The Death House Read Free

didn’t have to agree with him.’ He’s smarting.
    ‘Yes he did,’ Ashley says. He’s nibbling a piece of carefully buttered toast. ‘Just because you’re clever, you think you know everything. You don’t. Sometimes you’re plain stupid.’ He sounds smug, no doubt still annoyed with Louis for taking the piss out of his praying last night.
    ‘Let’s just forget about it.’ I want breakfast over. I wish I could be friends with Jake – not that I like him, but at least we’re the same age. If we were friends I wouldn’t feel as if I’m such a fucking nanny so much of the time.
    ‘Maybe we’ll get letters today,’ Will says. ‘They said our parents could write to us. They must have written by now. We’ve been here weeks. Maybe they’ll even be able to visit.’
    ‘Do you still want to learn to play chess?’ Louis says. ‘I’ll teach you, if you like.’
    Will smiles, the letters momentarily forgotten. I might be the boss of the dorm, but Will is most fascinated by Louis, and although their minds are miles apart, it’s clear Louis likes Will, too. I wonder what Louis’ life was like before this – all that brilliance but always several years younger than his classmates. No real friends. Always treated like a bit of a freak. I suspect Louis mentioned the chess on purpose to distract Will. There weren’t going to be any letters, and definitely no visits. That had all been clear on my mother’s face as she screamed my name when they put me in the van. This way no one has to know when it happens. It’s cleaner .
    For our families, at least.

 
    Thre e
    After breakfast there are lessons. We have these in dorm groups and the teachers rotate around the various rooms that might once have been bedrooms or dining rooms or whatever else someone filled this old house with, but now serve as small classrooms. Even though some of the dorms are down to just a couple of people, they don’t change that rigid routine by mixing us up.
    Mainly, given the age differences between us, we work from textbooks, answering comprehension questions or learning French we’ll never use or just staring out of the window and waiting for the next change of teacher. There’s a ten-minute break but no playground to dick around in. It’s basically just a toilet break. There’s no detention. If you don’t work and just sit there quietly the teachers don’t care. It turns out that you end up working anyway, just to make the morning pass quicker. Four hours is a long time to just sit and think, especially when you don’t have any good stuff to think about.
    The teachers are all middle-aged and I wonder about that. Maybe it makes it easier for them to distance themselves from us. We don’t know their names – just call me Sir or Miss should you need help – and I think they must be as bored as we are. They sit at the front and watch us until we have a question, but mainly if we don’t understand something we just move on to the next bit. Or, in our dorm, ask Louis. The textbooks we use are old, maybe twenty or thirty years older than the ones at school, and I think that’s intentional, too. It’s school but not school. Like this whole place is life but not life. At least the teachers, who disappear off to their own wing once lessons are done, will get out of here. Sometimes I’ll catch one watching us as we work as if we’re animals in a zoo. I can never decide quite what the look is. Fascination or fear, or maybe a bit of both. They watch for symptoms, too, I bet. Just like the nurses. I wonder if the teachers talk about us at night. I wonder if they take bets on which of us will go next – or say which one of us they want to go next. I think about rolling up balls of paper and launching them across the room to see if I can hit Ashley’s head, but I never do it. Aside from my lack of interest in mucking around here, I suspect that messing about in class is a sure-fire way to get Matron’s attention. I don’t want to be