The Legend of Winstone Blackhat Read Online Free Page B

explained. He’s a sex offender.
    I don’t care what he was doing, yelled Mrs Clarke. Give me that phone. And the rest of you, go away.
    We were just going to teach him a lesson, Janelle Lindsay said. See how he liked people looking at him.
    It’s disgusting, chipped in Lola Price. He’s a paedophile. And he’s got dirty pants.
    Go. All of you. Winston, pull your pants up.
    But Winstone couldn’t do that. He lay flat on his back in the grass with his wet eyes squeezed shut and both hands over his privates – except that they weren’t any more – and he couldn’t reach down for his pants without letting go and he couldn’t even curl up in a ball because then his bare arse would be showing.
    Winston?
    He tried to say something to Mrs Clarke standing way up there, but no words would come out, just a squeak like a farm dog locked in the back of a ute, and he tried to sniff back the snot that was tickling his chin and he willed her to see.
    What’s the matter? It’s all right. They’ve gone, you can get up now.
    Squeak.
    Pause.
    I’ll turn my back, all right? There. I’m not looking. Is that better?
    It was. Winstone pulled his pants and his trousers up and wiped his eyes and nose on the backs of his hands and his hands on the front of his hoodie. Mrs Clarke was looking at Jack Baxter’s phone. He could see it in her hand.
    Don’t watch it.
    I’m not going to.
    You are.
    I’m just deleting it. There. It’s gone.
    What if he sent it to everybody? What if he put it on YouTube?
    Mrs Clarke’s fingers moved over the phone. He didn’t, she said.
    Are you sure?
    I’m sure. Nobody’s going to see it.
    In that moment, Winstone felt a wave of love for Mrs Clarke, and his eyes got wet again. Then he remembered it was just the video that was gone, and that the whole school had still seen his dick and his shitty underpants and were waiting for him, and that Mrs Clarke had seen them too.
    Winston? Were you looking at the girls? You know that’s a bad thing to do, don’t you.
    I wasn’t.
    Ah. So why did the boys think you were?
    Because Harry had walked round the corner and caught Winstone with his eye pressed to a hole in the side wall of the girls’ cloakroom.
    I didn’t want to.
    Bodun had told him to look. Winstone wasn’t sure what at – there was no one in there and all he could see was the floor. Then Harry grabbed him and Bodun wasn’t anywhere and he couldn’t look up because of the headlock Harry had him in but he recognised Marlene’s scuzzy grey and pink trainers trotting alongside as he got dragged past the boiler shed and he yelled at her to go away and he could hear her crying. There didn’t seem much point in saying any of that to Mrs Clarke, so Winstone just pulled his hoodie down a bit more and stared at the torn-up grass.
    All right, said Mrs Clarke, but it sounded more like
we’ll see.
Go and get yourself cleaned up. Give your face a wash.
    Winstone didn’t though. There was no way he was going into the boys’ toilets alone. So it wasn’t until he got home that he realised there were sooty black tear-streaks all down his face and his nose and chin were powdered white with dried snot and there were grass stains in his hair.
    All the kids at school called him Winnie the Poo for a week or so after Mrs Clarke left and after that they got bored and just called him Shit-Stains. Winstone thought a lot about this, but there wasn’t much he could do. He thought that if Janelle and Lola and Harry and Jack had to wipe their arses with a ripped up copy of
Farming News
then they’d have skid-marks too. He thought he’d like to find that A.A. Milne and kick him in the balls. He started stealing toilet paper from school and he washed his pants with the sliver of yellow soap and he made Marlene wash hers too. But no matter how hard they scrubbed they couldn’t make the pants go back to their old colour.

WEST
    Winstone watched the wind shift. All evening it had broken behind the rocks at his back,