Underbelly High

It feels like school is largely optional in the Underbelly, flexible learning in the extreme. It maybe that the education you can get in the Underbelly itself is financially more rewarding and the skills you acquire are more fun. The school and the police turn a blind eye to truancy on the whole, surely because it works in both their interests. The youth of the Underbelly are viscous in the in extreme; theft to them is like picking your nose. It’s frankly safer to have them spread out across the town rather than in one building in the same way it is better to have five locusts in every house rather than forty million just outside the capital. Residents of the Underbelly know to nail down anything that could be sold at a car boot sale, because you’ll only need to go and buy it back.

If you were to imagine the school’s dismal shell, think Stalingrad 1944 with lots of children running around beating each other with whatever comes to hand. The building itself is a complex collection of sixties architectural experimentation. All structures within it are literally beginning to disintegrate and I suspect that integrity of the structure owes more to saliva and exercise book paper than it does to bricks and mortar. If this building is sick, what hope for its patients? Paint, the colour of the river’s dysentery mud, peels from its walls like it can’t be bothered to quite fall off in the same way the teachers can barely be bothered to turn up for another day manning the slippery trenches that lead to either stupidity or violence. The pock marked walls echo the faces that scratch and draw on them. The headmaster is a besieged and tired old General.

The school yard, teaches you whether you are and Underling, a Topdog or simply someone who needs to get out of this small town as soon as possible. I remember being held up against a tennis court fence and having a car battery run through me by one of the sets of Phillips twins. My arm ached for the rest of term. In the ultimate irony, rugby hardened gangs would jump the defenseless or scholarly and hang them by their underpants on coat pegs rendering them infertile. Another head in the war against intelligence.

Today as I walk past I can see that little has changed. A boy, perhaps no older than thirteen has a much larger boy pushed up against the same tennis fence, his face reddened and marked with its diamond shaped trellis. There is no battery this time, just repeated punches to the kidneys.

“Oi!” I shout. The boy doing the punching turns round.

“What?” I almost have no response but thankfully he gives an explanation. “He fingered my sister.” The boy gives him another two blows to the back.

“Did she like it?” The boy drops his prey to the floor so that he can go foetal. Before my eyes can return to the bully, he has disappeared, presumably back into the main school building.

“You’re back then?” An authoritative voice from behind me boomed like tenor and I turned on my heel.

“My God, hello sir. It’s been a while, well since I left school.” We both looked back at the school.

“It’s amazing any of them survive isn’t it? I mean as parents we take so much trouble to nurture and raise them as infants, and then,” The Headmaster raised his arm towards the school, “we just throw them in this skip.”

“It’s not so bad, well I say that, it is quite bad actually, really bad. How does it remain open?”

“You didn’t turn out to be a school inspector did you, thought not, no attention to detail, mummy’s boy. Anyway these days we just let them cheat.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Once you’ve had a few burly parents round, offering to petrol bomb your house, your attitude towards examinations and coursework tends to become a little more…flexible. Besides I only have one more year until retirement.”

“I see, and what about the good kids?”

“There are no good kids left, we sold all them to rich Arabs.” The Headmaster walked into the ensuing battle in the playground kicking and punching as he went. He looked back and shouted. “This is how you get respect.” A small viscous girl who had been trying to bite his leg bore the brunt of his next blow to the centre of her stomach. Unperturbed she got straight back up and jumped on his tweed shoulders like a Gibraltar monkey and went for his neck.

Watching violent children seems unreal, like play fighting. If they hurt one another they would be mortified. Subconsciously we believe that they don’t mean it, that somehow they will grow out of it, and that if they were just a little bit older, they wouldn’t be doing this. But it is an unfortunate fact that in the Underbelly, violent children become violent adults and as I turned the corner I was face to face with the bully I’d shouted at earlier. He had a flick knife and a big grin.