SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME THAT ALL PEOPLE look either like wolves or like pigs. It came to me again as we hunched under the library tables. Round about then I also realised that my teaching diploma wasn’t going to help. You only find this out later, when your spine is pressed against the steel legs of a government table. Things are different down there: democracy happens at floor level.
A girl whimpered. The sun caught her braces as she shifted in the trapezium of light from the library window. Her ears in the headgear were marvellously intact, as smooth and whole as the chocolate roses the prefects were dishing out to the girls gathered next door for Assembly (BE MINE said their wrappers) while we stole an extra lesson. I pressed her back into shadow, but it was useless, really. The other six girls were crouched the same way, instinctive as rabbits, completely visible but hoping somehow that they weren’t. As if the voices outside weren’t going to penetrate the world of books; as if no one’s ever hidden under a table.
We had heard them before they arrived, but you don’t run, here in the cloisters: here you wait and see. ‘Marco!’ a boy shouted. ‘Polo!’ someone else whooped back. They knew their way around, those boys from the school across the common. I watched them through the portholes of the doors: the poster pinned there left me with paper cuts. The boys were yanking on the red bunting round the quad, scattering the Valentine’s Day cards from the noticeboards. One stopped to set fire to the Styrofoam hearts that the girls had so painstakingly coloured and hung up in the week. The hearts flamed up and then sank in on themselves abruptly, like the cheeks of men in hospital; the stink of the burning plastic wafted to us. It pushed me back.
The door banged open, halving the porthole, and a boy charged over the library threshold. He stopped abruptly, judging the scene. There was mud – something splashed dark – on his school shoes, and he was going to track it into the library carpet. Wolf, I thought.
A bigger boy dashed in behind him and slammed the door shut. Pig.
I went back to the girl with the braces. I sat down beside her, under the table, and I put my arm around her. The thin one walked over, moving jerkily. I expected smoke and the smell of electrocution. He was emaciated, graceless, a spare coat-hanger of a boy. He was wearing a blazer even though it was February. He had pinned a heart to his arm.
‘Howzit, Miss!’ The girl behind me squeaked and pressed away. She had looked in the locker of her skull for instructions and found nothing in the way of words.
‘Just be quiet,’ the thin boy said, pointing at her. ‘Be quiet as a mouse.’ She stared at him, and then stuck her thumb in her mouth, the red elastics stretching on her braces.
He curled his finger back into a fist and shook his arm at me. The trophy heart blurred.
‘Check, Miss! On my SLEEVE!’ His voice cracked on the high endnote. He shoved his arm forward across my windpipe. The red heart throbbed. ‘How’s that for a … a …’ He turned to the fat boy at the door. ‘What are those fucken’ things called?’
The fat boy was in his shirtsleeves, but he was sweating, his eyes flicking to the corners of the room. I saw now that he was holding a knife, the heavy, serrated kind used for gutting fish, or held by a goblin in a role-play. With the other hand, he pressed the bridge of his glasses back up his nose. I knew that gesture.
‘Aphorism.’
‘Aphorism?’
‘I think.’
The thin boy turned back to me. ‘Is it an aphorism, Miss?’ I couldn’t speak because his arm was jammed against my throat, pushing me against the girl. I could feel her heart ticking on my back. The thin boy relaxed his arm a little. ‘Is it?’
I cleared my throat, the lid of my gullet closing off the top of my skull. ‘It’s just an expression. A saying.’
He raised his eyebrows mockingly, and his features pulled with them into his hairline.
‘Just an expression,’ he mimicked in a high voice. ‘A saying.’ He turned to the dumbstruck fat boy at the door. ‘We have a better saying. Say it, Kenny.’
The fat one looked down at the knife he was holding. ‘But you said—’
‘I said, Say it! It’s time!’
Sweat was streaking the fat boy’s collar. Somewhere they must have discarded their ties. Or, oh God, used them for something else. But he plucked his shirt away from his torso, and began to recite.
‘’Tis not long after /But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve /For daws to peck at.’
We were silent, the dumb covers of the novels ranged against him.
‘You forgot the last line, fuckwit. No wonder you need extra lessons.’
And it came to me. I’d had him for extra English, years ago, a pudgy little dyslexic boy who’d come to me for help and found Shakespeare. It wasn’t just words that Kenny got backwards.
He chuffed once, but thought better of the challenge when he saw the thin boy’s narrowed eyes. He cleared his throat, a pre-schooler prodded forward at a Christmas pageant.
‘I am not what I am.’
The thin boy clapped. ‘Othello! Act One! Scene One! Line sixty-three! Thank you very much!’ He bowed with a flourish, bending at the waist like a magician. He grabbed my copy of the play and held it out. ‘You can check.’
He wanted me to ask him why, and so I obliged.
‘Why are you boys here?’ My throat vibrated against his forearm.
He smiled as if I was the lunatic. ‘It’s Valentine’s Day.’ His voice was patient. ‘We’re making a delivery.’
I looked over to the fat boy, who was scrubbing viciously at his face. His eyes had retreated into the swollen flesh.
‘Kenny? Will you tell me what’s going on? Is it just the two of you?’
But he couldn’t look at me. He turned instead to the poster behind him. It was divided into two columns. GOOD RULES FOR BOOKS said the left-hand side, accompanied by big green ticks. BAD RULES FOR BOOKS said the right: red crosses showed the gravesites of books. A handwritten note added by the librarian threatened punishment. STUDENTS who DAMAGE BOOKS will be FINED!
The thin one answered. ‘What’s the problem, asswipe? You said you wanted to pork her. It’s your special day.’
Kenny glanced away again, ashamed. He had looked at the floor his whole life. ‘But it’s the library,’ he eventually objected. The old rules had rushed up to meet him. ‘You can’t—’
‘Listen to me, you fat fuck,’ said the thin boy. ‘We can do whatever we want. No one is going to stop us.’ The thin boy pulled up the sleeve of his blazer and pumped his fist in the air. The symbol had been carved into his skin with a compass and made permanent in ballpoint pen. A capital A in a circle. The scabs had reddish rims to them: the itch must have been driving him mad.
‘Do you even know what that means?’ I asked him.
‘It means,’ he said patiently, ‘that we can do whatever we want.’ He grinned: his lips pulled back from his teeth until they disappeared into the surrounding skin.
‘Check this one.’ He yanked up his other sleeve to show the sequence of six engravings between elbow and fist.
I AM NOT WHAT I AM.
When I closed my eyes the imprint was still there, burned on the retina, like looking too long at the sun. Entoptics. It was the studied savagery of it rather than the mutilation that was disturbing: someone who had gouged away at himself until he bled would have no mercy on anyone else. And no one was going to come. The double volume of the library had swallowed us, just as Assembly had taken the other girls into its mouth. We were floating in space: the dim globes of the lights were the old planets. I saw them reflected in the black eyes of the girl next to me.
That home-made tattoo helped me make up my mind. Of all the things that they were going to take from us today, there was still one left. The same choice, the old choice – whether to lie down when you’re told, or to stand up. Like a man, people say, as if women are excluded from honour and dignity. I saw our bodies like a rope bridge over the centuries, stretching back from the present to the beginning of time. It was made from us, that bridge. From our tongues and our fingers and our hair. It didn’t matter what we did now. They just wanted to hurt something.
I said, ‘Is that supposed to impress me?’
The thin boy leaned in. ‘It’s definitely going to make … an impression on you.’
‘You still have a choice. You don’t have to do this.’
‘Oh, no, Miss. It’s your choice. Left or right? No. I’ll decide,’ he said.
He reached out without breaking eye contact, and grabbed my wrist. I felt the bones grinding obscurely together.
‘Kenny!’ he sang. ‘Scalpel!’
The words slipped out before I could stop them, as if my heart had squeezed up into my throat and twanged the vocal cords.
‘Oh, Kenny—’
But I found that now I had spoken up, I had nothing to say. How do you appeal to people who don’t think you’re a person in the same way that they are? I wondered if the boys had already visited carnage on their own school first before they had come over; I wondered how many of them there were. I had a sudden vision of what they wanted: the windows smashed, the library in ashes, the last hard covers of the books smouldering on the carpet. And then my girls in the rubble, ranked like dolls in the cathedral stillness, their spaghetti straps snapped, their stick-on tattoos crazed with cracks. I saw the girl behind me, free of her braces at last.
But I never saw my own body among them – and believe me when I say that I looked hard for it.
I said the only thing I could think of. ‘Kenny, do you remember the rule?’
Kenny looked sadly at me through his glasses. The lenses were cloudy with grief. ‘I before e,’ he said. ‘Except after c.’ And he burst into tears. A string of snot bungeed out of one nostril. He tried to bury his face in his hands, but he had to drop the knife to do it. It clanged sideways against the door, and the girl behind me grabbed my arm and dug in at the sound. She was still sucking her thumb, her dentistry being destroyed like a citadel under siege.
He wept on in the awed quiet that follows an outburst of real emotion before an audience. The thin boy stared at him, disgust seeping through his pores, waiting for the end of the display.
Kenny wailed, ‘Ah, jeez! My dad is going to ki-hi-hill me!’ He had the look of a sleeper woken in an unfamiliar bed.
‘Then he’ll have to get in line,’ said the thin boy. ‘Pick. It. Up. You softcock.’
‘I ca-ha-han’t!’ wailed Kenny.
The thin boy turned on him.
‘Then THROW it here! You are such a fucken GIRL!’
Kenny bent by degrees to pick up the knife, as if he expected it to weigh more than it used to. The thin boy harassed him all the while. Behind me the girl removed her thumb from her mouth and whispered, ‘Why are they doing this?’ It was the question of children pushed off swings – and of whole villages swallowed by plague. When she saw I had no answer, she shrugged. The thin strap of her top fell down – she had no chest yet to hold it up.
Kenny flicked his hand. The knife skidded across the carpet.
The thin boy twisted my wrist towards him, and my arm pressed against his abdomen. He leaned over and picked up the knife with a sigh, as if he had come to the real business of the occasion. I think he had an erection.
‘I’m starting with her. As an example,’ the thin boy announced to the room, ‘but we’re here to carve it into every last one of you.’ He said this pleasantly, as if he was just passing the time of day. The girls under the tables were silent. They were being quiet as mice, as he had requested; they were twitching and scenting the air for the outcome.
‘If anyone wants to go first,’ he went on, ‘just let me know.’
What can I say? I should have set an example. I should have pulled away. But I didn’t. I couldn’t believe that he would actually go through with it.
The blade pressed against my skin but didn’t draw blood. It was blunt, that knife, decorative but dull, an accessory in a game. Somewhere people were sobbing; the last strains of the school anthem came from the direction of the hall, a soundtrack to suffering. I wanted to tell them, the girls and the boys, that time isn’t linear. It can stretch like Chappies, like the little red elastics on braces.
They say that you don’t feel the pain when your body is traumatised, but it’s not true. I felt every cut. The thin boy dragged down hard on the first stroke, and I saw my skin bunch and tear under the pressure of the blade. He sawed, humming as he went. I couldn’t help it. I screamed over the singing. I, said the red cuts on my wrist. He crossed the top and bottom in quick, ragged strokes, working his way towards my elbow. It was slippery work. And still I let him. You feel it all, but you send your mind away. You save it for later, so you can replay the scene again and again, looking for the trick of light that would have made a difference. It’s funny what your mind does, when it’s unbalancing.
Kenny was bunched against the laminated poster on the library door, touching his wet glasses as if they reassured him. I could see the fat roll at his waist where his shirt had pulled free of his school trousers, and the snail trails of stretch marks, the signs of growing. Tuck in your shirt, I thought, but that wasn’t what was coming out of my mouth. Is that me? I wondered. Am I making this sound? The thin boy was silent, concentrating on carving the crossbar of the A. I saw Kenny uncurl his body; he moved slowly. By the time he did anything it would be too late: I would be speaking the new language of a lacerated alphabet.
But he did move. He moved. Kenny pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose one last time and hauled himself upright. The carpet muffled the tread of his school shoes.
Kenny didn’t bother with speaking – he simply stretched his hands out like a sleepwalker and pushed the thin boy sideways. He toppled over and sprawled, and I yanked my arm back from him. Before I could do anything else, the girl behind me grabbed me by the wrist. I was about to struggle when she pressed something soft down firmly over the cuts. She did it so that I couldn’t see them, and I was grateful. Sometimes not looking is the best thing you can do. Later, when they had to rip it from the crusted slashes in the emergency room at Vincent Pallotti, I saw what it was: a bandanna that she would never wear.
The thin boy gaped up from the carpet at Kenny. ‘What are you doing?’
Kenny had stopped crying, or maybe he’d just run out of tears.
‘I did this for you!’ the thin boy cried. ‘You said you wanted to come!’
Kenny looked wordlessly at him. I waited for him to touch his glasses, but it seemed he was done even with that. Everything he knew was untrue, as if he had been bombed back into a past that precluded speech, as if the little dyslexic boy had found him out at last.
‘What’s WRONG with you!’ cried the thin boy. It wasn’t a question.
‘Not in the library,’ said Kenny. His voice was soft and devoid of emotion. He was stating a rule. He picked up my teaching copy of Othello and held it to his sweaty shirtfront to underline his short speech.
‘You fat FREAK!’ screamed the thin boy. He scrambled to his feet and lunged, throwing himself at Kenny, who lifted the book. The thin boy bounced off him and stumbled backwards. He fell back again under his own disequilibrium. I think it was the first time that Kenny had realised that his tonnage could stand for something other than ridicule.
But the thin boy was impervious to pain. He picked himself up again, gasping, and repeated his attack – and Kenny fended him off, a little more violently this time. The corner of the book had been crumpled in the assault, like the head of a turtle retreating into its shell. Kenny held it up.
‘Look what you did,’ he said to the thin boy. He spoke with a kind of wonder. ‘You damaged a book!’
The thin boy looked at him in amazement. ‘What are you going to do, Kenny?’ he asked. ‘Fine me? Are you going to fine me?’
The way of the world had come to visit Kenny. He understood, and drooped. The music from the Valentine’s Assembly had come to an end. Somewhere else the headmistress would be delivering a speech on kinds of love apart from the romantic. My pulse triangulated between head, heart and wrist, pumping blood to the cuts. I pressed the wad down harder in the pause between question and answer.
That was when the sprinklers came on, soaking everything in their cool, rational mist. It’s standard practice for emergencies now, but back then it was a miracle. The drops didn’t sink in as soon as they landed: they quivered, whole, like water under a microscope. I imagined the people who would come later with their tools, sifting our damp remains, matching femur with kneecap, counting out toes.
The rain fell and the covers of the books darkened by degrees, the stains spreading down their spines. The pages would swell to triple their size and the covers would warp. Nothing would fit back between them.
The first cellphone rang.
The girl beside me squeaked. It was surprise more than anything else. She hadn’t made a sound the whole time I was being cut, or when the boys were fighting.
The thin boy was back on his feet. He swivelled towards her.
‘What did I say?’ he roared. ‘Didn’t I tell you to be as quiet as a mouse?’ He shoved the knife towards his own face and for a moment I thought he would plunge it into his eye, but he only clenched it between his teeth. He marched over and began to drag her out from under the table. She was so light that he only had to pull once to unbalance her. A boy’s centre of gravity is in his shoulders; a girl’s is in her pelvis. She fell forward. The strap on her top broke under his hands. The thin boy simply hauled her over onto her back and sat on her chest. There were carpet burns on her knees.
He stared into her face, then he reached down and forced his fingers inside her mouth. He twanged the little red elastics on her braces. Then he tried to yank the girl’s head up by the hair, but the little hooks on her headgear had caught in the carpet and trapped her. The thin boy gave up and then raised both hands above his own head, clasping the hilt of the knife like an Olympic athlete on the podium.
It happened so fast, survivors always say, as if slowing it down means they could have done something about it. Before we knew what was happening.
The paper heart on his sleeve seemed to pump on the downstroke. At first I thought he had aimed for the heart and missed, but he stabbed her in the throat on purpose. In movies you see blood everywhere, saturating the floor and spraying the walls, but this girl produced only one feeble jet, like the water pistols her classmates would use to terrorise the school for Matric Madness. I didn’t expect the hot slaughterhouse smell of her insides, there among the books. Pig, I thought. Pig, pig. We were seeing the end of fiction.
The other girls had their heads in their hands. They hid behind one another. Some of them were sobbing, but they were trying to do it silently: they had seen what had happened to girls who weren’t as quiet as mice. More cellphones rang. The tinny voices rose in an approximation of music, an automaton’s idea of an orchestra.
The cellphone symphony rose and seemed to rouse the thin boy. He looked down at what he had done. He touched her mouth again. His voice was flat, as if shock could absorb sound. ‘I used to wear braces. But they hurt. Especially at night. This ache, you know?’ He wanted us to understand. ‘So one night I got up and I took them off with pliers.’ He laughed at himself.
Still the cellphones rang. The girls were crying, louder now. Kenny had sunk back down to the floor again, his stand for the old order overturned. He had let go of Othello, and it had fallen spread-eagled on the carpet, where the inferior ink began to run. Kenny saw the death of punctuation; he watched the lines lose their curly brackets. The words went last, smearing the pages. The paper itself would eventually dissolve back into its constituent fibres, like a time-lapse film, something running in reverse and sending all of us back to the forest. And they say there’s no undoing; they say there’s no going back!
The thin boy rolled off the girl’s body. He was still holding the knife. And he came to me, came to do what he had always planned to do, but had been frustrated by interruption and insubordination. The thin boy also had rules. I tried to move off my knees. For a moment there was the sick dream-fear that I was paralysed, that the thin boy had cut some vital wire in the current of my body. But they moved, my joints grinding, old and out of time. I shifted from under the table. The cellphones chorused, the prelude to a performance: bleeps and riffs and phrases from another world, like the recordings NASA sends into space. And I stood up to meet him.
He slashed at me, wanting to divide me in two like the poster on the door. But he counted on my being still, the way the girl was, and all I did was wait until he had completed his arc. I reached out with my good arm and dug my thumb into his wrist, there, burrowing deep between the bracketing tendons. He shrieked and buckled.
‘Kenny!’ I said. ‘Get over now and help!’ And Kenny did. He pushed the thin boy down and clambered on him: he had seen how it was done. But it was me the thin boy bawled at.
‘You got your blood on me!’
Outside, sirens were joining the cellphone chorus. Grown-ups were coming. The thin boy cocked his head as he listened, and he looked up at Kenny, calmer.
‘You know we can’t go back,’ he said. The thin boy turned his face to the library wall, away from the poster, with its BAD RULES FOR BOOKS. STUDENTS who DAMAGED BOOKS were going to be FINED.
I think if he had had a chance he would have tried to kill himself. It was a clean decision, the kind made by dictators in bunkers, by boys with mail-order guns. He ignored the body of the dead girl as if she had never existed. The spaghetti strap of her top hung off her shoulder. It bothered me, that broken strap. The flesh itself was unmarked under the blood: once she was washed at the mortuary there would be no way to tell what had happened except if you looked at the ragged hinge of her throat.
I reached out and slipped the strap back into place, where it belonged.
I think of her, now, whenever I undress. In the mirror I take off my bra and there is a groove in the grown-up flesh of each shoulder. She will never have these indentations.
It took two paramedics to lift Kenny off the thin boy.
I still see them, the pig and the wolf. I see the thin boy on his knees with his sleeves up, as he was at the beginning, not sitting on the dead girl’s chest at the end. It’s not the stabbing that horrifies me: that was a quick thing. It’s the inked scabs on his arm that stay, that merging of text and flesh.
And it’s Kenny I wonder about, the one who could have gone either way. I wonder what he’s going to do in the post-February world.
And me, of course. I wonder about me. I let her die. I am not what I am.
But at least I’m here to remember how the story about the wolves and the pigs turns out. I have the scars to prove it. I wear long-sleeved shirts as a rule, but sometimes they ride up before I can pull them down again, and students gawk. They should stare: it’s an odd tattoo.
I AM.