No Land's Man Read Online Free Page A

school day and they ran the school like storm troopers with relativeimpunity. If you ever complained about them or crossed them, it could mean an invitation to Toad Hall, the sixth-form recreational room behind the commissary where busted lips and kicks to the groin were the least of what you could expect.
    In the six months I had been living at Woodhouse Grove Boarding School, I had seen many of my classmates limping or crying as they walked back to their dorms. I, so far, had never experienced this treatment and I intended to keep it that way. So dry cornflakes it was every morning. I had convinced myself it was just like eating a delicious bowl of salt-free crisps. In a pinch there was always water to soggy it up. Although, having tried that one morning, I realized there is nothing more depressing than eating mushy flakes out of a tasteless puddle.
    After breakfast was chemistry. It wouldn’t be so bad to be forgotten out here, I thought, if it meant skipping Mr. Shorey (a.k.a. Smurf)’s chemistry class. He was a fat gnome who waddled around the room and mumbled into his beard. But it was far from comfortable out on the ledge. As far as punishments doled out by the dormitory prefects went (and there were many to choose from), being locked out on a ledge four stories high in the middle of winter in nothing more than my pajamas was the most imaginative and frightening one yet. I may not have been invited to Toad Hall, but I’d already had plenty of run-ins with the prefects who made it their duty to lord their power over the younger boys. For example, there was my first run-in, a few days after I had arrived, when I was forced to hand-wash a prefect’s sweaty jock strap and mud-stained rugby kit because I kept grinning at him. He seemed to be friendly and cordial and I was seeking companionship, but clearly that was not how the hierarchical system worked here and he wanted me to know it.
    Then there was the time my friends Cocker, Rob, Mizzy, and I all had to stand facing a wall while one of the prefects pummeled us with a cricket ball for being late for “prep” (the two hours before bedtime when we returned to our classrooms to do our homework). We were not allowed to scream or act like it hurt; however, the giant stains of urine that spread down our legs were a clear giveaway.
    Another time during prep, the same prefect had invented a far more creative punishment when he asked me to write down as many insults as I could in fifteen seconds, after which he added the words “I am a” to each one and escorted me to every classroom where I was instructed to recite them to uproarious laughter. I am a cocksucker, a motherfucker, a sisterfucker, a faggot, a Paki, a curry-breather, a shit stain, a cum stain, a hairy ballsack, a dothead, a sand nigger, a normal nigger, a piss head, an ass licker, a cunt, a bleeding cunt, a giant bucket of puss juice, a shit pisser, a spit licker, a snot guzzler, a eunuch jelly, and a puke stocking. The last two I stole from the movie
A Clockwork Orange
and William Shakespeare, respectively.
    And the ledge was far more terrifying, although slightly less imaginative, perhaps, than the time I had to pick a playing card from a deck to decide how many lashes I would receive from a broken television antenna for having been caught saying my Muslim prayers after lights-out. This was a classic punishment that many of the boys received for various infractions, but praying “Paki mumbo-jumbo to Allah Walla Ding Dong,” meant that the number of lashes would be doubled. I picked a jack of hearts, so ten lashes became twenty and I lost count after a dozen even though the welts on my behind continued to remind me for a few days following.
    Though there were some punishments worse than the ledge, now that I thought about it. I would have stood out on a ledge inthe cold for a month if it meant avoiding what I heard had happened to one of the fourth-form boys in the Atkinson House dormitory. Rumor was that