Back To School (Second Year Coursework)

(Another piece of recent coursework. Warning: Miserable adult content implied ahead. This is something that I put a great deal of work into and am pretty happy with the resulting outcome. Inspired by my love of Urban Exploration and abandoned buildings with a slight twist in its tail: a touchy subject matter that I didn't originally intend to deal with, however in the end, I felt worked with what I was trying to say. Enjoy.)

You decide to take a look around. After all, who knows how long it’ll be left standing before the builders come in and reduce the place to a pile of smouldering bricks and asbestos dust. The wall isn’t easy for you to scale, but somehow you manage it, scuffing up your converse high-tops against the bricks. Once you’re over, you’re surprised to find that the drop isn’t as far as it seemed on this side, and it isn’t long before you’re picking your way through the scratchy weeds that have taken root in the once beautifully pruned field and towards the building. It rises out of the overgrown greenery as a beacon of lost memories. The midday sun beats down onto your face. You wonder what you’re doing here again. 

You find a broken window with splinters of glass contorting it into a jagged mouth and decide that this probably isn’t the best way in. Not if you want to leave with your clothing intact. You keep walking, treading an increasingly familiar route that skirts the edge of the building. The next door you come to - a little further around the back - has been broken open by the repeated impact of some kind of large heavy object, and you manage to pull it open and squeeze through. You wonder briefly if the culprit is still inside. 

The sudden lack of background noise around you makes you stop for a moment. It’s not dark, but the shadows that linger in places that they shouldn’t give the room a desolate feel, as if you’re walking away from hope itself. Which is funny, because for six years, you treaded through these rooms every day. But with the shadows and the trashed furniture replacing the memories of comfort and order, you begin to feel a little uneasy at the thought of venturing any further. You decide that this is the best time to pull out your mobile phone. Just in case.

No signal.

Low battery.

Typical.

You choose to press on nonetheless. 

The room you’ve entered is a vaguely familiar classroom, so it’s not a difficult task to locate a door in the dim light that leads out into the sprawling mass of corridors. The one you’re in stretches off in both directions like a network of veins within a living, breathing organism. The thought of this makes you shudder. You concentrate instead on how your surroundings have changed since you last graced them. The paint on the walls is only beginning to peel here, and you reach your hand out to feel it against your skin: a cold concrete under layer covered thinly by a flaky papery paint that comes off in your fingers and feels as fragile as a sheet of tissue paper.

You remember the school as it was when you’d last been there. Twelve years ago, you had your last class in one of the rooms a little further down the hallway. You had your first kiss –it was for a triple-double-doggie-dare – just outside these doors on the left that led off into the playground. 

You haven’t realised that your feet are taking you somewhere. They trace familiar paths down the hallway and off through a winding maze of rooms. The school itself had always been easy to navigate, but the path you’re taking snakes in and out of classrooms and hallways in a nonsensical order. You double back on yourself. Visit the same room twice then walk off. After a while, you pass by some of the school’s more memorable landmarks: the empty trophy cupboard - trophies gone, now a splintered mess on the corridor floor - and a noticeboard which had once housed the faces of previous teaching staff. Some of their pictures are still there. The one you remember the most isn’t. 

Before you can realise where your feet are taking you, they turn right and stop you as you hit a dead end. A dead end that is, with only a large wooden door to confront your eyes.

The door ahead gives you goose bumps just like it always did before. The sticker that proclaims ‘FIRE DOOR KEEP SHUT’ just above the handle has been scratched off so that it now vaguely resembles a skull. You almost laugh at the sick significance of this. 

You remember this door. You remember walking past it every time you had sports lessons. You remember how, for most of your time here, it was just a plain old boring sports equipment storeroom. You also remember exactly what it felt like on your tiny hands as they scrabbled against the thick wood trying to reach the lock to free yourself from its confines. Back then you never understood why there would be a lock on the inside of a storeroom door. You were too young and too innocent. Not to mention too short to reach. You don’t want to remember this. 

You’re curious.  Unlike the rest of the building, it doesn’t show signs of decay. It’s simply there, just as clear and unavoidable as it always was. And no matter how hard you’ve wished to be able to repress it, it’s still there. 

Unlocked. Of course it’s unlocked. The lock is on the inside, deliberately high up, out of the reach of children. You can reach it now, you realise. You wonder to yourself how different things would have been able to reach those extra few inches back then. 

Just like any other plain old boring equipment storeroom, it’s small and dingy and a bare bulb is the only source of light inside. Stark and white against the heavy breeze block walls. It seems unfinished. Unfriendly. 

You remember that day. You remember the exact words he said to you. You wish that you didn’t, but you can’t help it.

“There’s nothing in here that can hurt you. 

This is just a plain old boring equipment storeroom.”

The door swings shut behind you. You haven’t realised that you’d brought yourself here until the noise of solid hard wood smacking against more solid hard wood brings you back to your senses. You don’t want to be here. In fact, you don’t want here to be here.

It’s dark. Your hands remember where the light pull is. At least you’d been tall enough to reach that back then. The unemotional white of the bulb throws the room into a sharp relief. Your eyes catch on some of the objects that litter the floor of the tiny windowless room. A pair of old gym socks. A half-deflated basketball. A bright orange sports vest with the number 13 on the back. A moulding cardboard box filled with odd shoes, spare running shorts and discarded school jumpers. A cigarette lighter.

A cigarette lighter? You reach down to pick it up. You don’t smoke and never have, but something about this tiny plastic object fascinates you. What would a lighter be doing in the storeroom of an abandoned primary school that has been closed for over ten years? You turn it over in your hands, flicking it until finally a flame erupts between the sparks. Old, but still in service. The flame dances around at the tip of your fingers, and you stare at it, willing it to cleanse you of all the memories that returning to this building, this very pocket of this very building has brought back to the surface. With the shadows in the corner of the tiny room suddenly given motion, you no longer feel alone in your boxy confinement. Almost like he is back in there with you. And you don’t ever want to remember what that felt like. 

You put two together. You make up your mind.

No, you think. There’s no way you could do that. You have more morals than that. But then you remember how this place ruined you. How everything that you’ve become today has been somehow stemmed from this one room. Every tiny insecurity. Every little insignificance that has ever held you back from trusting someone completely.

The combination of the cardboard and the fabric takes to the flames straight away, and the resulting feeling of satisfaction that ripples through you gives you a surge of adrenaline. The fire begins as a tiny orange body, moving slowly over the polyester vest top, and spreading over towards the cardboard of the box that holds it. Before you allow the flames to grow too big, you open the door, and drag the now smoldering box in to place and act as a doorstop, wedging it open. You’re careful not to trap yourself inside the room behind it – you know only too well what that feels like. You watch and wait in a quiet anticipation as the flames get bigger. They’re licking the door now, caressing it with their flickering orange fingertips. 

An idea enters your head. You want to feed what you have created. You retreat down the corridor to the mess that you remember seeing earlier. A lonely abandoned old trophy cabinet, long vacated of the school’s most prized possessions, now a small pile of meaningless wood on the corridor floor. You pick up as much as you can carry in one go and return to the fire. At this point, you don’t quite know what’s possessing you, what’s driving you forward. Nothing other than the vague lust of revenge. Vandalism and damage of someone else’s property wasn’t ever something that was high up on your to-do list. You return for the rest of the cabinet, picking up a discarded wooden classroom chair for good measure.  By now, the flames are taking to the heavy wood of the door. Smoke billows around the origin of the fire, and you cover my mouth with your sweater as you feed the flames with the memories of your time here.

After you feel as though you’ve done enough – two more chairs and several stacks of moulding old printer paper you found in the school office later – you decide to stop. You don’t linger to see what happens next. You walk away slowly without so much of a backwards glance towards what you’ve done. Nobody will ever even know you were here; you left nothing behind to even point the finger of blame anywhere near its culprit. You retrace the path back down the corridor, out of the classroom door and back over the wall for one last time, a grim feeling of satisfaction building in your stomach.

You’re not a vandal, you’re an exorcist.

As you drop yourself back over the wall, you take one final clichéd look back at the building you had frequented for so long. The memories, you hope, will fade and collapse alongside the bricks and mortar that housed them. And with that final thought, you turn away and begin home, the faint smell of smoke haunting the building behind you.