by Paul Berry
‘Maybe kitten skulls?’
‘Sounds charming.’
Terry is whispering behind his canvas and giggling with the other goths.
Mr Hewitt sighs. ‘It’s a pity other people don’t listen to my advice.’
‘Faggot,’ Terry mutters under his breath. Mr Hewitt smiles at him.
‘Please leave the classroom,’ he says calmly. Terry looks startled, unsure what to do. Mr Hewitt points towards the door.
‘Leave now before things get unpleasant.’
‘But—’
‘Now.’
Terry grabs his bag, stomps across the floor and slams the door shut behind him, jingling the paintbrushes in my jar. Rachel carries on painting the peacock tail, pretending not to notice.
Sometimes I don’t know why I’m friends with her.
I go back to my painting and notice a spot of red paint in the sky. I take a rag and try to blot it off, but it smudges into an angry streak. Mr Hewitt puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s one of the few people I feel comfortable touching me.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix that next lesson,’ he says. The heat from his hand travels through my t-shirt into my shoulder and I feel myself getting hard. ‘If Terry acts like a swine again, you have my permission to punch him.’
‘Yes, sir. I mean Mr Hewitt.’
He once asked me to call him ‘John’, but it felt too intimate, like we were friends sharing a secret.
‘Ok, people,’ Mr Hewitt says, looking at his watch, ‘start packing your stuff away.’
I feel dread when the bell rings, as Terry will be skulking in the corridor waiting for Rachel. As I’m about to leave, Mr Hewitt stops me.
‘If Terry bothers you again, make sure you tell me.’
‘Thanks … I will,’ I stammer.
Rachel is waiting for me in the corridor.
‘Thanks for not sticking up for me,’ I say. Anger flares behind my eyes and I dig my nails into my palms to stop it from spreading.
‘He’s only joking.’
‘You actually think what he does is funny?’
‘Give him a break. His grandma died a few weeks ago. That’s why he’s painting that picture.’
‘He was the same prick before that happened.’ Rachel sighs and rubs the top of my arm, but I jerk it away.
‘Look, I’ll have a word with him about it, promise. I think he’s already in enough trouble with Mr Hotness.’
She doesn’t mention breaking up with him, so she will give the stupid dick another chance.
‘Before you melt my face off, I have something for you,’ she says. ‘Consider it an apology present. Close your eyes and open your hand.’ I fold my arms and grunt. ‘Come on, Sam, I really am sorry.’
I hold out my palm, hoping she doesn’t notice the red half moons cut into the skin.
She presses something flat into my hand and closes my fingers around it.
‘You can open your eyes now.’
In my hand is a ticket for tonight’s ‘Halloween Horror Disco’. There are two dancing skeletons on it, one of them wearing a top hat, the other a ragged skirt. She senses my apprehension.
‘It’ll be fun.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’ll be fine. I know you like Halloween more than Christmas.’
‘There’ll be too many people there.’
‘Hewitt’s going. He’s dressing up as Dracula.’ My face cracks into a smile. ‘I knew that might persuade you.’
‘But I don’t have a costume.’
‘I’m sure you can find something by tonight. If not, you can always wrap yourself in toilet paper and go as a mummy. Then ask Hewitt to slowly unwrap you.’ She caresses my cheek. ‘Oh, Sam,’ she says in a deep faux-man’s voice, ‘I’ve thought about this moment ever since I first saw you waggling a paint brush in my class.’
‘I’m really looking forward to seeing your costumes,’ Mr Hewitt says loudly, winking at us as he walks past.
‘He heard me, didn’t he?’ she asks, covering her face.
‘It would be difficult not to.’
‘Well, at least he seems excited about you being there. That’s one reason to go.’
‘You should go as an irritating witch. No costume needed.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
Terry is standing outside behind the glass doors of the main entrance, hands in pockets and chewing on a strand of hair dangling from his fringe. Rachel pauses as if unsure who to choose.
‘It’s ok,’ I say. ‘Don’t keep your boyfriend waiting.’ She kisses her fingers and touches them to my forehead.
‘I’ll pick you up at eight p.m. on my broomstick.’ She runs down the corridor cackling and stops in front of the doors, takes a deep breath and opens them. Her smile drops and she starts arguing with Terry.
A group of students jostle along the corridor, oblivious to me, so I mingle with them, passing Rachel and Terry shouting at each other behind the doors, and follow the corridor to the library.
Chapter 3
Rachel is the only one I’ve told I’m gay, although telling her was like jumping into a lake of freezing water, the admission passing my lips and sending my body into shock. She hugged me and said she already sort of knew.
Afterwards, I felt like a weight had been lifted but also somehow more anxious, as if my identity was skinned and on display. The years of hoping the feelings would go away had ended that day. Never again would I look at pictures of catalogue women in lingerie and desperately try to make desire spark within me. The only time I feel my blood burn is when I see men. And Mr Hewitt.
I wonder how Terry and the others know, paranoid that the way I walk or speak makes it obvious. When the name-calling began, I involuntarily started lowering my voice an octave to sound more masculine, spreading my legs further apart when I sat, scared that any new person I met would instantly guess my secret.
Last month my dad asked me if I was gay and told me that nothing I said would change the way he felt about me. There was a brief pause before I shook my head. He ruffled my hair and told me to forget about it.
There’s an hour break until English class and I slip through the swing doors of the library, hoping nobody notices me. We have started Journal of the Plague Year, and I enjoy making Rachel’s face turn green by quoting descriptions of plague pustules.
I quickly scan the study tables and don’t spot any faces from art class. The librarian looks up and smiles. It’s the nice one, Mrs Turner, not the one with the perm as tight as a cycle helmet who resents everyone who enters as though we’re uninvited guests.
‘Hi, Sam,’ she murmurs, then looks around to make sure nobody’s eavesdropping. ‘Before you ask, the new Stephen King book still hasn’t arrived.’ She’s only supposed to get books with academic merit (orders from the principal, stuffy old fart, she confided) but said I spent so much time here that I get special book privileges.
One afternoon I found a copy of Maurice hidden behind a set of encyclopaedias. I clutched it in my hands, not even daring to sneak a look through the pages, the sweat from my palms speckling the cover. I checked nobody was looking and stuffed it into my backpack. When I got home I slipped it inside an empty video box. I waited until my dad was asleep to read it, wishing I went to public school at the start of the century and had clandestine liaisons in dark corridors.
I sit at one of the empty tables between the shelves. Someone has scratched into the wood in crude biro letters: ‘Sam sucks dick’. The writing is the same as the identical message scratched on the metal hand-drier in the toilets, the curl of the ‘S’ bigger at the top, the same way Terry writes it. I reach up to a shelf and pull out an illustrated book, Animals from the Amazon. Leafing to a photo of a bird-eating spider sinking its fangs into a hummingbird, I take out a sketch pad and start drawing the spider, its legs gripping
a tiny screaming figure of Terry.
‘Sam!’ My name echoes around the library. I look up nervously and see Bruce from English class waving at me. There is an annoyed shush from the librarian and he whispers, ‘Sorry,’ making a zipping movement across his lips. My cheeks flush and I cover the graffiti with my hand.
‘Are you …?’ The librarian glares at him and puts a finger on her lips. He lowers his voice. ‘Are you coming to the disco tonight?’
‘Not sure. I’ve got a tonne of homework to do.’
‘I’m surprised they’re letting it happen.’ Over the past year, five students have disappeared. We had a special assembly last week when the principle told us not to get into strangers’ cars as though we were primary school children.
The only ones that disappeared who I really knew were Marcus and Philip. They were in art class with me, making it more tolerable with Terry and the others, but I was usually too nervous to talk to them apart from the occasional nod. They always hurled the perfect put-down when Terry tried to insult them, usually involving his mother’s sexual prowess with farm animals. Nobody else dared say anything to them in fear of being on the receiving end of their verbal whip. One lesson, Philip had distracted Terry while Marcus tied his shoelaces together. He crashed onto the floor, dragging paint onto himself; it looked like a crime scene from a psychedelic massacre.
Even months later, the table they always sat at is left empty, as though we would invite the same fate by sitting there. The rumour whispered around the college is that they ran away after their father caught them messing around in bed together and told the police. Marcus was nineteen but Philip was still seventeen.
Bruce looks down at the picture of Terry. ‘Good likeness. His face is more rat-like, though, and you’ve forgotten his tail.’ I cover the picture with my hand. He stares at the graffiti. ‘Fucking arseholes.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m used to it.’ He takes a pen from his backpack pocket and scratches it out. ‘Thanks.’
‘Anytime, Sam.’ He pats my back and my body stiffens. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Anyone else gives you trouble, tell them they get a free punch from me.’
‘I’ve got a long list. You’ll have to punch half the college.’
He smiles. ‘Catch you later.’ He goes to a table where a couple of his rugby team mates are sitting. They high five each other and the librarian gives them a dirty look but can’t prevent the corner of her mouth curving into a smile.
I take out my Walkman, untangle the headphones and slip them on. I close my eyes, press play and Madonna starts singing about opening her heart. Rachel put the song on a mix tape for me and decorated the box with star and rainbow stickers. She tried to doodle a skull and crossbones on the insert, but it ended up looking like a potato wearing a bow tie.
The tape slows down and Madonna’s voice becomes a deep drawl and starts muttering in a strange language, interspersed by the synthesiser notes, which have dulled to low screeches. I pull off the headphones and look down. On the sketch pad I’ve drawn symbols next to the picture of Terry. They look like a mixture of hieroglyphs and runes.
I pull an eraser from my pencil case and rub them out, brushing off the twisted white strands of rubber. A book falls from the shelf and slams onto the table, and I cry out and jump out of the chair. The library has gone dark and I reach towards the book, blinking at the dust wafting up. On the spine is the title in gothic letters: A Walking Tour of New Innsmouth.
‘The library isn’t the best place to practise your singing,’ the librarian says. I turn around and she is smiling at me, the lights back on. I look at the table but the book has disappeared. My stomach clenches with nausea.
‘Are you ok?’ she asks. ‘You look paler than usual.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, jamming things into my backpack and hurriedly making my way out. Terry is sitting at the table near the exit doors with a blonde-haired girl who sometimes talks to Rachel. He is gently stroking the back of her neck. When he sees me he jerks his hand away.
‘Was that you I heard screaming?’ he says hurriedly, his jaw clenching in anger, knowing he’s been discovered.
‘I must have caught a glimpse of your face.’ This is the first time I’ve answered Terry back in front of his friends. He looks mildly surprised, then scowls.
‘Haven’t you forgotten to put on lipstick, homo?’ he asks. The girl laughs, tossing her hair back. He must be nervous if that is the best insult he can come up with. I bow my head and push open the swing doors.
‘He even walks gay,’ she whispers. Before the doors swing closed, I look back into the library for Bruce, but he’s gone. I decide to skive English and go home.
As I walk through the carpark away from the college, I think about the disappearing book. Sometimes when I’m stressed I hallucinate. Not huge visions; usually just small things like mouse-size shadows scurrying across my bedroom floor or moths fluttering against my face that vanish when I turn the light on. But this is the first time it’s happened at college. Did I also conjure up the men in the park last night? But there was spray paint on the back of my hand this morning, so they must have been real.
I think about the box in the bottom drawer of my desk. Inside is a shell the size of a two pence coin, one side ridged, the other smooth and pearlescent. I had a dream last week where I was walking along a beach and bent down to pick it up as it twinkled in the sun. I found it when I awoke in bed the next morning, digging into my back. Also inside the box is a dried pinecone that was in my hand another morning when I woke up, having pulled it off a low-hanging branch in a twilight forest where I was lost, the snarls of nameless creatures echoing through the trees.
One morning I awoke in the garden, shivering, my pyjamas soaked with cold dew, a scrap of parchment grasped in my hand. When I unfolded it, the eye in the pentagram stared back. My dad thought I had sleepwalked, but my bedroom window was still closed and all the doors of the house were locked.
‘You probably remembered something from David Copperfield in your sleep,’ he said. We had watched an episode a few weeks before where he had walked through the Great Wall of China. I can’t even shuffle a deck of cards without scattering them across the floor. My dad looked worried, so I lied and said I vaguely recalled locking the back door after me. He smiled, but I could tell from his eyes he didn’t believe me.
I tried looking in the library for any other cases of teleportation. All I could find was a story in a book called Mysterious World. A girl in nineteenth-century America would spontaneously disappear but then return hours later with bouquets of flowers. It happened regularly for several years, but then one day she disappeared, never to be seen again. That was what I feared the most, teleporting to one of those places and being trapped there, alone and dying of starvation in some endless wilderness, or, worse, being torn apart by its hungry inhabitants. I tried to pinpoint exactly when it started. It was soon after my mother died, also the time when the anxiety and depression which rule my life sank their claws into me.
The wind rustles dry leaves across the pavement as I walk home, seeming to whisper in a secret language, and people pass by unaware I exist, a ghost they see fleetingly in the corners of their eyes.
Preston’s winter sky hangs low, the rays of spring still months away from breaking through and awakening the daffodil shoots.
The clouds darken to storm grey like the ones in my painting, a faint streak of red snaking through them.
Chapter 4
I walk fast so I don’t miss the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, the one with the five children trapped in a magical realm after being transported there by a cursed amusement park rollercoaster. I’d forgotten to set my video to record before I left this morning, probably distracted by what I had seen in the park.
I usually walk home listening to my Walkman, but I don’t want to risk hearing that deep voice with those strange garbled words that somehow sounded fa
miliar. I wonder if my mind has begun to break and fantasy has finally bled into reality so I can’t tell the difference anymore. But I didn’t imagine those men in the park last night, and those objects in my drawer are real – I can see and feel them. Should I tell my dad? Maybe the medication I take has stopped working or I’m having some kind of reaction to it.
When I see the bus shelter, painted for some peculiar reason phone-box red, I remember the last time I spoke to Marcus and Philip.
‘Hey! Monster boy!’ I was walking past it at the beginning of summer, counting down the days until term ended, the volume on my Walkman low so the batteries would last longer. I clenched my jaw and bowed my head, pretending not to notice, ready for the next insult.
‘Sam! Monster boy!’ I looked at the shelter. Marcus was sitting under it, smiling at me, Philip twisting his earlobe.
‘Don’t call him that. He has a name, you ignoramus.’
Marcus swatted his hand away. ‘It was a joke. How’s life among the blockheads going?’
I shrugged. ‘Same as yesterday.’
‘Next year we’re vacating provincial life for more cosmopolitan climes,’ Philip said. I looked at him, puzzled. ‘Upping sticks to London, far away from all this small-town petty-mindedness.’
‘When next year?’
‘As soon as we get enough money together.’ Marcus was still being investigated by the police and wasn’t supposed to have any more contact with Philip.
‘Don’t you dream about escaping to a place where you can just be yourself?’ Marcus asked. Tears stung the corners of my eyes.
‘Every day.’ I winced, embarrassed about being so honest.
‘You’ll get out of here eventually,’ Philip said. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got all my things in my room. And my dad’s just fitted some new shelves.’
‘You can get new stuff.’ The thought of never sleeping in my room again prickled my stomach with anxiety.
