Tawse

I hope he dies.

I hope he dies in pain.

I plan it out in my head.

I know that if you have bad thoughts, it’s the same as doing bad things and that you will burn in hell ‘for all eternity’ – I was not sure how long that was, but the way they tell you at mass it sounds like a long time.

I do not and never will care.

He has a leather tawse. He keeps it under his jacket over his right shoulder, where his arm should be. For some reason, looking back, we all thought that he had been in a car accident and lost it there (how do you lose an arm).

On hot summer afternoons he brings the belt crashing down on a desk ‘just to wake all of you up.’

He belts me once, along with every other boy in the class.

All forty of us.

Why?

After lunch we sit in the classroom waiting for him. On one wall there is a life size poster of a hairy man called The Neanderthal. He is naked, striding forward. One leg covers the bits we all want to see. Mark draws a huge hard cock in pencil.

He walks in. He calls the register. He paces across the floor in front of the blackboard as he begins to read aloud from a book.

You know when he sees the poster.

He carries on reading.

I think of a wild animal, caged, in the zoo, pacing, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, planning the kill.

He snaps.

He fires the book across the room. It crumps against the poster and falls to the floor.

He makes us an offer.

‘If the boy who did this owns up, I will belt him twice. If he doesn’t, I’ll belt you all once. I’ll belt you all every week until I find out.’

No-one owns up.

No-one clypes.

I stand in front of him with my hand out. He clips the tips of my fingers with the first swing of the tawse. He says, ‘That does not count’.

Afterwards I sit at my desk. I wrap my hand around the cool metal leg.

Some boys are crying.

Years later he dies as he crosses the road near the CO-OP.

He shops around the same time every Friday night, buying his week-end groceries, walking the same route.

The driver does not stop.