by Tim Major
He turned slowly, brandishing the bag above his head again, and announced, “I guess I’d better play safe and not touch anything else in here.”
The crowd fell silent.
Then Fucksake upturned the bag. A pencil case, a notebook, crisp packets and two more books dropped out. Something large jammed in the opening.
Caitlin leapt forwards with a roar, but not fast enough to catch anything. Fucksake swung the bag away as though she were a bull in the ring. The final item fell from the rucksack. It landed with a crash on the gravel before Caitlin could identify what it was. Spencer leapt upon it. In each hand he held a plastic object shimmering with circuitry. It had been a computer, judging from the keyboard, but far smaller than the BBC Micros in the college library, and it had a built-in screen like the ones in calculators. By the looks of it, he’d constructed it himself. Smart kid. Poor bastard.
“You was right!” Goatee squealed. “He’s built a fucking bomb!”
The crowd began to bellow. From what Caitlin could hear, some were elaborating on Goatee’s accusation. Others just wanted to see Spencer get the crap kicked out of him.
“Defuse the bomb!” Goatee shrieked.
“Don’t you dare,” Caitlin said. She threw herself at Fucksake at precisely the same moment he started running towards Spencer.
Fucksake pushed her away roughly. She stumbled and fell, grazing her palms on the ground. She mouthed words to herself. Don’t you dare cry.
Fucksake slapped the computer from Spencer’s hands. One of his heavy boots crunched down upon it. He stamped twice more, grinding the LCD screen to shining shards that stuck into the all-weather surface.
This was the way things were.
With a snarl, Caitlin burst upwards from her crouched position. Dimly, she registered the indignant shout of “Students!” which signalled the arrival of a teacher. The crowd of onlookers dissipated quickly, the students shuffling away and gazing elsewhere as if their upcoming lessons, or even the sky, suddenly struck them as more interesting than the fight. Caitlin saw Jane slink away, too, with Evie in tow.
But her momentum was unstoppable. Her left hand clawed at Fucksake’s pockmarked face. As he twisted away her right fist thwacked into the cavity of his eye socket, fitting into it as neatly as an egg into an eggcup.
***
“‘I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,’” Russell said.
Spencer hesitated. “Right.”
“So does that mean anything to you?”
Russell noticed a twitch at one corner of Spencer’s mouth. The boy’s eyes strayed over to the smashed pieces of computer on the kitchen counter.
“Can you repair it, do you think?” Russell said.
Spencer chewed his cheek. He nodded.
“All right then. No point dwelling on it. Those boys will get what’s coming to them.”
The rust-coloured streaks were still there beneath Spencer’s puffy eyes. A sixteen-year-old oughtn’t to cry that much. But then sixteen-year-olds oughtn’t to be tormented either. Russell squirmed as Spencer gazed at him. Perhaps the kid thought that he, Russell, was going to deal with the bullies. But that was a job for Ellis, not his hired help. Anyway, once Spencer got over the shock of his computer being destroyed, he would probably relish building a new machine. From the little Russell had seen of the kid, he enjoyed a technical challenge. He had talked of little else on the journey to the house, once Russell had coaxed the details of the fight out of him.
Awkwardly, Russell tousled Spencer’s hair. Then he pointed at the battered copy of Macbeth splayed open between them on the wooden table. “Come on,” he said softly. “Your dad said we had to get through this homework tonight.”
Ellis’s phone call had come at a point where Russell had begun to tidy up the office for the day. It had occurred to Russell to tell his boss that, no, collecting his son from the sixth-form college was above and beyond his role profile. But he hadn’t. In all honesty, he’d felt a pang of curiosity to see Ellis’s house, especially without Ellis as a chaperone. Being allowed inside one of these enormous Summertown properties was too tantalising an opportunity to pass up. In contrast to its townhouse exterior, inside it was like a country mansion from another era, a time capsule. The thick velvet curtains hid all evidence of the outside world. The mahogany furniture and mounted animal heads belonged in a museum. And the place was enormous. His own bedsit would have fitted comfortably into one of Ellis’s two sitting rooms.
He had hoped to see Ellis’s wife, too. He had replayed her encounter with the office security guard over and over in his mind. He had tried to conjure her face. His pulse had quickened as Spencer had led him into the house, but she wasn’t here.
“Take it bit by bit,” he said. “‘I am in blood stepped in so far.’”
“Right.”
“Meaning.”
Spencer sighed. “Like, um. I’ve got blood on my feet.”
“Yes!”
“Yes?”
“Well, more like, I’ve walked through a river of blood to get where I am.”
“I must have missed a bit then,” Spencer said. “I’ll read that part tomorrow. Can I go upstairs now? I’m really tired.” He looked it, too.
“Tough day.”
“Yeah.”
“You know…” It wasn’t Russell’s place to say anything. He considered his words carefully. “You know your dad’s going to ask you what happened.”
“Right.”
“I mean, whether it could have been avoided. What I mean is, he’s going to talk to you about taking you out of that college. Putting you somewhere private.” Ellis had talked about it many times, often leaving Russell puzzled about how they had reached that topic of conversation.
Spencer fell silent.
“You’re not a fighter, are you? Me neither, never was. But your dad feels strongly about that sort of thing. I think he thinks you should stand your ground. Either that, or he thinks you should go somewhere where maybe you’d fit in better.”
“I like my college. The teachers are nice. And there’s this…” Spencer’s face flushed. A girl, maybe? Russell rifled through the pages of Macbeth, trying to appear not to have noticed.
“So. I’ve walked through this river of blood, meaning I’ve killed people. And should I wade no more, meaning if I give up trying to get across – the blood river, we’re still talking about – returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
“What does tedious mean?”
“Boring.”
Spencer gave him a hard look. “And what about ooh-er? Like ooh-er, missus? Dad watches those Carry On films that come out every summer. They say stuff like that all the time.”
“It means over.”
“Ooh-er.”
“It’s over.”
Spencer flipped the book cover closed. “And about time too. I’m starving.”
He hopped off his chair and padded across the kitchen barefoot. He was short for his age, which was strange, considering his breeding. Charmer kids were usually beanpoles, from what Russell had observed. Good genes.
The heavy oak door creaked open. Instinctively, Russell stood upright, as though he were a soldier and Ellis his sergeant.
But it was Nell Blackwood. Her hair was pinned up, but one side had come free of its clips to make a lopsided frame to her oval face. Rather than the suit she had worn at the office, she was now dressed in a grey hooded sweatshirt bunched beneath stained denim dungarees. The curls of wood shavings and the black flecks that clung to her shoulders acted as extensions of the freckled patterns on her cheeks and nose. Russell thought of dust or ashes rising and dissipating.
“I heard voices,” she said. “Oh. I recognise you. Cecil, is it?”
Russell found that his mouth had gone dry. Finally, he managed to croak, “Russell. I didn’t know you were here.” He thought about mentioning the scene outside the office, maybe offering some sort of commiseration. He decided against it.
> “Out back. Chipping away.”
She moved to the counter where Spencer was preparing a sandwich. She hugged her son from behind. They were the same height, which seemed only right. Spencer was more Nell than Ellis. Perhaps she wasn’t a Charmer after all, just Ellis – though it seemed unlikely that the minister would dare invite the criticism and threats of violence often levelled at mixed marriages. Another thought occurred to him: if she was a Charmer, she might not be as young as she looked. Nell reached around her son, took the sandwich and bit off more than half of it.
“Are you early?” she said, still chewing.
Spencer only shrugged, so Russell answered for him. “Minister Blackwood asked me to pick your son up from college. There was a bit of bother.”
Nell finally noticed the smashed computer. “Oh, love. More fuss?”
Spencer shrugged again. “The hard drive’s knackered, but it was only a half-megabyte drive for the prototype. I’ll build another computer, better.”
“I know, love.” Nell’s voice was full of sadness. “I know.”
Russell felt awfully out of place, as much as he wished to stay and see more of Nell. He found it impossible to reconcile the strident, confident woman from the office car park with this tender, sad, young person. He took three steps to the door before Nell put her hand on his arm to stop him.
“Why didn’t Ellis ring me? When the sixth-form got in touch. I’ve been home all day.”
Presumably, she was preoccupied with the possibility of Ellis being in the midst of an affair. Russell wished suddenly that he was bold enough to embrace her. “I assumed he’d tried. You didn’t hear us in here, so maybe you wouldn’t have heard the phone? While you were doing your…” He tailed off, realising that he had no idea what had been occupying her.
“Maybe. Yes, maybe it was that. Thank you for doing this, Russell. You shouldn’t have to. I’m certain he’s not paying you enough.”
He was a month’s rent late already, but he resisted the temptation to follow up on this line of conversation. He doubted whether Nell held much sway over Ellis’s business decisions anyway.
She watched him, unblinking, for several long seconds. “Do you want to see? What I’ve been doing?”
Russell glanced at Spencer, who was eating his sandwich, still standing at the counter. The boy had his mother’s eyes. They both looked wounded, or afraid. Russell nodded and allowed Nell to lead him from the room. Spencer didn’t follow.
A trail of footprints haloed with wood shavings led from the kitchen door to a ramshackle lean-to building inaccessible from the main part of the house. Russell guessed that it was originally intended for use as a conservatory. Its windows were grimy with sawdust speckles.
“Your workshop?” Russell said.
Nell flashed a smile and ducked beneath a trailing power cable to enter. He followed.
The wall adjoining the house – or rather, the outside wall of the house – was almost entirely hidden by shelves laden with plastic boxes, tools and tins of paint, piled precariously. Russell smiled despite his discomfort at the disarray. He had always kept his living space immaculate. An ordered mind demonstrated to the world that you were a serious person – though nobody but himself had actually set foot in his bedsit since he had arrived in Oxford three months ago.
At the far end of the lean-to, several clustered workbenches made a small island above the sawdust that carpeted the tiled floor. Russell had skirted all the way around before he noticed the object they supported, as if it were too large for him to process on a first pass. An enormous section of tree trunk lay sideways, resting on three benches and with additional support provided by upturned plastic crates. Ropes tied around four dining-room chairs held the thing in place. The circumference of the trunk was so great that Russell wouldn’t have been able to put his arms around it. Its bark was dark, gnarled and knotted.
It was hollow. At least, part of it was, as if Nell had been attempting to fashion a canoe out of the huge trunk, having removed a section of the bark and then worked her way inside. This must be the ‘chipping away’ she’d referred to.
She had left a thin central spindle of the tree intact, carving her way around and beneath it. The long, slender strand of wood looked like a filament in an old light bulb, or an exposed fuse wire.
He glanced at Nell. She nodded reassurance. He moved forwards and placed his hands lightly upon the dugout inside of the trunk. The wood was rough and splintered. Carefully, he stroked the spindle of exposed wood with his fingertips. It was smooth, as if it had been polished or spun on a lathe. Now that he looked closely, he saw that it wasn’t perfectly round. It bent a little in the centre of its length and had its own little knots, though far less grotesque than those on the outside of the trunk. He bent down to look along its length. Its end entered the rings of the main trunk dead centre.
“It’s the same tree,” he breathed. “But younger.”
Nell beamed. “I think of it more as archaeology than sculpture. It’s fun.”
“It’s incredible. Will you end up revealing the entire thing? The sapling that was hidden inside this ugly old tree?”
Her smile disappeared. “I haven’t decided. Is it so ugly?”
Russell looked again at the outer part of the huge trunk. It was majestic, certainly, but compared to the slender sapling within, it was a lumpen caricature.
He whirled around at the sound of somebody coughing. Ellis Blackwood stood in the doorway. He was smiling, but without warmth. “Admiring Nell’s little art project?”
Russell didn’t stop to figure out why he felt so exposed and guilty. He nodded, mute. He sensed Nell’s body stiffen beside him. What was their relationship, this husband and wife? He had seen colour-photo magazine lifestyle features that suggested their home life was idyllic. He felt a twinge of guilt for hoping that perhaps it was all a facade.
“I think it’s rather good,” Ellis said. “All those layers weighing that old tree down. Unnecessary, when you think about it. There was a perfectly good tree right there inside, all along.”
It was a closer analysis than Russell would have expected from Ellis. He didn’t dare turn to see Nell’s reaction.
“Anyway,” Ellis continued, “I don’t mean to interrupt. In fact, this is a flying visit. I’m afraid I’m off out again. An appointment. Work.”
Russell could picture the office diary perfectly. “There was nothing scheduled, sir.”
“No. But work it is, nevertheless. And it will take all evening.” He turned to his wife. “Which means, dearest, that I shan’t be able to take you and our ray of sunshine to the theatre this evening.”
Nell spoke for the first time. “Spencer needs a distraction. I’ll take him alone, then.” She sounded more tired than accusatory.
Ellis nodded, almost a bow. “Of course. But rather less sociable for you.” He turned to Russell. “I know I’ve prevailed upon you already today…”
Russell blinked. “You want me to take your wife and son to the theatre?”
Ellis took two long strides to clap him on the shoulder, then retreated to the doorway. “Excellent. Good man. Right. I’ll be off, then. I should think there’ll be food provided at the thing.” He wavered, perhaps considering whether to make an additional leap forwards to kiss his wife. After a few moments rocking on the spot, he gave an awkward wave, turned and left.
Baffled, Russell continued staring at the empty doorway.
“He’s been doing that more and more lately,” Nell said quietly. “Sudden, secret meetings with the upper echelons of power. I don’t know what it means.”
Russell thought of the question marks in the office diary, and the stranger’s assertions during the mysterious phone call. What ridiculous name had he used? ‘Ixion’. A reference to some character in a science-fiction book, no doubt.
“Upper echelons?” he said. “Are you talking about Adrian Lorde?”
“Would you describe the PM as powerful?” Nell’s smirk vanished as quickl
y as it appeared. “Interesting.”
Russell told himself to say no more. As much as he liked this sparky, untidy woman, he still worked for Ellis. And Ellis was a figurehead of the Party, and the Party was Russell’s future.
“And for the record,” Nell said, her face brightening, “you’re not taking us to the theatre. We’re taking you.” She squeezed his arm and set off back to the house.
Russell glanced again at Nell’s sculpture. Something about the tree, its exterior, struck him as significant. Black wood. Blackwood, just like Nell, but only on the outside.
FOUR
When the house lights came up, Russell felt as though he were waking from a vivid dream. He turned to his left, genuinely surprised to find Nell Blackwood sitting beside him. Tears glistened on her cheeks. Beyond her, Spencer was still staring straight ahead, too. Before the play had started, Russell had imagined that the boy might end up curled in his seat asleep, he looked so worn out. Now he was as alert as anybody else in the audience.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” Nell said, without turning.
At first Russell wasn’t sure whether he was the one being addressed. When Spencer didn’t answer, he said, “It really was. I’ve never seen Macbeth at the theatre before.” He paused. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Shakespeare play, full stop.”
Nell wrinkled her nose. “And yet you don’t appear at all out of place. You’re an anomaly, Russell Handler.”
Russell grinned. If anyone was the anomaly, it was Nell. How had somebody so pleasant ended up with a Party minister for a husband? Something about this observation struck him as important. Wasn’t becoming a high-ranking government official exactly what he hoped to achieve in his own career?
He shrugged. “Sheltered life, I guess.” He leant forwards to look past Nell. “At least Spencer’s avoided the same dire fate as me.”
They all shuffled sideways along the row of seats, slowly following two elderly women blocking the aisle with their coats and shopping bags. Once they had gathered together in the foyer, Russell felt instantly that he was the odd one out. It was plain wrong, adopting this paternal role in their little family. It was wrong to enjoy it so much.
