Tick Bite fever (2003) by David Bennun

Author:David Bennun
Format: epub
Published: 2003-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

MY MOTHER’S attempts to have me reinstated in the Nyumba Cub Scout pack were eventually successful. She convinced Reverend Phillips that I was misguided but not incorrigible. His creed directed him to hate the sin but love the sinner, and he prevailed upon Mr Stanley to allow me back. I was permitted to keep my badges, but found myself busted down to the Cub equivalent of buck private.

Still, it seemed that the Nyumba was doing its job well. The cheeking Akela incident showed that I was developing into a prissy, arrogant and publicly overconfident little snot. The British public school system was going to love me, if only I could learn to keep out of trouble. I couldn’t.

I was punished for attaching a dead rat by the tail to the inside of a girl’s desk, so that it swung like a rotting pendulum when she lifted the lid. When I mutinied by walking out of the school gates and heading home, I was retrieved by the deputy head in his Renault 16 and sent to Fergie’s office.

‘I understand you’re having trouble at home,’ said Fergie, with a scrupulous distaste that might have seemed dainty in a less raw-boned man.

Was I? This was news to me. It turned out that he was referring to my parents’ divorce.

‘And that,’ Fergie told me, ‘is the only reason that I’m not going to administer physical punishment. Normally in this situation…’ He thought this over. There was no ‘normally’ to the situation; nobody had ever been known to run or even walk away from the Nyumba. ‘Otherwise in this situation, we would give you a few good hard whacks.’

Instead, I was made to write 1,000 lines. It seemed this broken home business had its uses after all. I wouldn’t have dreamed of blaming my behaviour on my parents. If you ask me, I was just a recalcitrant wee sod.

Attempting to mould my inferior clay into a more worthy form, the Nyumba entered me into something called the Entwistle-Mayer History Prize, a written test in which I would compete against prep school students from across Britain. The essay paper turned out to be full of subjects on which I was worse than clueless; what little I knew about them was gleaned from half-remembered and laughably unreliable sources. My specialist topic, the Civil War, did not feature at all. Oh, there were questions on the Civil War, all right. Problematically, they were all concerned with the American Civil War, about which I knew one thing and one thing only: it had featured few, if any, Roundheads and almost certainly no Cavaliers.

I wound up improvising on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Not so much improvising, in truth, as vamping. I did things to history that Count Basie would have balked at trying on a piano keyboard. It’s quite conceivable that I wrote Count Basie into the murder plot, unless I was saving him for the question on the Magna Carta. Aided by a few shady factoids I had

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