Not Dead Yet

10

Eric Whiteley was remembering every second, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It all came back every time he saw a news story about bullying, and his face felt flushed and hot now. Those ten boys sitting on the wall chanting, ‘Ubu! Ubu! Ubu!’ at him as he walked by. The same ten boys who had been on that low brick wall every evening since the start of his second term at the school he hated so much, some thirty-seven years ago. Most of them had been fourteen – a year older than him – but a couple, the smuggest of them all, were his age and in his class.

He remembered the paper pellet striking him on the back of his head, which he had ignored, and just carried on walking towards his boarding house, clutching his set of maths and chemistry books which he’d needed for his afternoon classes. Then a pebble hitting him really hard, stinging his ear, and one of them, Spedding Junior it had sounded like, shouting out, ‘Great shot!’ It was followed by laughter.

He had walked on, the pain agonizing, but determined to get out of their sight before he rubbed his ear. It felt like it was cut open.

‘Ubu’s stoned!’ one of them shouted and there had been more laughter.

‘Hey Ubu, you shouldn’t walk around stoned, you could get into all kinds of trouble!’ another of them had shouted and there were even more guffaws and jeers.

He could still remember biting his lip against the pain, fighting off tears as he carried on along the tree-lined avenue, warm blood trickling down the side of his neck. The main school grounds, with the classrooms and playing fields, were behind him. Along this road were ugly boarding houses, big Victorian mansion blocks, accommodating sixty to ninety pupils, some in dormitories, some in single or shared rooms. His own house, called Hartwellian, was just ahead.

He could remember turning into it, walking past the grand front entrance, which was the housemaster’s, and around the side. Fortunately there had been no boys hanging around to see him crying. Not that he really cared. He knew he was no good, useless, and that people didn’t like him.

Ubu.

Ugly. Boring. Useless.

The other kids had spent all of the previous term – his first in this school – telling him that. John Monroe, who had the desk right behind him in Geography, had kept prodding him with a ruler. ‘You know your problem, Whiteley?’ he said, each word emphasized with a prod.

Whenever he’d turned around he got the same answer. ‘You’re so fucking ugly and you’ve no personality. No girl’s ever going to fancy you. None, ever, you realize?’ He remembered how Monroe’s horsey face would then break out into a snide grin.

After a while, he had stopped turning round. But Monroe used to keep on prodding, until Mr Leask, the teacher, spotted him and told him to stop. Five minutes later, when the teacher began drawing a diagram of soil substrates on the blackboard, Monroe’s prodding started again.