Читать книгу His Name is David - Jan Vantoortelboom - Страница 22

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‘SIR! SIR! ROGER pinched me in the balls!’

Walter and Roger had both appeared out of nowhere. It was Monday morning, break time. I had been daydreaming in the doorway, gazing at the low-hanging branches of the old silver birch that was beginning to lean precariously over the wall between the playground and the fallow land next to it.

‘Roger! You mustn’t do that,’ I said placatingly—I wasn’t entirely sure whom to believe, though I did know Roger could be a damned little pest.

Roger protested loudly, calling Walter a great big liar, a milksop with no balls. And adding that he should put some more talcum powder on the sweat glands of his feet, because they smelled like dead rats.

‘Roger, you’re not being very nice today,’ I said, struggling to keep a straight face.

‘But it’s true, dammit. His feet reek worse than the shit in our cesspit.’

‘There will be no cursing here,’ I said with sudden severity.

Walter nodded. ‘It’s because I tortured him the day before yesterday, sir. When we held him prisoner down by the mud heaps. The chump’s still angry. First we punched his head and then … ’

‘Pah. Didn’t hurt a bit,’ Roger bragged, but I could tell it rankled with him. He also had a slight limp.

‘Then what happened?’ I asked.

‘Nothing too bad,’ Roger answered, his face the colour of beetroot. But Walter was only too willing to give me all the details.

‘Well, we, the lords of Elverdinge Castle, had beaten the enemy, the Bakelandt Bandits, and taken one of them prisoner.’

‘And that was Roger,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes.’

Walter was dying to tell the whole story, but Roger pulled his arm and said he wanted to play marbles. Marcus was standing on the side as usual, his back against the wall, longingly watching the game.

‘We had captured Roger and dragged him to the haunted willow with a rope around his neck. Do you know that tree? It’s split open from top to bottom and they say that it’s almost two hundred years old. It’s just behind the third heap and it’s always bare.’

I knew the tree. It did have an almost ghostly appearance if you walked past it in the evening.

Roger smiled wryly, turned round and limped off.

‘Well, we tied him to the tree and then … we … um … ’ Walter picked at the tip of his nose, suddenly unsure how much to tell this grown-up in front of him, who was, after all, his teacher.

‘Well … Jef’—he pointed an outstretched arm at the playing scapegoat—‘pulled down Roger’s trousers and tied a rope around this balls.’

‘Excuse me?’

I couldn’t believe my ears.

‘It’s true! And he pulled really hard. And Roger screamed!’

I was suddenly livid with rage.

‘Would you like me to do that to you? Tie a rope around your small testicles? And give it a good tug?’

I was talking louder than I intended. Startled, Walter recoiled and blanched from his neck to the roots of his hair.

‘No, no, no,’ he squealed.

‘Never do to others what you wouldn’t like done to yourself,’ I said sternly, trying in vain to contain my anger.

‘But Jef …’

‘I’m talking to you, Walter Soete! Don’t you forget it!’

My index finger touched his freckled nose. There was a glob of snot dangling from it. Then I sent him away to play nicely with the other boys, who had gathered around to watch like a herd of curious bullocks, Roger, still red-faced, in the middle.

In preparation of their Holy Communion, the boys were given catechism lessons by the nuns on Saturday mornings. I counted myself lucky that I didn’t have to give those lessons. Ordinary religious instruction did fall under my duties, however. I had skipped it in the first week because I was too busy with other things and—if I was honest—because I had no qualms postponing it. I knew God wouldn’t punish me, confident as I was that he was a fabrication. Even so, I couldn’t shirk my responsibility any longer, if only to fire the boys’ imagination. I had resolved to take a strictly unbiased approach.

‘Sir, sir!’

‘Yes, Roger.’ The lesson was almost over and I didn’t regret it.

‘Surely God can’t be everywhere at once? Isn’t the world too big, and aren’t there too many people for that?’

‘It seems that there is a part of God deep inside each of us.’

‘How so?’

‘That is difficult to explain, Roger. Perhaps you should ask Father Storme.’

Roger looked disappointed.

‘What I can tell you, is that God is more present in some people than in others.’

‘But how do those people know? What does it feel like?’

‘You’re an altar boy, aren’t you? Then you should know better than even the teacher,’ Jef said.

‘Yes,’ Etienne said. ‘That’s true. Except he never sings along ’cos he still doesn’t know the songs by heart, and last week he told me he nicked some coins from Father Storme’s collection plate, and … ’

‘Not true! It’s not true!’

I could tell from the shrewd look on his face that it was.

‘You’re going to hell, you’re going to hell!’ Jef and Etienne taunted, and the whole class laughed nervously.

‘Come now, boys,’ I said calmly. ‘No one is going to hell.’

‘How so?’

‘Whuk?’

‘Father Storme says that if we eat too many marshmallows and cake during Lent, there’s a good chance we will.’

‘Or if we don’t say a Hail Mary and an Our Father on our bare knees each night before going to sleep, we could go to hell, too.’

‘No one goes to hell,’ I repeated calmly. ‘But if you eat too many marshmallows and cake, you might have to go to the dentist.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

That was Marcus. He had been listening silently the whole time.