Bad Company(14)

Reluctantly, Diane and I began to clap too, but our hearts weren’t in it.

Yet Diane was smiling. I was puzzled by that smile, until we were filing out of the class and she pulled me close to her and whispered, ‘Now, I know exactly how we can hurt Ralph Aird.’





Chapter Eight


March 9th

‘There’s no time like the present,’ that’s what Diane said. She says her dad always says you never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

But I suddenly wanted to put it off forever when I heard what she had in mind. Destroy Ralph’s collage! Rip it to shreds, tear it to pieces. It would all be blamed on the vandals who had been terrorising the school and the neighbourhood. That’s what Diane said.

We sneaked back into the empty English classroom after the school had emptied and all we could hear were the cleaners rattling their mops and buckets in the corridors below.

I was breathing so fast I thought my heart was going to burst. I didn’t want to be there. I’d tried to tell Diane but she wouldn’t listen. But as I looked at the collage and realised the amount of work that had gone into it I wanted to be there even less.

Diane pushed a massive pair of scissors into my hands. ‘I took them from the art class,’ she answered to my surprised look. ‘Now hurry, you haven’t got much time.’

That was when I realised that Diane wasn’t going to help me. I was meant to do this on my own.

‘It’s your revenge, silly,’ she said. ‘It’ll get all that anger, that frustration, out of your system. My dad does it all the time. He’s got his boss’s photo on a punchball in the basement gym. And when that boss of his really gets his back up, he punches lumps out of his picture.’ She laughed, covering her mouth so she wouldn’t make a sound. ‘Well, it’s better than punching lumps out of him, isn’t it?’

And wasn’t this much better than punching lumps out of Ralph Aird?

‘You wouldn’t want to do Ralph any real harm, would you?’ She seemed shocked at the thought of it and I hurried to correct her.

‘Of course, I wouldn’t.’

‘Well, material things don’t matter and this collage is only a material thing, isn’t it?’

She was right, material things aren’t important. I opened the scissors, but I still couldn’t bring myself to make that first cut.

Diane was getting mad at me by this time. ‘Goodness, Lissa. If you don’t hurry up the cleaners will be on this floor.’ She tutted in annoyance. She would never be this indecisive. Not Diane. I was letting her down.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Just don’t come running to me moaning about Ralph Aird and how he made a fool of you, and how he humiliated you. It seems to me you’d let Ralph Aird walk all over you and you wouldn’t do anything about it. Maybe you’re more like your father than you like to think.’

But I wasn’t like J.B. I wanted to shout that out to her. ‘If Ralph Aird was in your shoes, I bet he wouldn’t be holding back.’

And he wouldn’t. Not Ralph Aird. He’d be destroying everything with whoops of delight. That, I suppose, decided me.

I snapped the scissors shut and cut Harry Potter in two.

As Diane hurried to the class door to keep watch, I heard her sigh with satisfaction. ‘Thatta girl, Lissa.’

That first cut was the hardest. After that I snapped and slashed in a growing frenzy of anger. So much for Ralph Aird, and the way he’d made a fool of J.B. … Oliver Twist’s head shot to the floor. So much for Murdo, and how he’d lost all faith in me … Moby Dick dangled from the banner like a broken concertina. So much for J.B. and all his lies … Fagin was sliced into ribbons. So much for everybody! Scheherazade and Huckleberry Finn were snipped and shredded like so much confetti.

So much for them all.

I was breathing hard by the time I’d finished and the classroom floor was littered with the tattered remnants of Ralph’s literary collage.

I could feel beads of sweat running down my back and I was shaking.

‘Good work!’ Diane said, patting me on the back and pulling me from the class. ‘Now let’s get out of here before someone sees us.’

I’m still shaking now. I can’t stop.

What will I do if they ever find out it was me?

How could I ever have done such a terrible thing! Yet, I remember at the time thinking it was the best thing I could do. I can remember the rush of excitement I felt when I’d finished. Am I really such a nasty person?

I remember the fear too, the fear that someone would find out what I’d done. I didn’t want to go to school next day. If it hadn’t been for knowing that Diane would be there to support me, I don’t think I would have gone.