The year we killed our teacher we were ten, going on eleven. Mitch went first, the terrier, a snappy article with a topknot tied with a tartan ribbon. The morning we saw him we hooted. He didn’t like us laughing and he flew to the end of his lead, and reared up snarling and drooling. ‘Hark at the rat,’ we said.
Rose Cullan said: ‘Hark at Lucifer.’ He twisted, he screamed, his claws lashed out. The devil has several names and Lucifer is one.
It was because of an emergency that she brought him to school. She was fetched out of arithmetic by a message, and she had to go home and get him. Rose’s father said it was a gas leak. All that row of houses had to pack a bag and evacuate.
She couldn’t bring him into the classroom so she had to ask Sammy Kinsella to mind him. It being playtime when she got back, we were there to witness, and we could see her, half in and half out of Sammy’s hole. To reach Sammy you went down steps, and pushed open a battered green door that snagged and bumped along the ground. Behind it he stoked the boiler that kept us heated. The boiler was at the back behind twenty feet piled high with trash, smashed picture frames and three-legged chairs, scarred desks stacked with their feet in the air, globes of the world with obsolete countries, dusty crates and collapsing boxes that no one had looked in since Adam were a lad. He had a bedroll in there somewhere, snug at the back, and if so inclined he never went home but lay down among the rubbish.
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