A rock and a hard place

I’m late. In 20 years’ time a therapist might say that it was deliberate, and I might agree, but this morning I know it’s because I couldn’t move fast enough.

The russet tiles are buffed and gleaming, the fluorescent lighting bouncing from grey locker fronts, off glazed floor, and back onto walls sweaty with the sheen of wipe clean paint. I am listening. Emptied of bodies and bags and competing voices these corridors are superconductors for sound and I am straining for the slightest scuff of a shoe or the drag of a polyester sleeve against steel, for someone lurking in one of the doorways, hiding between banks of lockers, waiting. For me.

It is only my own shoes that I hear, lowered softly and peeled back up again. My breath, I assume, is inaudible to anyone but myself, but the shoes are enough that anyone waiting would know to grow still and alert, to grow ready. My locker, mercifully, is in the middle of a bank. Time to see someone coming, time to react. I walk past all the same. I walk past the toilet door too, though my gut aches to enter. No way am I going in there. It will ache until home, but it has ached for the last five days straight, so what’s the difference?

At the office they said I should slip in the back of the hall. Slip in and re-join the class on the way to period one, but I hesitate at the door. I am stood in the hinterland between astringent quiet and the fug of several hundred stifled kids, paused between the freedom to breathe this antiseptic cool, to be myself, unseen, and the safety of supervision and expectation, a coddling conformity. In this no man’s land, one tug of the door from Mr Gibson’s disapproving oversight, I feel as safe as I ever do in this place, and so I remain here, furtive, poised.

In my last school I knew the rules. Which kids would ignore me, which took the time to belittle me, which preferred to shove or to punch. This is the start of my second term here and I can smell the menace in the pheromone doused air, but I still can’t get the measure of it. Maybe someone else would assume they could relax, that if someone was gunning for them, they’d have taken a shot by now. In 20 years’ time that therapist might tell me it was understandable, given what I’d already learnt about the world, and I might agree, but this morning my vigilance feels like survival.

They are singing a hymn when I hear what I’ve been listening for, the fast slip slip of a flat sole approaching from the left. My stomach turns, thrusting my heart into my throat where it strains at its limits. My hand, on the brass door handle, is frozen, paralysed when I need at the most, and my mouth hangs in a desperate gasp. On my shoulders, the back of my head, my skin seems to reach towards the sound, nerve endings firing like they’re generating a force field, a thin shield of anticipation, and I cringe against my own spine. The feet draw near, slapping against the floor quick and quiet, closing the distance to that fatal arm’s-length while I wait, seemingly offering myself freely whilst just the other side of this dark oak door salvation remains sealed to me.

But then, am I fooling myself? Is the sound receding? Or was it never there at all? Did another boy, in another corridor, scuttle, scared, into another doorway? Or have I heard my own ghost, an echo of my own pulse, a spectre of my own fear? Did the devil pass me by or is he long gone, or yet to come?

From the other side of the door I feel a surge, a wave of heat and unspent energy compressed against the wood, and kids begin to spill into the corridor further down. I unclench my fist, release my hold on the handle, and with a dreadful relief, my gut releases too.