Zero Per Cent

Copyright

Published by HarperCollins Children’s Books,

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Mark Swallow 2002

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

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Source ISBN: 9780007126491

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007393220

Version: 2016-01-05

Dedication

for Sarah

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Zero Per Cent

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Zero Per Cent

THIS IS THE LAST GCSE EXAM FOR MOST OF YOU – FOR MANY, YOUR LAST EXAM EVER. SO LET’S MAKE IT A SMOOTH ONE, EH? AND LET’S GET THE HATS OFF, SHALL WE? BRAINS NEED CIRCULATING AIR…

Laila says she is going to be waiting for me afterwards. I like thinking of her waiting outside. For me.

So why did I try to put her off? Only made her more interested.

Why?

Because I know our school gates. This is where the hard ones wait, just beyond the civilisation of school – No Sir Land – beyond the dinksy policies on bullying, lunch queue rules and keep-left-in-the-corridors. They are the mothers who will welcome us today, many of them excluded from our year, excluded from our exams. They are so chuffed with their exchange of the acned playground tarmac for the hard lines of the pavement. And they will have brought their friends, kids of much more experience, almost certainly kids of some substance.

As a junior I used to creep past with my mates, thrilling at their palm-held electronics, their leisure wear and their trainers. Their occasional cars higgled and piggled against the kerb, bucking with the bassiest tunes. Their tangle of getaway bikes, small enough to ride through a copper’s legs. I admit to being impressed once but I’d sooner hop over the back fence these days.

At the end of this last GCSE I will leave this school, these peers. I’ll say goodbye to a few, see you later to even fewer, and nothing to most. I won’t bother to diss a peer – just disappear out the back and loop round past the garage to see if Laila really has come for me.

I SAID HATS OFF! AND THERE SHOULD BE NO MOBILES IN THE HALL.

The kids who have tried to keep their caps on are now being told to remove them before we can start. The only progress that’s been made in a generation’s fight against school uniform – and just when they let us off wearing them, we want caps after all.

RIGHT, ARE YOU ALL READY?

Now, are we all ready? The invigilator invites us to start, so let us begin.

The best place to start is on the stairs at home where we used to spend a lot of time sitting. Always the same formation, my little sister on the top one and Tommy on the second, with me down a couple and leaning against the wall. Our legs had habits too. Rosie bunched hers under her chin, Tommy’s were all over the place, never still, while mine pointed down the stairs with the right foot on top of the left trying to line itself up with the bottom of the hand rail. This is how we used to sit – for the clicking of the Christmas photograph, for the looking at ourselves in the mirror above the stairs and for the listening in on the grown-ups.

The photographs are still an easy present for Mum to give lucky friends and relations each year. We used to spend hours finessing our poses in the mirror but our ears were always on the kitchen where we might just be being talked about by Mum and Dad.

Five years ago I was the hot topic. I have been discussed a lot since but it was five years ago, when I was about to leave primary school, that I first picked up some interesting stuff.

My ‘educational destination’ was still undecided. Dad was finally losing what had been a long and cold war to send me to a private school rather than the local comprehensive. Still he refused to believe Mum would not change her mind at some point. She was furious he would not just roll over and accept her passionate belief in the importance of supporting state schools “with our own flesh and blood”. But even she was not as cross as Rosie and Tommy, who had nothing else to listen in on for weeks.

Dad worked very hard in a bank. He still does, in the City of London. Apparently that is the main reason we were able to afford this house, the biggest on Rockenden Road and just in either Hounslow or Isleworth depending on how you look at it. He travels all over the world so doesn’t mind being close to Heathrow. Mum has lived in the area all her life and works as a secretary at the health centre.

And how did I feel? I didn’t like the idea of leaving my mates, who were going to Chevy Oak Comprehensive. But I didn’t like the idea of disappointing Dad either when he had put me up or down or by for a school somewhere else. He kept on about the facilities and class sizes and the paintballing club they ran on Saturday afternoons. Mum seemed to have heard enough of it.

“This is where we live,” I heard from my stair. “It may not be particularly peaceful or lovely, Martin, but we are here in a neighbourhood – yes, neighbourhood – we know and in which we are known. And Jack, as one of our children, lives here too.”

“I am well aware—”

“The hell you are! This is not some computer package or bloody car we’re talking about here. It’s Jack’s education. You can get excited about your heated wing mirrors waggling for you at the push of a button, about your gleaming veneer and your plush velour, but Jack does not need extras. He needs the local school, solid, sane and free.”

“It’s got nothing to do with cars, Polly.”

“What are these posh schools of yours if not shiny cars with tinted windows which purr shut on the smog? You can go paintballing whenever you like but leave Jack here with us.”

“Very funny. A few months from now you’ll be sorry for this, Polly.”

“You want him schooled, Martin, and I want him educated. It’s as simple as that. Heir-conditioning with an aitch! That’s what you’re after.”

Our teacher at Primary was our friend. The floor of our form room was thick with rugs and cushions. The walls were beautifully decorated by all of us. I used to think that’s why they were called primary colours. There were amazing displays by our teacher with her perfect handwriting which I longed to copy completely perfectly. How could anyone (except Razza who has always had Special Needs) hate reading in our Cosy Corner? There was so much friendship in that room we even had loads to spare for the slimy lizards in their tank. There wasn’t even a bell. Instead, at the end of break, a toddler would proudly brandish that sign, ‘Please walk in now showing care and respect to everyone in are school’.

But Dad’s descriptions of secondary classrooms, delivered in chilling detail when he tucked me in at the end of the day, reminded me of Mexican Indian arenas we’d done in comparative civilisation where they played football with prisoners’ heads and volleyball with freshly ripped-out hearts.

On his way back to the office from Moscow, he invited me out to lunch in my last primary school half-term. I went along a little nervously. We sat in the window of a posh place in Richmond and Dad, in a grand mood, ordered caviar.

“I’d like to introduce you to an expensive habit of mine,” he said when it arrived. “Mum doesn’t like it, of course…”

“Caviar – or you eating it?”

“Either, Jack.” He spooned the shiny black stuff on to some fancy toast. “Would you like to try it?” For each go he pouted his lips like a gibbon to make sure he didn’t drop any.

“Eeeerrr! No, thanks, Dad.” I gobbled at my melon.

“Go on!”

The caviar did look quite beautiful, like a load of full stops.

“Naaah, Dad!”

“I won’t offer often, Jack!”

So I craned forward and took a nibble from the toast he held. It tasted sensational. All my buds were up and quivering and demanding more.

“Steady,” said Dad, snaffling the last of it himself. “But, I tell you what – last a couple of years at this comp, establish yourself as a survivor – and then I’ll stop banging on about different sorts of schools.”

“I’ll try, Dad.”

“And if you hate it after two years, we’ll try somewhere else. Either way we’ll celebrate with some more of this black stuff!”

When his phone rang all this rare enjoyment drained from his face. He said he had been “summoned”. I said I’d take the bus, expecting him to tell me I was too young and that he would give me a lift. But he didn’t seem to know I was too young, so I did it. No bother.

My mates Michael, Razza and a few others who had come up to Chevy Oak together were sitting on some steps in the playground, fresh young bums on worn-out bricks, discussing the planes which were even louder and lower here than at Primary. One of Heathrow’s smaller runways was actually visible, its huge grass safety zone separated from our playground by a high wire fence.

Razza started cussing another kid, just having a little laugh, casting around to see who couldn’t take it, eventually suggesting that this boy’s mum had “shagged a camel”. I was wondering why dads never got cussed when Michael stole Razza’s line.

“And the camel died of shame.”

The kid was blasted away by our laughter straight into Mr Ronaldson, our form tutor. He looked at us each in turn and then pointed to some letters engraved on the vertical of the step beside me.

“See what that says, lads?”

I could make out the name ‘Dennis’ and, also, ‘wanks’.

“The longest piece of writing Denny did during his five years here,” Ronaldson went on. “Do you know what he used to do in lessons?”

“No, sir.”

“He used to giggle, Jack. At first the kids laughed with him, but soon they got bored of Denny and began to ignore him. He began giggling louder, every term louder and louder. But do you know what? He left without a single GCSE.” He looked at each of us again. “Remember Denny, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” we said and I shifted uncomfortably to cover the name and the verb.

“He’s only me uncle,” said Michael, suddenly.

Ronaldson wasn’t thrown. “Well, you ask him about his time here, Michael. See if he hasn’t got any tips for you.”

“He had a laugh, though,” said Michael. A plane was overhead. “Denny had a good time, he did.”

Ronaldson had moved away but he turned and looked steadily at Michael, who tried to keep chuckling. “Isn’t laughing now, is he, Michael?”

Although I had no plans to giggle my way through the curriculum, I was not so interested in the classroom. I needed to show Dad I could hack the other parts: the corridors, the landings and the playground. I had no fear of being a loser on the Denny scale. But in what way was I going to be a winner? Certainly not by sitting on these steps waiting to be kicked. My parents’ voices were still loud in my head despite the planes.

“He’s a sensitive kid.”

“It’s a sensitive school.”

“We should be exercising our right – our ability – to choose the best school for him.”

“We are. This is the best school, Martin.”

There were groups of older boys before me now, too cool to move. They didn’t even bother trying to impress the girls in their cropped uniforms, skirts rolled up to the hilt, who coped just as coolly with the disappointment. Softer-looking kids hunkered down in corners and took it out on small insects and old birds while groups of little girls promenaded the perimeter, shouting, pouting, spouting.

But this playground was really about boys chasing footballs, knees punching the air violently, feet slapping on the tarmac. There was so much shouting of the one word “Fuck!” in so many different forms and tones that it was almost a one-word language. Most of all, there was so much fucking football.

As another plane came over we saw a massive shot beat a goalkeeper and then whack a tiny Year Seven, the camel-shagger’s son, on the rebound. We could see his soundless shriek but none of us moved. There were so many other games going on that people were being taken out all the time, so many bursts of speed and screeching halts. A boy pulled up his shirt after scoring and did a flip in front of jeering girls. We still had seven minutes to survive and my cherry drink was backing up on me. This was no place to relax but still there seemed no way off the step.

Two more huge people chasing a ball clashed heads right by us.

“Fucking tosser.”

“Fuck, man!”

They squared up to each other but decided they had each kept enough respect so they shoulder-barged each other and parted with a friendly “Fuck you!”

“Fuck that must of hurt,” whispered Razza with admiration, smacking his own head.

“Like fuck.” Michael was lapping it up, and indicated with his head that a fellow new kid was hiding a football under his jacket. With three minutes of break to go he grabbed it off him and they all stood up to try and play in a little space near the steps.

“Come on, Jack, mate!”

Hating fucking football, I stood reluctantly. It was a way off the steps but I felt like a shaky lamb out for the first gambol. When the ball came to me it passed right through my legs and into one of the huddles of seniors. It was lazily scooped up. The last moments of break were bounced away by our ball in huge hands. Then as the buzzer sounded this kid, a stubby ponytail drongo, booted it to the far end of the playground where another brute bicycle-kicked it on the volley way up over the fence into airport territory.

“Cheers, Jack,” said Michael. As if it was his ball anyway. Stacey Timms and her little posse, who’d come up from our Primary at the same time, called me a “prat” in passing. The ball’s owner looked at me miserably. I looked back as the playground emptied. Gulls wheeled down to feast on our litter and I realised I hadn’t eaten the cheesy strings Mum had packed for me. Tears queued in my ducts but somehow I blocked them out.

From here we went into whole school assembly – my first visit to this hall in which I am sitting now – to be addressed by Bumcheeks, the headteacher.

“As you know,” he began after many minutes of staff shushing, “Chevy Oak is one of the most popular schools in the borough and I would like to start this morning – this academic year – by simply congratulating you on being here.”

Older kids back-slapped each other facetiously.

“Our greatly improved set of results last year is still more evidence of a school on the move, a school aiming high, a school marching forward with confidence.”

At which point everyone began stamping in time, which caused Bumcheeks to turn bright red and pause a while.

“There are, it must be said, more of you than ever before. We are jam-packed in here, jam-packed in our very narrow corridors and in the playground even more jam-packed since the marvellous new block has gone up. We cannot reduce your size because, boys and girls, you have a habit of growing like aubergines. From now on, as you will have noticed from the new signs, you will keep left in the corridors and observe the new queuing system at lunch. But the main measure I wish to introduce – from tomorrow – has just been further justified by yet another nasty incident in the playground, a Year Seven boy hit in the face by a—”

The chortling briefly drowned him.

“Listen! Hit in the face by a football. Therefore I have decided on a measure we have long been considering – a ban on full-size footballs in the playground. From tomorrow you will only be allowed to use…”

“Wot?” The need to listen was suddenly urgent.

“I will tell you what just as soon as I get silence…”

“Oh WOT!”

“… only be allowed to use tennis balls.”

The baying began in earnest.

“Nah, nah, nah!”

“You can’t do that, Bumcheeks.”

Chairs bucked noisily.

“Tight, man. That’s dark.”

Aiming high, I looked up to check no sunbeam from an upper window was singling me out for warm favour. Three hours in school and the dreaded football outlawed!

The atmosphere was dangerous for the rest of the day as kids made especially violent use of their footballs before the ban. In a similar spirit of urgent frustration two older boys slammed me up against some lockers so a padlock dug into my back. Then they jabbed something else up into my heart. So much for sunbeams. Was this the “recreational bullying” Dad had told me to watch out for?

“Take this one for example,” said one to the other as if continuing a debate. “There’s a bunch of nasty little stiffs coming into this school. Why’s there not room for footballs? Let me tellya. Because of this.”

“You are in fact a stiff,” said the other who’d nicked our football.

“So neat in his new school uniform.”

“Neat as mumsy fuck.” His pony-tail quivered with anger.

“You want to loosen up a little, mate.” He yanked my tie and then, on second thoughts, tightened it totally. The other stabbed me again – this time right up into the armpit – and then scored me across the forehead with the same weapon.

“Record-keeping’s important. We got so many to get through we don’t want to be repeating ourselfs, innit.”

Michael saw us from the far end of the corridor and shouted to me that he was going to get his Uncle Denny to handle it after school.

“Nah, actually I’ll get him. He’ll come straight up school!” They turned towards Michael on his mobile and must have clocked the genetic link because they swore and dropped me over a fire extinguisher to hurry off in the opposite direction. Michael pulled me out of the corridor and into a classroom where he loosened my tie.

“Is it blood?” I asked, raising my head from my hands, gasping.

“Could be, man. Just in time, eh?” He was triumphant, breathing hard and fast, rabbit-punching the whiteboard and then plunging his face into a bag of crisps he’d ripped apart.

“Thanks for your help, mate.” I was still shaking and dabbing at my wound, which was in fact pink highlighter pen.

“It was nothing. Do you want me to take you somewhere? To Ronaldson? I’d like to tell him what made them run. Teach him to diss our Denny!”

“Nah, I’m fine…” But nor did I want to be left to face these corridors alone.

Dad came in late from Zürich, but there was enough time for him to get furious on my behalf. Tommy and Rosie didn’t even bother to take up their stair positions but I settled with some nervousness.

“Do you see now, Polly?”

“See what?” But she had caught a glimpse.

“Jack can’t cope. They are beasts in that school. They may be part of your blessed community but that hardly makes it better. They will beat up our son because of the way he looks. He is powerless. What can he do?”

“What did you do at your precious public school, Martin? How did you survive?”

“This didn’t happen, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t believe you weren’t bullied.”

“Don’t say it like that. I wasn’t terrorised. This Chevy Oak is an aggressive place. His primary school cardboard castles and peppermint creams, they won’t help him now. Football might have done but he seems to play that less and less.”

I shot downstairs and burst in. “I gave it up today!” They barely looked at me.

“So what, Martin? Games aren’t everything.” Mum was plunging her needle in and out of my blazer.

“Football isn’t a game. It’s a vital early form of communication. Before they can really talk, boys kick a ball. And if boy doesn’t kick ball, boy gets himself kicked. It’s body language at its simplest.”

Mum turned on me.

“Why don’t you play?”

Stay strong, Mum, I remember thinking. You don’t have to ask his questions for him. They both looked at me.

“It goes through my legs, especially at this new school. We have to play with tennis balls.”

“Tennis ball football?” cried Dad. “Now I’ve heard it all.”

My first break at Chevy Oak School had broken painfully. The second had to be much, much better. These twenty minutes, I could see, were the day’s key jostle time – preen-time, be-seen-time – even more important than the end of school at the front gate.

It poured with rain lesson three. Bumcheeks came on the loudspeaker to say we could spend break in our classrooms. I was relieved. But the sun mocked me, coming out brilliantly just before the buzzer, and I was soon being urged towards the sopping tarmac by hundreds of kids.

The airport was as busy as usual, executive jets from the side runway taking off directly across the playground. Would Dad actually be able to look down on my antics? The sudden sun warmed me a bit through the reinforced seams of my blazer. Lots of juniors were enjoying the new football rule, and even Michael and Razza were mincing about with tennis balls. Nothing there for me of course. I remained on the step, alone with the voices.

“This is where we live,” I could hear Mum say. “It may not be particularly peaceful or lovely, Martin, but…” I traced her sing-song tone with my finger on the pitted brickwork.