All day he studied in a sweat, and crammed, but through his effortless facility dark fissures showed; a sour hypocrisy. In corridors, their mildewed papers blotched by damp, he’d stick his tongue out, and fists jammed into his groin, see lights behind his eyes reveal a pattern. When a door opened admitting lamplight, they could see him high on the stairway, contained and out-of reach... In summer, cowed, complacent like a fish he’d meditate in the latrines and wish he was a hermit on a coral beach. In winter, he’d lie up behind the house, buried in clay, feet stretched against a wall and watch a cold moon whiten the garden. He’d force his eyes until visions appeared, and hear the creak of rotten trellises. The friends he chose as his accomplices were stringy, poor, pink-eyed and cretinous, who hid yellow and black grubby fingers coated with mud in threadbare, patched-up clothes. They spoke with gaps, these prematurely old village idiots, and if his mother caught him out in these friendships, and if she knew the depths of his concern, she said nothing.
