Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [55]
Ricky sat and listened to the school, letting its characteristic rhythms sink into his consciousness. He was getting to know the school.
Ricky concentrated for a moment more and then he pressed. That’s what it felt like. It was as if he’d applied pressure with his mind.
He wasn’t certain exactly what it was he did, but it reminded him of pressing on one end of a water bed and watching the mattress bulge at the other.
Ricky pressed with his mind and then he opened his eyes.
All around him the corridor was full of girls.
The girls looked at each other strangely and stared around, as if they had been summoned here but they were uncertain who or what had done the summoning. The girls were vital, distinctive, vividly pretty. Some of them had brought boyfriends along with them, hand in hand.
Their usual wanderings around the school had suddenly brought them here, but now that they’d arrived none of them quite knew why they were standing in this corridor.
None of them noticed the boy on the bench who sat quietly, smiling.
Then, cutting through the girls, came an older kid wearing a leather jacket. Trailing after him came a small group of teenage boys. A certain frightened silence among the girls followed their passage. On the back of the kid’s leather jacket was an image of a wolf, evidently hand painted by someone. Ricky couldn’t imagine that the kid had painted it himself. He looked like the only way he could use a paint-brush was as an offensive weapon, reversed in a thuggish fist and jabbed into his opponent’s eye.
Ricky sat on his bench and watched the arrival of the thug and his followers.
Everyone was stepping back as they walked slowly past.
The thug strode down the corridor ahead of the others. He glanced at Ricky but his gaze moved on without pausing, dismissing the boy on the bench as not worthy of his attention.
On the bench Ricky felt a flash of triumph. It was a strange wordless emotion, but if he could have put it into words he would have said, ‘I’ve fooled them again.’
The thug in the leather jacket came striding back past Ricky. He didn’t even bother glancing at the nondescript kid on the bench this time. Ricky kept his head hanging down to conceal a smile of victory. He’d done it again. Fooled them all.
He stole a look at the girls standing nearby. He knew that these girls represented the elite, the aristocracy in the school’s pecking order. Now they stood in the corridor, not quite knowing why they were here.
But Ricky knew why they were here.
The painted wolf folded and flexed on the back of the thug’s leather jacket. Ricky watched him move among the girls.
If the girls were the school’s velvet glove, he was its iron fist.
The thug stood for a moment in puzzlement and frustration and the other kids seemed to be holding their breath.
Ricky knew that the kid in the leather jacket was the local bully. The true power structure of the school. Sitting shut up in his office Mr Pangbourne might believe that he ran this Place, but Ricky knew what the truth was.
The thug was the uncrowned king of the playground and classrooms. This kid with his gang of cronies who didn’t even know why they were here.
Ricky knew why they were here.
The small crowd in the corridor was beginning to look anxious. They’d obviously seen this look in the thug’s eyes before and they regarded it as dangerous. Ricky watched the kid in the leather jacket, but circumspectly, so as not to draw his attention. He had learnt long ago that people seemed to become aware of his gaze very quickly and they would look around, trying to make eye contact with him.
Ricky dreaded eye contact. So he’d learnt a trick for watching people. He’d kind of look at them indirectly, out of the corner of his eye. And this seemed to stop them becoming aware of his attention.
Ricky sat watching the thug out of the corner of his eye.
The kid had an odd look on his face. It was a look consisting of rage and frustration. Ricky understood. He was frustrated