Peilis

By Kit Masters

"It’s a story about teenage love.
"Pressure of the lips and at the small of the back.
"A dangerous kiss between two special people.
"That no one can stop."

Raw and relentless, "Peilis" tells the story of four teenagers who are bound by tragic fate.
Kane Pritchard, promising eleven year old, down and out teen, fights for a community’s right to safety.
The violent, thieving Smith brothers, rule the school by fear, they won’t stop until there is blood.
Peilis delves into the conscience of a secondary school teacher, and the conscience of a generation.
Depression, anxiety and substance abuse cloud his judgement as he watches on, detached from the ordeal around him.

Peilis is a book like no other; it exposes the social infection which is multiplying in our schools.
The book tells a compelling tragic arc, mirrored in original artwork, of the lives of those who teach and learn in failing institutions.

Kit Masters is the author of Rūta, the heartbreaking allegorical novella. He is a writer, an artist and a teacher. His writing is immersive and personal, shocking and enticing, poetic and real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kit Masters
• Release date: Feb 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311420534

Kit Masters

Kit Masters is the author of Rūta, the heartbreaking allegorical novella. He is a writer, an artist and a teacher. His writing is immersive and personal, shocking and enticing, poetic and real. Peilis is his second work of fiction.

Book preview

Kit Masters

A Fiction.

For Lindsay, who never stood by and watched.

Table of Contents

Kit Masters

Table of Contents

Part one

Remembering as if in a Dream

Teenage Love

Carefree

Ego

I Start to Relate

Psychopathic

Intellectual, Emotional and Developmental Poverty

Nurture

Friendships and Reality

Detachment

Gateways

Orange Tunnel

Haste

Vile

Part 2

Adultery

Beauty and Caprice

Something I Couldn’t Have Made Up

No

Morality and Justice

Pursued

Imitation and Attention

Hamasa

Honesty

Orange Tunnel

Stop

Followers

Distraction

Family

Mask

Avatar

Temper

Anger

Rage

Fork

Bad Friends

Unprovoked Violence

Trepidation

Cease

Cath

Part one

Guercino - Sibyl

Remembering as if in a Dream

I’m having difficulty with how to start this story.

You’ll have to bear with me.

It’s something that seems so important to write, but something which I can have no pride over, which should never have happened.

A memory I wish I didn’t have, but I know I deserve.

I can think of nothing to compare to what happened, and no way to excuse how I ended up seeing what I saw.

Nothing happened to me in my life to help me make sense of Kane’s ended.

I have no violent past, no all consuming teenage love, no drug addiction, no lost homeland, or traumatic infanthood.

Thinking of Kane I feel some guilt.

Thinking of how he died I feel it is important that I write this honestly.

At least I think I do.

But maybe this story didn’t really start at the school.

Maybe it’s a tale that we’ve gone over hundreds of times in the last centuries.

Or maybe I need to go back even further.

So I’m having difficulty starting.

Struggling to find the beginning.

My head in my hands and my eyes downcast.

2016, a year of course you’ll all remember.

A place which I’m sure you won’t, but which you’ll all know implicitly already.

A large secondary school, in some satellite of London.

2016, but this isn’t a story about the war, about destruction and heroism.

It’s a story about love and tragedy.

It’s a story about teenage love.

Pressure of the lips and at the small of the back.

A dangerous kiss between two special people.

That no one can stop.

It’s a story about teenage tragedy.

Kick in the ribs and the flash of the knife.

The head as it fell to the floor.

Of two who met in violence, which I didn’t try to stop.

Palma - Carolinus

Teenage Love

Three years before he died, Kane was with Cath.

They already seemed like they were married, though they were only twelve and thirteen.

They were inseparable in their first few years at school.

They seemed impossibly happy, and in love.

Their relationship was the envy of all the other kids.

They relied on each other.

They were comfortable together, everyone else was shy, awkward, a social invalid in the presence of the opposite sex.

Most kids can’t talk to each other without giggling or stumbling over their words.

They can’t talk of love without getting silly.

But Kane and Cath seemed made for each other.

They were the brightest kids at school.

In these years I saw Cath change from being an extroverted wit, an assured self-confident girl to a retiring, shy, care worn woman.

After the tragedy I could still see the intelligence, and the vital spark of the younger girl.

But it was apparent only in the memory of her before.

And her downcast eyes avoided mine.

Rembrandt - Hendrickje

Carefree

A couple of years after Kane’s death, Cath told me how they had met.

Cath had been playing, well, sitting on the swings, with a boy in her year six class.

Kane came up and asked if he could have a go on the boy’s swing.

The boy didn’t want to get up, so they played rock, paper, scissors, for it.

Kane won.

Aged ten and eleven they’d sat there talking for hours, she hadn’t even noticed the other boy leave.

She told me what she’d been impressed with Kane for.

"He always made other people seem small, petty.

"Everyone else, especially other boys, just seemed insignificant once I knew him.

And like he did then, in that game of rock, paper, scissors, Kane always knew he was going to win.

Their love seemed so at odds with the rest of the world.

But I guess everything seemed at odds with that.

They were in their own world, the world of first love.

Around them the nation went through deep lows, and majestic highs.

In those years, 2013 and 14, in which Kane and Cath were together, global conflict seemed inevitable.

It didn’t matter to them.

Today though, as I look back at this time, as I start these pages, I am thinking about relationships.

And I was thinking how hard it will be to tell this tale.

Will it ring with truth and honesty?

Can I bring out the beauty of those kids in that hot July?

I need you to feel the truth.

This could happen at any time, in any school in our country.

This is a cautionary tale.

Leonardo – St Jerome

Ego

We tend to think our own lives quite mundane.

Yet we spend so much time fretting, worrying about who we are.

We dream of golden ages, wishing we were golden people.

So many conversations are one person saying what they think about themselves.

I start so many sentences I think.

We look for interpersonal approval.

The scale of this event is such that I haven’t