A Thousand Cuts

A Thousand Cuts Excerpt



So Miss Hobbs is crossing the playground, wobbling and swaying and looking like she’s about to drop this kid but no one helps her, not till she reaches the gates. All around her kids are buzzing about and the police, they’re going the other way, into the school. Then Miss Hobbs yells, she’s got quite a yell I can tell you, like the time she yelled at Banks for
flicking his sandwich crusts at Stacie Crump, and one of the ambulance men spots her and legs it over with a stretcher. They disappear after that, behind the ambulance, and that’s when I see Jenkins with the others by the lights.

I tug at Banks and I point and we weave in and out the cars and over to the crossing.

Where you been? says Jenkins.

What’s happening? I ask him.

Someone went loony tunes. In assembly. Shot the whole place up.

What, with a gun? I say and right away wish I hadn’t of.

Jenkins looks at me. Either a gun, he says, or a fifty-litre bottle of ketchup.

Who? says Banks. Who did it?

Dunno. Couldn’t see. People were up and running and that before we knew what was happening. Someone said it was Bumfluff but it couldn’t of been, could it?

Then Banks says, where’s Jones?

Didn’t I say? says Terry, who’s standing right beside Jenkins.

Didn’t I tell you it was Jones?

Jenkins gives Terry a punch on the arm. Banks doesn’t know it was Jones, does he? He was just asking where he was. Well, where is he? Terry says but Banks is already moving
away.

Where you going? I say but he ignores me. I run to catch up and hear Jenkins behind me. You won’t get in, he says but Banks doesn’t even look back.

We try the main gates first but there’s these policemen there dressed in yellow, they look like stewards at White Hart Lane. They turn us back. Banks tries again and has to scarper when one of the policemen shouts at him and tries to grab him. We go round the back instead, to the side gate by the kitchens, and there’s a policeman there as well but he’s talking to a woman with a pushchair, pointing at something across the street. He doesn’t see us.

I’ve never been in the kitchens before. I’ve seen em from the other side, from the counter, but only the main bit and even then you can barely see past the dinner ladies, they’re like
sumo wrestlers in a scrum. Not that you’d want to. It’s fucking disgusting. The main bit, where they serve the food, it’s not too bad but in the back, with the cookers and the bins, it’s rank.

I see what I had for lunch the day before, a pile of pork all glistening with fat like it’s been run over by a herd of slugs, just left on a tray in the sink. And there’s stuff all over the floor,
lettuce gone soggy and brown, and peas with their guts splattered and smeared all over the tiles. I almost throw up. I have to swallow it back down. But I’d rather eat vomit than eat in
the canteen again, I swear. Banks, though, he doesn’t hardly notice.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from A THOUSAND CUTS by Simon Lelic.

Copyright © 2010 by Simon Lelic