Read Online The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker - Free Book Online Page A

her. Jostled her. Pushed her against the wing mirror, so hard that it broke off. Other people were witnesses. Nobody tried to stop them.
    ‘The bitch needs a good fuck.’
    ‘Go on. Give it to her.’
    ‘Fuck the Bitch, Fuck the Bitch.’
    ‘She wants a good big one up her.’
    Behind the masks the voices were unrecognizable, but we all knew who they were. The incident was reported in the local paper. Everyone was questioned. No one talked.
    The violence which simmered just below the surface of suburbia was generated by boredom and drugs. I never took drugs for the not very creditable reason that everybody else did and I was determined not to belong, but to be different. Everything was on offer in the changing rooms, even crack, at a good price. Periodically there were sudden staff swoops and searches, and some of the fourth-formers, the well-known pushers, were expelled. Drugs were egalitarian and casually crossed all the class boundaries. Drugs were cool. It was the done thing to be out of your head from time to time. No one regarded drugs as criminal. They were an essential leisure activity. It was a crime to be bookish, clever, a pooftah, or to have a middle-class accent. It was still worse to be black. None of this could be policed, contained or controlled. Sometimes the teachers fell ill, gave up, went home early or absented themselves without notice, if disciplining their classes proved too exhausting and too dangerous. There were numerous cases of arson. Someone started a fire in the bike sheds and it was only the smell of burning rubber which alerted the caretaker. Everything was chained down and locked up. Otherwise it would have been stolen and sold.
    Roehm’s face shimmered behind a dense cloud of cigarette smoke. He listened with absolute attention. He made no comment.
    ‘My school’s like a police state where the militia can’t really control the underworld. There are more of us than there are of them. They may have more power, but we have more information.’
    ‘And what’s your strategy for survival in all this? Apart from the bunker in the library?’
    ‘Well, there are always a few of us who want to work. Doesn’t do to sit at the front, though, mid-class is safer. It’s OK now that I’m in the sixth. Everything’s calmer. I steer clear of the more aggressive gangs. Don’t go outside during break. Don’t take showers after PE. It’s safer to go home filthy. I fought once. I stabbed one of them with a compass. He’s still got the scar. But we even talk to each other sometimes now. If they know you’ll fight they’ll leave you alone. And they realize I’m not a snitch. I didn’t say anything after they threatened to rape my French teacher. I vary my route to school. I don’t leave my bike in the sheds. I lock it up behind the paper shop. Jess lets me do that. They’re Pakis. And I used to do one of his morning rounds when I was younger. Then I help them scrub the graffiti off the shop windows and walls. Sometimes we have to paint it over. You can still see the swastikas, but only very faintly now. I walk the last half-mile or so to school. But I even vary that route. I haven’t been beaten up for over two years. There are girl gangs too. But they only pick on other girls.’
    ‘I don’t think that your mother knows anything about this.’
    ‘No, she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her. She’d be worried. And then she might get in touch with the school. She thinks you can change things by protesting and making a fuss. That would only make life hell for me. Word gets around. If the parents kick up, the children get done over. I’ve seen it happen. Anyway, she wouldn’t understand. They don’t have discipline problems at the college. Everybody’s there because they want to be.’
    ‘But she does worry about you. She says you don’t appear to have any friends.’
    I suddenly resented this. I didn’t like her talking about me to Roehm. If I had no friends it was my