Rook: Snowman Read Free Page A

alarming tendency to burst out with insults and obscenities, just at the wrong moment. Borderline Tourette’s, the college psychiatrist reckoned.
    Ray left the classroom. Jim went over to his desk and dropped back into his chair. He started to sort out all of the homework that he had dropped in the parking-lot.
    Tarquin Tree had written, ‘Hamlet goes halfway nuts because he’s the only one who knows the truth about who offed his father. The only way he can get his revenge is by offing King Claudius. He offs Claudius, but he gets offed, too, on account of the swords are poisoned. So the moral is that if your mother’s a fox watch out for your uncle.’
    He thought: he’s getting there. At least he’s read the play and understood it. And even if he can’t fully express himself in writing, he’s had a try.
    He smeared his hand over his face as if he could smooth it out and rearrange it, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He probably had one or two Anacin tablets in his desk drawer, so he pulled it open to have a look. Immediately, he shouted out, “ Ah !”
    Crouched right in the front of it, right on top of his college diary, was a huge green furry rat. God, it must have gottenitself trapped in his drawer somehow, at the end of last semester, and slowly suffocated, and then rotted.
    “Hey, what’s the matter, Mr Rook?” asked Washington, half rising to his feet. “You look like – you look like you seen a ghost.”
    “It’s okay, it’s okay. Nobody panic.” Jim picked up his mechanical pencil and gave the rat a tentative prod. “Kyle, go call Clarence, would you? Tell him to bring his protective gloves and a plastic trash bag.”
    It was incredible that the rat’s fur had grown so long and such a poisonous shade of green. He prodded it again, and to his disgust it fell apart, revealing its whitish, semi-liquefied insides, and a membrane of transparent green slime. The smell was appalling, like overripe cheese. Then he suddenly realized that it was overripe cheese. This wasn’t a rat at all, but a cambazola and lettuce ciabatta. He had hurriedly dropped it into his desk drawer on the last day of last semester when Karen Goudemark, the new biology teacher, had come into his classroom to introduce herself.
    Like the Queen of Denmark, Karen Goudemark was a fox. Brunette, pretty, confident, with a bosom that you had to make a deliberate effort not to look at, because you were both professionals, after all. And gorgeous lips. And great ankles. You didn’t greet a woman who looks like that with a messy half-eaten cheese roll in your hand.
    To a chorus of exaggerated revulsion, Jim lifted the ciabatta out of his desk, balanced on his diary, and dropped it into his wastebin.
    “Something sure is rotten in the state of Denmark,” said Billyjo Muntz, flapping her hand in front of her nose.
    “An extra credit for a spontaneous and appropriate quotation from the Bard,” said Jim.
    “I got one! I got one!” said Joyce Capistrano. “Act 1, scene 2 – ‘the memory be green’!”

    “Okay, an extra credit for you, too. But let’s get back to work, shall we? I’ve got your homework to sort out.”
    He was just about to sit down again when Ray walked back into the classroom. He didn’t have any toilet-paper, and he was frowning as if he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
    “Ray?” said Jim. “Ray – is everything all right?”
    Ray stared at him. “I went to the guys’ room,” he said.
    “That’s right. And?”
    “And … I think you’d better take a look for yourself.”

Two
    Jim stepped out of the classroom just as Clarence came along the corridor wearing a livid red pair of industrial gloves and carrying a heavy-duty plastic bag. “What’s going down now, Mr Rook? You only been back here ten minutes and already there’s an emergency crisis.”
    “Tautology,” said Jim.
    “What’s that? Contagious?”
    “Tautology means using two words when one word will do. Like