The Rotters' Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

deposited in Fletcher’s pigeonhole by nine o’clock the next morning: a particular humiliation for Benjamin, who was famous for never incurring punishments of any kind. As for Harding himself, he had been put, inevitably, in Saturday-morning detention. They could see him now, waiting at the bus stop on the other side of the road (Harding lived to the north of Birmingham, in Sutton Coldfield), surrounded by fans and still bearing the battle scars of his adventure, for his face had been thoroughly scrubbed but retained a spectral residue of ocean blue. At least half of his audience was female, Benjamin noticed. King William’s School for Girls stood on the same site as its male counterpart, and while there was very little official contact between the schools – until you got to the sixth form, anyway – a good deal of nervy, spellbound fraternization would take place on the buses home, and Harding already had no shortage of female admirers. He looked gleefully unbowed, basking in the heat of his growing notoriety.
    Benjamin and his friends were savagely envious. The girls in their bus queue talked only among themselves, perhaps throwing an amused glance in their direction once in a while, but otherwise indifferent to the point of hostility. Lois, of course, would not have dreamed of talking to her brother on these occasions, even though they were standing only a few feet apart. The edgy fondness which they sustained at home collapsed into hideous embarrassment whenever their schoolfriends were around. It was bad enough that they were known, collectively, as ‘the Rotters’, an epithet dreamed up when somebody noticed that their names could be pronounced ‘Bent Rotter’ and ‘Lowest Rotter’. What made it worse was that Benjamin still had to wear school uniform while Lois, as a sixth-former under the Girls’ School’s more liberal regime, could dress as she pleased. (Today she was wearing her long blue denim coat with thick white fur collar, over a ribbed acrylic roll-neck jumper and embroidered denim loons.) Somehow this created another barrier, the firmest of all, so that normal contact was out of the question until they had reached the impenetrable privacy of the family tea table.
    ‘Busy evening ahead for you boys, then?’ said a plummy, prematurely broken voice behind them. They turned to see their old enemy Culpepper: junior rugger captain, junior cricket captain, would-be athletics champion and long-standing object of derision. As always, he was carrying his books and his PE kit in the same bulky sports bag, from which the handle of his squash racket protruded like a permanently erect penis. ‘Six sides apiece, wasn’t it? That should have you burning the midnight oil.’
    ‘Fuck off, Culpepper,’ said Anderton.
    ‘Ooh,’ he gasped, in mock-admiration. ‘Most amusing. Such dazzling repartee.’
    ‘It was only a joke, anyway,’ said Benjamin. And he pointed out: ‘You were laughing with the rest of them.’
    ‘You’ve only yourselves to blame,’ said Culpepper, wiping his nose and thereby revealing, to less than general astonishment, that even his handkerchiefs had name-tags attached. ‘Fletcher’s a dreadful old liberal softie. He wouldn’t let anyone get away with impersonating a nigger.’
    ‘You shouldn’t use that word,’ said Chase. ‘You know you shouldn’t.’
    ‘What – nigger?’ said Culpepper, enjoying the effect these two tiny syllables were having upon them. ‘Why not? It’s in the book. Harper Lee uses it herself.’
    ‘You know that’s different.’
    ‘All right, then. Wog. Coon. Darkie.’ Having failed to provoke them, he added: ‘It’s a rotten book, anyway. I don’t know why we have to read it. I don’t believe in it at all. It’s propaganda.’
    ‘No one’s interested in you or what you think,’ said Anderton, and to prove the point they turned away from him, knotting themselves into a tighter group. The conversation drifted, as it always did, towards