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favourites. When I was nine I dreaded people asking me ‘How old are you?’ In the end I’d hold up nine fingers like I was being dead witty but I know the other person’d be thinking, Why didn’t he just tell me, the twat? Hangman used to like Y-words, too, but lately he’s eased off those and has moved to S-words. This is bad news. Look at any dictionary and see which section’s the thickest: it’s S. Twenty million words begin with N or S. Apart from the Russians starting a nuclear war, my biggest fear is if Hangman gets interested in J-words, ’cause then I won’t even be able to say my own name . I’d have to change my name by deed-poll, but Dad’d never let me.
    The only way to outfox Hangman is to think one sentence ahead, and if you see a stammer-word coming up, alter your sentence so you won’t need to use it. Of course, you have to do this without the person you’re talking to catching on. Reading dictionaries like I do helps you do these ducks and dives, but you have to remember who you’re talking to. (If I was speaking to another thirteen-year-old and said the word ‘melancholy’ to avoid stammering on ‘sad’, for example, I’d be a laughing stock, ’cause kids aren’t s’posed to use adult words like ‘melancholy’. Not at Upton upon Severn Comprehensive, anyway.) Another strategy is to buy time by saying ‘Er…’ in the hope that Hangman’s concentration’ll lapse and you can sneak the word out. But if you say ‘er…’ too much you come across as a right dimmer. Lastly, if a teacher asks you a question directly and the answer’s a stammer-word, it’s best to pretend you don’t know. I couldn’t count how often I’ve done this. Sometimes teachers lose their rag (specially if they’ve just spent half a lesson explaining something) but any thing’s better than getting labelled ‘School Stutterboy’.
    That’s something I’ve always just about avoided, but tomorrow morning at five minutes past nine this is going to happen. I’m going to have to stand up in front of Gary Drake and Neal Brose and my entire class to read from Mr Kempsey’s book, Plain Prayers for a Complicated World . There will be dozens of stammer-words in that reading which I can’t substitute and I can’t pretend not to know because there they are, printed there. Hangman’ll skip ahead as I read, underlining all his favourite N and S words, murmuring in my ear, ‘ Here , Taylor, try and spit this one out!’ I know , with Gary Drake and Neal Brose and everyone watching, Hangman’ll crush my throat and mangle my tongue and scrunch my face up. Worse than Joey Deacon’s. I’m going to stammer worse than I’ve ever stammered in my life. By 9.15 my secret’ll be spreading round the school like a poison gas attack. By the end of first break my life won’t be worth living.
    The gro tes quest thing I ever heard was this. Pete Redmarley swore on his nan’s grave it’s true so I s’pose it must be. This boy in the sixth form was sitting his A-levels. He had these parents from hell who’d put him under massive pressure to get a whole raft of ‘A’ grades and when the exam came this kid just cracked and couldn’t even understand the questions. So what he did was get two Bic Biros from his pencil case, hold the pointy ends against his eyes, stand up and head-butt the desk. Right there, in the exam hall. The pens skewered his eyeballs so deep that only an inch was left sticking out of his drippy sockets. Mr Nixon the headmaster hushed everything up so it didn’t get in the papers or anything. It’s a sick and horrible story but right now I’d rather kill Hangman that way than let him kill me tomorrow morning.
    I mean that.
     
    Mrs de Roo’s shoes clop so you know it’s her coming to fetch you. She’s forty or maybe even older, and has fat silver brooches, wispy bronze hair and flowery clothes. She gave a folder to the pretty receptionist, tutted at the rain and said, ‘My, my, monsoon