Classified

Day Two

Afternoon


The class had been poised for this moment. Before I had barely recognised the lunch bell, most of the class were already involved in the everlasting battle to get out of the door before everyone else. This minor skirmish led to even greater war grounds, the waiting line for the dinner hall or, as I like to call it, close quarters combat.
The dinner line was deadly and showed no mercy. Even if both your parents had died in a horrible glue accident, the dinner line would beat and jostle you and probably throw something from the floor at you, just like it did to everyone else.
It was true equality.
Jumping the line was, of course, absolutely forbidden. Instead, to advance closer to the front and secure an extra celius or two on your mashed potatoes, you had to knock other people out of the line. While simple in concept, the trials of the line were often very different in practise. Usually, most of the quiet and non-violent kids stuck to the back, waiting patiently in line and not stretching the limits of bone structures.
This led to violence further down the line, but it gradually petered out to civility heading towards the front. This was for two reasons. The least important was that the line turned a corner and then you were in view of the teachers. The most important was that the line turned a corner and the final stretch of the line was generally quite soothing and people didn’t mind the wait.
Thus, the middle of the line was full on combat. Strangely, the ‘no pushing in rule’ was strictly observed, even out of sight of all authority. It was just pushing people out of the line that led to the violence.
Generally, someone would push someone else out of the light. Infuriated at utter defeat, they would grab the person who had pushed them out, usually by the head and drag them out, proceeding to kick them in the shins and/or punch them in the arms. It was a generally accepted rule that the victor was allowed to take his place back in the line. The loser had to go to the back of the line, but most of the placid kids just stepped aside, not wishing violence. However, to keep up the pretence of pushing them all out of the way, the loser had to scream. Screaming was intimidating. So there would be so mad kid, with some mud on his face or a bruised arm running down the line, screaming. It generally made things interesting in the wait, that’s for sure.
However, that was not my fate today.
“Matthew, Brian, Louis, all of you stay behind for detention. Matthew, Brian, sit opposite ends of the classroom, Louis, go fetch the cleaning equipment from under the sink.
Passively, I moved away from the centre of the classroom and sat at its edge, looking up to see Brian smiling at me.
“Where are the classroom monitors?” Mrs Benson bellowed.
“Here,” said Chris, stood next to her. Sam was, as usual, right beside him.
Mrs Benson jumped a little as she turned to face them.
“Ah, very good. Well, the tables are being cleaned so, um, I guess you’ll just have to sort out the nature display,” she said, regaining composure.
“Okay,” said Sam, and both boy and girl proceeded to their task.
Mrs Benson glared across the classroom at me, Brian and Louis individually, each of us averting our glances.
This took a while because Brian was picking his nose while staring into what I presumed was space, but for all I knew he could have been staring at the lining of his eyes.
Also, Louis was underneath the sink, digging out the cleaning equipment and trying not to inhale rat poison.
After the glaring had been done, the teacher sat down and began marking work. By marking work, I mean she ticked those who had done the work, crossed those who had drawn pictures of cats and, at random intervals, applied stars of varying representations of precious metals.
I sighed. I was hungry. Detention meant you got your dinner last, which meant you got it cold and also replete with absolutely horrible things like broccoli and, I presumed, cow toes. The source of the meat was, at best, dubious. At worst it probably wasn’t even meat.
I stared out over the classroom. Louis had turned the tap on, and was running a cloth underneath it. It had grown so stiff since it was last used that it actually retained the wrinkles and was formed in the shape of a rat bed. He desperately soaked and manipulated the cloth in an attempt to make it usable.
Casting my vision over to Brian, I saw he had his nose in his atlas once more. His eyes flicked across the pages and, occasionally, he leant back and smiled with glee. He was amassing knowledge and it was far more entertaining than what I was doing.
My eyes finally came to rest on the aliens. They were the far side of the classroom, quite close to Brian and they were sorting out the nature display.
This consisted of sweeping up all the soil that had been knocked out of the pot plants and pulling the escaped caterpillars off the walls and replacing them in the secure facility, AKA, a plastic tank. With holes in the roof for them breathe and escape out of.
They looked human. Very human. So human, infact, they didn’t look human at all. I blinked at my thinking, then they just looked human again. Was I seeing through their disguise? Was I becoming truly aware of what they were? Was the prose becoming very confusing indeed?
I shook my head slightly and looked away, watching Louis who, with a slight smile on his face, set across the classroom towards the magic circle on the desk. My eyes flicked to Mrs Benson, who was watching covertly, while still marking books.
Her eyes didn’t leave the advancing boy, even as she closed one book, opened another, turned the pages and applied ticks, crosses and stars.
Louis reached the table and put down his equipment. He had an air of professionalism about him which amused me slightly and terrified Mrs Benson.
He raised the cloth over the table, and bought it down across the circle.
Thunder rumbled through the skies outside and Mrs Benson leapt from her seat. She stifled a cry and looked away, realising it was only thunder.
From my seat, I could see her silently miming the words, “Only thunder, only thunder, only thunder.”
She was ticking furiously and, after a moment, she realised she had ticked the same page about fifty times. She dropped the pen quickly, repulsed at what she’d done.
Then, she slapped her hands down on the table, repulsed that she’d just been repulsed.
She appeared to regain a little composure and stood up silently.
“I am going to get a cup of tea,” she said, unlocking one of the drawers on her desk and producing a bottle of brandy which she quickly hid under her cardigan.
“Behave, I won’t be gone long. Louis, continue cleaning.”
With that, she stumbled across the classroom and left very quickly indeed.
The teacher gone, I could confront the aliens. With the opportunity, I suddenly became very afraid of them. I stared out of the window as something to do and as a way to avoid Louis’s gaze, which would be saying “Go on, ask them, you arse.”
I shuddered involuntarily and watched the barrage of rain descend upon the kids outdoors. With the falling rain, my heart lifted.
Through the window, I could see the playground monitors and teaching staff running around, directing and ordering children inside like people on an aircraft carrier. They were lacking signal beacons but made up for it with the sheer amount of flapping they were doing.
Sounds of the staff outside filtered through. They were mostly shouting “Inside! Now!”. It was a curious phenomenon I had observed, but it seemed that the louder you spoke, the more limited your vocabulary became.
I remember, months ago, it was raining outside. The teachers executed the action plan with great haste. I happened, that particular break time, to be stood quite close to the door. I watched the teacher from the class next to us walk briskly, place his hands on his hips and shouted, very loudly, the magic words.
“INSIDE NOW!”
I stood there, and the teacher looked at me. In almost a normal level of volume, he said “You, get inside now.”
Then, addressing the rest of the playground shouted “INSIDE NOW!”
I wasn’t quite sure why the louder you spoke meant you had to use less words. I guess it was something to do with the fact that more energy devoted to speaking loudly meant that less could be devoted to thinking of the words to say. I wasn’t quite sure of this, though, I was no expert in these matters.
Not long after my initial discovery, however, I decided to approach an expert.
“Mrs Benson,” I had said, then clearing my throat. I explained my theory to her and asked if she could provide any insight onto the matter.
“I don’t know what on earth you are talking about, stop saying those things, get your finger out of your nose and sit down.”

As I pondered, the sounds of outside were quickly drowned out by the sounds of inside. Kids were walking in, barely wet. I put this down to that fact that it was barely a drizzle and not that fact the teachers demanded them inside. Indeed, us kids have an uncanny ability to maximize the wetness gained from rain.
“… and then he destroyed the lettuce with just the power of his mind!”
This discernible snippet faded into laughter which faded into the usual chatter of school kids in a classroom as more people piled inside. One thing the chatter could not mask was the occasional screaming of someone falling victim to the coat pegs.
I looked around, and saw Louis had finished cleaning the magic circle off the table. With regret, I knew this would lead to something of normality in the teaching schedule.
Looking at Brian, I saw his head still buried in the atlas. The aliens were patiently and quietly maintaining the nature table. Someone had, in its inception, had the incredible idea to create a border from real leaves from outside. Stapled to the wall behind the table, they were quite efficiently rotting away and creating rather a large mess. Mrs Benson had, for some reason, decided not to act on the matter. I suspected this was once more laziness masquerading as education, much like the classroom monitor system.
I turned my attention back to Louis who was presently running across the classroom with his cleaning equipment. He thrust the plastic container laden with bottle of poisonous substance and probably a decayed and now liquefied rat under the sink, straightened up and casually walked away. The cleverness of his plan dawned upon me. Mrs Benson would never know he hadn’t cleaned the other tables, as she was currently intoxicating herself to protect her from Satan. The true genius of the plan occurred to me when he started towards the door which leg to main hall, currently full of people eating. With lunchtime detentions, one has to stay in the classroom until the end of the regular queue has been reached. Only then were you allowed to be served your food. “Food” being a rather broad term, “Euurgghh” being the specialised term.
However, in the event of rain, queues were coordinated from inside the classrooms.
I quickly rose from my seat and walked to the door. I tried to look as casual as possible, tried to mask my hurry.
The teacher from outside, the one from the classroom next door marched in. Before he had even spoken, the kids milling around the classroom realised what they never remembered to realise until the said teacher walked into the classroom.
They bolted for the door, in order to gain a superior position in the line. Louis was already there, and I managed to make it into second.
“Line up at the door!” he barked, not actually sounding anything like a dog, but a suitable verb nevertheless.
The jostling for position and general GBH occurred behind us, as we huddled against the wall and didn’t get involved.
“Very clever,” I said.
“I like to think so,” Louis smiled.
As we relaxed against the wall, waiting for our summons into the hall, our eyes rested on what was directly in front of us.
The aliens at the nature table.
They were still sorting it out, like they had been told to. Lesser pupils, human pupils would be well into the fray by now, battling up the line.
“Weird,” said Louis quietly.
“Yeah,” I said, “there’s definitely..”
“No, I mean, the hall. It’s weird.”
Vaguely perplexed by the non-alien conversation, I said “The hall? “Why is it weird?”
“Well, in the morning, it’s always empty, so we can sit down and listen to the assembly.”
“Yeah..” I said, not seeing where he was going.
“Yet, at dinner time, it’s always full of tables, chairs and metal cabinets and stuff.”
“Yeah... ”I said, adopting a different tone as I digested this information.
“I’ve never once noticed them put the tables out of anything. Have you?”
I raised my eyebrows in surprised. I had not.
“I have not,” I said, “that IS weird.”
“Yeah, thought so.”
With that Louis fell back into contemplative silence, as did I. The implications of this were quite terrifying. How could I not notice? How did the tables get there?
These questions and more pressed on my mind when, for some reason, a shoe flew past.
I was pulled out of my thought and looked at the shoe, before looking down the dinner line.
A particularly harsh battle had started against one of the big kids and a boy who had not wished to submit his place. The defender was currently on the floor, missing a shoe and, I presumed, his glasses.
Either that or he usually flailed around that inaccurately. As I watched him, I concluded that both the lack of glasses and the inaccurate flailing were both true statements.
The back of the line is, sadly, reserved for the losers. The weak ones, the small ones. The shoeless ones.
It is a harsh thing indeed, but if anything is to inspire a kid to fight for his rights, being at the back of the line is that thing. It’s not so much that the dinners served at the end of the lunch lack meat.
Far from it, infact. It’s the fact that the meat is actually substituted with congealed gravy. I would never have thought it possible for gravy to congeal into such tough, bizarre fragments, but somehow it was achieved.
Mind you, I sometimes had my doubts if it was even gravy at all.
Being second in the queue assured me almost unrecognisable body parts in my portion if meat.
To make the wet lunch break system fair, a few kids were called in at a time from each classroom. This was fair in the sense that it mimicked the usual lunchtime queue system. The strong kids at the front, or those who know how to be ignored, like me, got the best food. Then, all the weak kids at back got the crap food.
Personally, I thought this rather unfair. It would have been nice for entire classrooms to be called at a time, so occasionally, the weak kids would be able to get some top notch meat.
However, this would cause them to love rain. My mind turned over the thought of the head teacher thinking about weak kids doing pagan rain dances.
“Absolutely not! I will not have it!” I imagined he would scream.
I sighed a little. If a kid could pull off a rain dance, he should be richly rewarded with premium meat cubes.
Of course, that’s just my opinion.
The wait in the lunch queue was longer than usual, but I put this down to the fact that many kids who had been queuing outside all had to be ushered to some secret waterproof bunker, lest they get wet. These all had to be served before us, of course. To pass the time, I watched the aliens calmly clean up the nature table. They picked up dead leaves, escaped caterpillars and oppressed what seemed to be an emerging ant colony.
A notice board fell on me.
“Ow!” I cried as the large cork board fell from the wall behind me onto my head. I staggered forward, clutching my head, with the board falling to the floor.
“Oh shhh—” I began, before the teacher walked back into the room.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—” I continued, not wishing to complete the word in the presence of a teacher, but unsure of what to do instead.
“Sssssshhaarrgghhhhh!” I decided on. I jumped around a little bit to justify the outburst, then continued clutching my head for a while to emphasise that a notice board had indeed fallen on my head.
The pain had gone, but putting on a show was a very important part of school life.
“Stand quietly,” said the teacher sternly, taking the no nonsense approach. I respected his straight forward attitude and stood quietly.
Quietly, the strong, tall male teacher from the classroom next door, the one we shared a cloakroom with came and picked up the notice board. He placed it onto the brain-matter grey work surfaces which line the classroom and looked at the wall.
“Hmm,” he said, “the hook is gone, and the nails holding the string.”
I spun at hearing this to witness the next stage in robbery of metal items in the classroom and stared at the wall. This immediately drew the suspicion of the teacher and I must admit, I did look pretty suspicious.
“You look pretty suspicious,” said the teacher.
“I admit it,” I replied, “I look pretty suspicious.”
“Did you take these.. things?” he asked, unable to find the collective term for the small metal items which combine to hold up a board, framed painting or cross-stitch.
“No,” I said, turning away from the wall and avoiding the teachers gaze. As I turned, I saw the aliens heads turn, flicked my eyes up and saw them still working at the nature table, taking no heed of the events surrounding them.
My confusion and, I’ll admit, even a little fear at how fast they could move entombed me in silence. Luckily, this was exactly the response the teacher needed to stop suspecting me, even though I hadn’t heard what he’d said. I am guessing that he said anything at all. Infact, the very lengthening of this paragraph is going absolutely nowhere.
I turned to Louis, who was turning to me.
“Did you see—”
“I saw them—”
We fell into silence.
“This is getting weird,” said Louis.
“This is getting painful,” I said, rubbing the back of my head.
The significance of Louis thinking something was weird set off alarm bells. He’d obtained a copy of the Necronomicon, and he thought this was weird. I shuddered and took my mind off things by contemplating the delicious savoury meats I would soon be inserting into my mouth.
I shuddered again.

Eventually, we were called in to the dinner hall and me and Louis ate a large plate of something liquid and brown, with something hard and browner floating in it. I’m not quite sure floating is the correct word. Sailing is probably a better description for what the meat was doing. There were vegetables, which were somewhere between carrots and peas, in both colour and shape.
“So,” I said quietly, trying not to draw the attention of the other kids on our table, “the aliens. You reckon they can move really fast or something?”
“Like Superman?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
I stuck my fork in my mouth and separated meat from metal.
“If they could move really fast, Superman style, we’d never even see them doing all those suspicious things, like when we look up and suddenly they’re facing another direction.”
Louis twirled some vegetables around in his gravy, continuing with “I just think they’re really clever.”
“Really clever?”
“Yeah, and I think they know we know that we know.”
The fork remained in my mouth, allowing my brain full power to parse this sentence.
“Er,” I decided upon.
“What I’m trying to say is, they know we’re onto them.”
“Right,” I said, nodding, before pulling the fork out of my mouth, “What?! They know?!”
“I reckon so.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah. They keep checking us out, but they’re too clever. They’ll always look away before we see them. They’re really clever.”
“So we need to catch them out.”
Louis looked contemplatively into his gravy, before wishing he hadn’t.
“There’s three of us,” he said, “and two of them.”
“So how do we do it?”
Louis sighed. I forked another forkful of meat into my mouth and looked at the other people on my table. They were eating so fast it actually made me feel ill. As a result of this, I began to regret putting another forkful of food into my mouth.
“I’ll come up with a plan. For tomorrow,” Brian said.
I couldn’t help but smile, remembering how his last plan went.
“Okay, that’s cool.”
I decided I’d had enough malnutrition for one day, so I offered my food to the guy sat next to me. He leapt at the chance to almost double his calorie intake, and I was free to leave.
Leaving is quite intimidating. You take your empty plate to this table where some old dinner lady scrutinises your plate to see if you’ve eaten enough. I’m not quite sure what happens if she deems not enough has been eaten, but the general consensus is it probably involves teeth being pulled.
The woman herself is the anthropomorphic personification of dismay. She disapproves of everything you do and was probably a Nazi, although I wasn’t a great authority on Nazi’s, but I’d learnt enough from this fat guy with glasses to know that this dinner lady was probably a Nazi. Or at least a husband beater. The fat guy with glasses had told me about husband beaters too.
Put me right off getting married, that did.
Mind you, his stories about Nazi’s put me right off my lunch.
I’d left Louis at the table to do the freaky contemplation thing he does. How he can think for so long without talking is beyond me, it really is.
I walked back into the classroom, being as it was still raining outside. Louis was in the middle of the queue, but luckily the violence had all but died down. The biggest conflicts occurred between classes, not within the same class. Saying that, Marx was wrong about where communism would originally emerge, so I wasn’t exactly going to take his word as gospel.
The aliens were at the back. I didn’t even look at them, I was just too scared. I didn’t like how I was getting afraid of the aliens now, and that worried me. So now I was worried and scared, which was freaking me out. I could go on, but it probably wouldn’t be very funny to do so. Nevertheless, I was now scared, worried and freaked out, which was perplexing.
I needed to have a sit down.
To ease my worries, I drew a large bear eating what was possibly a car, although it looked more like another bear by the time I’d finished. The rest of the class began to fill with people finishing their lunch and slowly the noise level grew. I didn’t see much of Louis or Brian for the rest of the lunch break, although I did see a lot of the nice Catholic girl who was sitting quietly at the table I was sat at, also drawing. I bet she wasn’t drawing bears, though.
As I looked at her, I was overcome with an urge to hurt her. This could only mean one thing. I decided to draw more bears.

Lunch break ended with Mrs Benson staggering back into the classroom, looking a lot more confident, although this was probably down to the large crucifix she had acquired somehow. I noticed she didn’t bring the bottle back with her.
She forced us into silence and took the register in Cantonese, nobody getting caught out, which was a very good idea in the teachers current state.
After the registration process was somehow completed, she announced that the lesson would be comprehension. This was very similar to English, but with more letters. Also, the actual lesson involved understanding what we read, rather than just reading. It involved writing and, in drastic cases, actually talking to the teacher.
She handed out some paper, one with some writing printed on and some lines. We had to read it, then write out a summary in our own words.
“And do it quietly!” she shouted, “or.. else!”
The class erupted into conversation but I decided to try and work and achieve the task set before me. Slacking off would probably mean I’d have to talk to Louis and Brian about the aliens, which I wasn’t really feeling like doing. I lifted to the paper I had to read in front of me and began to scan the lines.
Brian sidled up to me, oozing the kind of casual and non-committal demeanour which could only mean he really wanted to tell me something.
“Just passing,” he said, crouching down next to my seat at the table. I looked sidelong at him, not wishing to encourage what he was undoubtedly going to say. It was like turning your back to a shark as it’s biting off your leg and generally making a mess in the ocean.
“You know,” he said, “I had a sausage roll last night.”
“Really.”
“Well, I made one.”
“Impressive,” I said, meaning it, “I can barely cut a cucumber without slipping the fork.”
Brian paused, caught off guard for some reason, but he ignored whatever it was had caused it.
“Yeah I made it with a real sausage. Only problem was, I couldn’t find any pastry.”
I continued reading.
“I looked all over for the pastry jar, but I guess someone moved it.”
A pastry jar, I thought, the delivery deadpan even in my mind.
“So instead I got a slice of bread and wrapped it around the sausage.”
“Basically, you made a sausage sandwich.”
“No! It was a sausage roll! You see I buttered the bread all the way around and toasted it!”
“Toasted it,” I muttered dumbly.
“Yeah,” said Brian, looking absent mindedly at something in the distance, before drifting back to the conversation at hand, “only problem was, it wouldn’t fit in the toaster.”
I actually turned my head to look at him with this remark.
“You tried to put a sausage sandwich in a toaster?” I asked with mild surprise.
“Roll. Sausage roll.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, I did, but it wouldn’t fit. So I was thinking, how can I toast without a toaster? Then the answer came to me!”
“The grill?” I said.
“The oven!” he said.
“Brian,” I said, slowing things down to make them clear in my rapidly unclear mind. It was like a fog of confusion had descended upon my synapses and I was walking in the middle of the road.
In the dark.
“Brian, you tried to toast a sausage sandwich— ”
“Roll.”
“A sausage roll in the toaster. When that didn’t work, you took it from the toaster and put it in the oven?”
“Well,” he said, licking his lips tentatively, “I didn’t take it off the toaster.”
I blinked. On the fog ridden road of my brain, I’d just been hit by something.
“I put the toaster in the oven with the sausage roll.”
I found myself with very little words to say beyond…
“Um.”
“Yeah you see I figured that ovens don’t toast, otherwise they’d be called toasters. Or supertoasters. So in order to toast it, I had to put the toaster in.”
“So you cooked an electrical appliance.”
“Er.”
“Plugged in to the mains.”
“Well no, actually,” he said, clearing his throat and rising defensively, “I’m not stupid you know. I powered the toaster with batteries.”
“You put batteries in an oven?!” I cried.
“No, because I couldn’t find the battery jar,” Brian continued, “so you remember how one time some crazy guy came in to an assembly and instead of God he made a light bulb work with a potato?”
I whimpered.
“Well I stuck the plug into a potato.”
I nodded slowly.
“But I didn’t put it in the oven, because everyone knows you don’t put batteries in the oven.”
It suddenly occurred to me that, throughout my entire, admittedly short lifetime, nobody has ever told me not to put a battery into an oven. I concluded that it must be some sort of innate knowledge I was born with, much like genes and the awareness that God is boring.
“So I had the power cable trailing out of the door of the oven with a potato stuck to the end. Clever, eh?”
His finishing remark was a desperate grasping for some sort of normality in the web of surreality he had created. I wasn’t even sure surreality was a word. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure what it meant.
“No, Brian. That’s possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He looked a little downcast, like he’d been expecting the news but had been hoping against hope that it wasn’t going to arrive. In a heart wrenching moment, it kind of typified Brian. He was so undeniably optimistic about everything.
“You buttered a slice of bread and wrapped it around a sausage, which you balanced on top of a toaster and put in the oven. Then you stuck a potato on the end of the toaster’s power cable which was dangling out of the oven door.”
Brian arched his eyebrows and looked at me.
“When you put it like that,” he said, “I can see why my mother was so annoyed.”
I nodded gravely.
“I thought it was just because I’d used the last potato or something.”
“Well, that was not the case, you see?”
“Oh, it was. I had used it.”
“Oh,” I said, silently registering the mounting mountains of horrors Brian was piling.
“At least the bread went brown,” he said, that optimism thing creeping into his voice again.
“Yeah,” I laughed, “at least it worked!”
“Well,” said Brian, looking down at the table again.
I stopped laughing and, in that moment, it seemed like I had never known laughter. In retrospect, this was a pretty dramatic thing to think, but you had to be there.
“The sausage wasn’t cooked. I guess the freezer is as cold as it feels.”
Ignoring the fact my best friend had tried to eat a frozen sausage, I had to question his freezer remark.
“What do you mean, as cold as it feels? Of course it is!”
“Hey, no,” he said defensively, “people are always saying things aren’t as bad as they seem. Like on TV, when the grey haired guy killed himself by driving a car into a wall.”
“Oh, Charles Bronson?”
“Yeah! Well, if things aren’t always as bad as they seem, then I thought that perhaps,” his voice got quieter, “perhaps the freezer wasn’t as cold as it seemed.”
Anybody else, I would be laughing. With anyone else, it would be stupid, but not with Brian. The sheer pathos emitted from his discovery that freezers are as cold as they feel was deeply moving and, at the same time, rather disturbing.
“Brian,” I said softly.
“Yeah just thought I’d share that with you!” he said, brightening up in an instant and catching me rather by surprise.
“See you later, I’ve got work to do!” he said. I swayed gently in my seat, taking in the discourse I had just been privy to. I watched Brian proceed quickly to the sink, where he poured himself a glass of water and slowly drank it. Pausing for air, he repeated the process.
I frowned a little. That was the work he had to do?


I decided not to dwell on the matter and get back to more pressing issues, like the lesson at hand. I opened my green workbook and looked the faint blue lines within. They were so the teacher knew where to put the red crosses.
I flicked through a few pages of old work, looking at the dates. Most of them were crossed out and re-written because I always forget to write the proper year when we have a new one. By the time I'm getting into the swing of writing a new year in the date, it changes to the next. Once, I gave up writing the year, instead just putting in a vague clue in the form of which century we were in.
This didn't go down too well with the teacher and, I imagine, it wouldn't go down too well with historians hundreds of years in the future either.
I kept on flicking pages until I found a particularly awesome battleship I had been working on. I drew a few more gun turrets and a rather suspicious looking shark before deciding I didn't know what comprehension meant and thus I could no longer continue the lesson.
Of all the people in the classroom, there were only five I could think of that would hold the answers I sought. Looking across at Mrs Benson, who was swaying gently in her seat and trying to write on her own arm, I decided to narrow it down to four.
A stroll to the nerd table was in order. Usually, I never had much to do with them, although I wouldn't have minded. They seemed to have intelligent conversations and were not usually that noisy, things I tended to like in people. However, nerds are nerds.
"Comprehension," I said, standing over them.
They turned and regarded me with a cold stare, like I'd just said a contextually suitable but still completely irrelevant word.
"What does it mean?" I elaborated.
They relaxed, now they knew I wanted their brains, not their pocket money.
"Well," one said, "it's quite simple. Comprehension means understanding. To comprehend is to understand."
I thought about this for a moment, aided by a quick gnawing at The Forbidden Fingernail.
After a moment, I objected, "I don't think so. Understanding means understanding. Comprehension has to mean something else."
They were silent. "It does?"
"Of course it does! You can't have two words meaning the same thing!"
One of the nerds objected to my objection, which I suppose is a doublejection, something I think my grandma had once.
He said, "What about cool? Cool can mean cold and also it can mean... cool. As in, cool, you know. Like those clicky pencils with leads you have to put in yourself. That kind of cool."
I snapped my fingers and declared, "You know, those are cool, although I keep breaking the leads. Thanks, guys!"
And with that, I went back to my seat, sat down and was none the wiser about my original question, although I did have an urge to buy another clicky pencil.
I stared out of the window for a while, thinking about how lovely it would be to be outside, being chased by bees. I was restless, bored with the lesson and worried about the aliens. I opened the workbook to give the illusion that I was doing something and I drifted gently into a daydream, although it was more quiet contemplation than a dream and the day would be more accurately described as an afternoon. An afternoon quiet contemplation didn't have quite the same alliterative ring to it, I suppose.
That was the sort of thing I daydreamed about.
I also thought about the aliens. You could say they were consuming my mind. Something me and Louis had never really discussed was what the aliens plans could be. I had never seen any films documenting what happened when aliens invaded a classroom taking the form of two children, so I had little idea what to think.
I figured they'd be here for a reason and the only reason I could think of was that they wanted something. This didn't seem too convincing in my mind, though, because it seemed the only thing they wanted were the hinges on a door.
I got out my seat, wandered over to Louis and explained my theory in the hope he could add something more convincing.
"Louis," I said, "I think the otherworld door industry is having a hinge shortage."
With a dreadful slowness he turned and faced me, with the kind of frown reserved exactly for this kind of occasion.
"What?" he said.
"Oh yes," I said, "I've been thinking."
There was a brief silence between us where we waited for somebody to make a tired gag, then we moved on.
"About what?"
I leaned closer and said darkly, "Them."
Louis moved slightly and looked at the people on his table, who had glued their hands to their workbooks and were trying to free themselves without alerting the authorities. Mind you, with the current state the authority was in, I don't think they had much to worry about.
I glanced across at Mrs Benson, who was having trouble navigating her way around a pencil sharpener.
"What about them?" Brian asked.
I shook my head and said, "Not them. Them."
Brian turned back to his book and said, "Go on."
I knelt down and moved closer and spoke in a whisper. "I've been thinking, they're here for something, right? So what is it they want?"
Brian glanced across, writing his workbook. "Keep talking."
I kept talking. "And those hinges on that door went missing in very strange circumstances, so I think the two are related."
Brian's silence encouraged me to speak the conclusion I had reached. "So I though... maybe they want... hinges?"
With a surprising turn of speed, Brian faced me. "Or they want to kill Jack."
I raised my eyebrows, my jaw hanging open slightly. "I didn't think of that."
Brian turned back to his book. "I did. I've been thinking a lot about this too. I can't see what two aliens would want here, in this classroom."
"So the two things we've come up with so far are... they want hinges..."
"... Or they want to kill Jack."
I screwed my face up in contemplation.
"But why would they want to kill Jack?"
Louis retorted, "Why would they want some hinges?"
I saw my chance and made the intellectual attack. "Because of a hinge shortage in the otherworld door industry!"
Louis flapped his hand at me airily, smiling the smile of someone who has already thought up the disproof of an argument.
"Don't be foolish," he said, "if something is capable of space travel, then they'll have sliding doors. Have you not seen Star Trek?"
I admitted I had not, as I had never been a fan of trekking and the idea of boldly going anywhere sounded like a lot of effort.
"So what do they want?" I asked desperately.
"That," he said, "is yet to be discovered."
With that could be considered a flourish, he twirled his pencil between his fingers and began rubbing out something on his workbook with the rubber on the end of his pencil. Only it didn't work, because there was no rubber on the end of his pencil.
He dropped it and recoiled in horror. "Whoa," he said.
"Wrong pencil?" I asked.
"No. This has a rubber on it. Well, had. It's... gone."
Across the table, someone else heard and said, "Yours too?"
Louis flashed me a meaningful look. What the meaning was, I had no idea, but it was there, being mysteriously meaningful.
"And I definitely know I had one because I used it this morning!" the kid across the desk said, exasperated. "And... and I only bring one because I'm not allowed more than one and so I don't know what's go--"
I sensed all useful information from that person had now ceased to flow, so I turned to Louis, who was looking at me.
"Coincidence?" he said.
I waved my hand and said, "No thanks, I've just eaten. This is weird, though."
He rolled his eyes and said, "Indeed. Go and find out if anyone else has had a pencil eraser go missing."
I frowned at his use of the word eraser and sloped away to another table.
"Can I borrow a rubber on the end of a pencil?" I asked, as innocently as God is innocent of genocide.
"No!" someone shouted at me.
I was expecting an answer like this. "And why not?" I did ask, hoping to unearth some information.
"Because you elbowed me in the face yesterday."
I nodded, finding this perfectly acceptable. I decided to try another table. I had a leisurely stroll to another table and once more asked the question.
"Can't. Lost it."
Now this was interesting. I pressed on. "Lost it?"
"Yeah. Had it this morning. Now it's gone."
"I suppose it happens all the time," I lied.
"Yeah."
"Well, thanks anyway. I should go and get some work done," I lied again, leaving.
I passed Brian on my way back to Louis. He grabbed my sleeve, almost pulling me over.
"Matt," he whispered, "I've been thinking."
This was serious. "We'll talk about this later, okay?"
"Okay."
When Brian got thinking, it was usually in a completely different direction to most people. Also, he didn't do it a lot, so when he did it was always going to be something special.
I stood next to Louis and resisted the urge to salute. He turned wearily, having been engaged in a struggle with an enormous chunk of rubber which was carefully designed to rub out half a line of writing either side of the line you were meant to be rubbing out.
"Well?" he said wearily.
"It seems everyone is missing them."
"Hey," said another kid across the table, "I've got one!"
Both Louis and I cast an eye across the table at the speaker, who suddenly shrank under our gaze. He held out a pencil in front of him defensively. It was a clear plastic clicky pencil, one to be revered as the true king of pencils. You lifted the rubber out of the end, dropped in little 0.7mm graphite leads and then pressed the end down to pop the lead out.
The true joy of clicky pencils is the clickyness, an adjective that only came into existence after the joy of clicky pencils was discovered. Being justified in making an annoying noise is a rare thing in the classroom.
"Weird, very weird."
"Indeed," said Louis, obviously deep in thought. Which reminded me...
"Louis," I said, laying a hand on his shoulder, "Brian has been thinking."
"This is serious," he replied.
"I thought so too."
Nothing more was said, so I decided to say nothing either, something my mother had always taught me. I walked slowly back to my seat, casually glancing at the aliens on the far side of the classroom as I did so. They were busy writing in their books.
I decided to make the distinction between working and writing in books because I had often been found to be writing in my book without actually doing any work whatsoever. I reasoned that if someone like me could do that, then some aliens certainly could. From the strokes of their pencils as they wrote, I could see they were writing words and not drawing complex plans of the school in order to assure our utter destruction at the hands of massive alien weaponry.
I sat down, pulling my still open workbook towards me. After a brief moment of blank staring, I realised that if I was even going to give the impression of doing work, I needed to have the worksheet at hand. I looked around my table and saw everyone else with a piece of A3 paper folded, with official looking words printed in serif fonts.
There was a small stack in the middle of the table. I wasn't aware of how much of the lesson had passed, but I was fairly confident that I should have been well into the solving of the worksheet by now. It was going to take some skill of get that worksheet without being noticed.
I imagined myself as a detective in an almost-but-not-quite black and white detective movie. Film noir, it was called, which seemed ridiculous to me. I liked to call it film presque noir et blanc, to the almost continuous irritation of my father.
I looked around furtively, taking in the shady characters doing shady things in the shady bar around me. It wasn't actually very shady, being as the classroom was full of fluorescent lights. I stretched my arms up in a slow, faked yawn, the idea being to bring my arms forward and subtly pull the worksheet towards me. Like in every film presque noir et blanc though, there was a twist.
Mrs Benson saw me.
"Yesh Matthewww?" she crowed.
I quickly lowered my arms and realised what had happened.
"What do you want?" she shouted, drawing the attention of a few people on my table. A raised teachers voice is almost always cause for amusement, as long as you're not the one having your voice raised at.
I turned, my face a mask of innocence and horror, something usually reserved for the headteacher. "Nothing!"
She slammed her fist on the table and looked in surprise at her fist. Then, she slumped back in her chair and moaned, "I need some bran... dee... tea..."
I turned around and quickly pulled a worksheet towards me, hoping she'd just leave me alone. It seemed to work, although she might have fallen asleep. I didn't fancy moving to find out. Across the table, the nice Catholic girl spoke to me.
"Don't worry about it," she said softly, "I think she's under a lot of stress."
I looked up from the worksheet, meeting her eyes. She was facing down slightly, her big brown eyes darting to the teacher. Her long dark fringe fell slightly over eyes and she smiled at me before getting on with her work. I felt slightly guilty that she was working so hard and I wasn't but this quickly passed. Very quickly.
I'd never really thought about her much. Her name, I knew, was Natalie. She was nice, polite and quite quiet, traits I found positive in people. She wasn't a nerd, either. The only real thing that stopped me from really getting to know her was that she was a girl. These things happened, I suppose. I stared at her for a while, mainly because I didn't want to look at the worksheet I now had in front of me.
After a few moments of this, Natalie looked up at me and asked, "Is there something you want?"
Off guard, I muttered something about world domination and looked down. I opened the worksheet and began reading. This comprehension lesson appeared to be based on an old exam paper. I hoped it was, because if this was an actual exam, I was in a bit of a mess.
The purpose of the exercise was to read some common phrases they had probably stolen from the internet and translate their meaning into more everyday terms. This seemed pretty easy and I was completely right. I looked at the first proverb.

Many hands make light work.
This, I wrote, meant that if a lot of people help with something, then it's easier. For a bonus point, I added that the proverb probably originated from the people who carry coffins.

I smiled to myself. The next was:
The early bird catches the worm.
My translation of this was, 'You have to wake up early to see birds eating worms.'

Moving far-from-swiftly-on, I approached the next proverb.
Practice what you preach.
Easy, I thought, writing, 'Don't tell your child to not be late home, then go out drinking with your old school friend and come back at four in the morning, smelling of smoke and collapsing into a pile of your own sick.'

I leaned back from the worksheet, having done a rather significant amount of work. Keeping my arms well below the Question Asking/Answer Giving Hand Airspace, I stretched back and inadvertently kicked the girl across the table.
“Sorry,” I said quickly, shooting upright. Then I realised I'd just apologised to a girl for kicking her so I quickly followed up with, “Sorry about your ugly face.”
Natalie looked up and smiled briefly before continuing with her work. I felt kind of stupid, so I turned a few pages in my work book and wiled away the rest of the lesson with a series of various people being crushed in various ways.
The bell rang, the kids stood, everyone ran outside. Everyone, that is, except about twenty of the kids, who walked outside and one who was kept behind by Mrs Benson.
And that one was me, most unfortunately.
“Matthew,” she said.
I agreed. “Yes.”
“Take this home to your mother.”
“Right,” I said, turning to leave.
“No!” she cried, forcing an envelope into my hand. “Put this in your bag, then when you go home, give it to your mother. She must return a form inside for tomorrow.”
“Right,” I said, turning to leave.
“No!” she cried once more. “Put it in your bag!”
“Right,” I said, turning to put the envelope in my bag, which I did, remembering to tell Brian and Louis about it. I rushed quickly outside and briefly took in the spectacle of the wet playground drying.
The midday rain had turned the asphalt a dark grey, with dry light grey patches where something had shielded the ground from the rain. These light grey patches often appeared mysteriously and with no real explanation, but now was not the time for pondering such asphalt related matters.
I marched over to Louis and Brian, who were lurking near a bench, not wishing to sit down for several rain and bird poo related reasons.
“Gentlemen,” I said, nodding.
“What?”
“Hello,” I ventured.
“Hi.”
I said, in my most business like of tones, “We don't have long, so let's talk. Brian, you said you had been thinking. What have you been thinking about?”
“Well...” he began.
“Why did you take so long to come out?” Louis interrupted.
I remembered and said, “Oh yeah, Mrs Benson gave me a letter. I dunno what's in it, she said it was for my mum.”
“Sounds ominous,” Louis said gravely.
“Yeah,” I agreed knowingly, having no idea what ominous meant.
“Sorry, Brian, go on,” said Louis.
“Well...” he began again.
A football hit him in the face. He staggered back but didn't fall. I picked up the offending football from the ground and took a step towards the advancing football players. With all my vengeance, I dropped the ball and kicked it angrily far and away from where the kids were playing football.
I was never very good at football, though, so I sliced the ball and it rolled neatly into someone's hands. They all laughed, so I had to think fast. My reputation was on the line.
“Yeah, fooled you, didn't I? You thought I was gonna kick it miles!” I laughed a little more, as did they.
Having defended my pride sufficiently, I turned back to Louis, who was rubbing his face. He didn't appear to be bleeding, but I had heard on the television the night previously that you can bleed on the inside. I decided that was absolute rubbish, but I thought it better to check.
“Are you bleeding?” I asked.
Brian turned to Louis. “Am I bleeding?”
“No.”
Brian turned to me and said, “No.”
“Right. How about... on the inside?”
“What?”
“Internal bleeding. It was on the television last night.”
Brian began to look a little panicked. “I... I don't know. How do I check?”
“Erm...” I said, “close your eyes.”
As Brian closed his eyes and wriggled about a little, Louis said, “Internal bleeding? That's stupid.”
“Better to be safe than sorry, I always say.”
“No you don't,” Louis protested, “Infact, that's the first time I've ever heard you say that.”
“I suppose. Well, Brian?”
“I can't see anything, it's all dark,” he said, slowly shuffling in circles.
“Well, that means you're fine, I suppose,” I said.
“Oh good,” he said, opening his eyes. He took a step right then a step forward and then dizzily turned around. “Woah, checking for internal bleeding is pretty... disorie... dis...”
Louis said, “Disorientating.”
“Yeah.”
I put my hand on Brian's shoulder to steady him. “Brian, you said you'd been thinking.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh right, yeah, what I was thinking was, if we all thought about things for a while, we could figure out what the aliens were up to.”
I let this statement sink in for a moment, in the hope that something would click and it'd all make a lot more sense. Louis' silence seemed to indicate he was trying much of the same.
After a few moments of this, I decided to speak up and say, “Brian, let me get this straight. You're saying that your idea is that we should think about something.”
“Well, yeah.”
“What do you think we've been doing?!”
“Well you've been thinking wrong. We've got several clues now so they must all somehow be linked. If you can find that link, you've got a lead.”
He was right and I was amazed and I told him so.
“I'm amazed, but you're right. We've not been looking at this in the right way. So... Louis, what has happened so far?”
“Have you forgotten?”
“No,” I said.
“How do you know? If you had forgotten some vital clue, how would you know you'd forgotten it?”
“Good point,” I said.
Louis listed the alien related events so far. “So first, there was that door that fell on Jack, then that display board thing falling on Matt and finally the rubbers on the pencils going missing.”
“Not all of them,” I pointed out. “A few people did still have rubbers on their pencils.”
“Well, I suppose, but I still think it's important.”
Brian raised his hand to his forehead and said to us, “I see a pattern.”
We turned with interest. “What is it?”
“Things... falling on people.”
“Um.”
“Is that it?”
“It's a vital link!” Brian protested. “A door fell on someone and a noticeboard fell on someone!”
Louis sighed and said, “You're right, but... I don't think it's the kind of link we're looking for. I mean, it doesn't tell us anything.”
“It could do,” Brian said. “It could mean the aliens are really crap murderers!”
I sided with Brian on this matter. “Yes, I don't think we can write anything off yet. We've got no leads, so we can't count it out. They could be really crap murderers.”
Louis, in what appeared to be mounting desperation or a really bad itch, rubbed his nose and said, “It doesn't make any sense. Why would they want to murder us? What is their motive?”
“That's a bit personal.”
“It means, 'What reason do they have to do something',” Louis said.
“Well,” I said desperately, “I don't know! Maybe we-”
“And!” Louis interrupted, “Aliens are from space. Space! Do you know where space is? It's right over there. And aliens from space have guns. Big ones. I really find it hard to believe a space travelling alien is having trouble killing us. I don't think murder is what they're here to do.”
Brian said, “Yeah, but they're crap murderers.”
“Why would they send a crap murderer here?”
“Maybe they got lost!”
“Lost?!”
“Space is pretty big, you know!” Brian argued hotly, getting onto firmer territory. “I can get lost on the estate, imagine how easy it'd be to get lost in space! And maybe they were just on their way to the murderer school, which would explain why they're so crap! Because they've not been taught yet!”
“Murderer school?!” Louis shouted, taking a step towards Brian. I stepped in between them and the bell for the next lesson began.
Louis quickly marched back inside the classroom while Brian and I took a more sedate stroll back.
“It's just the stress,” I reassured Brian, “It's getting to him.”
“It's getting to me, too. And my bladder.”
I widened the gap between me and Brian. We walked back inside, through the cloakroom and to our seats. Everyone was preparing for the next lesson by sitting on desks and shouting at each other. I forgot what the next lesson is.
Mrs Benson had, in the break, carefully collected all our worksheets in a pile on her desk that spills neatly onto the floor and flows under a cabinet. The teacher herself rises from her desk and picks up a green book. This can only mean one thing. Geography.
And geography can only mean one thing. Colouring. I sit back in my seat and relax while Mrs Benson hands out big pieces of paper for us to colour in while she explains the exercise of the lesson. I don't pay the slightest bit of attention, I'm too busy thinking about the aliens.
In an effort to unravel the mysterious origins and motives of the otherworldly visitors, I try to find a link between everything that they have stolen. I had no proof they stole anything, of course, but I had a hunch and hunches were important, no matter what my mother said about posture.
They took the hinges from a door, the hook from a noticeboard and the rubbers from some pencils. But not all the pencils. While I was shading in Russia, I concentrated every thought process I had to spare on the issue of the missing rubbers. I felt like a clue was staring me in the face and it all had something to do with why only some of people's rubbers on pencils had disappeared.
Having finished Russia, I stuck my hand into the ice cream tub of pencils to retrieve a blue with which to craft the oceans. To my surprise, someone's hand was already in there.
To my absolute horror, it was Natalie's hand. I withdrew mine sharply.
“Sorry,” I said.
She smiled. “Do you want a blue?”
I looked up from my work and into her eyes, big and white, with a brown circle and a black dot in the middle. That went for both of them.
“Yes,” I said, taking the pencil from her hand. “Thanks.”
And with that, I went sailing the seas. It wasn't long before I was bored and required a brown with which to draw boats, a green with which to draw sea monsters and a red to draw what happened to the sailors afterwards.
After about twenty minutes of this enriching activity, Natalie spoke to me across the table. “Do you know any of the answers?”
I looked at her blankly for several reasons, the primary being, 'Answers to what?' After consulting my worksheet and asking a few probing questions, I realised that the blank boxes protruding from various countries was actually a space for me to write in the name of the country.
“I thought it was just a rather large pier, from which to launch mighty battleships to crush the sea monsters ravaging our fair sailors,” I explained to Natalie.
“I think this one is Italy.”
I continued, “I know that we don't have many wooden boats now, like I've drawn here, but I'm getting into the spirit of things. As you can see, this map is rather old. Look at England, it's all green here. I live in England and I can tell you, it's definitely not that green. It's actually pretty grey.”
“I think that's Russia.”
“I think the last sea monster is under siege in Scotland,” I confided in Natalie.
She looked at me. I looked back. She said, “What country looks like a deflated football being kicked by a boot?”
It was then I noticed a question sheet, in which to test us on our cartographic task. The question she had asked was one of them. I decided to help her out, as I considered myself something of an expert on world affairs.
I gazed down at the map. “Um,” I said.
“Do you know?”
“Well,” I said, “it seems to me that pretty much any country in the entire world could be said to look like a deflating football. As for the boot part, well, I saw a Boots shop in town. And they're all over the place.” I left it at that. I think we both knew I was talking out of my behind. It was like a special bond we had. And I knew all about special bonds. My mum was always telling me what a waste of money they were, you never see any return on the bloody things, but will your father listen, oh no.
I spent the rest of the lesson colouring in, preferring the quiet solitude of work to the riotous laughter that results from sticking a sharp pencil in someone's back. The lesson bell rang before I knew it and it was time to pack up.
As I left the classroom with Brian, Mrs Benson called out to me, “Matthew! Don't forget that envelope for your mother!”
“I won't!” I shouted back, promptly forgetting all about it.
Me and Brian walked up the school drive.
“Did you think of anything?” I asked Brian.
“I thought mostly about deflated footballs,” Brian replied.
“I can see why. I thought about rubbers.”
“Not very tasty.”
I nodded grimly. “Noted. See you tomorrow, Brian!”
“Bye!”
And we parted ways, never to see each other again.
Until tomorrow, obviously.