Low Expectations by Stuart Everly-Wilson

Author:Stuart Everly-Wilson [Stuart Everly-Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

6

I was still reading Animal Farm when I arrived at school the next day. First classes should have begun, but the playground was full of kids. I dismissed it at first as the result of a teacher’s meeting. Then I saw what was going on.

I closed the book.

‘Oh, Devon, you’re here,’ Flannery snipped, when I stepped onto the verandah at the Gulag. ‘Come with me now.’

‘What’s up, Sir?’ I asked.

‘Bring your bag,’ he added, gravely.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Mr Whitely’s office.’

‘You’re in the shit—um-ahh,’ Frank observed, happily.

I followed Flannery, in agreement with Frank’s assessment. Because what I had thought looked like most of the school’s male teachers, methodically, one by one, emptying the contents of every boy student’s schoolbag onto the ground, turned out to be exactly that. Every single bag. In an act that screamed: ‘Looking. For. Porno.’

‘See all the trouble you’ve caused, Devon,’ Flannery said.

A weird stillness had settled over the entire quadrangle, as kids watched in horror while their bags were seized, unzipped, tipped upside down and shaken until they were empty—of their books, PE gear, cigarettes, flick-knives. Most stepping back from them as if disowning a friend in need. Some heads turned to notice me in escort: the kid behind the extraordinary search. I was unsure whether to feel relief or disappointment that my own bag—for the first Monday in ages—contained no merchandise.

I was told to sit in the anteroom outside Whitely’s office, while Flannery disappeared inside. I wondered if P.W. Thwaite was in there. I hoped he was. I posted the letter to the Director General of the Department of Education confessing it. I was an entrepreneur. And proud of it. While a portrait of the Queen frowned down on my smirk, I basked in my pride. Then I remembered Smiddy. He wouldn’t be in there, would he?

Whoever it was, I was ready for them. I alone had had the idea to turn what had been deemed just rubbish into the biggest racket in school. Right under the noses of those deadshit teachers, who were busy upending every boy student’s bag because, in their ignorance, they believed no girl student would be interested in purchasing a little sex-education for herself.

I wondered where Stephen was, as other boys started to trickle in. Customers I recognised but did not know by name, they filed in sullenly, the weight of the world suddenly heavy on their lumpy frames. They hurled their schoolbags under an available seat or dropped them at their feet petulantly. Some glanced at me—the cause of all their strife—but their glances were identical to those that fell my way in the quadrangle: dismissive. At a loss to know what to make of me. Soon it was standing room only and I became increasingly invisible, as my gutless customers crowded about me, banging into my knees, treading on my toes, wasting the meagre supply of oxygen with their pathetic whining. And I realised many of the pornos had never even made it out of their schoolbags. Where better to keep them hidden from your parents?

Then at last Stephen arrived.

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