48. Another Bad Thing That Happened to Pamela
Thomas Mottle’s hair was cut straight as a pin in back, so that when he walked it moved with a bobbing motion. He was a chorister, like Roger Sharpless, and he looked like such a pearl of a boy, but really inside he was the kiss of the devil, basically. And one day, which wasn’t the finest of days anyway, Thomas Mottle did something to Pamela that made Nory want to tear out some of his hair, it made her so steamingly angry. It began as a good day because Nory and Kira got into a state of herorious giggling by pretending to worship Nory’s almighty ink eradicator, after Nory got it to balance upright on the table. Actually Nory laughed before Kira noticed, but quite quickly they were laughing the exact same amount, and the funny thing was that Kira hadn’t seen Nory do the thing that was actually funny, she only heard Mrs. Thirm say ‘Nory, what may I ask are you doing?’ Nory had been bowing her head in worship before the ink eradicator and then she and Kira starting saying, ‘No, no, no, no, you can only worship one god,’ so they pretended to attack it and punch it without their hands touching it, because they didn’t want to knock it over.
That was extremely fun, as you can imagine, but then the bad part of the day was that Mrs. Thirm gave them a Mental Maths test in which Nory got one answer right out of fifteen. Mrs. Thirm was saying the multiplication problems aloud very fast in a way Nory didn’t understand, since English people say double-naught or triple-three sometimes when they mean ‘zero zero’ or ‘oh oh’ or ‘three three three’—let alone when they say ‘M-I-double-S-I-double-P-I’ for the spelling of Mississippi, which always tempted Nory to want to write a letter d for ‘double’ or a number two, depending on whether it was numbers or letters, that is. Mrs. Thirm was doing something similar, but not exactly that, and Nory couldn’t conceivably figure out what in the Blue Blazers Mrs. Thirm was asking the class to do — so bingo, one right answer out of fifteen in Mental Maths, which is not a very good record. So that made it not the finest of days. And then after lunch along came Thomas Mottle.
The bothering of Pamela was continuing steadily anyway, and getting worse. It had progressed to the stage of barking Pamela’s shins. But the kids who did it were clever kickers and never did anything when a teacher would catch sight. ‘Barking your shin’ is what it was called because it’s as if the bark came off. In other words, the skin was scraped. Pamela told Nory about it but she only saw it with her own eyes a few times, because they didn’t do it when Nory was there.
Then that afternoon Nory watched Thomas Mottle sneak up behind Pamela and kick her very viciously in the back of the leg and then try to dash off. He was probably thinking he would disappear as quick as lightning, which is what the boys would normally do. Naturally Pamela fell down and her books splattered out on the path. She turned bright red this time, and she cried a little, too. Nory was a ways away with some other kids so she only saw it off from a distance, and she was on her way over to help Pamela, when one eighth of a second after Thomas kicked, Mrs. Hoadley, the science teacher, appeared from out of somewhere, and stepped up to the plate. Thomas Mottle saw her and completely changed. He was a different child. Very purely and simply he helped Pamela up and picked up her books, one by one. By the time Nory got there she heard Mrs. Hoadley saying, ‘Thank you very much, Thomas.’ That was they way they acted, these blasted bullies — not just kicking someone in the shins, but then as soon as the teacher was on the spot, pretending to be sweet as pie, nicely helping the person.
‘You should have told Mrs. Hoadley that Thomas was the very one who made you trip!’ said Nory to Pamela. ‘Now she probably thinks you tripped on your own two feet! You have to tell them!’ But Pamela was still thoroughly mum’s-the-word. That’s why she was having the absolute worst year of her life, while Nory was having the absolute best year of her life, just about. A few people teased Nory about her accent or said she was ugly, but nobody would ever possibly dare to sneak up on her and kick her, because if someone kicked her, oh boy, she would be off like a rocket and chase them down and kick right back just as hard, and if they hid her jacket she would wring whoever’s neck who hid it, and if somebody tried to capture her duffel-coat peg with their duffel-coat she would scrummage fiercely for it and get her duffel-coat peg back, no questions asked. But Pamela never fought. It was not her personality to fight, or if it was, they’d changed her personality bit by bit since the beginning of the year by being constantly awful to her. When Nory said to two of the kids, ‘You better stop being mean to Pamela or she’s going to tell Mr. Pears,’ they just laughed, they didn’t bother to stop, because they knew that Pamela wasn’t going to Mr. Pears. She never had and never would. Again and again Nory said, ‘Pamela, it would really be much better if you told somebody,’ but she didn’t want to at all. So no matter how much Nory wanted to take one of them by the scroll of the neck to Mr. Pears, she couldn’t, since Mr. Pears would have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and so on and so on. So the bullying went its merry way.
Nory planned out things she could say to the people who were doing it, but words didn’t really help because the boys kicked and then disappeared, and whatever insulting thing you wanted to say couldn’t be said in time for the person you wanted to insult to be insulted. Nory did try to fight back at Thomas Mottle by calling him Cinderella’s stepsister a few times, since one time in drama class Thomas had played the part of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, wearing a big blond wig. ‘Just the sort of thing Cinderella’s ugly stepsister would do,’ Nory said to him.
‘Hardly!’ he said. And that was that.
49. Word-Fighting
Even Julia Sollen was a little shocked and a little bit nice to Pamela after she saw her being kicked by the revolting Thomas. If you hear that somebody took a kick at somebody, you just think, ‘Oh, I see, that’s bad.’ But if you see it eye to eye, the sneakiness of it, the pure meanness of it, it is something quite else besides. Nory was furious to think that a kid could have a basic urge to kick in his impudent mind and then get away with doing it, just because he knew from his observations that Pamela wouldn’t be the type of person to kick him back, so he was safe from punishment. Maybe there was so much constant kicking of shins in England because all the boys wanted to be footballers when they grew up. That was what they said that they wanted to be in class, anyway, except for a few kids like Roger Sharpless, who said that he wanted to go to Durham and learn to make barometers. In football, which is actually soccer, you use your feet more than your hands, so you have all this practiced ability with your feet that you could easily use for barking up the wrong shin.