— What I don’t understand, Frank said, is how Sammy
— Are we nearly there?
— Yes we’re nearly there.
— What time is it?
The driver looked at him again, but said nothing.
Frank looked at his wrist but there was no watch there. He had his phone in his hand.
— Nobody knows, he said. Nobody knows.
The Joke
She was furious, and the language she breathed out cleared her path.
She climbed the hill slowly, pushing the wrong gear, standing out of the saddle and injecting the pain in her legs back into the slope as if into the skin of an animal that had done her harm. She felt her back becoming damp. It was a blank-sky day, all of London suspended in a bowl of hot milk, her headache spooning through the sludge of her brain, her eyes almost closed, a taste in her mouth of the metal in the air and the shit in the metal and the blood in the shit. They didn’t pay her enough, for one fucking thing. They didn’t pay her enough and they treated her like some unwanted unnameable sap, something between a servant and a ghost. What are you doing here? was the permanent expression on their fucking faces. Everything. Ferrier. She hated Ferrier. My god she really did. Last few yards. Close to the summit. She shook her head to dislodge a bead of sweat that tickled her eyebrow but the shaking hurt and she stopped, and breathed out a long garbled curse that took in the school and all its staff and all its students, the air of London, the people of London, the stench of London, the heat of London, the hills of London, Denmark Hill in particular, and the stinking beast beneath it, whose hump she was now climbing like a fly, and she cursed the future and the past, and the eternal fucking present, and she damned the world to hell and hell to the world, and there was nothing, in, exist, tence, that, she, did, not, damn.
There.
There. Breathe. She sat back in the saddle and relaxed and her legs rippled, her muscles fluttered, a burst of butterfly pains that faded. She was too fit though. She was hitting the top too quickly, powered by rage and her rector femoris. Her quads, her glutes. She didn’t have enough time any more to go through all the bad things. She had told Stan about this. How her anger and her hatred and her terrible thoughts climbed to the surface as she climbed the hills. How they boiled to the top like magma and belched out of her and how she liked to let it happen and how it had become a highlight of her day. He had smiled at her. And said it was probably healthy, she shouldn’t worry about it. She didn’t know if it was healthy or not, but she hadn’t been worrying about it.
Up the hill in anger, down the hill in peace. More or less. Sometimes they got crossed over, when her mind was elsewhere. Sometimes there was no peace. The school, and Ferrier, had a lot to do with it of course. But she was, she thought, running out of uphill for the anger she had. She might change her route. Make it longer, with steeper inclines. Seek them out. Go home via Crystal Palace. Shooter’s Hill. Vignemale.
She coasted past The Fox on the right and King’s came into view, its chimneys and its helicopter pad and the city behind it, steaming. Her back cooled in the downhill and she breathed easier, though not very much. You could get a mask but they said that you suck harder through a mask so you end up getting the same amount of gunk anyway. She thought she should look that up. She wasn’t sure who they were. Maybe they were Stan. She glanced to her right, at the station and the Sally Army HQ, and slipped out another curse — a precise unsubtle stricture.
The hill had home on one side of it and work on the other. It would be nice if each of them stayed put instead of following her up and down, down and up, like a pair of awful drunks.
Not Stan. She didn’t mean Stan. She meant the flat.
She was stopped at the pedestrian crossing by the entrance to King’s. She sat up straight and arched her back. Her head felt like it might burst and she glanced at the Maudsley with a sort of longing. There was a shuffling little crowd, always the shuffling little crowd, between the hospitals and the station and the bus stops — day patients, outpatients, sick people and their worry and their plastic bags, and the medical staff amongst them, out in their scrubs for a sandwich. She watched a doctor, or maybe a nurse, as he crossed from left to right. She wiped her nose and wondered what he wore beneath his papery sky-blue outfit. Didn’t look like very much. He was eating an apple and carrying a book. She couldn’t see the cover but his shape was such a pleasing thing that she decided it was a good book. Her eyes lingered on the back of him as the lights turned, and she wobbled off towards Camberwell feeling sad and slightly happy.
It was a humming day. The humidity. The white sky. She wanted a shower. But she did not want to go home. She cycled straight on, through the little valley of Camberwell to the plains of Burgess Park and found a place to take a couple of paracetamol and read her book and dry out and think. Stan would be working for another couple of hours. And might have a meeting. She took her paracetamol, read, dried out, but thought mostly about the sky-blue doctor or the sky-blue nurse, and what his life was made of.
The cloud broke up into cities, immense structures that hung over her head, over London, and Maria spent long hushed minutes contemplating them, trying to grasp their scale, but their scale lay in not being able to grasp it. Sometimes giant airliners appeared against them or disappeared into them, and they were no more than specks, a speck, like a bus in Brixton or Hackney, against clouds that were taller, wider, thicker, deeper than Brixton and Hackney and Peckham and Croydon and all the places where she had lived her life, all put together, and her life was smaller than a bus. She stopped herself then. Stupid. But still. Clouds are very fucking big. That’s the point.
The landlord had emailed to let them know that he hadn’t broken the window so he wasn’t going to fix it. This was a small shattered pane in the bedroom — they didn’t know what had happened. A bird perhaps. But it was hard to see how a bird could have flown over the wall that backed onto the outdoor area of the pizza place next door, and dived to the ground floor and had enough speed to break a window, even if it had got through the bars, and there had been no corpse. That they could see. The space outside their bedroom was inaccessible. Two foot of nothing where litter accumulated in windy weather and stayed there rotting, or vanished in another wind. They had covered the pane with some cardboard at first. After a couple of days Stan found a piece of wood somewhere and used that instead, because rats can chew through cardboard.
Every day when Maria came in she opened all the windows and walked from room to room while the place cooled a little, and then she closed all the windows again before Stan came home.
One night Stan had been washing the dishes, listening to podcasts on his headphones, the kitchen window open. He’d been daydreaming, he’d told her, miles away, happy, enjoying the discussion, and the first couple of times he saw something moving just out of his field of vision he’d assumed — unconsciously, he said — he must have assumed that it was people walking by on the street. But it was a rat. It had come in through the window and was exploring the windowsill and nosing the plates waiting to be washed, licking them Stan thought, its long tail slapping glass. He had backed out of the kitchen and closed the door and she had never seen anyone so pale. It had taken him a couple of minutes to tell her. Rat. There is a rat. A rat came through the window.
Time had stopped and pooled at their feet and she did not know if it had been minutes or hours or whether it had ever ended. Neither of them could open the door, so they went out to the street and watched through the window as the rat ransacked their cupboards. It was a big rat. Stan wouldn’t let her go to the pizza place to ask maybe one or two of the guys to come. She should have gone anyway. He wouldn’t let her call anyone. They waited. She went back inside, stood at the kitchen door with her big boots on, her gloves, a broomstick in one hand while her other hand trembled on the handle but could not turn it. Just could not turn it. Eventually Stan ran back in and barged past her into the
kitchen and pulled the window shut. He said it had climbed out dragging what looked like a bar of chocolate and had run off towards the main road. The kitchen looked and smelled like a place they had never been before.
Stan had been terrified. So had Maria. But with Stan it had seemed to stir something in him that he didn’t understand. He had cried that night. He had cried and could not settle, and she had found him, when she woke from her thin sleep at dawn, sitting upright beside her, pale and twitching and watching the floor. He told her that the night was full of noises. She told him they could move. He didn’t want to move.
On the way to work she didn’t curse so much. The hill was longer and not as steep from the Camberwell side, and she was never as angry with Stan as she was with work. She liked that she was going against the flow, that she was not a part of the crowd of rich shits coming the other way on their stupid expensive bikes with their head cameras and their lycra and their attitudes. She could hear them sometimes shouting together at drivers. Oi. Wanker. Fuck’s sake. Watch it. Arsehole. She took her time on the way up, sat back on the way down, wore leggings and a jumper, and didn’t bother with a helmet. Drivers saw the helmet and recalculated the risk. She wasn’t sure that was completely true. She hated a sweaty head.
Stan didn’t want to move because he’d lived around there all his life and he was furious about it. They were on the list for a council flat. That was that. He wasn’t going to be bullied from landlord to landlord. He was going to stay put. But if they could get a better place? One that didn’t have a kitchen window beside the bins of the pizza restaurant next door? The council designated bin location? There would, Stan said, always be something. She had gone and spoken to the guys in the pizza place. They’d been defensive at first, but they said they’d make sure the bins were kept locked, and they wouldn’t put stuff on the ground when they were full. And they’d stuck to that, more or less. And Stan had talked to people in the council, or to councillors or something like that, about moving the bins, and they’d said they’d look into it and that had calmed him down a bit, gradually. But he’d taken to wearing earplugs. It wasn’t noisy, where they were. But in the silence he heard things. And he kept the windows shut and they no longer left food out anywhere, and he cleaned all the time, every surface, hunting for crumbs.
Flying down the hill with the cities overhead. The air was better on this side. There was more greenery. She could see some of the kids cycling, but not many. She could see more of them climbing out of expensive cars. Some of them getting off buses. All of them so neat and groomed, in their blazers or their jumpers or their shirt sleeves. Their neatly creased trousers, and their neatly pleated skirts. They flowed in her direction and every morning she argued and remonstrated with herself. It was not their fault. Do not hate them.
— What do you mean, assassinations?
— Murdering politishhhians, Misssss.
— In general?
— Yessss. We need to find out how Missssssssssss.
Laughter. The stage-whispering nonsense wasn’t entirely to annoy her, they just seemed to enjoy croaking their voices through clenched throats, sounding like a huddle of ghosts around her desk, hissing their demands at her and giggling.
She eyed a dim-looking boy at the side, smaller than the others.
— Does it not hurt you to talk like that? she asked him. It looks like it hurts you. You look like you’re in pain. Are you in pain?
He blushed and shuffled and the others laughed more quietly, coughed. Maria sighed. She pushed her hair back. This was Tuesday. No, Wednesday. These were Year 9 kids, spotty and sometimes entertainingly weird. But this was a little pack of them, and they were always annoying in packs.
— I’m not sure we have much on how to assassinate.
— Oh Misss, no. Not really.
— Not to do them really.
— We need to research what they change.
The voices were now more or less reasonable.
— What they change?
— Miss it’s true.
— Their effects and effectiveness Miss.
— Mrssss Grant wants us to bick uh politician t’asssasssinate.
Some of their accents were so thickly posh that it took her a moment to decipher what they’d said. There was a honking clip to the tallest boy, a sort of slur and bubble. He sounded like he was drowning, but he was an admiral.
— Mrs Grant wants you to . . . ?
— Pick uh politician to
— To assassinate Miss.
— To see what would happen.
The kids were always superficially polite. None of them had ever lost their temper with her. The had with teachers, though only rarely. She suspected it was a status thing. Teachers are on a par. Arguments can become heated with an equal, but you don’t lose your temper with the staff.
— She wants us to choose a politician and work out what would happen, politically, if that politician were to be assassinated.
— It’s good isn’t it Miss?
— We’re going to shoot the Prime Minister.
— Hat’s too hobvious, said the tall drowning boy.
— Mrs Grant said that would be very complicated.
— She said it would be unpredictable, not complicated.
— She’s a martist I think, said one of the girls with a quiet, hard voice.
— Is she Miss? Is she a Marxist?
— We should assassinate Corbyn.
— Hat’s too hobvious too.
— Who then?
— The queen.
— Not a politician.
— He wants to shut down private schools. He’d put you out of a job Miss.
— Who? asked the dim boy, who reminded her of her brother.
— Corbyn.
— Is she a Marxist Miss?
She thought she probably was. She was an elegant woman who seemed perpetually amused. She had nodded at Maria a few times as they’d passed in the corridors. Grey-haired, about sixty, tall and thin and impressive, always wore a suit. But she taught history, and political science, in the sixth form. Maria hadn’t known that she taught the middle-school kids as well. Perhaps she was covering. It did sound a little like a bored politics teacher covering a younger history class.
— But perhaps, Maria said to them, perhaps if you assassinated Mr Corbyn he would become a sort of martyr, and his policies would become more popular, and someone else with the same policies would become prime minister and shut down the school. And put me out of a job.
One of the boys, with glasses and spots, smiled at her breasts. Another boy beside him, also with glasses and spots, said
— That’s the sort of thing we have to inculcate Miss. Who to kill to make sure we get what we want.
— Inculcate?
He blushed.
— What we have to work out.
— Calculate.
— Who to kill to keep you in a job Miss, said a girl in a headscarf, not unkindly. A small handsome boy looked at Maria very seriously.
— Do you think assassination is a good thing Miss?
She had the vague sense of Ferrier, hovering behind her. A couple of the kids had dropped their heads.
— No. I don’t think it is really, Maria replied. But it’s an interesting puzzle Mrs Grant has set for you. Let’s see what we have.
— Assassination?
This was Ferrier, leaning on the counter with her elbows as if she thought there might be smaller children out of sight on the other side.
— We won’t have very much on assassinations I don’t think. Some Kennedy biographies. Gandhi, I suppose. Mahatma and Indira. Complicated stuff though, that. How on earth did Mrs Grant get onto assassinations?
— Spencer Perceval, said several of the kids at once.
— Oh I see. Well we’ll certainly have an amou
nt on the Perceval assassination. Maria?
She was already looking it up.
— Is this an essay or a project?
— Project.
— In groups?
— Yes Miss. Cells.
— What?
— Not groups. Cells. She’s told us that we’re cells. Like terrorists.
— We’re going to be ISIS.
— Nah we’re ISIS.
— You and Josh? And Marcus? You’re neo-Nazis bruv.
— Well that’s a little. All right. Pipe down. No one is going to be ISIS in my library. And no bruv-ing either young lady. I wish Mrs Grant had let us know. We could have prepared some resources. First I’ve heard of it. Did you know about this Maria?
The tone was accusatory, of course. Maria shook her head, made a noise of some sort.
— Well sort them out with some Perceval and I’ll have a word. See what she has in mind. Are you on a study break you children? No devices in that case please young man. Now, please. Thank you. Leave Maria to get on with it and go and do some study. Study space by the windows please.
She herded them away and Maria watched her go. She pitied her in the mornings and hated her by afternoon, and every day coming down the hill she persuaded herself that she had no reason to do either, and promised to try again. But Ferrier shut her down repeatedly, like a device.
Her brother came and stayed for a couple of nights. She didn’t know what he was up to exactly, but he was up to something. She suspected after a while that he was seeing someone. Or meeting someone that he’d met online, and was using her place as a base. Which was fine, but why could he not simply say so? He couldn’t. And she couldn’t ask, because part of her thought that there was a small chance that he had genuinely come just see her. To spend a little time with her. That he missed her.
They ran through their childhood sketches and talked obliquely of their parents and the things they had abandoned for now. He came and went and slept on the sofa. He tried to be friendly with Stan, but they were differently assembled, and she wondered about her love for each of them and how it differed. It troubled her that they didn’t get on. Was her love too liberal?
A Shock Page 10
