Flood by Ian Rankin

day.

    'You're fucked then, aren't you? When that happens it means you haven't been concentrating. You might have written anything down. Serves you right, you fucking swots.
    What good will it do you when we leave? There's no jobs anyway. Why bother?'

    Belly Martin's stomach sagged obscenely over his waistband, and his pudgy fingers would lift leftovers from a neighbour's school-dinner plate straight into his gaping mouth. Fat boys are usually ridiculed at school, both in comics and in reality, but Belly was too ghastly to have even that fate befall him. He was not the archetypal fat boy.

    Indeed, Sandy often shuddered when he contemplated the differences. Belly was vicious. He would hug you to him in a clinch and would crush your face against his chest, smothering you. His shirt smelled of vinegar, as if he had not washed for a long time. He lied and stole and cheated, and if confronted by a teacher would retreat into the guise of typical fat boy - picked on, unloved, unwanted, innocent. To the frustration of his classmates, it was a part he played to perfection. He would spread his arms wide plaintively, and his eyes and mouth would open in astonishment, then he would blurt out his controlled acting until the teacher frowned and looked again for a culprit. Belly would soon be grinning, and would reach a hand deep into his trouser pocket, wriggling it around until he found some ancient paper-covered sweet. This he would crunch into tiny pieces, still laughing and slavering mild taunts at those who had informed on him.

    'Ha! Better luck next time, clipes. Go tell fucking teacher.
    Ha!'

    Sandy was revolted by the boy and always had been. He seemed impervious to pain, either mental or physical, like a lumbering dinosaur. That was the frustrating thing. Sandy tried not to be sitting near him in the examination hall.
    Belly scratched his bemused face with a rasping sound like the unwrapping of a difficult toffee and made life unbearable for those around him.

    Revenges, often colossal in intent, were planned against him, but were never carried through with any degree of success. Sandy had planned several of his own. The simplest was the braining of Belly with an empty bottle in a dark alley. The most complex involved pieces of machinery, a trifle containing ground glass, and a nest of rats. Sandy used to keep these plans in a stolen jotter in his secret drawer at home, but he had guiltily torn them up just before his exams in case there was a God and it or he or she decided to spite him with low marks. It had been childish anyway. Any worthwhile revenge would be simple and short-winded. But what? That was the problem.

    After the final examination, Economics, a few of them went down to the park with a carry-out filched from Colin's
    father's drinks cabinet. They leapt what had once been the hot burn - now a sorry old thing, dehydrated, its clay a raw, rusty colour - and jogged across the playing field in the direction of a small pond in the Wilderness. They carried the cans of warm lager inside their rolled-up jackets. They were so nearly men, only weeks away from the dole and the free money that came with it.

    All except Sandy.

    'Christmas!' yelled Colin. 'Christ's Mass! Sandy's got to stay on till Christmas!' As Sandy wiped his damp forehead he found it impossibly difficult to envisage snow and being wrapped up in layers of clothes and rushing to the fireside.
    It seemed too ludicrous an idea to have any grounding in the real world. He became disorientated, and almost asked his companions if they really believed in something as alien as snow. Then his head cleared a little, just in time for him to realise that they were crossing the pipeline over the river.
    He watched the others playing at being acrobats as they walked over the slender cylinder, then walked across himself, his legs trembling. They were waiting on the other side, laughing and pleading with him to fall off. He tried to smile, but kept looking down at the