The Rotters' Club Read Online Free PDF

music. Anderton spent nearly all his pocket money on records and had just bought Stranded by Roxy Music. He was trying to persuade Chase to borrow it, insisting it blew the socks off his poxy Genesis albums. Benjamin was listening, but half-heartedly. Both bands left him cold: so did the Eric Clapton tape his parents had given him for his birthday. He was growing out of rock music, looking for something new… And besides this, something very distracting was going on at the bus stop on the other side of the road. Harding now seemed to be talking – this was unbelievable, but true: actually talking – to Cicely Boyd, the willowy goddess who ran the junior wing of the Girls’ School Drama Society. How was this possible? Her aloofness was legendary, and yet there she was, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed as he recounted and pantomimed the recorded highlights of his latest prank. Ben watched in amazement as, even more incredibly, she licked her finger and rubbed at his cheek, attempting to wipe off some of the inky traces.
    ‘Look at that,’ he said, nudging his friends and pointing.
    The musical spat was quickly forgotten.
    ‘Bloody hell…’
    ‘Shit…’
    Even Anderton, whose sexual politics were rather more sophisticated than the others’, was reduced to speechlessness by the spectacle of Harding so casually hitting this particular jackpot. There seemed to be nothing they could do, except gawp; until, after a few moments, the 62 bus arrived, and with a series of wistful backward glances they piled on to the front of the top deck.
    ‘He’s got a nerve, you know,’ said Chase, as the bus swayed into motion again and rattled with the din of schoolkids’, chatter. ‘It was all his idea. Now we get into trouble and he gets all the glory.’
    ‘It was a crap idea anyway,’ said Anderton. ‘I said so at the time. You never listen to me, you people. There’s only one person who should have been allowed to play that part, and that’s Richards.’
    ‘But he’s not in our form.’
    ‘Exactly. So we should have dropped the whole thing.’
    Richards was the only black pupil in their year: the only one in the entire school, in fact. A tall, sinewy, somewhat melancholy Afro-Caribbean, he lived on the outskirts of Handsworth and was a new arrival at King William’s; he had joined in the third year, and his form was upper-middle D. Anderton, incidentally, was unique in referring to him as Richards. The other ninety-five boys in his year called him ‘Rastus’.
    ‘But we worked for hours on that scene,’ Chase protested, ‘and we never even got to perform it.’
    ‘That’s life.’
    The bus had squeezed its way through the Selly Oak traffic and was making its way along the faster, leafier carriageways of the Bristol Road South. Chase’s stop was the first, just before Northfield, and a strange thing happened when he got up to leave. The girl who had been sitting behind them – a girl they had all seen countless times before, but barely noticed – followed him down the stairs, but just before she disappeared from view she threw a glance, unmistakably, in Benjamin’s direction. It was an eloquent glance: sidelong, surreptitious, but at the same time not exactly quick. Her eyes, peeping out from an unruly fringe of dark hair, lingered on Benjamin for two or three seconds, almost appraisingly, and there was the clear intimation of a smile in her full lips. In a couple of years’ time, Benjamin might have recognized this smile as flirtatious. For now, it merely stupefied him, setting in motion a wild complex of different feelings which had the effect of rooting him helplessly to the spot. Before he could make any kind of response, she was gone.
    ‘Who was that?’ he asked.
    ‘Her name’s Newman, or something. Claire Newman, I think. Why, d’you fancy her?’
    Benjamin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked curiously out of the window, watching as Chase followed her along St Laurence Road. He was walking at an