Shuttlecock Read Online Free PDF Page B

authority. The headmaster and the schoolboy again. You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don’t know, you don’t question it, you even distrust your own doubts. It’s like the people in the Tube. They may be seething to rise up, to protest, to commit unspeakable acts against normality, but because someone has seen to it that there are Underground trains for them to be on and because some system makes sure that they keep shuttling and circling through the dark, and that is how it will be, today, tomorrow and the day after that – they don’t.
    Quinn turned his face for a moment towards the window. He looked at the cherry tree. Then he turned back to me.
    ‘Something you want to say, Prentis?’
    The old bastard.
    ‘No.’
    What a weak, what a cowardly man I am.

[5]
    And why did I want a pet hamster?
    It was because of the hamster we kept in our class-room at primary school – in a green cage, beside the dank-smelling sink where we used to wash out paint brushes and jam jars. Every week two of us would be chosen as monitors to look after the hamster, to feed it and clean out its cage, and every Friday one lucky person would be selected to take the hamster home, to be its guardian over the weekend.
    Our class-master was a man called Forster. Perhaps it was Forester, but that, maybe, is just fanciful association. One of the subjects Mr Forster used to teach us was Nature Study. From what I gather from Martin and Peter, Nature Study is not a subject they teach any more in primary schools – and that, I can’t help thinking, is a bad thing. Our school was in Wimbledon. There is quite a lot of Nature in Wimbledon, as London suburbs go; but I never really thought of Nature as something ordinary and familiar. Mr Forster’s twice-weekly lessons gave me an impression of Nature as a rare and mysterious commodity. I didn’t think of it as a principle, as a word, oreven as a collection of multifarious items, like the pictures of buds and toadstools Mr Forster drew on the blackboard. I saw it as a stuff, which could be gathered, or mined like gold, if only you knew where to find it. Above all, it was something quite separate and distinct from me.
    Our class-room was a dim, gloomy room with a view of a dim, walled-round asphalt playground. I don’t remember it too well, but I remember its smell: a mixture of chalk, floor-polish, water-colour paints and the various, spicy and ever-fascinating smells of my class-mates. In those days I registered other people not by their names and all the other identity tags but by smells and indefinable peculiarities. As if people were really only, somehow, indistinct outlets from which exuded scents, hints of some far-off source. I have forgotten the names of my class-mates, but I still remember their smells. There were certain girls who had a sharp ammoniac smell, and certain boys with a soft, dull smell, like that of much-used India rubber. Mr Forster had a reassuring, reliable smell, like the smell of wood, and just above his upper lip he had a strange and intriguing birth-mark, like some dark, fossilized fruit. As for myself, I believed I was odourless and nondescript – as if I were made from something that didn’t exist.
    Then one day Mr Forster carried into the class-room this green cage with a wire-mesh front and something living inside it. And in producing the hamster before us, like a conjuror, he used the words – as if he were revealing to us a fragment of some precious lost treasure – ‘a part of nature’. It was these words, I swear it, and not any sentimental child’s craving for a ‘pet’, for a fluffy thing with legs, which sowed the seeds of my desire for a hamster of my own. How conscientiously I carried outmy duties, when it came to my turn, as weekly monitor. How yearningly I waited for