SCALEY IS DEAD.
We were in the handball courts, whacking a ball around waiting for the school bell to ring, signalling the call to class. We were a mixed group, not to overestimate matters. Abdullah was an Afghani, AB was a Prussian who, thirty years later was to find out his Dad had not been dead for all that time but was dead now. A lawyer had contacted him with the bizarre details that his father had just died at the back of a brothel in Sydney. The lawyer said he had been a German officer in the war and had been hiding out all that time. Might have been a war criminal, but not contacting AB in all those years was pretty criminal too, I reckon. Then we stopped and were told that Scaley was dead.
Tommy Trantum was an English orphan. Someone laughed and said, “Who gives a fuck?” But Tommy did. He was crying.
No one realised it at the time but Scaley’s death basically made Tommy the last orphan.
How did Scaley die?
He hanged himself.
You see the school was Clontarf Boys Town. To the general community it was a monument to Christian caring. To the boys it was indeed straight out of the Bible, all the bits that describe Hell.