Fish in the Sky by Fridrik Erlings Read Free Book Online Page B

two short whistles and one long. Or three long and one short. I can never remember the meaning of his chirping. That’s why I’m too late to figure things out, too late to run — late, late, late. Then he picks me out of the row and makes me do thirty push-ups as a penance — that’s two long whistles.
    But there’s another reason that makes me hate gym, that gives me a chill and fills me up with anxiety thinking of gym, that gives me nightmares the day before gym, and that’s Sandra the shower warden.
    To begin with, I can’t figure out why on earth a woman is a shower warden in a gym for boys. Surely no other school in the world has a female shower warden in the boys’ showers. Would anyone hire a man to be a shower warden in the girls’ class? I doubt it. And it has to be this woman. Why her? She doesn’t even look like a woman. Maybe that’s why. Not that she looks like a man, no way. She looks more like a ghost or a monster or an alien or all three at once. And I’m scared to death of her. For some reason, no one else seems to experience this the same way I do, at least nobody talks about it, and that’s understandable — because this is something that you can’t talk about with anybody.
    She’s not old and not young either, not thin nor fat. And there’s absolutely nothing she does or says that is terrible or horrifying; she just herds us into the showers, turns the water on with a long iron pole, and orders us to wash thoroughly. That’s all.
    But there’s something about her, how she moves, how she looks, even the way she does her hair, that makes me terrified of her.
    And her face is the worst. It is pale blue, and her hair is white and thick, cut at the jawbone, and her jawbone is broad and strong. She always wears pink lipstick, screaming pink, and her lips are really thin, so she puts the lipstick on the skin around her lips, probably to make them look bigger.
    And her mouth is so wide, it fills me with disgust just to think about it; the corners of her mouth reach far into her cheeks and turn downward, so you can imagine it opening up forever, like inside there are no teeth, just a bottomless black pit. Her eyes are large and round, protruding far out of her skull, so when she blinks, it takes the eyelids forever to slide over these glassy water bags that barely hang in her face. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself that no human being has orange eyes, still it’s a fact that hers are.
    This is a face that stares at you in your worst nightmares, a face that never looks away but just keeps on staring, not cruel or threatening but completely empty of all emotions, cold and unmoving. That’s why you fear that a face like that hides all the worst things you can imagine, and maybe something even worse than that.
    We are running, sweating, and short of breath and cram into the locker room, and I hurry to undress and get into the shower before Sandra appears. Tom starts to fool around, stripped naked, waving his willy, standing on his hands, snatching somebody’s underwear and throwing them in the showers to the applause of others who are in with him at the moment and therefore get to keep their underwear.
    “Hey!” he suddenly shouts, throwing his leader’s glance over the locker room. “Hands up who’s done it!”
    Everybody who wants to be in with him throws an arm up. The others fetch their wet underwear from the showers.
    “Naaah!” somebody says. “Who do you think you’ve done it with?”
    But Tom smirks for a long time and moves his eyes from one to another while they’re all waiting eagerly for the answer, ready to laugh and shout.
    “With Clara cute-ass, of course,” he says finally, and the shouts and screams echo in the room with whistling and laughter. I, on the other hand, feel a cold sting in my heart under the boiling-hot shower.
    “At least like this,” Tom says, laughing and grabbing his willy with his right hand.
    And the boys laugh. “Yeah, Tommy,