The queue for the disco
He once threw a basketball at the back of my head at school and knocked me out. He was not the school bully, for 'Nick' (that was his name) was too snide for bullying. He was the bloke who would empty tip-ex upside down in your schoolbag and never admit to it. It was all sneaky-sneaky with this prick...always behind your back, from behind a concealed hand...oh, and he once broke into the car belonging to his best friend's Mum (who lived next door) and sold the radio, and never admitted to it. Oh yes, he was evil in a way that my 16-year-old self could never understand.

Everyone at school was pretty careful to stay on his good side, should they find their bag full of tip-ex, or suddenly eating pavement having been knocked out by a errant basketball. Until the night the entire year embarked on a trip to the 'bad side' of town- to visit an 'underage nightclub'. As in, an u18s dance, only populated with quite dangerous borstal types and sink-estate gangsters. These lads were a step up on the criminal ladder from stealing car-radios.

We queued up, looking and feeling horribly middle-class and over dressed, and Nick was there in a white Ralph Lauren shirt, as was the fashion at the time. I'm coming to the Schadenfreude bit here, because no one saw the pack of feral youths approaching.

They seemed to have Nick by the throat so quickly, yet despite being in a group of 50 so-called mates, no one seemed to spring to his defence. Nick looked rather worried, and his sideways glances at 1) his so-called mates and 2) a parked police van full of coppers, went amiss.

They found him to have nothing worth stealing, so they relieved him of his shirt, and so he was left, in a snaking queue of what must have been 500 of his piers, neighbours and friends, topless. I remember the moment when he started crying.
(whitehorse, Tue 22 Dec 2009, 21:56, 2 replies)

I think
a lot of people are mistaking Schadenfreude for comeuppance?

yeah the guy was a twat but getting robbed as we've astablished is pretty shitty
(Monkeystrumpet monkey. Monkey, MONKEY!!!, Wed 23 Dec 2009, 16:41, closed)

One of us is also mistaking 'peers' for 'piers' as well.

( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Wed 23 Dec 2009, 17:31, closed)