Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 1.2

Dinner was always in the hall. It had big windows, and two lines of trestle tables, and a chequerboard lino floor, and a couple of plastic plants with dust on the leaves. The girls sat along one long table and the boys along the other. There were faded posters on the walls, like Mickey Mouse dancing with Minnie while Pluto bounded around them. Someone had drawn a penis coming out of Mickey's head. Where the posters were torn they'd been fixed with Sellotape that had gone brown and peeled off again. You took your plate or bowl or whatever and you went to the kitchen window where the Whistler-cook served you.

The Whistlers never bothered trying to keep us under control at dinner. They sat together at their own table by the door. They ate like crows pick at garbage. They hung the whistles on a hook by the door when they ate – when it was summer and they had the big fan going in there they'd jangle like wind chimes. They ate quicker than us, and usually left before we were finished.

The night I was telling Dirty Joe about was hot as hell. When it was hot we weren't as hungry, so we tended to throw food instead of eating it. We'd start by flicking peas at each other. Then pieces of carrot. Then roast potatoes. After the Whistlers left things started to get out of hand.

There was a six-year-old with hair so blonde it was white, and he was the king of gravy that night. It was smeared on his cheeks and in his hair and it dripped from his ears, and a kid on the other side of the table was tearing his bread roll into tiny pieces and throwing the bits across the table so that they stuck to the gravy king's face. A glob of mashed potato oozed down the window like a slug. I couldn't see who was next to me because somebody had got me in the eye with a big chunk of carrot. I knew who it was though. Jungle Jim.

Jungle Jim was ten, but he looked fourteen. He had hair on his lip. He had piggy little eyes and long arms and knuckly red hands.

Jungle Jim. Fuck a duck.

"Watch this," he said, grabbing a jug of gravy and swivelling around on his seat. We all stopped what we were doing and watched: Jungle Jim had this way of getting people's attention. We all knew something serious was about to happen. With Jungle Jim serious things happened all the time.

The girl he chose had messy hair and a green bracelet around her wrist. I didn't know her name. When you're eight you don't really associate with girls. I don't think Jungle Jim knew her name either – she just happened to be the nearest one to him.

What he did was hook back the top of her skirt and pour the jug of gravy down inside. He shook the jug to empty out the last drops. Then he put the jug back on the table and went right back to his dinner.

Nothing happened for a couple of seconds. Nobody even breathed.

Suddenly the girl burst into tears and ran out of the hall, leaving a trail of gravy.

Jungle Jim sliced a slice of roast beef carefully into pieces, and chewed thoughtfully on a piece. Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin. Finally he looked up and said, "Fancy shitting yourself at the dinner table."

There were some sniggers, and one barking laugh. Everybody else watched their plates.

I felt suddenly very strange. I don't know why I did what I did. Somehow I was up on my feet and heading for the door. I was gone before anyone really noticed.

I wasn't thinking to go and find her – I just wanted to get away – but when I got out to the corridor I decided to. Find her I mean. It wasn't hard to work out where she'd gone: there were gravy footprints leading off down the corridor towards the girls' dorm. I just followed them.

The boys weren't allowed in the girls' dorm, but there was nobody around, so I went in. I'd never been in their dorm before. It was neater than ours, and it had that girl smell about it like everything's made of strawberries. The bathroom door was shut, but there was light coming from under the door. I could hear sobbing from inside. When I knocked on the door the sobbing stopped.