Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [62]
It wouldn’t matter if these emotions just faded away. But they didn’t; they stayed with him and they got worse, like ruts digging ever deeper in his mind. It reminded Tommy unpleasantly of being a child, utterly vulnerable to his own moods.
School had been the worst. He remembered the feeling of plunging terror he used to get when he sat down in a classroom and realized that there was nothing the teacher could say or do that would even remotely interest him. He knew more than most of the teachers did about the subjects they taught. But he was still condemned to sit there hour after our, numb with boredom.
Not all the lessons were like that, of course. He could always lose himself in the beautiful abstract symmetries of mathematics and there was also the glory that was the biology lab. But those lessons only occupied a few hours in each week’s timetable. The rest of the time he was forced to sit in the slow‐motion horror of boredom until he was finally released to go stumbling into the corridor feeling dazed and sick.
And the corridors were just a different form of torture. The corridors and the playground. They were, if anything, worse than the classrooms. At least the tedium of the classrooms was a known equation. Outside, at the mercy of the other children, anything might happen.
Not that Tommy was bullied. Sometimes one of the other children tried to pick on him but they soon learned to be wary of his big sister. Chubby and formidable, Pam had no hesitation about wading into battle on his behalf, grabbing some kid and swinging him around by his collar until he learned his lesson.
But there were other bad things besides being bullied. Like girls. The girls didn’t bother Tommy until he hit puberty. Then everything changed. Going from child to teenager was a nightmare. Suddenly he was painfully self‐conscious about every moment of his waking existence. He couldn’t walk across a room without feeling the girls looking at him, without sweating with anxiety and awkwardness.
Tommy felt that he had been turned out of Eden. Childhood had been a paradise compared to this new world of savage embarrassment and self‐awareness. He wished he was invisible so that the girls wouldn’t notice him. But the more he tried to evade their eyes, the more he singled himself out. They looked at him and giggled and Tommy knew why. He was ugly and he was clumsy and he stank. His face became crusted with acne and his skin and hair became oily, and the girls laughed all the harder.
But every cloud has a silver lining. If it wasn’t for the way the girls tormented him, he would never have discovered natural justice.
Because the world is ultimately a good and sane place. Crimes do not go unpunished.
Tommy remembered when the idea first came to him.
He was sitting in the biology lab, working after school one dark winter evening. It struck him like a revelation. The lab had recently acquired a litter of hamsters for the children to feed and look after. Tommy had suffered some particularly vicious little jibe from the girls during lunch that day.
He didn’t have to hear it to know that they’d said something about him. He saw them giggling. He knew they were talking about him. How could they be so vicious? Didn’t they know what they did to him? His face flushed with embarrassment, sending his pimples an emphatic hot red and causing the greasy sweat to flow in his armpits. All it took was that one stifled giggle. He was certain he’d heard it.
So that winter evening, alone in the blissful silence of the biology lab, Tommy had found the answer. He looked up from his book and saw the cage full of hamsters. Then he looked across the room at the cupboard where they kept the bottles of hydrochloric acid.
Tommy was all alone and he could do whatever he wanted.
That evening Tommy had discovered the system of natural justice. After that, whenever