Killing Ground by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page B

years. She had heard the worry in her mother's voice and the bluster in her father's voice. She hadn't had her ruined tea, nor had she done her preparatory work for the next day's class with 2B. Later, she had heard her mother's footfall outside her door and a light knocking and she had not replied, and much later she had heard them going to bed beyond the thin partition wall. A tossing and restless and hideous night, with two images churning her mind. The twin images that denied her sleep were of the warmth and kindness of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, and of the cold certainty of Axel Moen. They confronted her, the love shown her by Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, the matter-of-fact hostility of Axel Moen. She should not have given him the time of day, should have shown him the door. She thought she had betrayed the warmth and kindness, the love, of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio . . .

    Her night had been unhappiness and confusion. Her day had been exhaustion and distraction.
    It seemed God-given, a moment of mercy, when the bell echoed through the low-set prefabricated walls of the classroom. Perhaps the kids of 2B, the kickers and gougers and scribblers and bullies, felt the crisis and were afraid. They waited for her. Every day, at I he end of classes, she swapped jokes and cheerful banter with the ix-year-olds, not that day. She swept up the books and notes on her desk. She was first out through the door. It was her decision to go home, to apologize to her mother and father and to make believe that the tall American with the blond pony-tail of hair had never walked with her in the garden behind the bungalow, never propositioned her, never talked of necessary 'access'. Her decision . . . She stopped beside a rubbish bin outside the classroom, reached deliberately into her bag, took out the letter of invitation and ripped it to small pieces. She dropped the torn scraps of paper, and the envelope into the bag. There was a mass of children around her as she walked towards the lean-to shed where her scooter was left for I he day.
    'Charlotte! Are you all right, Charlotte?'
    The shrill voice bleated at her back. She turned. The headmistress faced her.
    All right? Yes, of course I'm all right, Miss Samway.'
    I just wondered . . . Charlotte, there are two men to see you. They're at the gate.'
    She looked over the running and shouting and charging horde of children going from the playground to the gate that led to the street. She looked between the heads and shoulders of the young mothers with cigarettes at their lips, gum in their mouths, babies on their arms, bulging stomachs in tight jeans, who yapped about the night's TV. So much anger, fuelled by the tiredness. She saw two men leaning against an old Sierra car, not the last model but the model before that, and the door which took the weight of their buttocks was a recent addition and not yet sprayed to match the rest of the bodywork, that was scraped and rust-flecked. They were not like anyone she knew.
    They wore old denims and T-shirts and one had a leather jacket over his shoulders and one wore a dirtied anorak. The hair of both men was cut short, and the one who was more slightly built had a silver ring piercing his right nostril, and the heavier one waved to her, and she could see the tattoo between the wrist and knuckle of his hand.
    'I don't know if they're friends of yours, Charlotte, but I don't want people like that hanging round my school.'
    She went to them. She stood her full height. The headmistress behind her would be watching, and others on the staff, and the mothers would be watching. Little Miss Parsons, stuck-up Miss Parsons, entertaining two low-life types who waited on the street for her. Something to talk about in the common room, and as they pushed the prams and led the kids back to the bloody little homes where the telly would blast all through the evening, and reading would involve the figures on scratch cards, and . . .
    God, she was just so bloody