Retroexposure

Chapter 9 - School Memories 2

Wednesday 10th October 2007 9:30am
I want add more about the 'kid from hell' that I referred to yesterday. RP was two years younger than me, and I'm a fool to admit, I was scared of him. Not just of him, but of his brother and his mates who were all a year older than me. They had bullied me throughout the first two years of school. Then RP arrived. I was year 9 and he was year 7. He capitalized on the fact that his brother had bullied me.
What made this all the more humiliating was the fact that, obviously, he was much shorter than me. Although the details are a little fuzzy, I do remember the last day of school when I was in year 10. I forget why, but he was trying to attack me with a cricket bat. He swung it at me, and fortunately, he missed me. So instead he dropped the bat and punched me in the face. So even though by this point, I'd regained some sort of respect for myself, I was still being terrorised by this pain in the ass. When we went back the following school year, I felt a little more confident, probably due to the fact that RP's big brother had now left school.
Since then, RP's brother was killed in a car accident, and the last thing I heard about RP was that he was being sent to prison for assaulting a jogger. I remember bumping into him, and he told me that he had a court case coming up. He seemed quite proud of the fact that he was being sent to prison. By the sounds of it, it's the best place for him, in my opinion anyway.
Now, me getting bullied was happening so often, that soon I saw name-calling as water of a duck's back. I gave the impression that I wasn't bothered by it anymore. Truth was, I'd had enough. On several occasions throughout my time at the school, I'd felt suicidal. I'd thought about taking pills, slashing my wrists and even stepping in front of a train.
But I was a coward. I was more worried about how Mum and Dad would feel if I'd done myself in. Maybe they were my inner strength, and until writing this down here and now, I didn't realise that.
The most rebellious thing I did at school would have to have been when I brought in a bottle of alcohol. It wasn't just an ordinary bottle of alcohol; it was one of my 'paint stripper' cocktails! My Dad called it 'paint stripper' because when I made him a cocktail once; I put in a drop of everything that we'd had in our drinks cupboard. It was only a small tumbler glass, but it took dad 3 days to drink it, and even then, he had to throw some of it away.
With the bottle I took to school, I used a litre sized squash bottle. I'd used the same ingredients, but I added orange and blackcurrant squash to slightly dilute it, and to disguise the colour. I was planning on sharing it with my friends, but there was one kid who wanted some, but we wouldn't let him have any. I can't say that it was for his own good as he was too young, because A's girlfriend at the time was in the same year as this kid, and she had a swig too, I think.
Anyway, by lunchtime, we'd finished the bottle. The only place we could drink it, discreetly was in the school's chapel! Not a wise place, I know, but hardly any pupils at the school used the chapel, which for a Catholic Comprehensive, is probably a very poor show. I mean the chapel was used for what it should be used for, but most of the time it was used just for groups to just chill out. After I finished the bottle, I hid the empty bottle in the nearest place I could find – the chapel's organ stool! Lots of people dumped their rubbish in the stool's storage compartment, so I just added my bottle to it.
Towards the end of the lunchtime, the head of R.E came and found me, and told me that I was in serious trouble. The kid that I refused to give a swig of the drink to had gone and reported me. He'd even told the R.E head where to find the empty bottle. When he found it, he unscrewed the cap, and took a whiff, to try and identify the alcohol. But the potency of the drink practically knocked him back. I told him what the ingredients were, which surprised him. I was suitably punished, I forget what, probably an after school detention. A few years later, I bumped into the teacher again and he told me that his lasting memory of my time at school was the alcohol incident! 10:19am