Soft in the Head Read Online Free PDF Page B

could teach us, he humiliated the weak, the dunces, all those who really needed him.
    To be that much of a bastard takes talent, I think.

 
     
    Y OU CAN SAY what you like, but, for a kid, schooldays aren’t the happiest days of your life. Anyone who says different doesn’t like kids, or doesn’t remember what it was like to be one.
    What makes kids happy is fishing for gudgeon or building gravel barriers on the tracks to derail goods trains—even if everyone knows it never works. Or climbing up the strut of a bridge from the bank (which doesn’t work either, because of the slant). Jumping off the top of the cemetery wall, setting fire to a patch of waste ground, knocking on doors and running away. Making little kids eat ‘sweets’ that are really goat droppings. That kind of thing.
    When you’re a kid, all you want is to be a hero.
    If your parents aren’t standing behind you, banging on about how school is important, how you have to go, how you’ve got no choice, well, you don’t bother—at least I didn’t—or you go as little as possible.
    My mother wasn’t strict about stuff like that. She would have broken a brush handle over my head if I’d tracked mud into the hall, but I don’t think she gave a damn that I never learned to read and write. When I came home at five o’clock, she hardly even looked at me. Her first words were always:
    “Did you get the bread?”
    And the next words were:
    “Don’t leave your stuff lying around. Go and put your schoolbag away.”
    I didn’t need to be told twice. I tossed my bag at the foot of my bed and went out to play with my mates, or by myself.
    The older I got, the more I bunked off. When Bayle asked me where I’d been, I’d give him some lame excuse: my mother was sick and I had to do the shopping, my grandmother had just died, I’d sprained my ankle, I’d been bitten by a rabid dog, I’d had to go to the doctor.
    I trained myself to lie and look him straight in the face. It’s harder than you think, when you’re only ten and you’re not very broad in the shoulders yet. But it taught me about courage. That’s something it’s important to have in life.
    It didn’t matter, Bayle was happy to let me fool him. It was better than having me causing trouble in his class, and it gave him a bit of a rest from constantly yelling Chazes, can you repeat what I just said? knowing full well I couldn’t. What all this meant was by the end of primary school, I was more likely to be off fishing somewhere than warming my arse on a school bench. This meant that later, when I joined the army, I was classed as suffering from mental retardation, a phrase that neatly contains the word they really thought described me: retard .
    In the period I was talking about just now, the period when I first got together with Annette, life pretty much went right over my head. And it didn’t bother me. I didn’t ask questions. I did my business in the sack and elsewhere, I played cards, I got hammered every Saturday night anddried out during the week, I took jobs on building sites when I was strapped for cash, life seemed straightforward. I made no real connection between living life and understanding life, if you see what I mean.
    It’s like with cars: if someone asked you to change the distributor, the coupling, the drive belt—or even just top up the oil, it doesn’t matter—how would you fare? Because most people who can drive don’t know the first thing about how or why an engine works. That was pretty much how I looked at my life. I turned the steering wheel, changed the gears, filled up when I needed to, and that was all…
    When I met Margueritte, at first I found learning stuff complicated. Then intriguing. Then depressing, because learning to think is like getting glasses when you’re blind as a bat. Everything around was comforting, it was simple, blurry. Now suddenly you see all the cracks, the rust, the rot, you can see that everything is crumbling. You see death,