The Rat Bastard

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I glared down at my empty piece of paper. Maybe empty was the wrong word. Quiet, it was a quiet piece of paper, as quiet as the room in which I now sat. The mood, the humor, the sense of any frivolity had been sucked clean out of the room. 

The man at the top of the classroom saw to that with his posh, put-on accent and the way he pursed his lips to somehow prove to this room of veritable children that he was better than them. Not just significantly older, but superior in every way.

It didn’t matter that he spent his weekends scouring his local golf course for balls that other people lost. He saw nothing improper with bringing hundreds of these balls to the school on days that the other teacher was out. It was just good business for him to have students spend the day washing his balls so he could sell them second hand on whatever black market existed for beat up golf balls in rural Ireland in the 90s.

Students washing golf balls. Student. Always one specific student.

His stupid fucking glasses hung limply around his wrinkly neck. My back was to him but I could tell from the sounds and subtle movements behind me. He was moving his false teeth around in his mouth. The sound was unmistakable, a mix of saliva and pure, unbridled loathing for the children who sat in front of him. 

He was cutting his apple now. I could hear the knife slice through what sounded like a particularly juicy one today and could visualize the apple now balanced on the knife moving methodically towards his mouth. Next would come the chewing, made ever more gruesome by the false teeth. I didn’t know much about false teeth at the time but I knew that they shouldn’t move around inside the mouth so much.

I dry heaved but didn’t dare show any movement in my body lest I be called upon in front of the class. I set to the task of drawing something that would knock this man’s socks off, forgetting for a second that it was an impossible task and that for this one hour every Monday, I was the worst student in the class. 

With significantly lowered expectations, I set to work. How hard are horses to draw? Could I draw a nice horse? Maybe, let’s give it a go.

Fuck. 

That doesn’t look like a horse at all. Maybe a Connemara Pony or a malnourished donkey. Does it look like it might be a little like a dog? 

Okay, it’s a dog now. 

Let’s get a sun up in the corner and a line of trees to show that this dog is in a field and we can pretty much call it a day. I spent the next few minutes tinkering around the edges in case any sudden inspiration or artistic talent might strike out of the blue and cause this to look more impressive. It’s not bad for a seven year old, I thought to my seven year old self because I was, in fact, seven years old. 

“Eau-kae, let us behold your creations,” he finally said, his voice dripping with a level of cuntiness that put the heart crossways in most of the children in the room but none more so than the one he was about to call on.

“Young Joseph,” the glasses were on his face now, balancing impossibly on the tip of that nose he so smugly looked down on everyone with. He extended his arm slightly and produced a curly index finger for added effect and summoned me to the desk.

I knew my horse-cum-dog wasn’t going to be a hit but I hoped that he would go easy on me. I was Young Joseph because there was an older Joseph who already resided in the classroom five days a week. Since I was just a visitor on Monday afternoons while the girls set about learning how to knit in the other room, I was resigned to junior status. I was pretty sure the man himself was also Joe so you would think there would be some semblance of brotherhood between us all. Why was there so many fucking Joes in such a small school?

He was studying the drawing now, his face fully pointing down but the glasses somehow held fast on the end of his nose. Were they glued on? I was getting very nervous at the silent judgement and knew the dog did not please him. I chanced a look up at the rest of the room. All of the other boys were sat up straight, elbows on the table and one hand rested flatly on top of the other. If they weren’t sitting like that, they could expect a glower from the top table and to see the false teeth move around in the mouth until they got the message. 

Finally he took the glasses off and looked at me smiling. It was not a kind smile.  

“And what, prey tell, is this craythur supposed to be?” he asked a question with no right answer. I might as well have said it was a koala bear standing in front of a eucalyptus farm for all the good it would have done me.

“A d-d-dog. It’s a dog in a field, sir.”

“A d-d-dog? It doesn’t look very much like a dog, does it, Young Joseph?” 

He held my drawing up to the class. Somewhere behind me, the court jester held up a sign with ‘polite laughter’ scrawled on it. The room duly obliged. I turned red although I’m sure I probably already was.

“It is my belief that you were trying to draw a rat. Were you trying to draw a rat, Young Joseph?” He paused for just a second before adding a “Hmmh?” for emphasis. 

Did he expect me to answer that? I suspected not until I got a second, more condescending “Hmmh?”  

“I don’t know, sir,” I muttered to the floor, shame engulfing all my senses now as the chorus of obedient laughter continued from the floor.

“My assumption… is that you were trying to draw a rat and you ran out of time. Here let me help you.” 

He elongated the tail of my dog and added some comic-villain-like whiskers. It was a shit rat but might have been less shit than my dog. He held up the doctored drawing and asked the room what they thought of Young Joseph’s rat to which the laughter continued. 

The laughter was empty. The eyes in the faces that held the mouths that were doing the laughing were empty. 

Only one person in the room was enjoying this.

The whole ordeal lasted probably not much longer than half a minute but was filled with enough shame to damage future generations as he handed me back my bastardized rat and I traipsed back the impossibly long seven steps to my desk. I couldn’t wait for this day to be over. 

He picked a couple of people who could actually draw next to showcase their pictures. They received limited praise and the afternoon wore on. He probably told one of his “Here’s how I was a total cunt in real life recently but I think I am the hero,” stories to which he expected a standing ovation. He had a captive audience afterall. 

I was counting down the minutes to three o’clock. However much of a complete prick he was, he never liked to stay a minute past three. 

At ten to three, I heard the two worst words I could possibly hear at that time.

“Young Joseph…” a pause so pregnant I could almost hear the nurse telling it to push.

“You may put my milk bottle in my briefcase.” 

He wore the very same shit eating grin on his face that suggested this was not going to be a good time for me either. 

He gestured towards his bag which sat flaccidly on the floor beside his desk, old beaten leather that was once brown, sporting a lock that locked like it was probably older than the man himself. From the glorified bag that he liked to call a briefcase hung a sad length of twine with a piece of plastic tied to the end of it.

The lock was closed and the piece of plastic was obviously the key. I walked whatever-the-opposite-is-of-confidently past his desk, gathering up his empty milk bottle as I passed. I didn’t even have time to wonder why a grown man brings a bottle of milk with him to drink every day or how warm it likely was by the time he did actually drink it, considering the distinct lack of a fridge in the school. I was concentrating on the task at hand.

I put the milk bottle on the floor, took the piece of plastic in one hand and shoved it roughly into the keyhole of the lock. A normal person in a typical situation would have expected the lock to give, and the briefcase to open. I knew not what to expect but I knew not to expect that. Nothing happened and nothing gave way. 

The man was saying something to the rest of the class. As I continued to fumble with the lock, every so often trying to open it with all the sheer brute force a seven year old can muster, I could hear his voice turning in my direction. 

I could hear the smile widen on his lips and I could feel the eyes of the room on me. I knocked over the milk bottle and it clambered onto the small, inexplicably tiled area beside where I was. I fumbled to pick it up, causing a bigger ruckus and set about continuing my task that lasted a full 8 minutes.

At this point, he announced that I had failed to open his briefcase and asked for one of the older boys to volunteer to show me how it is done. One of them did so with great aplomb and a level of grace that suggested he had been me before. He returned to his seat as I put the milk bottle safely into the briefcase. 

I looked the man in the eyes, questioning without words if I should now close the briefcase again. He gave an imperceptible nod and I obliged. The room was quiet enough that we all heard the lock click together. A perfectly, crisp click and one that signified more than just the shitty bag closing. It was the closing bell of my ordeal. 

“Young Joseph… my apple knife.” His hand was already outstretched. He had waited until I had locked the bag again because he hadn’t seen me fail enough yet. 

He was holding the knife by the blade, handle facing towards me, and wearing that gruesome duck face he made when he was really enjoying torturing a child. I crossed the distance between us in two quick steps, grabbed the small, wooden handle forcefully so that it sliced the palm of his hand, and before he had a chance to fully survey the damage, I drove the knife deep into his neck and through the back of his throat.

The blood spurted violently, spraying his desk and knocking the core of his rapidly decaying apple off its axis. The boy who opened the bag in the front row had his glasses covered and older Joseph fell backwards off his chair trying to escape the cartoonish squirts. 

I plunged the knife deeper still and looked in his eyes as I twisted ever so slowly before pulling it back out of his mangled neck. He had lost so much blood so quickly that he couldn’t fight back and pathetically clawed at my blood soaked hands as he gargled on a gallon of his own blood. It was filling up his lungs now and covered his chair before draining onto the carpet below.

I didn’t know the human body could contain so much blood. As quickly as it started, the gargling subsided and his lifeless body slumped back into the chair, no more hatred left to spew, no more shame left to impart on his innocent audience. I dropped the knife into the pool of blood at my feet and looked back to the room of the other schoolboys who had been enduring this for years like me. They were all on their feet, and a slow-clap began to reverberate around the room before descending into raucous cheering and wild applause. I took a moment to smile to myself and drink in the adulation.

“Young Joseph. My knife,” he repeated. “It is three o’clock.” 

I blinked and looked at him, stood up and took the knife by the faded, wooden handle. I turned to the briefcase and found enough of an opening on one side to be able to slide the knife in without having to attempt to open the lock. I returned to my own desk and started packing my bag. 

Small victories, I thought as I began to conceptualize a plan to shit my pants in the car on the way to school next Monday morning so that my mother would have no choice but to keep me home and I could avoid this.