Leith, William by The Hungry Years Page B

amazing, it really is. It really sets you up. I could do it now if I wanted, just rush across the street and then just nip behind the wall.
    Anyway, I decide not to.
    And then, click.
    Would You Look at the State of That Cooker
    I'm 15 and I'm at boarding school and it's the middle of winter and my parents are in Canada again and I'm sitting in my study, wondering if this particular prefect is around,
    wondering if he'll come into my study, wondering what he'll do, if anything, the next time we come face to face. Last week I was sitting in my study with a guy called Templeton, drinking a cup of coffee, when this prefect came in, just burst in, he didn't knock or anything, and he mentioned the fact that there was a ring of milk around the edge of my coffee cup. When I say mentioned. He went wild. Then he trashed the room.
    Coffee's important in this place. We're allowed to make coffee in our studies. We have these things you plug in, like the elements from kettles, and you clip them to the inside of your mug, which you have already filled with water.., I suppose they're quite dangerous. And then you put in the coffee, and the sugar, and the milk. Except on this particular day, not every drop of the milk went into the cup.
    Templeton, he's an OK kind of guy, except for the fact he was one of the Three, or was it the Four, nobody seems to be sure, who were sodomized by a guy called Guppy who got expelled last term. This is all before my time here. But, see, I knew Guppy, from the school I was at before, and he didn't seem to be that sort at all, the sort who goes around sodomizing people at random. I say random, because Templeton, he's not a bad guy, but not the sort of guy you'd sodomise if you had any choice in the matter.
    In any case, I never would have expected it of a guy like Guppy. Of course, you get your frisky types, who will pin you down, say, and try to poke their dick in your eye or whatever. Yawn.
    Guppy and Templeton. The whole thing made me curious. So when I asked Templeton about it, just a casual enquiry,
    this is my first week, Templeton says, hang on a minute, and asks me to step outside in the galley. The galley is where we're allowed to cook some of our own meals if we want. Big privilege. We cook Chinese food from dried ingredients, which come in boxes we call Vesta packs. That's the company that makes them. So anyway, I do what Templeton says, I step out into the galley, and he says, would you look at the state of that cooker. And I look, and the next thing I'm on my back, looking up at three or four people. Stevenson and Hughes and somebody else, and Templeton is crying. Hughes told me it's kind of a code of the Three, or the Four, or whatever. If anybody mentions Guppy, they mete out what they call Ultraviolence. Templeton just knocked me out. Just smashed me across the head, and apparently I landed badly, which made it worse.
    Anyway, the second bad thing that's happened to me since I got here was this thing with the milk. The prefect just said, and I knew he had this bad reputation, but he just said, you fucking dirty little bastard. He put his finger in the ring of milk and wiped a smear of milk across the desk. Then he pulled out my desk drawer, and tipped the contents on the floor, and he emptied every one of my cupboards, again tipping the contents on the floor, all my clothes and the stuff from home, and he overturned my armchair, and grabbed the milk bottle, and tipped the rest of the milk over everything. Then he stalked out, saying he'd send one of the other prefects to inspect me in half an hour, and if the whole place wasn't perfect, I'd be on drill.
    This place makes me hungry. Today I've eaten: two rashers of bacon with tomato and fried bread, three slices of toast
    with marmalade, two more slices of toast and marmalade smuggled out of breakfast folded over in my pockets, two cups of tea, one cup of coffee. That was breakfast. During chapel and the first two lessons I eked out a packet of