Spud - Learning to Fly

by John van de Ruit

Mom held out her empty wine glass and Dad charged around from behind the bar to refill it. He then gave her a huge smile and darted back.

  ‘Debbie’s doing well,’ said Mom suddenly.

  ‘Oh good,’ I replied.

  ‘Saw her last Thursday at the Hypermarket,’ she continued, as if she was imparting some vitally important information. ‘She looked radiant.’ She watched me for a reaction. I didn’t reply and gave nothing away, and after a pause Mom took a swig of wine and said, ‘Lovely girl that. You should have done better by her, Johnny.’

  As always, I kept silent. Inside I was screaming with indignation, but what was the point, and where would I begin.

  I pretended to fall asleep in the car on the way back from the pub. I couldn’t bear any more talk about how I supposedly blew it with the Mermaid.

  Here I am, my first holiday at home in months and already I’m avoiding both my parents and counting down the days to get back to school. Now that’s saying something, considering what awaits me is a vile psychopath hell-bent on savage revenge for a crime I didn’t commit.

  Sunday 11th October

  15:00 Decided to pack my Swiss army knife in case Pike attempts to slaughter me in the night. Unfortunately, it usually takes me about ten minutes to pull the blade out of the knife itself, which isn’t exactly ideal when confronted with pure evil in the darkness. I suppose at the very least I could poke him in the eye with the corkscrew.

  Monday 12th October

  6:30 Woke up sweating and terrified. I staggered out of bed and fumbled around in my cricket bag until I found my Swiss army knife. I then hurled it back into my drawer and slammed it shut before collapsing onto my bed, panting with exertion.

  I dreamed in the night that Pike slit my throat with my own Swiss army knife, and then ruthlessly sucked all the blood out of my neck, until I lay utterly deflated on the dormitory floor.

  ‘The Final Act’

  19:30 ‘It’s Spud!’ shouted the mad Malawian from his perch on the windowsill of our dormitory. I had cautiously entered the quad after carefully scoping out the scene for Pike. Garlic’s shouting wasn’t the sort of under-the-radar arrival I was shooting for.

  ‘It’s Spud!’ shouted Garlic again in absolute delight. He then turned to whoever was in the dormitory with him and shouted, ‘It’s Spud!’

  There was a traffic jam at the house door because Plump Graham and Rowdy had succeeded in wedging Meany Dlamini’s trunk between the two doorframes, and Norman Whiteside was in the middle of a long lecture about common sense around the house. Spike and JR Ewing had also gathered but only because they were sensing trouble. Standing in front of me was Meg Ryan’s Son, who stood patiently listening to Whiteside’s sermon in a blazer that almost reached down to his knees.

  ‘Coming through!’ I raised my voice, and stepped forward with great intent. The group of bodies parted for me like the Red Sea and I strode, bags in hand, straight over the top of Meany Dlamini’s trunk, into the house and up the stairs.

  Everyone watched me go in shocked silence, and I marched up the stairs feeling like something monumental had just changed inside me.

  I threw open the dormitory door and was met by the grinning pink face of Garlic.

  ‘Spud!’ He shot out his right hand to be shaken. ‘Boggo said you’d died!’ he said with huge relief after making sure it was really me.

  ‘I was talking about his acting career, you toss,’ came the irritated voice of Boggo.

  ‘Hey, Spud, look who’s back!’ said Garlic, and stepped aside while pointing at a tanned figure with blonde hair sitting confidently on his locker oiling his cricket bat.

  ‘Simon!’ I shouted, sounding disturbingly like Garlic.

  ‘Hey, Spud man,’ said Simon grinning like he was genuinely happy to see me.

  Simon seems different to how I remember him. I’m not sure if it’s an act, but he seems more relaxed and laid back now. In fact it looks like he’s spent the last six months suntanning on Clifton beach. I didn’t know what to say to him. What do you say to somebody who’s just recovered from a nervous breakdown?

  ‘Wow!’ was all I could come up with in the end.

  ‘I’ll show you wow,’ said Boggo in a loud voice as he flashed us a poster of a lady whose boobs were twice the size of her head.

  Thankfully that was when Fatty bustled through the dormitory door.

  ‘Simon!’ Fatty’s face lit up.

  ‘Fatty!’ exclaimed Garlic. The Malawian was delirious with excitement.

  ‘Bullshit!’ said Rambo in disbelief as he entered the dorm after Fatty.

  ‘Rambo!’ screamed Garlic.

  ‘How you, buddy?’ grinned Simon and jumped off his locker and ran up to Rambo. Rambo dropped his bags and started laughing. The two of them hugged while the rest of us stared.

  ‘Oh, get a room, you two,’ came a grumpy voice from Boggo’s cubicle.

  ‘Get a life, Boggo,’ said Rambo and sauntered off to his own.

  Then there was an almighty crash from the general direction of the staircase. We all charged out to find Vern sprawled on his back at the bottom of the stairs, covered in a great number of bags and suitcases. Obviously the weight of his bags had sent Rain Man crashing backwards all the way down to the bottom of the stairs. Garlic rushed down to help the stricken Vern, and nearly wiped himself out in the process. Eventually the cretin staggered to his feet and Garlic helped him slowly ascend the stairs.

  Not sure if it was the fall or perhaps the brightness of his tan, but Vern seemed extremely disturbed by Simon’s return and refused either to speak or look at him directly. He slunk low on his bed and spied around the side of his locker in a mysterious fashion.

  HOLIDAY SCORECARD

  RAMBO Said his holiday was ‘intense’.

  VERN Seems to have replaced his fetish for striking matches with a fetish for calculators. He now has three of them – four if you count the one on his watch. (?)

  FATTY Spent the entire holiday with Penny and says they are already talking marriage. He’s also lost weight although it’s impossible to say how much.

  GARLIC Lake Malawi.

  BOGGO Worked off his outstanding stationery debt at his step-dad’s betting tote.

  SPUD Narrowly avoided the terrifying ‘birds and the bees’ speech from his father, and suspects his mother could be just as irrational as his ex-girlfriend.

  SIMON

  After Whiteside switched off the lights, Simon gathered us all in his cubicle before swearing us to total secrecy. Once we had all sworn on our mother’s lives, Simon informed us that he hadn’t had a nervous breakdown after all. He reckons he spent the last six months playing Sunday league cricket in England for a club called Rotherham. He described his strange behaviour as a ruse to throw everyone off the scent. He reckoned the invitation from the cricket club had come through last year and that Sparerib had denied him permission to miss two terms of school. According to Simon, he and his Dad decided against asking Viking, in case he also refused, so they cooked up the mental breakdown plot using the golf day as an excuse.

  ‘Why do you think I made such a show out of practising for the golf day?’ said Simon, with a cheeky grin on his face. ‘I was so realistic that I should have been acting at Wrexham instead,’ he added, chuckling at his own cleverness.

  Simon’s excited admission was met with complete silence. Simon desperately rambled on, trying to convince the disbelieving faces that surrounded him, but not even him swearing on his mother’s life could sway anyone other than Garlic.

  Eventually he grew frustrated. He turned to Rambo and asked, ‘You believe me hey, Rambo?’

  Rambo grinned mischieviously and said, ‘Definitely.’ Simon took this as winning the argument and immediately demanded a complete retelling of everything he had missed starting from the golf day. Rambo began the story but we all chipped in as we described the demise of Pike (which Simon hugely enjoyed), Mad Dog’s farm, and our slightly odd term at Wrexham.

  Then it was Garlic
’s turn:

  GARLIC’S 3RD TERM OF HELL!

  Mongrel ruled the house like a bloodthirsty tyrant.

  Garlic was thrashed twice for talking after lights out despite being alone in the dormitory on both occasions.

  Garlic attempted a single-handed nightswimming mission but was captured by the guards near the cricket oval, wearing nothing but his underpants. Since he was over a kilometre from the dam and heading in the wrong direction, he was beaten six for bunking out instead.

  Pike threatened to roger him on a daily basis.

  The entire Normal Seven was thrashed repeatedly.

  Norman Whiteside spent half the term living in the san because he was terrified of his daily meetings with Mongrel.

  The entire house was gated for the long weekend due to general lack of discipline.

  Gastro left the school a mere four days into Mongrel’s reign of terror. (Fragile Five is now Fragile Four.)

  The entire house (including Pike) was forced to run the cross-country course every Monday morning at 5: 00am, followed by swimming laps in the freezing dam.

  All laughter and fun was outlawed.

  Mongrel snapped a grand total of five canes during his orgy of violence and mayhem.

  The longer Garlic went on about his miserable third term under Mongrel, the more Wrexham seemed like a holiday. On a more positive note, however, for the first time since I’ve attended the school, nobody was expelled during Silly Season.

  I perched on my windowsill and gazed out at the empty quad. The last time I heard Pissing Pete’s trickle was on the 2nd of July – Wombat’s birthday. Suddenly it’s now the middle of October and life feels like it’s furiously galloping towards something. Aside from my own bed at home, I don’t think there is any place I would rather be right now than right here on my perch above my little world.

  Tuesday 13th October

  06:00 I awoke half expecting Penny and Brenda to charge in with tea and loud announcements. Only Vern was awake, and he lay in bed with Roger thumping away at one of his new calculators like he was on the verge of a major mathematical breakthrough.

  06:14 I heard the footsteps of a boy running across the quad.

  FIVE … FOUR … THREE … TWO …

  And then the rising siren. Like a programmed machine, I stepped out of bed, grabbed my soapbox and towel and joined the migration of sleepy boys stumbling down the stairs to the showers.

  9:00 Mr Bosch was delighted to see Fatty, Boggo and me and gave us a friendly welcome back to the land of the living, before beginning his class on population density. The other boys stared at us like we were crusading womanisers, who had just returned from a highly successful rape and pillage mission. (Obviously Garlic has been spreading wild stories about our supposed orgies.)

  After History, Lennox called Rambo and me over and informed us that he had dissolved the African Affairs Society while we were away.

  ‘I’m sorry, boys,’ he said with a mournful expression, ‘but there didn’t seem much point in keeping it alive.’ The good news is that Lennox will begin a new society next year and asked us both to sign up for it. Unfortunately, this means that we have to join another society for the rest of this year, which Rambo quite rightly termed ‘a ball ache’.

  Eve was wearing a see-through blouse during our Drama practical. Underneath it her sexy black bra seemed to be struggling to keep her assets in check, especially when she bent over to demonstrate the perfect spinal stretching technique. Boggo was beside himself with horniness and passed me a note that read:

  Imagine 3some Eve + VPH!

  Eve’s sexy attire also seemed to have Rambo acting in an erratic manner and he wasn’t his usual cocky self.

  Overheard Spike telling other boys in the common room that he had kissed VPH and felt her up. In his dreams perhaps?

  Wednesday 14th October

  Reverend Bishop was deeply alarmed that aside from Garlic, we had all missed an entire term of his confirmation guidance. ‘We’re terribly behind, boys,’ he said shaking his head sadly.

  He became even more concerned when we informed him that we had been worshipping in a Methodist school chapel for the last eight weeks. Obviously the chaplain has very little respect for Methodists and only stopped just short of calling them outright heathens. We then spent the rest of the class discussing different denominations of Christianity and other religions.

  RELIGIONS/CHURCHES DEEMED SOUND BY THE CHAPLAIN

  All Anglican churches

  Some Catholic churches

  RELIGIONS/CHURCHES DEEMED SUSPICIOUS BY THE CHAPLAIN

  Most Catholic churches

  Presbyterianism

  Hinduism

  NG Kerk

  Judaism (this despite Jesus being Jewish)

  RELIGIONS/CHURCHES TO BE VIGOROUSLY AVOIDED

  Evangelicals

  Baptists

  Islam

  Jehovah’s Witnesses

  RELIGIONS/CHURCHES TO BE DESTROYED

  Satanist

  Buddist

  Methodist

  To end the class, Reverend Bishop read a ‘cleansing’ prayer to rid us of any possible Methodist indoctrination and contamination.

  After lunch, Boggo pulled me and Fatty aside, and declared that Simon was lying about playing cricket overseas. ‘We all saw him,’ he whispered. ‘Simon had a full on nervous breakdown.’ Then he motioned us to follow him up the stairs to the archives room.

  Seated on our comfortable chairs and secure from the rest of the school, Boggo nodded proudly like he had just cracked the case wide open and said, ‘He wants to be cricket captain and a prefect, so he’s putting out the word that he isn’t a flaky.’

  ‘He does seem a bit different,’ conceded Fatty with a concerned look on his face.

  ‘He’s much more relaxed,’ I noted.

  ‘That’s because he’s had shock treatment, you helmet,’ cried Boggo. ‘My oath to God.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Fatty warming to the conspiracy.

  ‘Hunch,’ replied Boggo.

  ‘No proof?’ Fatty looked disappointed.

  Boggo shook his head and fell silent. Then he said, ‘You know, if Simon gets away with this, one of you two won’t make prefect.’

  Boggo’s logic has it that the battle for head of house is down to a race between himself and Rambo.

  ‘Garlic’s old man could buy him a spot, and never count Vern out because in this place anything’s possible,’ he said, and then looked at us like we should do something about it.

  We had to abruptly stop the Simon discussion because the freckled face of Sidewinder appeared mischievously in the doorway. Sidewinder was so excited to see Fatty that he raced up to him and stopped just short of leaping into his arms. He then felt embarrassed and blushed terribly before looking down at the floor.

  ‘Check it out, Sidewinder,’ said Fatty fumbling in his blazer pocket for his wallet. After much tugging and negotiating, he eventually wrestled the wallet free, along with a significant amount of the lining of his blazer. He then flicked it open and proudly displayed a photograph of Penny. ‘How hot is she?’ he said.

  ‘Very hot,’ said Sidewinder looking at the photograph and nodding slowly as if highly impressed.

  Boggo made loud gagging noises and said he was about to throw up his lunch. Since Fatty was now in full cry about Penny, I followed the muttering Boggo down the stairs and back across the quad to the house.

  17:00 Viking called in the Crazy Eight for a meeting in the common room. He closed the door and windows because he said it was a secret meeting, and then proceeded to speak so loudly that the entire school may well have heard. Firstly, he announced that we would need to cover many of the duties for the prefects while they were studying for their finals this term and that we had to set the example in the house once they had left. He told us that he was doing away with Sparerib’s old policy of announcing the prefects next year, because he said whomever was chosen would need to prepare mentally during the holidays
.

  ‘It’s a vital job,’ he boomed, ‘and I won’t be handing out the privilege willy-nilly!’

  You could have heard a pin drop in the common room. I looked around at the others who were all watching Viking intently, lapping up every single word he said.

  Our housemaster concluded the meeting by declaring that we were all still very much in the running for prefect, and said we should prepare for a great test of our leadership abilities soon. He warned that he would be watching us closely over the coming term before coming to his decision.

  We left the common room in silence and then went our separate ways.

  It’s obvious everybody wants to be a prefect, if only for the privileges of having a slave to make your bed and take your laundry, and hanging out in the prefects’ room with free tea and toast. It also means that some of us won’t be prefects and will have to deal with being second-class citizens next year.

  Thursday 15th October

  Rambo threatened to kill Vern if he kept up with his unnecessary thrashing on the calculator before the rising siren. It’s still unclear why Vern is suddenly so attached to his calculators, but I’d take the irritating tapping over the striking up of matches.

  11:00 I think I’m beginning to understand the way in which the universe works: desire something and you’re doomed. Ignore it completely and you get more than you ever dreamed off. The same rule applies to cricket, girls, exam results, and just about everything else in life. Not only that, if you expect nothing, then you can never really feel depressed when you lose out. After all, you never really wanted it in the first place … I’m going to call it the Universal Law of Desire.

  From now on, I’ll forget all about girls and sex. In fact girls and sex are the last thing on my mind. Not for me.

  Never. No, thanks!

  Without having bowled a ball since March and not having given the noble sport of cricket a moment’s thought in six months, I have been promoted, not one, but two cricket teams. Howzat?