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| Down by the Schoolyard by Colin Leonard We were hoping to get away early. My wife stayed at home and fine-tuned the packing of the suitcases while I drove up to the school to collect Sean. The school secretary had been a bit nasally with me on the phone, sighing and groaning on about how they don’t usually allow kids out early without proper notice. I suppose they have a point. They got in a whole heap of trouble a few years ago when a boy ran off on them. To be fair, the poor kid had just been told that his parents had died in a car accident and, instead of sobbing away in the headmaster’s office, he burst past the wringing hands of his teacher and disappeared into the grimness that surrounds the school grounds. I don’t believe they ever found him. Missing posters were plastered on every lamppost and shop window. News reports burned the image of his face into the town’s collective consciousness. The school became a right stickler for the rules after that. It was already a joyless place, crushed up on the industrial end of the town, backgrounded by a miserable housing estate and a mismanaged recycling centre, but that tragedy gave it another reason to be dour. “He’s in P.E. at the moment, so you’ll have to wait,” said the secretary when I presented myself at her office. “Oh, can I not just take him in the middle of it? We are in a bit of a rush.” “You do know that we frown on pupils taking holidays in the middle of term time,” she crackled with the spiteful energy of someone whose every interaction was an argument. “We’re not going on holidays,” I lied. Her eyes widened in anticipation of further details but I wasn’t giving any. We had gotten a great deal on a chalet in Bordeaux and Sean missing a week of school wasn’t worth the hundreds more it would cost during the midterm break. “Well you can’t wait in here for him. I have work to do.” “Where should I…?” “I’ll tell the teacher of his next class to send him straight out to you.” I didn’t fancy prowling the corridors like some displaced janitor and there was nowhere to sit and wait so I ambled outside and followed the sounds of footballing shouts.I thought maybe I could extricate him early with a sneaky signal. The pitches were sidelined by a towering chain-link fence that ringed the recycling centre. It felt ridiculous calling it by such a progressive name, a dump is what it really was. By the time I strolled over, a whistle had shepherded all the boys together and they were traipsing in after their teacher. I caught sight of the back of Sean’s head chatting to one of his mates. I guessed about five minutes for him to get changed, two minutes to get to his next class and a few more to be identified and sent out to me. I could see the main entrance from where I stood, the wide windows reflecting back the greyness of the yard. I decided to stay up by the pitches, leaning against one of the rusting, spire-like fence posts, while I checked my phone for emails. Then a scurrying behind me made me jump away from the fence. The last thing I wanted was a rat-bitten ankle for my holidays. The place was in a state of filth. Through the wire I saw bashed-up fridges with mould growing out of them, decaying mattresses, oozing radiators. Up further, there was a shrine of smashed porcelain: a litter of toilets, sinks and shower trays and in among them I could see a bundled-up school uniform. It moved. I flinched with rodent fear again but the whole pile of clothes was moving and it was too big for a rat. Maybe it was a sleeping dog having nightmares under the clothes; there was some sort of dark fur showing. I rattled the fence. It moved again, the bundle starting to unfurl. I went closer and risked a friendly whistle, but it wasn’t a dog. What I had thought to be fur was a clump of dirty hair. “Hey, hey, are you ok?” I shouted then whirled around to see if another P.E. class had emerged yet but the sandy pitches were deserted. It was definitely a kid in there. A painfully thin hand spidered out from under its body. I started pulling up the fence to make a gap at the bottom. “Hold on. I’m coming.” The fence wasn’t sunk deep. I managed to drag a section out from the clay and peel it up against itself. I lay down on the dirt and stuck my head and an arm under the wire. Then the skinny figure shivered and the head turned around. I knew that face, still the same age as in the posters, but sodden and sunken with death. He skittered towards me. I tried to crawl back through my gap but he grabbed my hair at the same time as a loose strand of fence scragged my collar. His skin was soft and yellow, like something that had lain covered for years on the damp ground. “Wh-what do you want?” I stammered. I twisted my face away and tried to scream towards the school but when I opened my mouth my voice caught in my throat as he drove a twist of scrap metal between my ribs. A drip of oily saliva joined ghostly words in my ear. “I’m so lonely here on my own.” “Leave me alone,” I rasped. “I’m not your parent. Your parents are dead.” I could see Sean appearing through the school doors on his own, bag on his back, casually looking around for me. “I don’t want a parent,” he said, crawling over me and squeezing through the gap in the fence. Sean began walking down the steps. Why wasn’t somebody with him? “I want a friend.” |