One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night by Christopher Brookmyre

of children to char instead.
    Matt drove his rep‐
mobile into the car park, relieved to see a number of empty vehicles but no luxury coach, which meant the full‐
service school‐
trip party had already departed. He was going to have to face them soon enough, but all the way up to Cromarty in the one bus constituted too much, too soon.
    He got out of the Mondeo and walked to the school’s main entrance, which looked down a concrete exterior stairway that Eisenstein would have been impressed by. All it was missing was the runaway pram and some blood, but the latter would be supplied next week when the kids started back after the summer. The steps led down to the school’s football pitch, a hard, unforgiving, compacted grit surface known as red blaes, which remained in use despite being outlawed by – at the last count – UEFA, FIFA and the Geneva Convention. It wasn’t much use for playing on, but it did have the potential for exploitation as a cosmetic exfoliation treatment, just as long as the flayed look was in that year. It looked calm and quiet today, no hint of the grapeshot effect that the wind and the red ash could sadistically combine to produce. Just the thought of it was enough to make Matt rub at his eyes in painful memory.
    The only activity out there that morning was a guy tormenting his dog with a frisbee and an expert wrist, firing the thing for the mutt to chase, only for the disc to come arcing back to his own hand every time. Matt figured five more throws before the dog went for his balls instead.
    Separated from the football pitch by a concrete path was St Michael’s other playing field, ‘field’ being the appropriate term as it was used for cattle grazing during the summer months when the school was closed. Its only other formal use was as a rugby pitch for the two weeks that the curriculum stipulated the males in each class be subjected to the dull‐
but‐
dangerous sport. There was probably therefore some calculated psychological reason why the PE teachers chose to schedule it for that first fortnight after summer, when the churned and muddy mire was strewn with fresh cowpats: literally stomping you down into the shit to let you know that the fun was over and you were back under the staff’s boots for another year.
    Certainly there couldn’t be any more wholesome explanation, like trying to drum up interest for a different sport before the football season got fully underway: nobody in Auchenlea, nobody in Renfrewshire, Christ, nobody in the west of Scotland was the slightest bit interested in playing or even watching the game. The only time it got paid any attention was if England were losing at it, but then shove‐
ha’penny and ‘best man fall’ would be accorded similar heed if they ever attained international competitive status.
    There were a few black‐
and‐
white bovines loose on the rugby field just then, chewing the cud and working hard at turning what grass there was into watery big tolies for poor first‐
year midgets to land in during tackling practice the following week. Back on the football pitch, a slight breath of wind tossed just enough grit into one of the frisbee‐
thrower’s eyes for him to suddenly double over in delicate rubbing. The frisbee whacked him on the top of the head, eliciting a yelp of delight from Fido, who promptly fucked off with the thing and began energetically mangling it a measured distance away.
    Matt had a glance through the locked glass doors at the empty and unrecognisably clean ‘social area’ allocated to the first‐
and second‐
year inmates. He hadn’t laid eyes on it in fifteen years, but the smells of half‐
eaten apples and wet snorkel‐
parkas came vividly to mind, along with hollow feelings of impotence and timid vulnerability. Rain and hunger dominated his memories, generously interspersed with random violence. Back in the wee diddy days of S1 and S2, it had always been pissing down, and he’d always been starving,