"And more pointless."
"Maybe you should read the whole book before you dismiss it like that. The real monsters are the things inside people"s heads."
"Some people"s."
"Maybe a bit of Pynchon will wake yours up."
The t.i.tle of this book sounded scientific, but Ben began reading a scene involving a brigadier and his mistress that Fowler would have been ashamed even to have dreamed. "Hey, stop it," Fowler shouted. "She doesn"t want to hear that."
"What"s it to do with you, son? Remember you"re on probation here."
"Neither of us wants to hear it," Suzanne said primly. "If that"s your taste, just keep it to yourself."
Ben glared between the two of them, his ears bristling. "Never mind acting the innocent. I"ve seen you stamp both of these books out for people. Don"t you want to admit what you"re serving them?" he said as if his lips were hindering his words, and shoved himself out of his chair. "I"m going for a drink, and if you stay here I"ll have to lock you in."
"Fine. I like the company," Suzanne said.
They heard him tramp into the library, throw the books onto the shelves, open the door and close it behind him with a crash and an overstated rattle of keys. "Good riddance," Suzanne murmured, and began to leaf through a bicycle repair manual. She glanced up and met Fowler"s eyes, and he blurted, "So would you like to go and see one of those films?"
She sighed. "Can"t either of you leave me alone?"
Fowler felt his mouth pull his hot face taut. He stared about wildly, but there wasn"t a book to be grabbed, nothing to hide him. Suzanne sighed again, more gently. "I"m sorry, Fowler. That was unfair of me. You aren"t like him. Let"s give it time, shall we?"
Did she mean until he was older? He was already old enough, he thought, but one way to prove it was not to persist. "Thanks. That"d be great," he said, and then he froze. "No she didn"t," he said.
"I missed that. What did you say?"
"Nothing, forget it," he stammered, just as the voice repeated, "She led him on."
"Don"t be stupid," Fowler muttered, surely too quietly for Suzanne to hear-but she could see that he was speaking. She pulled the hem of her skirt down and blinked at him. "Are you all right, Fowler?"
"Of course I am," he said, with a harshness he meant only for the voice.
"She wanted him to dirty her. See now, she"s trying to make you look at her down there by pretending that she doesn"t want you to. Don"t you know where those legs lead? She"s an occasion of sin, Fowler. Turn your eyes away."
"Shut up," Fowler said against his knuckles that were bruising his gums. "See, I"m not looking. Shut up now. Leave me alone."
"I will if you want me to," Suzanne said, not quite evenly. "Perhaps I better had."
He saw her stand up and remember that they were locked in. "You can stay here," he babbled. "I want to get something to read."
He floundered into the library and seized a book from the shelf nearest the counter, something about the subconscious. He flung himself onto a chair behind the counter. "Far enough?" he said through his teeth.
The absence of a response was only a threat of more if he ventured back toward the staffroom, he knew. He sat in the empty library, occasionally shivering from head to foot, until Ben unlocked the outer door. Ben smirked at him and then strode pompously into the staffroom, saying loudly, "I hope there"s been no misbehavior I should know about." Suzanne fled into the library without replying, and at once the voice said, "Don"t look at her."
After that the day grew steadily more unbearable. Whenever Fowler had to stand at the counter with Suzanne, the voice started to harangue him until he could move away. "Occasion of sin, occasion of sin. Don"t touch her, you don"t know where she"s been. Keep back or she"ll be smearing you with her dugs, she"ll get her smell on you ..." As the time for the afternoon breaks approached, the voice grew positively deranged, piling up images more obscene than the pa.s.sage Ben had tried to read aloud, and fell silent only when Suzanne insisted on taking her break by herself.
Fowler spent his break in one of the easy chairs, his eyes closed, his head aching like a rotten tooth. When he made himself go back to the counter the voice recommenced at once: "There she is, little harlot, filth on legs ..." Somehow he managed to help serve the growing queues of readers, hating himself for feeling relieved when Ben finished his break and kept sidling between him and Suzanne. At last it was closing time, and he groped his way to the staffroom for his coat and walked more or less straight to the door where Ben was waiting, having already let Suzanne flee them both. "I hope you"ll be fitter for work on Monday," Ben warned him.
He was stepping out of the shade of the shopping precinct into the humid afternoon when the voice came back. Now it seemed to be trying to soothe him, trying until he thought he might scream. "That"s right, you go home where you"re safe. Go home where you"re loved and looked after. There"s only one woman for you . . ." It sounded more out of control than ever, less and less able to disguise its feelings and itself.
The football game had emptied the streets. When he reached his bunch of houses, he heard his mother praying for him, a sound so ritualized that he knew the prayers couldn"t occupy the whole of her mind. He crept along the terrace, sneaking his key out of his pocket, and inched the front door open.
Silence gathered around him as he eased the door shut behind him. Both the praying and the voice that had urged him home had stopped. Did that mean his mother had heard him? Apparently not, for another prayer began at once: his mother had only paused after an amen. He tiptoed upstairs, growing less sure at every step what he meant to do. How could he suspect her, his own mother, of even thinking what he"d heard? But if it hadn"t been her, must it have been himself? He dodged past her bedroom door and peered around the edge.
She was lying on the drab counterpane in the reluctant light from the speckled window, her hair covering the pillow like a rusty stain, her hands clasped on her chest. Except for the movement of her lips, she might have been asleep or worse. She was troubling her rest by praying for him, and his idea of grat.i.tude was to imagine outrageous things about her. He put one hand on the wall to ease himself out of sight and make his way back to the street before she noticed him. He was still gazing at her, his head pounding with guilt, when the voice said, "Why, yes. There I am."
He couldn"t mistake its meaning, nor its certainty. He gasped, and shrank back out of sight, praying that his mother hadn"t heard him. But her feet thumped the floorboards, and she rushed to the door and threw it open so hard it cracked the wall. "Who"s there?" she screamed.
Before Fowler could speak or move, she ran to the top of the stairs. She realized someone was behind her, and swung around, sucking in a breath that rattled in her throat. Just as she saw him, her face lost all color and collapsed inwards, her eyes rolled up. As he lunged to catch hold of her, she fell backwards down the stairs and struck the hall floor with a lifeless thud.
Fowler leapt, sobbing, down to her. He clutched her hands, rubbed her sagging cheeks, made himself press one palm against her breast. Nothing moved except silvery motes of dust in the air. He dug his fingers into her shoulders and began to shake her, until he saw how her head lolled. He was drawing a breath to cry out helplessly when a voice murmured, "Thank you."
Fowler bent to his mother"s face and scrutinized her lips. He had recognized her voice, and yet they weren"t moving. He was staring so hard at them that his eyes stung, trying to will them to stir, when the voice said, "Don"t look for me there. You"ve set me free."
He staggered to his feet, twisting about like an animal, almost tripping over his mother"s corpse. The voice was above him, or behind him, or on his shoulder, or in front of him. "Just let me get my bearings," it said, "and then I"ll tell you what to say to people."
Fowler began to retreat up the stairs, unable to think how else to escape, unable to step over the body that blocked the foot of the stairs. He thought of going to the top and flinging himself down as injuriously as he could. "Silly boy," the voice said. "Don"t you know I"d never let you do that? You mustn"t blame yourself for what happened, and you mustn"t think you were tricked either. I didn"t realize it was me until after you did."
Fowler halted halfway up the staircase, staring through the murky light at the husk of his mother. He felt as incapable of movement himself. "That"s right, you get your breath back," the voice said, and then it grew wheedling with just a hint of imperiousness. "Let"s see you smile like you used to. I"m going to look after you properly from now on, the way I used to wish I could. You"ll always be my baby. Just think, you"ve made it so we"ll always be together. Surely that"s worth a smile."
The Old School (1989).
The house was locked. Dean strolled around the outside for a quarter of an hour, gazing through the tall windows at displays of roped-off rooms, and then he climbed the wide steps to the balcony. A lawn broader than his eyesight offered shrubberies and formal gardens and tree-lined walks. At the edge of the lawn, almost half a mile away, woods blotted out every vestige of the further world.
He"d known for years that the house was less than an hour"s drive from home. Even better, it was only half an hour from the new town and the school. He could drive here after teaching, when he needed to relax and be taken out of himself. He was gazing at a distant shrubbery, where either mossy statues were hidden in the foliage or the topiary itself was shaped into faces, when the August sun found a gap in the flock of fat white clouds. Sunlight wakened all the drops of rain that still lingered from the afternoon, seeds of rainbows everywhere he looked, and the sight washed away his thoughts.
As he leaned on the parapet, no longer aware of the cold stone through the leather that patched the elbows of his jacket, he heard a sound he would have hoped to have left behind in the new town. Someone was kicking a tin can. He sighed and straightened up, automatically brushing his hair back over as much of his scalp as it would cover these days. Perhaps the tinny footballer was a gardener, and would desist when he saw the place had a visitor.
Dean heard a more determined kick, and the can landed deep in a bush. Three children appeared around the side of the house, two boys and a girl who wore high heels and lipstick so crimson Dean could see it even at that distance. The boy with a black eye poked at the bush with a stick while the other boy, whose pate looked dusty with stubble, danced hyperactively around him. Branches snapped, the can sprang into the air, and the boys jostled after it towards the steps.
The game ended when the hyperactive boy leapt on the can and trod it flat. His friend made a gesture of generalized menace with the stick and chopped twigs off bushes as he went back to demand a share of the girl"s cigarette. The children were about eleven years old, Dean saw. He ought to interfere, though he felt as if there were nowhere his job would leave him alone this side of the grave. When he saw the children whisper and glance warily about, not noticing him, before converging on the nearest window, he went down the steps.
The children veered away at once. The girl blinked over her shoulder at him and nudged her companions, who glanced back, whistling tunelessly. The boy with the stick turned first, raising his shoulders like a boxer, and Dean saw that the bruise around his right eye was a birthmark. "h.e.l.lo, sir," the boy said like a challenge.
They were from the school where Dean taught. He"d seen the boy in the junior schoolyard, thumping children for calling him Spot the Dog. Surely Dean needn"t play this scene like a schoolmaster. "Enjoying your holidays?" he said in his best end-of-term voice.
They stared at him as if he"d made an insultingly feeble joke. "They"re all right," the girl mumbled, treading on her cigarette.
"So long as you don"t enjoy them at other people"s expense. Spoiling them for others might mean you"ll spoil them for yourselves."
The hyperactive boy jiggled his head as if to a beat only he could hear, the boy with the black eye swung his stick like a rod divining violence, the girl dug her hands into the pockets of her short faded second-hand dress and stared morosely at her budding b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "So have you something to do?" Dean said.
"Like what?" said the boy with the stick.
"Surely you know a few games."
"We"ve nothing to play with," the girl complained.
"Can"t you play with yourselves?" Dean said, and had to laugh at his choice of words. At least that prompted the children to laugh out loud too. "If I were you," he said, "I"d be using this place to play hide and seek."
"Why don"t you, then?"
"He won"t play with us," the boy with the birthmark said with what sounded like bitterness.
If he were in Dean"s cla.s.s Dean wouldn"t treat him with undue sympathy, would insist he join in activities like everyone else. "Of course I"ll play if you want me to," Dean blurted, and added when they smirked incredulously: "I"m off school too, you know."
"Suppose so," the girl said as if she were humoring him. "You know how to play Blocko, don"t you?"
"Remind me."
"Whoever"s It has to count fifty and then try and find us, and run back here and shout "Blocko Tina one two three" if they"ve seen me, or Burt if it"s him, or Jacko if it"s him. Watch out with that stick, Jacko, or you"ll hit someone."
She had already been addressing the teacher in the same maternal tone. She began to point at each of them in turn as she chanted: "Girls and boys come out to play, The moon does shine as bright as day. Eeny meeny miney mo, Bone in the wind and it points at you."
"It"s sir," Burt shouted, eager to be running. Jacko struck his own thigh several times with the stick while Tina removed her shoes so as to be quicker. Dean covered his eyes and turning to the steps, began to count. "You have to count so we can hear you," Tina told him.
"One!" Dean p.r.o.nounced in a voice capable of traveling the length of both schoolyards. "Two! Three!..." He heard the children scatter, and then only his voice. "... Forty-nine! Fifty! Here I come!" he shouted, and swung around to find a couple in their sixties staring warily at him from beside a corner of the house. "I beg your pardon?" the woman said in a voice that refused to admit where she came from.
"Blocko," Dean explained with a conspiratorial grimace.
The man"s face grew alarmingly like empurpled blancmange, and he pointed at Dean with his knuckly cane. "What did you say to my wife?"
"Blocko. The children"s game, you know. You"ll see the children any minute."
The woman grabbed her husband"s arm. "What"s that about children? Is he raving?"
"Everything"s under control, madam. I"m a teacher."
"He says he"s their teacher," the man communicated even more loudly.
"Not their teacher," Dean said, and gave up. He crept towards the shrubberies while the couple watched him suspiciously. They distracted him, and so did noticing that there weren"t any statues or anything like faces where he thought he"d seen some. He was out of sight of the steps when Tina announced her return there and the boys joined her, shouting.
The suspicious couple had stayed near the steps. As Dean jogged back the woman announced, "He said he wasn"t their teacher."
"Then he"s up to no good."
Tina brandished her shoes at them. "You leave him alone. He"s from our school."
Burt commenced swinging his stick in defense of her or of Dean, and the teacher said hastily, "Time for another game. Off you all go."
This game wasn"t too successful. When he pounced on a movement which he glimpsed beyond a shrubbery he came face to face with the elderly couple, though he"d thought he had heard them retreating around one corner of the house. They glared at him as if he"d invaded their bedroom, and he could only jog away as if he hadn"t noticed them, trying not to swing his arms too vigorously and yet concerned that he might appear sloppy otherwise, feeling as if he were trapped into miming enjoyment while pretending that he had no audience. When he turned tail and ran back to the steps they followed him, though he was running because he"d seen Tina lurch into view beyond a hedge behind them. "Blocko Tina one two three," he declared.
Tina put on her shoes and stamped. "That wasn"t fair. Burt or Jacko scared me, whispering behind me."
The boys appeared around opposite corners of the house, and Dean counted them out. "It couldn"t have been the boys, Tina. They were nowhere near you."
"Thank G.o.d something frightens her," the woman told n.o.body in particular. "Children respect nothing these days."
"We aren"t frightened of you," Burt said, punching the air.
"You wouldn"t dare say that to anyone if you were from the boarding school," the man rumbled, jabbing his cane in the direction of the woods. "That"s what teaching should be. You"d be terrified to open your mouth until you were told."
"You"re right, Tina, it isn"t fair. I"ll be It again," Dean said. He began counting very slowly, staring at the couple until they moved away. As the children ran off between the shrubberies, arguing in low voices about something, he closed his eyes.
Now that he"d started counting so slowly he found that he couldn"t speed up. In the pauses between numbers he heard the wind in the leaves, the footsteps of the couple marching regally away along the gravel drive, stealthy movements that must be the children tiptoeing around him at some distance, though once he thought he heard a whisper unexpectedly close to him. "Fifty!" he shouted at last, and looked.
The lawn was deserted. He"d already deduced from the movements he"d heard that the children had crept around the house. He was cupping each ear in turn towards the ends of the facade when he caught sight of a child among the trees at the edge of the lawn.
It was a boy-he wasn"t sure which one. Dean might have called out, but that wouldn"t be fair until he could say the name. In any case, the child wouldn"t be able to reach the steps before Dean. He paced towards the trees, keeping his gaze on the boy"s face.
At first he thought the child was staying still and hoping that Dean hadn"t seen him, and then he realized that the small face was withdrawing through the tall undergrowth at exactly the speed of Dean"s approach. The sight made Dean"s eyes feel shaky, the child"s face seeming to appear and vanish as the shadows of foliage camouflaged it, made it shift and turned it greener. He sprinted towards the woods so as to be able to put a name to it, and at once he couldn"t see it at all. Presumably the other children were also in the woods, or they would have been able to saunter to the steps by now. He peered between the trees as he ran to the edge of the lawn.
He could see no obvious path into the woods. Here and there the undergrowth had been trampled, but not for any great distance. Dean headed straight for the place where he had last seen the boy, who must have reached it by another route, since the undergrowth between it and the lawn was undisturbed. Stepping over ferns and spiky gra.s.s, raindrops speckling his trousers and darkening his shoes, Dean stole into the woods. As soon as he was out of the direct sunlight, he saw a child"s face blurred by shadows, watching him from the undergrowth between the trees ahead.
The sound of children"s voices made him glance towards the house. Three children were walking away along the drive: Tina and the two boys. If they"d tired of the game, who was Dean tracking? He swung round, and glimpsed the boy"s face in the instant before it fled, leaving a patch of ferns and gra.s.s swaying. The boy was several years younger than Tina and her friends. The idea of such a young child roaming the woods, especially so close to nightfall, dismayed Dean. "Hold on," he called. "I wasn"t chasing you. Don"t run away."
The trees had begun to vibrate with his scrutiny when he saw the face again, five or six trees further off. He held up one hand and was opening his mouth when the face was swallowed by shadows again and reappeared deeper into the woods. "Don"t be frightened," Dean shouted. "I"m a teacher."
The child"s face quivered and disappeared. The movement was so violent that it must have been mostly of the low foliage through which the child had been watching. Dean was wondering if he should pretend indifference-if that would coax the boy into the open- when he realized that the child had fled because he"d identified himself as a teacher. He had to a.s.sume that the boy was from the boarding school beyond the woods.
Sometimes Dean found it necessary to play the ogre with his cla.s.ses, but he didn"t enjoy it much. The idea of relishing children"s fears, as the elderly couple had, disgusted him. When he managed to locate the boy"s face again, in the midst of a cl.u.s.ter of leaves, he went forward. He wanted to see the child safe, but also to judge whether the school was as terrible as the couple would like to believe, though he didn"t know what he would do if he found that it was.
The woods proved to be even more extensive than they had appeared from the balcony. He must have walked in as straight a line as the trees and patches of marshy ground would allow for nearly half an hour. Before long he saw that there was more than one child. As soon as he glimpsed any of the faces in the foliage or undergrowth, they retreated into the leafy shadows. They were letting him see them, he realized: they were continuing the game he"d started with Tina and the boys. He wished he could enjoy it more. Once when he was sick in bed with a childhood fever, he"d seen the wallpaper piled high with faces like skulls in a catacomb, and since then the kind of picture puzzle where you had to discover faces hidden in foliage had made him feel feverish too, but now he was nervous also because the boys-five or six of them, he thought there were-seemed to be fleeing from him as much as playing.
By the time he came close enough to the far edge of the woods to be able to distinguish a building through the trees, he was having to pick his way over roots. In the growing dimness the faces of the children were barely visible, through a bush at the edge of the woods. He wasn"t even sure that he was seeing them, for when a breeze rustled through the foliage, the greenish faces appeared to separate into fragments that recombined grotesquely. Increasingly nervous, he stumbled out of the woods.
The sight of the school made him catch his breath. For a moment he thought that the long Victorian building, all gloomy red brick and high pinched windows, looked decaying only because the twilight was filling the windows with darkness, and then he saw that it was derelict. The windows were empty of gla.s.s, the grounds were rubbly and overgrown; the school must have been abandoned years ago. All the same, he knew instinctively that it had been almost as grim and daunting when it was in use.
A movement at one of the windows overlooking the woods drew his attention. A face was watching him from inside the school-the face of the boy he had followed into the woods. "Stay right where you are, son," Dean shouted. "Don"t run off in there, it could be dangerous."
He gritted his teeth as the face vanished. The boy must have stepped back into the dimness. In the poor light the face had seemed to collapse into itself. "What"s the matter with you?" Dean said through his teeth, and ran towards the school, across lumps of stone that had been a harsh schoolyard.
The entrance door nearest to the woods was ajar. Presumably that was how the boy, or however many of them were inside, had got in, since the windows were too high for even Dean to reach. He squeezed past the door, which appeared to be wedged open, and halted in the corridor.
He was standing still in order to listen for movements that would help him locate the children, but more than that had halted him. Something was wrong with the place, with the long bleak stone-floored corridor that led past a series of cla.s.sroom doors, their upper panels gaping. He hadn"t time to stand there, he had to take the children somewhere safer before night fell. He strode along the corridor, pushing the doors open.
He could see nothing of significance in any of the rooms. In the corner of one a legless desk crouched, its distorted lid grinning beneath the single blotchy socket of the inkwell; in another cla.s.sroom a few chalk marks glimmered on a blackboard like bones hovering in darkness. Despite the emptiness, something was waiting for him beyond the doors, acc.u.mulating like the twilight as he went from room to room, as he stared at the desertion where ranks of desks trapping children had stood, no doubt silent as the emptiness was now except for a single voice and a timid response: it was fear.
It wasn"t his, he told himself, except insofar as the place reminded him of the worst of his own schooldays. How afraid must the children have been for their fear to have lingered almost palpably in the air? They wouldn"t have been able to see the outside world from their desks, and the outside world wouldn"t have been able to see in, not that it would have bothered to look. The children must have felt they were in prison without visitors, at the absolute mercy of the staff.
Dean tried to think he was exaggerating, but that would mean some of the fear was his. Certainly the rooms were beginning to make him nervous, because he"d realized what was wrong with them: they were too empty, and so was the corridor. Where were the dust and cobwebs and dead leaves that the building should have acc.u.mulated? He was also wondering how the child had managed to look out at him from such a high window when there was nothing to stand on in the cla.s.srooms; the broken desk wouldn"t have served. He could only think the boy had balanced on someone else"s shoulders.