Bye Bye Baby by Fiona McIntosh Page A

and good-looking. We were in the same English and Science classes. On top of his handsome appearance, Billy was very smart and I hated that he wasted his gifts simply because of a stutter that brought unwelcome attention from his peers. Instead of rising above it, that simple flaw prompted in him an all-pervading bitterness.
    I ignored Billy’s call and hurried on, feeling the full weight of my homework in my schoolbag. I clutched it tightly, knowing it would be the first item to be ripped from me and emptied on the street or tossed into someone’s garden.
    ‘Hey, Bletch, wait for us.’
    That was Michael Sheriff. I could tell by his scratchy voice. Mikey was stocky, permanently rosy-cheeked and cursed with severe eczema behind his knees and thick, forever-cracked lips. I’d been at junior school with Mikey but he was now at a different senior school, although I gathered he had no friends and still relied on his earlier acquaintances for his social interaction.
    ‘What have you got in your schoolbag, Bletch? Anything for us to eat?’
    That was Phil Bowles, preoccupied with food as usual. It was Phil who’d begun the routine of following me home from school, doing his stupid Biggles impressions, forming his fingers into gogglesaround his eyes and pretending to zoom around in an aircraft. He was tiny for his age and I’d known him since primary school, when he used to like pretending to be a dog and would bound alongside the other kids. He was funny then, but something had obviously happened to him since to shape him into something far more sinister than man’s best friend. I had no idea what school he went to now for he didn’t wear a uniform; just nondescript black trousers and a white shirt without a tie.
    Finally, there was Clive Farrow, who solved his problems with his fists. Clive was slow, always in the remedial classes at school, and subjected to a lot of taunting. By secondary school, he’d learned to fight back by picking on people more vulnerable than himself and had become a fully fledged bully. If the foursome of tormentors had an inciter, Clive was probably it, although Billy was quietly accepted as their leader.
    It was Clive’s coarse voice that answered Phil. ‘No, Bletch ate it all. Be careful, Phil, Bletch will eat you too. You’re about snack size, aren’t you?’
    This set off much joshing and I sped up. I didn’t want to flat out run because that was an invitation for trouble, giving them the excuse they wanted to chase me down. If only someone would step out of their house or pull up in a car and frighten them off.
    No such luck. Billy was on my case now, stammering out the next insult.
    ‘You think you’re so clever. I saw that test you did today. Perfect score. Only one in the class. What are you doing in this school anyway if you’re so smart?’
    Billy Fletcher had hit the bull’s-eye, the one taunt that could really injure me. Yes, I was smart, cleverenough to have gone to the grammar school and shone. But just before the eleven-plus exam, my mother had been rushed to hospital to get her stomach pumped after an overdose of tranquillisers. I’d been terrified I’d be left alone, and in my trauma I had fluffed the most important test of my life. There was no going back, no resitting it. The brown envelope arrived in due course to announce what I already knew. I remember crying alone at the bottom of the garden in my father’s shed, thinking of other kids who received good news in those pristine white envelopes, telling them they were the ‘cream’ and would attend one of the two county grammar schools and have a better chance in life.
    I stopped and turned angrily to answer Billy. ‘I don’t want to be here.’
    Michael licked his flaky lips. ‘Go to grammar then! We don’t want a fat, ugly, clever bastard around us.’
    ‘What does it matter to you? You’re not even at our school, and I’m no more a bastard than you are,’ I countered. ‘My father may be dead but I