at least the last two years. She had the same yellow teeth and small beady eyes and she elicited almost the same revulsion as the dead brown rat I had encountered that morning. Her lank brown hair, less lustrous than the rat's, framed her harsh sallow complexion and her tight mouth successfully held back any slightly interesting thing she might teach us.

I was the milk monitor, a job I had managed to secure after being the first child in the class to correctly recite the seven times table.

Lifting my small glass bottle and pouring the warm white liquid carefully into the very bottom of most of the thirty four other bottles was my daily routine and my daily rebellion against Mrs Rat Briggs. We were only allowed to leave a very little of our third of a pint of milk, which meant that if I carefully decanted mine across the other empty bottles I could avoid drinking any of it. Pulling out the saliva covered, chewed up paper straws from the tin foil milk bottle lids and occasionally dripping milk onto my grey school skirt, knee-length white socks or ugly leather shoes was a price I was willing to pay.

I read two pages from "The House on the Hill" knowing I could write a much better story if only I could learn to spell. The Initial Training Alphabet no doubt had its strengths but in the real world of words, nothing much is phonetic.

Roy Douglas sat in front of me in the dinner line, he was long and thin and his brown coloured legs never folded properly. I shoved him in the back and he turned round quickly and hit me across the face with his long bony hand. I blinked back the tears and wished I could fold my eyelids back on themselves like Lesmore Lewis did when he wanted to scare people.

At playtime I stood by the white line hoping to catch a glance of my brother in the juniors' yard. Anthony ran past several times, making his high-pitched aeroplane noises, arms spread wide enough to touch me every time. I wished he would stand on a dead rat.

At lunchtime Mrs Ridgewell's rotund, mustard check clad personage, bustled us into line, her screeching voice sounding so much like Anthony's aeroplane I thought she must be his Nan. I held my bowl out for the insipid lumpy custard which would ruin the dry coconut tart. Suddenly I realised I could eat the tart dry, so I moved my bowl. The dinner lady ladled the custard onto the floor. I stood in it with my black bar shoe and sensed it mingle with the rat's innards. The Ridgewell screech broke through my imaginations and the fingers of the Ridgewell hand curled into my shoulder and shoved me out of the custard and towards a wooden table where my knees would collect splinters.

After I forced all the dry coconut tart down past the rat induced imaginary obstruction in my throat, I was taken to the headmistress's office and told to "Stand there while Mrs Hall decides what to do with you."

Mrs Hall decided to ask me to tidy the books in the stockroom and gave me a sweet for my trouble. Mrs Ridgewell and Mrs Briggs would have been disgusted had they ever found out.

Mercifully Mrs Briggs was mysteriously absent for the last hour of the day so Mr Williams came to read a story. I was concentrating on rat's teeth when he asked me a question and was unable to answer coherently. "I can't remember," was the best I could do. Mr Williams leaned his fat body towards me and whispered loudly, "Tie a knot in your neck, then you'll remember." I wondered if I could tie a knot with the rat lump still hovering in the middle of my throat. Would the lump be above the knot or below the knot? I would prefer it below so I didn't have to spit it out through my mouth which I feared would make me vomit.

The bell went for the end of the school day. Unsure of my ability to hold the vomit back until I had walked the two miles home, I took myself out to the long concrete building housing twelve cold white toilets.

The toilets had black wooden doors on strong black metal springs. I never used them unless I was absolutely desperate. Roy Douglas regularly ran through and shoved open every door as he went. They banged shut leaving me trembling in my cubicle whether I went in the first one and got it over with, or the middle one and waited for the bangs to reach me. No sick came so I pulled the cracked rubber handle on the slightly rusty chain and flushed away nothing.

As I neared the bridge on the way to 5 Milborough Crescent, I wondered if the rat would still be there, guts along the paving slabs where I had spread them with my size twelve and a half feet, teeth still staring at me below the soft brown eyes. I closed my own brown eyes to a squint and ran. My footsteps echoed quickly under the archway and then I was through.