Best Served Cold

(contains some swearing)

Benny Peters farted and all of us at the back mimed suffocation by poison gas, giggling, gurgling, and holding our throats. Mr Hunt – as his first name was Kenneth, we sometimes used just the initial and his surname – was not amused.

“Pipe down, you lot!” he bellowed and threw a blackboard rubber in our general direction. I ducked but it bounced off my forehead.

“Ow!” I exclaimed, rubbing the spot. I could feel a bump rising already.

“Serves you right!” Benny muttered through grinning teeth. I poked him in the ribs. He farted again, even louder this time. We at the back repeated our reaction, in slightly more subdued fashion; after all, there were more potential missiles where the blackboard rubber had come from.

Hunt clapped his hands loudly until he had our undivided attention.

“Right, I’ve got an announcement from the headmaster.”

This was met with exaggerated groans from us. The headmaster was always handing down diktats – invariably ignored – more often than not about keeping the corridors tidy, or not running in the corridors, or not loitering in the corridors; he had a thing about the corridors.

“Silence!” Hunt growled.

He could be truly dangerous when his patience hit zero. He wasn’t far away from that point now, so we settled down.

“He says that he’s very disappointed.”

Hunt paused there and glowered about the room, making eye-contact with each of us in turn. When it seemed that he wasn’t going to finish his thought, and the atmosphere was getting a little uncomfortable, I took it upon myself to defuse the tension.

“Why’s that, sir?” I said, loading my voice with a degree of curiosity that neither I nor, I was sure, my classmates were feeling.

“I’m glad you asked, Spencer,” he boomed, though he maintained the pause until he was good and ready. Eventually, we saw him take a deep breath, heralding actual words.

“It seems that there’s been a very poor response to the call for contributions to the school magazine.”

We looked round at each other, trying to figure out who had responded at all.

“There have been three in total. Three! And two of those were by Harrington!”

Percy Harrington was the school swot who could always be relied on to participate in this kind of thing. He was a bright chap but as boring as the grey paint on the walls of the headmaster’s beloved corridors. I always figured he was destined for politics; I would eventually be proved right.

By default – because I’d already intervened – I felt that I was the spokesman for the class, that I was representing the general sentiment when I said:

“But the school magazine’s boring, sir!”

Imagine a beetroot with a beard and glasses. That was what Hunt’s face resembled now. I cringed, convinced that he might explode. But there was a hiss and a wheeze, like a dilapidated safety valve, and his face returned to more or less its normal hue.

“You think so, Spencer?” he said amiably.

“I do, sir. I mean, we do,” I said, encouraged by his reasonable tone.

“Then perhaps you’ll find detention a little more interesting? One hour. This Friday.”

“But sir, I was only–” I began to protest.

“One and a half hours,” he said with a vindictive smile that perfectly matched his nature.

Any further objections on my part to what was obviously highly unjust punishment would’ve sent the duration of the detention clicking upwards. I didn’t want to miss United’s match on Friday evening, so I kept schtum.

“Well then, boys and girls,” Hunt continued, “what are we going to do about it?”

I wanted to say shove it up your arse, but I bit my tongue. Elsewhere, there was a lot of shrugging of shoulders and mumbling; no one felt inclined to have an opinion and get what I’d got.

“All right. Let me make it simple. By Monday, you will all submit to the headmaster – there’s a box outside his office for that purpose – a piece of writing to be considered for the magazine. It can be a story, an essay … even – God forbid! – a poem. And if any of you lazy good-for-nothings think you’d rather not, then that will mean you’d rather spend time in detention.”

There were more groans from the assembled troops, though quickly curtailed; detention was the pits and we could sense that Hunt would be delighted to hand out more.

Suffice it to say that I wasn’t too happy with being singled out for punishment. Benny Peters didn’t make things any better. As we bundled out of the classroom at the end of the day, he sidled up to me.

“Bad luck, loser!” he sneered.

I gave him a good glare and whispered – because I think understatement can be quite powerful at times – a measured response:

“Don’t worry, fart-arse – you’ll get yours.”

I noted, with a certain pleasure, how nervous his laugh was.

On the way home, I racked my brains to come up with something to write about for that bloody magazine. I drew a blank. I wasn’t much cop at writing, though if the truth be told, I wasn’t much cop at anything really. And I was far from happy at there being a deadline to demonstrate that fact.

“What’s up with you?” mum said when I arrived; my face must’ve been a mile long.

“Nothing. Just thinking,” I said. She laughed.

“You? Thinking?!”

That hurt, I must admit.

“Well,” she said, “you can do your thinking on the way to the shop because we’re out of spuds. Nip down there and get us a couple of pounds of King Edwards.”

She gave me a shilling and told me I could buy myself two penn’orth of sweets from the change. That cheered me up a bit.

In fact, I whistled my way down the street – a medley of Beatles hits – bidding a bright hello to the two or three neighbours I met. They looked at me as if I’d just landed from a different planet; I don’t think they were used to seeing me so chirpy.

When I got to the shop – a little supermarket on the corner of our street that had everything – I walked up and down the three aisles, looking for something to nick. There were some pens and small packets of biscuits that took my fancy, but they were in one of the aisles that old Mr Beasley could easily surveil. So I moved to the back aisle, where all the toiletries were, to have a look there. Nothing much caught my eye. I was about to make for the veg empty-handed when I heard a familiar voice from the middle aisle.

“He won’t find out,” it said. “Don’t worry.”

A female voice evidently was – worried, that is.

“He’d be liable to throw me out. What would I do? Where would I go? Speaking of which, have you talked to your wife? About the divorce, I mean.”

“Listen, Maud,” the other voice said. “It’s complicated at the moment, what with the pregnancy and all. In time–”

The woman scoffed; she’d heard it all before apparently.

“You and your in time. Time’s what I don’t have much of if I want children. But you don’t seem to understand that.”

“Of course I do. We have to be cagey, though. For now.”

“Well, I think he may already have found out anyway,” she said.

“What do you mean?!” the man said with a note of panic.

“Well, last night…”

And that’s when the voices drifted out of earshot. I tiptoed to the end of the aisle to peek past a stack of tins of baked beans. There at the cash register, paying for whatever they’d chosen, was K Hunt with a woman. I’d seen her before with the headmaster. I put two and two together.

I made sure they’d left before I emerged and grabbed the spuds my mum wanted. I was so excited that I even forgot to buy myself the two penn’orth of sweets.

I felt suddenly inspired. After dinner, I announced I was going upstairs to do my homework. As I left the dining room, I heard my mum say to my dad:

“There’s something wrong with that boy.”

There was nothing wrong, and everything right. I stayed up late to finish my piece, enjoying myself for once.

After the last class before lunch the next day, I hung back as everyone rushed out.

“Sir?” I said when they’d all gone.

Hunt looked up from the register he was completing.

“What is it, Spencer? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

I kind of enjoyed his curtness on this occasion, knowing full well that it might be the last time he would aim it at me.

“I’ve written something for the magazine, sir. Could you take a look at it before I submit it to the headmaster?”

He grunted and shook his head.

“I’m sure it’s fine Spencer. Put it in the box outside his office.”

“Couldn’t you just take a quick look first, sir,” I said, placing the sheet of paper on his desk. “Please!”

He sighed impatiently and snatched it up.

I’d like to have had a camera there to record how the blood ran out of his face, how his mouth twisted, how his eyes bulged. And I’d like to have had a tape recorder to register the croak in his voice when he got to the end.

“Wha… where…?”

I acted all innocent, though I was sure Hunt knew the truth.

“I based it on a conversation I overheard in a supermarket, sir. Is it any good? Is the dialogue realistic? ‘Cos if it isn’t, I can scrap it and write something else. Shall I scrap it, sir? Shall I? Or shall I pop it in the box, like you said?”

For once, he was speechless. I could almost hear the cogs turning. He swallowed and gave a little cough.

“Yes, well … it’s not bad, Spencer, don’t get me wrong. But maybe it’s a little … shall we say adult for the magazine. Why don’t I hang on to this and you write something else?”

“Ah, I would do, sir. If you remember, though, I’ve got something on Friday afternoon. What with all my other homework, I’m not sure I’ll have time.”

Was that a click I heard now?

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “We can forget about the detention just this once. You get that new piece written.”

“All right, sir. If you say so. See you later, sir.”

“Er … yes, see you, Spencer.”

I left the classroom with a spring in my step. Of course, I had no intention of writing anything at all for the bloody magazine.

And I was pretty hopeful that all other homework K Hunt set me for the rest of the year would be entirely optional.