Hiding in the Woods
7 minutes to go until lunch is over. I’ll stay here until there’s 2 minutes and 45 seconds to go. This will give me the right amount of time to walk directly to my English class, neither too fast nor too slow, neither dawdling and conspicuously alone nor rushing like I might be running away from someone. That way I can walk into class without having to wait for the teacher to let us in. Thinking about it, maybe I’ll leave it 1 minute and 45, because Miss Wallsley can be a lazy cow, lingering over her cigarette behind the fire escape where she thinks no one sees her.
I’m not surprised at her reluctance to engage in the irony of Othello with Steve Pounder and his thuggish disciples. His lips move when he reads a copy of The Beano or the school dinner menu. The day he wrenched my diary from my hands I was consoled by the knowledge that anything other than printed text was beyond him. But those extra couple of minutes she makes us wait outside the classroom can feel like days. Mainly because there’s no supervision. It’s one of those in between times that doesn’t exist in the timetable, an 8 and a half floor elevator stop or platform 9 and three-quarters to Hogwarts, where the kids who don’t like you can do just what they fancy because all bets are off and the rules don’t apply. Maybe I’ll just start walking when the bell goes.
So that leaves me 6 more minutes here. In the woods by the school. It’s my new hiding place from the homophobes, and a good one because you can’t easily be cornered. My main concern up here is the potheads who hide out to smoke their spliffs but they’re so focussed on their own little processes its no problem; spending 10 minutes hunched over with rizlas and tobacco, making their little wind-block freeze-frames as the Zippo flame splutters and dies. Then come the giggles and the cahoots. I’ve actually come to enjoy their company over the last few weeks but of course always from a distance. Even if they discovered I was here it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There’d be a few catcalls, maybe someone would pretend to come after me, but they don’t really have the energy to be truly vicious and besides they’re having too much fun.
But then I’d have to find some other hiding place. I can’t go to the old home-economics block since that time the graffitists arrived there and, well, I really got a shoeing. I found that spot in the tree where you climb up the hedge and I liked the vantage point it gave me. But then I was discovered up there right at the start of lunchtime. Phil Leach and his gang started collecting people to come and taunt me until there was a steady stream of new arrivals. So the names started – faggot, poof and so on, but there really aren’t that many names you can call a gay 15 year old. After a while I noticed a couple of them got a pen and paper out and were starting to invent new words to call me. Miss Wallsley would have been so proud. Of course by this time some of them were getting hungry and can you believe that Ryan Bartropp even started organising a primitive rota system so that people could go off and get their lunch. They’d recharge their batteries until they were ready to shout more insults and hurl more weapons. Sticks and stones may break my bones. Yeah, and so may coke cans and coins. The last ones eventually let me be 5 minutes after lessons started. Then I walked in to class late but in plenty of time to be subjected to a vitriolic and condescending lecture on the principles of time-keeping by whichever fascist happened to be playing out his domination fantasies at the time.
The same fascist insisted on talking to me after class that day. I was pleased, because I could leave by myself, but I didn’t tell him that. He asked me if I knew why he had kept me behind. ‘Is it because your Mother never loved you?’ I asked, and then wished I hadn’t, because I just started thinking about my own Mother and our last Parent Evening. Me, Mum, and my form tutor, a neat and free-flowing triangle of mistrust. Each with our own neuroses being played out, theirs fully formed and mine putting on a spurt. I view it as a bad dream, or rather a bad film that should be edited down and down to nothing. I would call it ‘Fear and Loathing in Saltmarsh Secondary.’
Matt Greenwood writes fiction for children and adults. He is currently undertaking a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University as well as teaching in a school in Islington. He has worked in Japan, Spain and the Czech Republic, and now lives in Walthamstow, East London.
