Campion's Choice

Jumping out of the Bentley he ran across the playground. There was nothing for it but to get to school and take his punishment.

At the classroom door he stopped and caught his breath before looking in through the little glass window.

‘Good,’ he muttered.

Mister Marray, his form master, wasn’t there.

Through the tiny window he could see the gargantuan form of Mister Clamp.

Clamp, the Head of Sixth form, was sitting behind the teacher’s desk. He was engrossed in keeping a ball in the air with a cricket bat.

When Jack slipped in and began to make his way to the back of the class Clamp caught the ball and put the bat down.

‘Ah, Jack. Come in, come in. That’s it, settle yourself down. In your own time. Good of you to join us in all your hirsute glory.’

Some of the kids sniggered even though they didn’t know that hirsute meant ‘hairy’.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Jack muttered.

‘I was being sarcastic. Is there any particular reason why you’re late? Or are you a part time student?’

‘I’m full time.’

‘Again, sarcasm. We’ll talk later. Sit.’

He sat down, tuned out the teacher’s voice and thought about the scene in the back of the Bentley. Did everyone have crazy relatives?

His only Aunt, Aunt Joan, had sent him a book for his birthday called ’It’s all over: Supernova’. Aunt Joan lived in Australia. She was an astronomer. She kept sending him books. One time she sent a hundred year old book called ’Take the coins, take the Earth-Aliens all around us’. Apparently she found it in a junk shop in Sydney and thought her nephew might be interested.

He skipped the boring bits but he did get that the Cambridge professor claimed aliens had been on Earth for thousands of years. He said aliens had become ’part of the human race’.

Yeah right! What did they do? Go to Las Vegas and get married? Now that’s a picture he would like to see: two little green extra-terrestrials, exchanging wedding rings and promising not to spend too much money on spaceships.

Oh, and in that book, there was some theory about aliens finding coins and taking over the World.

Jack stared through the classroom window at a brick wall opposite and managed to completely ignore Clamp droning on until the teacher said one particular, peculiar word.

‘… Deathstalker … yellow scorpion …. you won’t find Deathstalkers … I was on an archaeological ….’

‘Deathstalker?’

Jack repeated the word out loud which stopped the teacher in mid-flow. Clamp turned to face him.

‘Ah, Jack. I thought you’d fallen asleep. Are you interested in the Deathstalker? It’s a particularly dangerous, yellow scorpion. Look it up. But enough of my stories, as I was saying, I want to clear out the old air raid shelter on the Sixth Form site. It’s not a dangerous job. No killer scorpions to contend with. I need two volunteers for break time.’

Jack shook his head and clicked a finger next to his ears to make sure he was hearing things right.

Deathstalker.

That was the word the Dadster kept repeating, on the night of the accident. It was one of his last words, just before he passed out. Deathstalker. And he had looked it up, in Wikipedia.Leiurus quinqustriatus. A yellow scorpion. Why was Clamp banging on about it?

Before he knew it Jack made the offer.

‘I’ll volunteer. I’ll help with the air raid shelter.’

Clamp rubbed his hands and smiled.

‘Good man. All is forgiven.’

‘Creep,’ someone muttered. Others joined in.

‘Yee haw cowboy.’

‘Way to go, Crazy Horse!’

Clamp’s body went rigid, his face flushed with anger and he crashed a fist the size of a boulder down on his desk. The class inched back in their seats.

‘Where did that stupid name come from?’ the teacher demanded loudly.

A hubbub of voices called out.

‘When Jack came back from America he said he was a Red Indian.’

‘He made him run around the room whooping and made him jump over a waste paper basket.’

‘He said that some boffins need a bang on the head.’

Clamp banged again for silence.

‘Who said and did all these stupid things?’

There was a moment’s silence before one voice piped up.

‘Mister Marray. Our form teacher.’

Clamp’s face turned from red to purple as he leant forwards in his seat. His voice began quietly but then rose to a thunder.

‘Anybody who repeats anything like that again, will regret the day their parents looked across a crowded room and decided to make the world a less pleasant place! The phrase, Red Indian, is racist. The proper term is Native American Indian.’

Jack glanced out of the corner of his eye. Kids were silent and stunned. Clamp’s face returned to its normal grey colour. He spoke quietly.

‘Good. Now, I need one more volunteer to help clear out the air raid shelter?’

Clamp stood up and girls, at the front off the class, flinched. He was ridiculously big. In the silence that followed everyone, except for Jack, stared at their desks to avoid the teacher’s eye.

When a mobile phone beeped it was hurriedly silenced. But too late. Clamp smiled. He searched the room.

‘Ah, Gidean! Just the person. Hand over that phone. You are my other volunteer.’

A murmur of relief ran around the room and everyone twisted and turned in their seats to see what would happen next.

Gidean Saint-George, with his ‘Boy Band’ good looks, with his blonde hair, symmetrical features, excellent teeth and pale blue eyes, sat with a little invisible glow of smugness hovering around his body.

‘I’m rehearsing at break time,’ Gidean yawned.

‘I beg you pardon?’

’We’re doing a sword fight. I’m playing Romeo. I kill Tybalt. I stab him in the eye and it looks like his brains fall out. That’s my idea. I think you’ll find that I’m indispensible,sir,’ Gidean answered.

It was the ’sir’that did it. And the little sneer. Gidean had the lead in ’Romeo and Juliet’. He had a good excuse. He shouldn’t have tried to be clever.

Some kids held their breaths. The teacher’s huge frame twisted, unhurriedly, like an enormous, alien spaceship, changing course.

‘I think you’ll find, Romeo, sorry, Gidean, that, if you don’t come along at break, you won’t be involved in any more rehearsals. Ever again. And give me that phone!’

Gidean’s smugness flickered, faded and went out. The boy shrank. He crept up to the front of the classroom and handed over his mobile phone before skulking back to his seat.

‘Good! Good, good, good, good! God is in his heaven and, as the blessed Voltaire said, all is well with the world.’

Clamp snapped shut the thin blue register and sat on the edge of his desk. It creaked unhappily.

‘Er, sir?’

Tia Cole put up her hand.

‘Portia?’ Clamp looked surprised.

Jack looked at the girl. Only the teachers called Tia, Portia.

She was a funny one. She kept herself to herself but she was liked my most kids. You never knew what group she’d pop up with. She was on everyone’s ‘Friends’ list. She was tall, with long brown hair and striking, green eyes. It was said that her hair had been grown to hide a birthmark, in the shape of an upside down palm tree, on the back of her neck.

‘Please, sir, I missed a French test last week and I have to make it up. Could I come to your room, at break time, and do it then?’ she asked sweetly.

Clamp looked irritated and ground his teeth. As he shifted on the desk it became more rickety. The bell rang for the end of registration.

‘Fine. Yes. Bring your test. There’s the bell. Off you go.’

Clamp stood up and left the room.

As Jack jumped up to join the rush he looked back across the classroom. Portia Beatrice Cordelia Cole, to give her full name, gave him a big, happy smile. What was that all about?

Redemere Village College has two sites.

The first, for the Lower School, is a jumble of shoebox shaped glass and concrete buildings. The other, the Sixth Form site, is an old Victorian building with turrets and circular staircases. It was once a lunatic asylum and then, years later, it became a home for orphans. Now it proudly housed the brightest and best from the town of Redemere and several surrounding villages.

Mister Clamp’s classroom, on the Sixth Form site, had a view over the immaculately groomed cricket pitch. It was also attached to an old World War Two air raid shelter. Clamp was always banging on about how the shelter smelt terrible and was full of ancient junk and had a low roof that made his spine ache.

At break time his two ‘volunteers’, stood at the door to the shelter.

‘The school caretaker has placed bin bags at your disposal. I want you to go in there and fill them. It’s all rubbish. Don’t make any noise. Portia is doing a test.’

Obediently Jack and Gidean grabbed their bags and disappeared into the musty gloom.

Jack flicked the nearest switch by the door and the two boys stepped into a pool of flickering yellow light.

‘I’ll start this side, you do that,’ Jack said.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ Gidean snapped.

Jack looked at him.

‘What are you staring at? Creep,’ Gidean grunted. He turned his back and resentfully began to clear a path through piles of junk.

Jack headed off towards some old furniture at the murkiest end of the shelter. Cold and the shifting shadows made the hairs on his neck begin to prickle.

By some strange trick there seemed to be a lot of grating and scratching noises back here. What if an old bookshelf tottered over and crushed him? And then rats ate his body? Inch by inch he backed away from the darkness.

Something caught around his shoe. When he moved it tightened, squeezing the life out of his foot.

‘Yeuugh!’

He was terrified. He had to look down. Please, let it not be a snake.

It was a thin leather strap attached to an ancient, battered school satchel.

Close by Gidean talked to himself under his breath.

‘That Troll can kiss my butt … mutter, mutter … brain too small, too far away from the rest of his body … met more intelligent pieces of furniture.. mutter.. mutter.. something out of a cartoon … eyebrows like ferrets … good riddance … when I get to Kester next term … mutter, mutter…’

Jack had been about to free the bag around his leg but he stopped. Kester was one of the most expensive and prestigious private schools in England. It was fifteen miles away. It used to be a castle.

‘You’re going to Kester?’

‘You bet. Get outta this dump and go to a proper school. Good riddance to The Troll and the rest of you losers.’

Gidean saw the school satchel and said, ‘Chuck that in the bin.’

‘Chuck yourself in a bin,’ Jack answered, bending down and pulling at the strap. He tried to free his foot but only managed to split open the old leather satchel.

‘Moron,’ Gidean mocked.

When the four coins fell out of the bag they both bent at the same time to grab at the money. Jack got there first.

‘Yesssss!’ he said.

But the moment he wrapped his fingers around the prize, he could have sworn that two things happened: first the world stood still and then, like a minor earthquake, it shifted slightly.

‘Whoa!’

He rocked from side to side. The coins in his hand felt warm, and surprisingly light. They also felt stuck together.

‘Mine,’ he said triumphantly.

‘No way!’ Gidean shouted.

‘Way!’

The door to the air raid shelter flew open and Clamp stood in the doorway.

’Out!

Jack blinked his way back into the bright light of the classroom. He saw Tia look up from her work and smile. There it was again. The smile. He avoided eye contact and moved along. He wondered why she was pulling stupid faces. Maybe she felt the minor earthquake and was feeling nervous?

Like a giant in a nursery school, Clamp sat at the desk and drummed his fingers. Objects on the table – a cricket ball, two silver trophies and a set of wooden bails – rattled unhappily as he spoke.

‘You are here to help me and you are doing important work for your school. You were asked to work quietly. That girl is supposed to be doing an important test in silence.’

Clamp was interrupted by a knock at the door.

‘What?’

The door opened and closed. Liam Dee came into the room carrying a yellow Report Slip, which Clamp took and read in silence.

‘You were caught smoking?’

‘No,’ Liam answered.

Jack looked at the older boy. He knew Liam to be one of the school’s ‘characters’, a kid who teachers described as a ‘bad apple’. Some boys around school called him ‘cool’ others called him ‘psycho’. Some said his dad was a crook, a villain, a gangster.

The girls also said he was ‘cool’ but usually added ‘gorgeous’ or ‘stunning’. The girls loved him. He looked like a fifteen-year-old Maori warrior.

‘Case of mistaken identity. Not surprising given we wear uniforms to make us all look the same,’ Liam said.

‘Just like in the Army?’ Clamp smiled.

‘Or prison?’ Liam answered.

Clamp shook his head. He threw the Report Slip in the bin and nodded across the room.

‘Wait in that corner. Be quiet. Take your hands out of your pockets. Stop grinning.’

Liam obeyed the orders.

Clamp stood up and leant against the white board like a fallen tree.

‘What were you making such a row about?’

‘Noth ….’ Jack began. The teacher held up a hand.

’Do not say ‘nothing’. If you do, you will definitely be in that subterranean hell, battling cobwebs and spiders and crunching under foot the bones of long dead schoolboys for the rest of the week. What was that row about?’

‘I found something,’ Jack said.

‘Money. It fell on the floor! And we both saw it,’ Gidean argued. He had already forgotten all about the bag.

‘I found it!’ Jack repeated.

‘We found it!’

‘I found it. I saw it. I bent down. I picked it up and then there was a whooshing sound and my ears felt a bit like they do when a plane lands and then there was an earthquake …’

‘Stop talking gibberish. Show me the money,’ Clamp demanded.

Jack opened his hand. The four coins seemed to be stuck, or rusted, or glued together in a zigzag line.

Reluctantly Jack placed the find in Clamp’s leathery palm and watched as the teacher’s fingers gently closed around the coins.

A blinding flash of light took them all by surprise. Instinctively Jack shut his eyes but a perfectly round purple image appeared behind his eyelids.

When he opened his eyes and looked at the others they were all blinking.

Clamp frowned. He looked suspiciously at the windows. He looked at Liam. Liam’s eyes were closed and his mouth was open in a surprised ‘O’ shape. Clamp stayed silent, his brow furrowed with lines of puzzlement. When he eventually opened his hand the four coins were evenly spaced apart. They looked cleaner. You could see they had markings, or writing around a square hole, which had been neatly punched through the centre of each coin.

’Interesting. In shape and size these are very like the Chineseban liang coins from the first century BC,’ Clamp said. He was fond of regularly reminding pupils that he taught History.

‘So they’re dead valuable?’ Gidean squeaked excitedly.

‘No. They’re toys. They feel like plastic. They must have belonged to some kind of a game,’ Clamp said. He tossed the four discs up in the air and watched them turn slowly before catching them nimbly in mid-flight.

’One each. Finders, keepers. Oneban liang for you,’ he said and handed the first coin to Jack.

‘One for you,’ he said and tossed a second coin which Gidean caught just before it hit the floor.

‘Portia? Heads up?’ Clamp said. He spun a third coin into the air. With no more than a glance upwards Tia put out a hand, grabbed the gift and snapped it into her pencil case.

’Right. I’ve done the whole ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ thing. You two get in the shelter. Back to work,’ Clamp ordered.

‘Don’t I get one of the coins?’ Liam complained from the corner of the room. Clamp smiled, his face splitting open like a badly cut pumpkin.

‘Ask and ye shall receive,’ the teacher intoned.

‘Can I have one of those coins, please?’ Liam asked politely.

‘No. Right, you two, back to work. I want the end of that shelter cleared. I want to be able to push a television trolley in there so it’s out of my way.’

‘But sir …’ Gidean began.

‘Go!’ the Head of Sixth Form snapped and added, ‘I will not repeat myself a third time. Three times and you really will be out. Back in there! Clean out that junk. If you don’t want to get pneumoconiosis, hold your breaths. I do not want to see your tiny little faces again unless it is, in extremis, to come out and tell me that you have found an Indian elephant behind the bookcases.’

Turning to Tia the man said, ‘did they predict stormy weather today? Flashes of lightning? ’

Tia, without looking up, shook her head.

As he walked back to the air raid shelter Jack felt theban liang in his hand. As soon as he got back inside the shelter he was going to chuck it in a bin bag. It was useless. A foot dragging, clearly angry, Gidean followed him.

Gidean’s face was red. He was mumbling again as he moved.

‘Mutter, mutter ..… Indian elephant … mutter … takes one to know one… mutter…’

At the entrance to the air raid shelter Jack stepped to one side and held the door open, like a lift attendant.

‘After you,’ he said with exaggerated politeness.

Gidean grimaced but went first.

Jack was about to follow and was wondering where that really, really bad smell was coming from when Gidean jumped back out into the classroom and slammed the door shut.

‘What is it?’

Gidean, eyes fixed on the closed door, retreated, step by step, across the classroom.

‘Er … Clamp?’ Gidean said. There was an edge of panic in his voice. He staggered and almost fell over a desk.

‘I warned you …’ Mister Clamp began through gritted teeth but Gidean cut him short.

‘There’s an elephant behind the bookcases!’ he shouted.

Jack watched as the teacher’s eyes opened wide.

‘What?’

Gidean Saint-George cleared his throat. He spoke slowly and uneasily. His voice quivered.

‘There’s an elephant. Behind the bookcases. I’m not sure if it’s Indian or African? Which one has big ears?’