Facing the Tank Read Online Free PDF Page B

other sister, Polly.
    ‘It might help you understand where they’re sending you to live for the next five years,’ she had said darkly. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’
    He would have liked to stick up pictures as Jermyn had suggested, but he had brought none with him. Perhaps on his first exeat he could pull a poster off his bedroom wall and bring that. He had brought one picture but it wasn’t one he would care to hang. He opened the crisp front cover of Barchester Towers to check that it was still there. Then felt a familiar prickling in his stomach and wished he hadn’t.
    It was a photograph of Lottie, his dog. She was an extremely pretty mongrel. She was white with a brown splash on her back, fluffy ears and a tail like a squirrel’s. Crispin had been allowed to choose her from a litter born in a neighbouring farm a few days before his eleventh birthday. As she had grown his mother had said she looked like a Cavalier King Charles ‘gone wrong’. She was called Lottie after the assistant matron at Drummond Lodge with whom Crispin was madly in love at the time. The photograph was not an expert one, being ill-lit and lopsided, but it was typical in that Lottie had her head quizzically to one side and had been interrupted in dancing on Crispin’s bed. Looking at it, the gnawing sick worry of the past weeks – the melancholia his mother had mistaken for impending homesickness – came seeping back. The business of getting packed and saying goodbye to everyone had chased it briefly away but now he was alone, a naked prey.
    Crispin had only recently started to masturbate. A friend had taught him as a kind of leaving present at Drummond Lodge. He kept up the practice religiously, not out of any great enjoyment, for he had scant material and insufficient knowledge for a vigorous fantasy life, but from a firm belief that it was not like riding a bicycle; that if he stopped for long he would forget how it was done. One evening several weeks back he had only just finished a strictly medicinal session before his bath when Lottie came pounding in through the door, leaped on the bed and licked him with wild excitement and not on the nose. He had suppressed the memory of this little incident, not least because of the guilty pleasure it had given him. When however his mother announced more recently that Lottie was unquestionably pregnant it came back to him and a terrible connection was made. He had sat at one end of the table while his mother teased Lottie at the other, saying,
    ‘Yes you are. You are ! And you’re going to have babies. Yes! Lots and lots. And I wonder who the father is.’
    As has been said, Drummond Lodge was weak on most subjects other than discipline. Human biology was to be dealt with this term and Crispin was having to miss it to spare his father’s bank balance. In any event this was probably too specialized a case to be dealt with in the parameters of a Common Entrance paper. At every opportunity since hearing the news, he had taken Lottie for walks past local houses in the hope that her mate would run out with a friendly yap and make himself known. He had made her jump back and forth over ditches, made her climb stiles, even, when left alone one afternoon, exhausted himself running her up and down stairs. He had sat her down in pride of place on his quilt and begged her, in their secret whispered language, to show that he was blameless in this affair, but she had only gazed devotedly back and raised a reassuring paw which made the outlook blacker still. His imagination, which proved so feeble at conjuring up shades of fantasy lovers, tortured him now with nightmare scenes of his mother shrieking as puppy after glistening puppy emerged with the family nose, or human hands instead of paws or maybe just one baby would be born, nearly human, marred only by a squirrel tail and a tendency to yap at the postman. Yet again Crispin stared hard at the dog’s image and thought, ‘Please no.’
    A boy came