11PM—I can’t bloody believe what happened today. CAN’T BELIEVE IT. Right, so today me and Carrie and Sean and Joshua and Saf are all sitting in the Audio Visual room in the dark watching this film called Secrets and Lies for Film Studies which sounds like a right old doss but believe me it ain’t ’cos you have to concentrate proper hard and try to work out how the filmmaker is “creating tension” and “building characters” which is NOTHING LIKE going to the AMC Loews where everyone chucks popcorn and farts and talks on their phones the whole way through.
So we’re all in the dark and it’s totally quiet aside from Carrie snoring and suddenly there is this well loud BANG outside. Like, BAAAAAAANG! Like a car backfiring proper loudly. Then seconds later loads of screaming and shouting. Then doors slamming and loads of noise in the halls and thundering feet and yelling and shrieking. So we all stand up and run to the window and look down onto the path up to the school gate and suddenly there’s loads of Year Ten and Year Eleven kids outside all waving their arms and looking frightened and sickened and excited all at once like something proper amazing had just happened.
So I open the window and shout down to Tariq who is one of Murphy’s friends, “Tariq, what’s happened?”
And he shouts “Clinton Brunton-Fletcher has been shot! Someone has shot him, man! Brap Brap Braaaaaap!” And Tariq is waving his hands in the air giving gun signs looking sort of happy but sort of disgusted at the same time.
So I said, “What do you mean? Where’s Clinton?”
Tariq said, “Dunno man, he’s gone! Whoever shot him is well gone too!”
I backed away from the window, suddenly feeling well cold and sick, and by that point the bell was ringing and outside turned into total bloody chaos ’cos suddenly there was like a thousand kids all flocking around the main gate and everyone telling everyone else the tale that Clinton had been shot and Uma was in the center of it trying to talk on her cell phone looking proper upset. And then the police arrived blaring their sirens and then even more police arrived and then some news reporters arrived and then loads of parents arrived and then loads of passersby started loitering and everyone was shouting at each other and Mrs. Radowitz and Ms. Bracket were trying to push the kids back indoors. And by this point people were saying that they’d DEFINITELY seen the car and they’d definitely seen Clinton covered in blood and it weren’t a small gun, no it was a big gun, in fact it was one of them proper gangster MAC-10 submachine guns and the gunman were on a moped, no in a Audi, no in a Benz Jeep. And there was four of them. No, five. Five gunmen in ski masks doing a drive-by shooting! Except one gunman took off his ski mask and a Year Seven lad saw it was DEFINITELY JANELLE.
This was all crap. No one had really seen anything, in fact the only people who’d seen anything at all was two Year Nine kids, Olivier and Mikey, and they were now saying that they saw Clinton on his BMX, then they just heard a bang, which was maybe just a car backfiring and then Clinton shouting out then pedaling away. But by this point that story seemed pretty BORING and everyone wanted to believe the gun story more and everyone wanted to be part of the drama, except Uma who now seemed to have disappeared, and there were girls crying and boys giving it the big one saying Clinton deserved to get merked and everyone was talking about gangs and guns and by this point Sky News had arrived on the scene and my mother called my cell and said that Mayflower was live on the telly on one of their big flashing News Flash bulletins that said, “SHOOTING AT SUPERCHAV ACADEMY.”
Mum said I had to come home straightaway and I shouted, “Mum, I don’t even think there’s been a shooting!” and Mum shouted, “Well there’s been something going on! It’s all over the news! I’m watching your bloody school now! There’s a police helicopter circling the school! Get yourself home RIGHT NOW!” So I says to her, “Mum I don’t think that is a police helicopter I think that’s maybe the Sky News helicopter filming the pictures that you’re watching.” Then she told me to stop being so bloody clever and get home before I got my head blown off.
I didn’t go home. Me and Carrie hung about around the film crews for a while listening to news reporters do their reports. Loads of kids were trying to get into the camera shots and people who knew NOTHING about Mayflower School were suddenly turning up being a world flipping authority on the place which was making me proper angry. I was listening to this one guy wearing a suit and tie holding a microphone and he was going live on BBC and he was obviously just making up crap as he went along going something like…
“Well, Julia! Here I am, outside Mayflower Academy! Now, this is a school that has been DOGGED BY CONTROVERSY for a long time and it had seemed recently as though there had been some VAGUE IMPROVEMENTS, but now it’s more of the same: weapons, gangs, violence, drug-dealing, and antisocial behavior! What a sad example of the youth of today this school is! I mean, to set the scene, this was the school that was once called the WORST SCHOOL IN BRITAIN providing some of the lowest standards in education in the country. In turn it gained a nickname in media circles as “Superchav Academy”—chav being a term for the very underclass, FERAL, out of control children we see all too often in Britain today. Well the nickname CERTAINLY FITS TODAY, Julia, because here I am on the scene of what is looking to be a drive-by-shooting incident! More news as we get it, this is me, Max Blackford, reporting for BBC news, now back to the studio…”
This made me really really mad. Max Blackford didn’t mention that this maybe weren’t even a shooting. Or if it was it HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH MAYFLOWER KIDS, it was caused by somebody who left years ago. Max didn’t say there were lots of really good kids at Mayflower. Or mention Tonita’s ice-skating or Manpreet’s Countdown prize or the time Year Eight made that Diplodocus out of egg cartons to give to the children’s hospital or the lad in Year Ten who got scouted for West Ham youth soccer squad last week! Or the fact that loads of kids at Mayflower got proper GCSEs this year or the fact that we WEREN’T ALL BLOODY CHAVS WHO WERE INTO SHOOTING EACH OTHER, RIGHT????
So when Max bloody Bratford asked me and Carrie if we wanted to go live on the six o’clock broadcast for forty-five seconds and give an interview about “What Life is Like as a Superchav” I decided I’d wait till the cameras were filming and tell him exactly what I thought. Go and look on YouTube—the clip is up already. His face is a proper picture.