So, after the banquet, he had wandered with his friends, not speaking, across the flagstones of he old school building in the moonlight. The school building had been abandoned long before, and now lay empty, its windows vacant. M could still see, as he strolled aimlessly along, old broken apparatus in the science room windows, rusty sinks and cracked worktops, which reminded him blankly of the science teachers that had taught him, dumpy suburban men in ties and shirts who had graduated from dull universities in the seventies. Now all their classrooms were empty. M's friends walked a little way ahead of him, talking amongst themselves, planning some ragged-haired crime.
They walked up into the shallow basin of the school-yard itself, which resembled at this hour the bottom of a dried-up lake, with the sound of their heels scuffing the gravel echoing among the empty windows of the steel and glass buildings looming up around them, door like gaping mouths, panes of glass reflecting nothing. If the place itself, the playground and the surrounding buildings, had been montaged from sandpaper blasted grey, or with a ghostly kind of fatigue and decrepitude worked into the gritty pebbles and moon-blanched stone, had been erected vacantly, as a junkyard or a monument to failure, it could not have looked more hopeless. All the blood, semen, snot, spit and coughs of a million schoolboys had been spattered on the midnight walls there, all the ghosts of murdered teens still lurked there behind the pillars and in the piss-smelling alcoves, the dirt-flecked vomit of foul-mouthed goblins had been wept over behind the trees and vacant lots of the smoker's hangout, until darkness itself had dreamed of brick prisons, and made in its image, a high school.
There is not a curse to express its ugliness.