The Heat of the Sun by David Rain Read Free Book Online

dais at the end of the hall, where masters and senior fellows, Scranway included, dined together at the high table. Trouble progressed
slowly, my too-long coat dragging on the floor behind him like a cape.
    Silence fell. Under sickly electric light, the dishevelled, bloodied Trouble was an apparition: Banquo’s ghost.
    At the foot of the dais, Trouble stopped. He stretched out an arm and pointed. His voice, when he spoke, was steady.
    ‘Fight me,’ he said. ‘Fight me yourself.’
    He dropped his arm, swayed, and crumpled to the floor. Cries broke out. Frantically the headmaster tried to quell the uproar, as Mr Gregg rushed towards the prone boy.
    They kept Trouble in the infirmary for three days. The cut on his forehead was long, but not deep; his ribs were bruised, but none was cracked, and he had caught a chill. On
the afternoon of the second day, I visited him. I found him sitting up against pillows. Circling his temples was a white bandage. He held a pen and resting on his thighs was a portable escritoire,
with a sheet of paper at the ready.
    ‘A visitor. Isn’t that dangerous?’ he said.
    ‘For anyone else, perhaps.’
    ‘Compassion for the cripple? I wouldn’t bet on it. How’s Eddie Scranway?’
    ‘The masters wondered why you pointed at him,’ I said. ‘Scranway was in class all that afternoon.’
    ‘I was light-headed. You said so.’
    The infirmary occupied an attic under the eaves, with creamy walls sloping between dormer windows. I thought of the hospital ward where I had lain for weeks in Paris. I hated hospitals. I hated
sickrooms. I never wanted to be in a sickroom again. ‘They must have asked who did it, didn’t they?’
    ‘Do you think they want to know?’
    There were five other beds, four of them empty, pillows crisp as untrodden snow. A mousy boy slept in the bed next to Trouble’s; disturbingly, he reminded me of Billy Billicay. Under the
window gleamed a spindly hoop-backed chair. I perched on the end of Trouble’s bed. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ I said. ‘How can you stand what
they’ve done to you?’
    ‘Don’t you think I deserve it? You’ve heard the stories.’
    ‘Stories are stories.’
    ‘Oh, the test paper, that’s true. Maybe it was stupid of me, but it seemed so unfair, Scotty being kept out of officer training, all for the sake of some silly set of questions. But
the diary? Come on! Let’s just say there are people who hate the senator. They’ll do anything to disgrace him.’
    ‘They failed, though. It wasn’t in the papers.’
    ‘But the story’s spreading.’ Cries, like birdcalls, echoed from the playing fields. The boy in the next bed shifted, murmuring; he must have been dreaming. Trouble reached for
a handkerchief, sneezing into it lustily. The bed squeaked and shook, and I asked, too urgently, how the story could have spread. His nonchalance maddened me.
    ‘At Navy school, there was a fellow from Kentucky or Tennessee, somewhere like that, who’d never seen the sea before. They called him Landlubber and ragged him about what sort of
sailor he’d make. His real name was Elmsley – Dan Elmsley. Guess whose cousin he is?’
    ‘I’ll kill that little rodent.’
    ‘Relax. It wasn’t Elmsley. Not really.’
    ‘What? Elmsley heard it from Cousin Dan.’
    ‘Well, he might have let slip a few things. But he didn’t do this.’ Trouble sneezed again. ‘Listen,’ he went on, between wipings of his nose, ‘there might
be... a favour you can do for me. Would you like that?’
    ‘Depends what it is, doesn’t it?’
    ‘One moment,’ he said, and dipped his pen into the inkwell on the escritoire. As he wrote, a furrow appeared between his dark eyebrows; writing, I suspected, had never been easy for
him.
    ‘There.’ He held up his paper and blew on it. ‘I think the bulletin board in McManus Two would be best, don’t you?’
    I took the paper carefully. Trouble’s handwriting was remarkably neat.
    CHALLENGE
    That BASTARD