The Grim Room - Chapter 14 of "The Knock 'em Down Boys".

Sparky moves from The Grim Room at school to a choice he doesn't want to make while Rat learns more about Robin.

Chapter 14

The Grim Room

The next night, I met Robin near the train station on the way to Sparky’s Gym.

I had organised to meet him after school by text. We didn’t have any afternoon lessons together and Sparky was going straight to the gym, so I had hung around completing maths and geography homework while he left.

Completing homework, not the most exciting thing in the world – especially maths, but it matters to me. Maths is logic, strategy, intelligent abstract thought; just what I need. The power to think, to plan – to win.

There were plenty of other kids in the school library. Some of them might have wanted to talk to me, distract me from the job in hand, so I found a cubicle with a single seat in order to complete the maximum amount of work, with the minimum amount of distraction, in the quickest amount of time.

Town were in London against the Wombles of Wimbledon, but it was a dark Tuesday night in November, which gave us a bit of a problem because of school – so we weren’t going. We would keep an eye on things on the radio.

We knew we weren’t really missing out on anything. AFC Wimbledon don’t have a reputation for physicality, too busy picking up rubbish I suppose. Eco warriors, rather than real warriors, if you know what I’m talking about.

Robin was mooching around outside the front of the train station when I arrived around the corner. She was dressed simply: in jeans, a pink hoodie and her hair was down. Her fringe obscured some of her face so it seemed like she was looking around using only one eye.

I was wearing my school uniform as I hadn’t had time to go home before I met Robin. She was smiling as I walked over to her. I couldn’t help feeling a bit of anger rising in me as she seemed to smirk at me. What was she smirking at?

“Have you not been to school today?” I asked her.

She was still smiling as she responded, “I don’t go much. It’s not my thing.”

As we were talking, I noticed Robin looking around us and brushing the hair from her face before it fell back into the place.

“Are you sure you want to come to the boxing gym?”

 Robin raised her eyebrow in answer to the question, pushed her hands into the stomach pockets of her hoodie, and motioned for us to be off.

Robin followed me past the front of the train station and into the underpass with the train tracks running directly above our heads. Cars barrelled past us on the road, exhaust noises reverberating around this sound chamber, and trains from London and Wales passing overhead causing a noise like thunder.

We didn’t say much, due to the noise and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Robin watching me, but I didn’t say anything.

When we were out of the railway underpass, Robin looked at me and stopped.

“Look, I’m sorry if I seemed a bit arsey back there.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“It’s just that you look kind of funny in that school uniform, you know, compared to the first time that I met you.”

I didn’t think that I did look funny – at least no funnier than any other lad who’d been to school.

Robin laughed then, “That blazer and that tie,” she flicked my tie up into my face, “all tightened up to the neck. And I’ll bet your top button is all fastened up too, isn’t it?”

I started to smile back then, because it was.

Then, maybe a little self-consciously, I loosened my tie and opened my top button, widening out my collar.

“Don’t you feel better now?” said Robin.

“Not bothered really.”

 We walked a little way along the dual carriageway that lead into the estate where Sparky’s gym was located.

“The way you’re all tied up in that uniform, that’s how school makes me feel,” said Robin.

“How do you mean?”

“I feel like I’m tied up and trapped, like the gates and fences, and the endless little boxes of classrooms are just another prison.”

I nodded to make sure that she could see that I was listening. I didn’t miss the fact that she had called school another prison.

Robin continued, “It’s like even though there’s probably over a thousand other kids in the place, I feel sort of alone. Like there’s only me there who’s like me, and no one else is the same. And not in a good way either. And worse than that, all the other kids know it too.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

As far as I knew, schools weren’t in the business of putting signs around kids’ necks that basically told everyone the entire history of a vulnerable kid.

Robin thought for a moment.

“You know what kids are like? We can smell something different a mile away. I turn up, new, unusual, and I’m different straight away.”

“I get that,” I said, “but how do you know they’re thinking what you say that they are? They might not be.”

“It’s not one easy thing you can put your finger on. It’s like, they stare at me. They look at me in a different way. Then there’s the way that no one really wants to sit next to me in class, unless they’re forced into it. That kind of thing makes it a bit obvious really.”

“Suppose so,” I said.

“I’m there for a while, and then I’m not, and then I start the whole process again.”

“So what do you do when you don’t go to school then?”

“Just knock about the streets for a while, go into town, window shop, sip coffee in cheap cafes slowly, and see mates – whatever really.”

I wondered what type of mates wouldn’t be at school.

“And that fills in six or seven hours does it? I’d rather be at school, even if I do have to put up with the droning voice of Mr McMenemy sending me off to sleep in English, or Mr Watson the History teacher wetting his pants with excitement over the difference between railway workers’ housing in Swindon in the early 1900s and now.”

“Yeah,” said Robin, “you’re not exactly selling it to me, are you?”

“Probably not, but it’s got to be better than trailing around the streets in the rain, repeating the same things over and again, hasn’t it?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s not. And that tells you something.”

I nodded.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not as boring as you’d think. Something out of the ordinary happens. I see someone I know and we hang out for a bit. Then the days are a lot less boring – a lot less.”

I changed the subject, “Did you hear from Sparky today?”

“Just in a text. To be honest, I didn’t really follow it. He said he couldn’t say much because he was in The Grim Room, or something like that. But he did say he’d meet later. What’s The Grim Room?”

“It’s where you go if you’ve been kicked out of lessons.”

Sparky had been in The Grim Room for most of the day. He hadn’t behaved badly, been rude or disrespectful. Sparky’s attitude to school was the same as mine. What Sparky was guilty of was silence.

There had been an incident in the first class of the day. A bunch of kids in the class had decided to play that game of whenever the teacher turns his back to the class then simulate a cough and shout an insult aimed at the teacher before looking angelic and innocent as the teacher turns his furious eyes on you, lasering into each face in order to find his tormentor.

Seven or eight kids were taking part, making it impossible for the teacher to identify the offenders. Every time the teacher turned, another voice coughed and shouted, “Cocksucker!”

Panicking, the teacher turned around and fixed his stare at random on Sparky.

Sparky stared back.

Spluttering, red-cheeked, and with sweat patches beginning to show under his arms, the teacher made his move.

The wrong move.

Accusing Sparky of shouting out, the teacher got the response he should have expected.

It wasn’t me Sir.

Pushed into a corner, the teacher continued to panic and demanded to know if it wasn’t Sparky, then who was it? Sparky knew exactly who it was, but remained silent. Because of his silence, the teacher found Sparky guilty.

Sparky landed himself in The Grim Room, and I bet the teacher baiting still continued.

The Grim Room lived up to its name. Around fifteen cubicles were lined against the walls and painted a kind of porridge grey. Once in a while, a kid might scrawl something on the cubicles’ walls to relieve the monotony, but the Deputy Head in charge of the isolation centre would make sure that someone came that same night and restored the walls to their prison uniform colour by the next morning.

When we got to the gym, Sparky was in the middle ring. Danny was urging him on. Sparky was hitting Danny’s pads harder and harder, slipping and rolling, avoiding Danny’s simulated hooks and jabs.

We sat and watched as Sparky’s training routine wound up.

When Sparky felt that the session was near enough over, he relaxed a little and looked over at us. He smiled over at Robin, simultaneously trying to dodge Danny’s swings – showboating a little.

That wasn’t like Sparky. It was unusual. And so were the glances that he kept shooting over at Robin.

Spotting that Sparky wasn’t concentrating one hundred percent, Danny feinted a left jab which Sparky slipped to his right. The pad in Danny’s hand came around in a left hook he had intended before his feint and smacked into Sparky’s head guard as Sparky turned and moved to face it.

Sparky took three steps backwards, but didn’t go down. It was the kind of move we would have acted out on some shitty firm’s frontline, and Sparky had fallen for it. And if Sparky looked pissed off, Danny looked furiously right back at him.

Never let your guard down, I remember thinking. Yet Sparky had done just that – while he was looking at Robin.

  At the end of the session, Danny sat Sparky down on the edge of the ring and began to speak to him. We could only see the back of Danny, but Sparky’s face was setting into the expression I had seen many times before. He wasn’t happy about what he was hearing, that was clear, and when Danny left Sparky’s face was impassive.

Sparky’s stuff was in the corner, and he went to pick it up before coming over to us.

I was about to speak when he cut me off.

“Not here,” he said, “outside.”

We followed Sparky out of the gym and into the yard outside. He sat down on a small wall and we sat next to him.

“Are you alright?” I said to him.

“Yeah.” He looked away. “He says I could make it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Make it, you know, box for England – maybe even try out for the Olympics.”

I didn’t understand what his problem was, “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“How not?”

“Because,” he turned to face me, “he knows about the lads. He knows about the firm and he’s told me that if I don’t stop going to football and commit only to the boxing, he’s going to stop working with me.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“Bollocks to fair. As far as he’s concerned, I’m pissing around with you lads. Pissing around and taking unnecessary risks that’ll damage my boxing career. And if I continue pissing around, he says I’m not worth the investment of his time.”

“What a dickhead, we’re not pissing about,” I blurted out.

Sparky shot me a look that showed me I had overstepped the mark.

“Don’t ever disrespect him to me. He’s right. It isn’t worth him putting in the time if I don’t do what he says.”

I knew that Sparky was right.

We knew the risks we were taking every time we went to football with the lads. The risks were part of the excitement. The risks were part of the challenge. The risks were what it was about.  And the risks were different to boxing. There was no matching of lads of similar weights and skills. And there was certainly no referee to step in when things were going badly or if you got separated from your mates.

Sparky got up and began walking away from the gym. I followed and slowly Robin followed us.

We walked through a few streets before Sparky sat down at a bus stop. I sat next to him and Robin sat to my right.

“What do I do?”

Sparky was looking to me for the answer. What could I say?

“You’ve got to do what’s right for you. Otherwise, all you’ll have is anger at everyone else.”

It was Robin who said that. But she wasn’t looking at either of us. She was staring up the road into the distance.

I left things as they were for a few moments before I spoke, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Sparky. “But we’ve got the Wolves on Saturday, so maybe that’ll help decide. This is proper doing my head in.”

And that was it. Sparky rubbed his face and we got up and headed back into town, none of us really talking that much.

The Wolves on Saturday would come quick enough and looking at my mobile I could see that Scratch had sent a message.

The message was simple: Got something special planned for the Wolves – be there.

We would be.

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