Dinner was always in the hall. It had big windows, and two lines of trestle tables, and a chequerboard lino floor, and a couple of plastic plants with dust on the leaves. The girls sat along one long table and the boys along the other. There were faded posters on the walls, like Mickey Mouse dancing with Minnie while Pluto bounded around them. Someone had drawn a penis coming out of Mickey's head. Where the posters were torn they'd been fixed with Sellotape that had gone brown and peeled off again. You took your plate or bowl or whatever and you went to the kitchen window where the Whistler-cook served you.
The Whistlers never bothered trying to keep us under control at dinner. They sat together at their own table by the door. They ate like crows pick at garbage. They hung the whistles on a hook by the door when they ate – when it was summer and they had the big fan going in there they'd jangle like wind chimes. They ate quicker than us, and usually left before we were finished.
The night I was telling Dirty Joe about was hot as hell. When it was hot we weren't as hungry, so we tended to throw food instead of eating it. We'd start by flicking peas at each other. Then pieces of carrot. Then roast potatoes. After the Whistlers left things started to get out of hand.
There was a six-year-old with hair so blonde it was white, and he was the king of gravy that night. It was smeared on his cheeks and in his hair and it dripped from his ears, and a kid on the other side of the table was tearing his bread roll into tiny pieces and throwing the bits across the table so that they stuck to the gravy king's face. A glob of mashed potato oozed down the window like a slug. I couldn't see who was next to me because somebody had got me in the eye with a big chunk of carrot. I knew who it was though. Jungle Jim.
Jungle Jim was ten, but he looked fourteen. He had hair on his lip. He had piggy little eyes and long arms and knuckly red hands.
Jungle Jim. Fuck a duck.
"Watch this," he said, grabbing a jug of gravy and swivelling around on his seat. We all stopped what we were doing and watched: Jungle Jim had this way of getting people's attention. We all knew something serious was about to happen. With Jungle Jim serious things happened all the time.
The girl he chose had messy hair and a green bracelet around her wrist. I didn't know her name. When you're eight you don't really associate with girls. I don't think Jungle Jim knew her name either – she just happened to be the nearest one to him.
What he did was hook back the top of her skirt and pour the jug of gravy down inside. He shook the jug to empty out the last drops. Then he put the jug back on the table and went right back to his dinner.
Nothing happened for a couple of seconds. Nobody even breathed.
Suddenly the girl burst into tears and ran out of the hall, leaving a trail of gravy.
Jungle Jim sliced a slice of roast beef carefully into pieces, and chewed thoughtfully on a piece. Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin. Finally he looked up and said, "Fancy shitting yourself at the dinner table."
There were some sniggers, and one barking laugh. Everybody else watched their plates.
I felt suddenly very strange. I don't know why I did what I did. Somehow I was up on my feet and heading for the door. I was gone before anyone really noticed.
I wasn't thinking to go and find her – I just wanted to get away – but when I got out to the corridor I decided to. Find her I mean. It wasn't hard to work out where she'd gone: there were gravy footprints leading off down the corridor towards the girls' dorm. I just followed them.
The boys weren't allowed in the girls' dorm, but there was nobody around, so I went in. I'd never been in their dorm before. It was neater than ours, and it had that girl smell about it like everything's made of strawberries. The bathroom door was shut, but there was light coming from under the door. I could hear sobbing from inside. When I knocked on the door the sobbing stopped.
"Um," I said.
"Go away. You're not allowed in here."
"Can I come in?"
"Were you laughing too? I bet you were."
"I wasn't."
"This's the girls' dorm. You'll get in trouble with the Whistlers."
"Fuck the Whistlers."
She let out a barking laugh. She sounded like a seal, and I laughed at her laugh. I'd never said fuck before. I didn't even know what it meant. It had a nice ring to it though.
"I'm coming in," I said.
I heard her dash to the door and push against it, but it had no lock, and I was stronger than her, and I pushed my way in.
"Get out!"
I didn't.
Her gravy-covered clothes were in a pile over by the shower. Her hair was wet and she was wrapped in a big towel. She went to the toilet and sat on the closed lid and looked at me expectantly. I didn't know what to say to her now that I was inside. I didn't know why I was even there.
I said, "I wasn't laughing."
She just hid her face in her hands and started crying then. It wasn't like when kids cry usually – how they wail for attention like baby cows. It was throaty and awful. It only occurred to me later that maybe it wasn't the gravy she was crying about at all.
"Was it hot?" I said.
"Was what hot?"
"The gravy. Did it burn your arse? Is that why you're crying?"
"No."
She sniffed and wiped her eyes. "You're Ben aren't you?"
I nodded. I didn't know how she knew my name.
"I'm Sophie," she said.
I didn't know what to say to her, so I said "the lid's closed."
She looked at me blankly for a moment. Then suddenly she was giggling. I have this way of saying something like "the lid's closed" and making people laugh. I didn't even realise it was funny. There was that barking seal laugh again. Sophie the seal.
"You'd better go," she said. She'd stopped laughing, and was looking strange and serious, like she knew something about me – I don't know, like she knew what was going to happen all along.
"Okay," I said, and left. I went outside to the boys' dorm, which was in a separate building. There was nobody there. I didn't turn the lights on – just lay on my bed without getting under the blanket, and started thinking about things. I thought about Jungle Jim, and Sophie, and the gravy, and all those faces around the dinner table. I rolled over on my side. I could feel my heart pumping and the blood going through my neck. My throat was burning. People had done stuff to me before, like Jungle Jim and people like that, but this was different somehow. I listened to the steam shovels going by on the highway in the night and just got angrier and angrier.
The lights came on and I listened to them all come in. I couldn't see them because my back was to the door.
Jungle Jim's voice suddenly rang out. "What's your problem, arsewipe?"
I didn't even know if he was talking to me.
"Right down the crack!" he said to the others, and there was laughter. I couldn't see him, but I imagined him sitting there like some ape of the jungle with his hairy lip and his long arms wrapped around his knees and his red knuckly fingers locked together.
"Fuck you," I said.
The boys' voices stopped, like they'd been switched off.
I heard a bed creak. Footsteps approaching. The footsteps stopped at my bed. I still didn't look up. I don't know why I wasn't scared. I should have been. I was too angry to be scared I guess.
"Get up," he said.
I didn't move.
"Get. The fuck. Up."
I had a jacket on that I wore most days, even in summer. It was a dirty thing with a broken zipper, and the string that you tied under your chin had gone back into the hood like a snake. When Jungle Jim grabbed me by the collar I slipped straight out of the jacket like a snake shedding its skin. That's the way you get with clothes like that.
Jungle Jim looked stupidly at the jacket in his hand. I rolled off the bed. He leapt across to grab me, but I was as quick as anything, and I went under the bed. Jungle Jim came slowly around it, tossing my jacket away to one side.
When he got around the bed I rolled to the other side and got out from under it. This was pointless. I should have just faced him and got it over with. I couldn't run away – the others wouldn't let me. Seeing Jungle Jim beat the daylights out of someone was the only entertainment in their shitty lives. I was on my own.
Jungle Jim walked casually back around the bed. He didn't say anything. People who mean business don't talk much, and Jungle Jim always meant business. I backed up against the wall, feeling behind me on my bedside table for something, anything.
When I first came to Crapper I was three years old. I don't remember it. I must have arrived there with the alarm clock, because I can't remember not having it. It was the old kind that you have to wind up every day. Except I never wound it: when you turned the winder it just spun loosely. It was broken, stuck at a quarter past eight forever. But still, I'd hung onto it for all those years. Pretty retarded. I used to imagine that my parents owned a clock factory, somewhere far away, where they made clocks for kings and queens, and one day I would find my way there. It was a nice dream to have.
It was the alarm clock that my hand found, and it was the alarm clock that I picked up and smashed into Jungle Jim's face. There was a sound like when you drop a bag of marbles, and a surprising amount of blood gushed out of Jungle Jim's nose. I looked down at the alarm clock in my hand. There was a crack in the glass and it was smeared with blood.
All hell broke loose.
The others formed a ring around us and started yelling their heads off. I didn't know if they were yelling my name or Jim's. It didn't sound like words at all. It was like the cries of wild animals. Nobody had ever hit Jungle Jim before.
Then he was coming at me, his nose gushing and blood dripping down his shirt. He grabbed me under the arms, and literally lifted me off the ground, and threw me into the wall. That was when I bit my tongue. Almost before I hit the ground he was kicking me. His boots were hard, and he kicked hard. All the wind went out of me. I curled up like a bug and covered my face with my arms.
Suddenly there was a voice.
"Jesus."
Jungle Jim was hauled away. He looked like a doll dangling from Dirty Joe's hand, and I couldn't help it – I started laughing.
Then the Whistlers were coming through the door. I wiped the alarm clock on the front of my shirt to get the blood off – even when Jungle Jim was kicking me I hadn't let go of it. I got up and put it back on my bedside table and sat on my bed. I felt something warm and itchy at the side of my mouth and wiped at it and saw blood on my fingers. I could taste blood in my mouth. I wanted to spit it out on the floor, but the Whistlers were there, and I figured I was in enough trouble already, so I swallowed it.