The sleeping bag

Text 1: After Detention, by Callum Birtwhistle

An original novel extract.

Sol had forgotten his football boots, which was why he went back to the changing rooms at half past five, after detention, when the corridors were empty. The lights in the sports block were on a timer. They came on in stages as he walked, one panel at a time, so that the corridor seemed to be waking up just ahead of him and falling asleep behind.

The changing room door was propped open with a fire extinguisher, which it never was. He noticed that and did not think about it.

Inside, it smelt of what it always smelt of: damp towels, deodorant, the sour green tang of the drains. His boots were where he had left them, under the bench by the showers. He bent to pick them up and saw, under the far bench, in the corner where the radiator was, a sleeping bag.

It was rolled out neatly. There was a pillow at one end, a real pillow with a striped case, and beside it a phone charger plugged into the socket meant for the hairdryers, and a toothbrush standing in a plastic cup, and a library book, face down, open at the middle. Somebody had hung a school shirt over the radiator to dry.

Sol stood very still with his boots in his hands.

He knew the book. He had seen it every lunchtime for three weeks, in Danny Mercer’s bag. He had seen the striped pillowcase too, though it took him a moment to place it: on a washing line in Danny’s back garden, last summer, before Danny’s mum left and Danny started saying his house was being decorated and nobody could come over.

A lot of small things, suddenly, made a shape. Danny always first in at registration. Danny always the last to leave. Danny’s hair wet in the mornings, which everybody had laughed about, because who washed their hair before school?

Footsteps in the corridor. The lights clicking on, one panel, then the next.

Sol looked at the sleeping bag, and the toothbrush, and the drying shirt with its collar turned carefully outwards, and he understood that he had about four seconds to decide what kind of person he was going to be.

He put his boots down. He sat on the bench. And when Danny came round the corner with a carton of milk and stopped dead in the doorway, white as paper, Sol said, “Alright,” as though it were the most normal place in the world to meet.

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