Drudgery in school, me getting worse and worse, and falling out of favour with every teacher on staff, and getting pucked in the arm on a daily basis by Jack Downs. Elsewhere O’Culigeen’s post-rape chats have gone completely off the scale. Sometimes, in fact, I think he’s raping me just so he can have the post-rape chat. He gets me to lie beside him in the sacristy, on a DIY mattress made of rough red cushions pushed together and covered in a purple picnic rug, and he lights up a fag, or a ‘sneaky smoke’ as he calls it, the big prat, and starts banging on about all his plans and dreams for the future. His passion, he says, is travel. He’s never been anywhere but he wants to go everywhere. He sucks on his fag and goes on about sunsets over the Pacific and what it must’ve been like to be a Polynesian tribesman in a little leather boat sailing through giant thirty-footers. And then he tells me how the Polynesians discovered America before the Americans, and how you could sail today from Tahiti to New Zealand by using the stars alone as signposts.
