The Rector's Toilet

Malone bought a Millry-bar, the kind with nuts and wafer and a drizzling of sesame oil, with the milk-money his mother had given him for school. He ate it behind the rector’s toilet, just out of sight of the rector’s assistant, a penitent with pale ashen skin and a nose like a rutabaga. He heard the rector grunting and moaning, then the sound of a match being struck, then no sound at all, then the voice of the rector’s assistant saying, ‘Sears or Roebuck?’ To which the rector replied, a faint moaning still in his voice, ‘Geographic, and quick with it…’ Then no sound at all, not a voice, a murmur, a groan or a grunt, nothing. Malone finished his Millry-bar, stowed the wrapper in his trouser pocket and hi-tailed it back to the recess yard, where a girl named Pamela was busy showing all who dared look the underside of her dress, beneath which she revealed an otter’s foot, a baseball and two pairs of bloomers cinched into a knot, two knots, in fact, that held sway against the crop of her thigh. The rector left the cloister of his toilet, his assistant in tow, and checking to see if he’d left his hat in the loo, corseted across the yard, a faint moaning and groaning and wisp of unearthly air cockscombing in his wake.