Dorm

Along the wall on the left are the wardrobes, my memory exaggerates and I see forty of them or something, but there are problem only a dozen or so all lined up and when I think of them now I wish I had taken a photo. It would have been an arty shot, the peeling old white paint and the doors all ajar in differing degrees of dissarray. In my memory I walk towards them at the head of the pack, footsteps rumbling and stumbling down the winding staircase behind me. I head for mine, my footsteps racing in a panic that I don't want anyone to see. I grab the door and lean into my cupboard it's door a shield for me and for a moment I feel safe. In here they cannot see my tears, they can't see my shaking hands as I pretend to search for some misplaced item. They cannot know how weak I am.

Behind me there is a double sided row of drawers. My two are labelled with my name and number. Across the other side of this long narrow room are our beds. They are metal framed with wire bedsprings supporting our "horsehair" mattresses. They are not really horsehair of course, they are probably coconut husk or some coarse fibrous material like that, I can't remember them as being that uncomfortable as they were pretty much the same as what I had at home. A bed was a bed.

There was a story in the dorm about a ghost who came every fortieth night or so. She was said to drift above one bed and then below the next, stabbing the knife she killed herself with into every second mattress from below. Apparently her knife was snapped so you had to be pretty unlucky to get knifed, I still lay there at night waiting for the sharp pain in my back or closing my eyes incase she was floating above me and leering down at my face. Our boarding house was full of stories like that.

It was usually the seniors who passed these stories on, telling the gullible year eights then watching their eyes widen in fear before they slipped back to their twin rooms snickering with glee. My sister was my dorm prefect when I was in first year. It wasn't a good thing. My dorm scoffed at me for getting preferential treatment while my sister treated me extra harshly so that she would not be accused in kind. She found it wonderfully convenient though, having me close to run her errands and also to wake at five am so she could train me to swim as well as her. She desperately wanted to be proud of me. Alas I was a disappointment and in the end I rewarded her by getting suspended and shaming her name. Given that it was her stupid boyfriend that dobbed me in, I say serve her right.