Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  My efforts were watched by a tall, pale prefect called Marlow, who looked as though the tightness of his starched collar was preventing the blood from reaching his face. It was to be done again, then again – not for the sake of cleanliness, but for some other, vaguer, reason. And then, said Marlow, looking at the floor, I could do it again.

  Eventually, I was told to go and see the head of house, an unsmiling young man called Keys, with the grey face of someone who had eaten a hundredweight of bread and margarine in his five years, but had come to understand Chatfield. He told me that my ‘attitude’ was wrong and that he was going to beat me with the cane. I wasn’t aware that I had an attitude, right or wrong. Alternatively, I could write out the whole school rules – about eight sides of single-spaced small print – three times by ten o’clock the next evening. Keys was short (he played scrum half ), but he looked strong, and unstable; there was a deadness in his eyes. I opted for the rules. This meant writing by torchlight beneath the bedclothes and beneath the desk throughout lessons all the following day. Part of the punishment was the risk of being caught by the teacher and beaten anyway. Keys didn’t seem gratified when I handed him the encyclopaedia-thick stack of curling sheets; he looked disappointed, and sent me off with a warning that next time it would be beating without the option.

  I was told to get up half an hour early and take a cup of tea in bed to the boy in charge of our run of cubicles, who, it turned out, was Baynes. I had to shake him vigorously by the shoulder to rouse him, and when he had cursed me for a time and drunk some tea, he came to inspect my cubicle, running his finger along the glazing bars of the window to look for dust.

  My days had a sort of rhythm. Breakfast, silent lessons, back to check on havoc in my room; clear up; more silent lessons, rugby; chores; bed . . . I had a tiny transistor radio, about the size of half a paperback, with an earpiece. I could sometimes manage to escape beneath the bedclothes.

  God, I don’t know.

  The latrine block was some way from our house and no one had told me when we were allowed to go. One morning we were about ten minutes into Physics, when I put up my hand and said, ‘Please, sir, can I go to the toilet?’

  The teacher said No, I couldn’t, I must wait. All the other boys started muttering ‘toilet’. I thought I’d picked the wrong time to go, but no one had told me any better. Gradually, I began to see that it wasn’t my choice of time but of word. Toilet was considered an outlaw word. I’d never heard the thing called by any other name at home, St B’s or the grammar school, so what was I meant to call it? It took me a long time to establish. The big block was called the Jackson Rears; the urinal halfway up the stairs, the one we shared with the house above, was called the Halfway House. The cubicle beneath the stairs was the Dump. There was no generic.

  By the end of the day there was no one in Collingham who didn’t refer to me as ‘Toilet’. Toilet Engleby, that was my name. I had to suppress a flinch of recognition when someone called out ‘Toilet!’ in the corridor.

  Baynes and Hood and Wingate weren’t going to let me get away with that. ‘Come here when I call you, Toilet. Don’t you know your own name?’ They took me to the Dump and held my head in the bowl, then flushed it.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Engleby.’

  They went on and on until finally when I came spluttering up, I answered, ‘Toilet.’ I thought that would satisfy them, but they seemed disappointed when they let me go.

  It was surprising how quickly I got used to this. Every day I woke up with a feeling of low panic in my gut. My defences were on full alert by the time I went down to the bathroom to clean my teeth at seven-fifteen.

  The other boys in my term, Francis, McCain and Batley, talked quietly amongst themselves. None of the boys in the year above would chance talking to me, especially the ones I went to lessons with. There was one boy called ‘spaso’ Topley, who looked like a fish in specs – the house joke, beneath even bullying – who occasionally gave me a sort of girlish simper but didn’t risk speech.

  I couldn’t blame them. Batley was in some class so elementary that it didn’t have even a year number attached to it, so I never saw him, except once, coming back from the rugby field, when he happened to walk past. He said, ‘Bad luck, Toilet.’ Batley was probably all right in a way.

  I had surprisingly been picked for the second team rugby in my year. I played hooker, where the main job was, as Ridgeway might have put it, to ‘keep your head down’. Then the First XV hooker got mumps and I was promoted. I didn’t know any of the others, because although they were my age they were in different houses and a junior academic year. By some telepathy they’d picked up that it was dangerous to talk to me, though one or two did call me by my proper name, and one said ‘Well played.’ So I grew keen on rugby and stayed late practising – so much so that when the First XV hooker recovered he couldn’t get back into the side. I became a tackler as well as a scrummager; I enjoyed driving my shoulder into someone’s solar plexus to hear him gasp. I liked to run behind a pimpled little shit who’d ‘toileted’ me and throw myself at his ankles, risking the mouthful of studs for the pleasure of hearing him hit the ground; and then he might accidentally get trampled at the bottom of the ruck that followed. I swapped boots with McCain, who hated rugby but had metal studs; sometimes there was blood on my laces.

  Afterwards, most people went to the small food shop and bought chips or sweets to supplement the swill doled out from metal troughs at mealtimes. For some reason – being broke, probably – my mother hadn’t thought to give me any pocket money so I relied on the bread and margarine sent up to Collingham. One day, though, she sent a cake. When the post came, a young boy called out the name of anyone who had a letter. ‘Parcel for Toilet!’ called his unbroken voice, and a number of doors opened.

  ‘I think we’d better have a look and see what’s in there,’ said Baynes, grabbing the parcel. It didn’t take him long to tear off the brown paper. ‘A cake! Who said you could have a cake, Toilet?’

  ‘Look,’ said Hood, ‘it’s home-made by Mrs Toilet. Can’t she afford to go to a shop?’

  ‘It’s not a cake,’ said Wingate. ‘Feel how heavy it is. Catch.’

  He threw it to to Hood, who caught it and tore a bit off. He put it in his mouth. ‘Christ, it tastes of shit,’ he said. ‘It tastes of toilet shit.’

  ‘Is that what you eat at home?’ said Baynes. ‘Toilet shit?’

  They began to throw the cake around, sometimes dropping it on purpose, all the time keeping up a commentary, things like, ‘What’s for lunch today, Mrs Toilet? Let’s have shit, shall we?’

  I went to the table and picked up the wrapping from the floor and went back to my room, leaving them to do what they wanted with the cake. There was a note inside the brown paper saying, ‘Mike, Me and Julie baked this. Hope you like it! Love, Mum.’

  It probably wasn’t up to much, because neither of them were very good cooks and Julie was only five anyway.

  A couple of days later I was doing the evening prep in my room, when Wingate opened the door without knocking. He was a troubled-looking boy who hung around the showers a lot. He didn’t say anything, just walked round the cubicle, picking things up, looking at them closely, then putting them down again. He had fewer spots than Baynes, a blue, stubbly chin and dead-fish eyes.

  I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He stood by the bed and looked at me. ‘Get on with your work, Toilet,’ he said eventually.

  I looked down to the passage of Livy I was preparing for class the next day. I didn’t dare to look at Wingate, but I became aware that he was doing something to himself as he stood over my bed. The Latin sentences swelled and dissolved. I couldn’t make much of them. Wingate let out a small grunt. ‘Better wash those blankets, Toilet,’ he said, buttoning up his trousers.

  Chatfield was in a straggling village that clung to the perimeter of the school grounds. Upper and Lower Rookley were bisected by the enormous college and its playing fiel
ds, its cross-country runs, its rifle ranges, its evergreen woods and assault courses. On top of the hill in Upper Rookley was Longdale, a hospital for the criminally insane. The college and the hospital had been founded in the same year, 1855; the committee of the bin wanted the high ground for the views, the school governors wanted the flat playing fields below, so everyone was happy, if that’s the word we’re looking for.

  Every Monday at nine-fifty, during our double Chemistry period, Longdale had an emergency escape practice, which meant sounding its siren. ‘sir, sir,’ said twenty boys at once, ‘Bograt’s escaped, sir.’ Bograt Duncan rolled his eyes and sighed. I tried joining in the communal joke once, but only once.

  A patient did escape once, as a matter of fact, and the headmaster called an emergency assembly of the entire school. He warned us not to talk to any strangers in the grounds. I went for a walk in the woods that afternoon, half hoping I might bump into him.

  What was odd about Chatfield was that it enjoyed a high reputation. It was expensive. It played rugby against other famous schools, like Harrow, and while a lot of its pupils went off to the navy, plenty went to universities, some even to the best ones.

  I never thought of complaining to old Talbot about what was going on because it would have sounded feeble. ‘They won’t talk to me . . .’ Well, why should they? ‘They wreck my room . . .’ Don’t tell tales. ‘Wingate . . . He . . . You know – on my bed.’ Don’t be disgusting.

  Since the head of the house and the prefects were all in on the deal, it was in any event semi-official. Why would Mr Talbot take the word of a new boy who said ‘toilet’ against that of the boys he had himself nurtured and promoted?

  His report at half-term proved me right. ‘Michael seems to be uncomfortably aware of his own precocity and must be careful not to ruffle feathers in the house.’ My mother said, ‘What’s precocity?’

  Sometimes I hid in the bathroom, where Sidney, the disreputable cleaner, took his tea break. Sidney threw a pile of tea leaves into the corridor each morning and swept up the dust with a moulting broom. He was about sixty, with muscular, tattooed forearms, a former corporal in some supply regiment, though evasive about how much ‘action’ he’d seen.

  The problem was that by being there one became a captive audience for his foul stories. One day I found myself in an audience of two (Batley was the other, though I don’t know why) sitting on the duckboards at his feet.

  ‘This bird,’ Sidney began, ‘when I was on leave and we was gettin’ on pretty well, and I rolls on top of’er, see, and she says to me, “Ooh, Sid, you mustn’t do that,” and I says to’er, “I’ll just put the end in, all right?” and she says, “All right, Sid,” so I gives’er a thorough good seein’-to and when I’m done, she says to me, “Ooh, Sid, you said you’d only put the end in,” and I says, “Yeah, I know, but I didn’t say which end.”’

  He laughed until he made himself cough for a minute or so before resuming. ‘Another thing. I’ll tell you what. The average length of a woman’s twat is nine’n’ a half inches. The average length of a man’s prick is seven.’

  ‘Really, Sid?’

  ‘Yeah. That means that in Britain alone there’s almost a hundred and fifty miles of spare layin’ around, so—’

  ‘Gosh, Sidney, that’s an awful lot of spare t—’

  ‘So make sure you gets your fair share.’

  Batley and I were arranged like the figures in The Boyhood of Raleigh, but I don’t suppose that this was quite what Millais’s old salt was telling his boys. Though on second thoughts, I suppose with old sailors you never know.

  In the holidays, I forgot about Chatfield. From the moment I got back into the house in Trafalgar Terrace, I put it from my mind. I’ve always been able to do that, to make as though things aren’t really happening. When you look back at what you’ve been doing for the last half an hour, for how much of the time have you really been aware of it? When you drive a car, for instance, you’re not aware of the functions that your brain and hand and eye are performing at eighty miles an hour, skilled movements that save you and others from death. You’re thinking about something else altogether. The music on the radio. What you’re doing next Tuesday. You’re having an imaginary conversation with someone. We’re not really conscious of what we’re doing most of the time.

  As we entered the final week of the holidays, though, a dry taste came into my mouth. I couldn’t sleep.

  When I went back to Collingham, I wrote a lot of letters to my mother and some to Julie. My mother wasn’t much of a correspondent. She was busy at the hotel and it became clear that writing to me was just one more chore in her busy day.

  So, ‘Dear Julie,’ I might write instead, ‘How’s things? I’ve been doing Latin, which is the story of what the Romans did. They were early Italians who conquered other countries. Know the waiter in the Oasis Café near the cinema? He’s a Roman. I’m having fun here. I have this game in my room with some socks rolled up in a ball. I try to kick them against a spot on the brick wall of my room. I have different teams, like the Animals against the Birds. You get points for how close you get. I write down the scores on a piece of paper. Starling is very good but Zebra is no good at all. Write to me, Jules. Tell me anything. Tell me about your friends at school and what you’ve been doing. Love, Mike.’

  It was strange to see my name written down like that. It was weeks since I’d heard it. ‘Mike.’

  After about eight letters of mine, I got three pencil lines. ‘dear mike, me and jane plad with her cosens. We had wimpey for tee, love juliexox.’ I didn’t even know she could write.

  And at least I read it before it was intercepted. I gave the letter fag two shillings not to call out my name, so Baynes wouldn’t be alerted. I stole the two shillings from a jacket in the changing room, but I didn’t know whose it was so I didn’t feel bad about it.

  I began to steal quite a bit after that. It was useful, and it had a good effect on my morale. I was extremely careful and never took notes, just coins that would be hard to trace, and only small sums, never more than five bob at a time. Once, when I was on changing room sweeping-up duty, I saw Baynes’s brown tweed jacket unattended on its hook. I was the last one there and I knew Baynes was doing extra rugby practice until it was dark. There was a pound note in the inside pocket. It was very, very tempting, but I put it back. The one thing I had over Baynes was that I was cleverer than he was. That was an advantage I couldn’t afford to blow. For all I knew, it was a plant and he’d noted the serial number.

  Of course, it might have given him a dilemma if I’d been caught because I would have been expelled and that would have been a disappointment to him and Hood and Wingate, having no one to torment. But I guessed he would have found a way of not reporting it and of making my punishment more ‘informal’.

  One of Baynes’s favourite tricks was to send me to do a rubbing from a brass engraving in a church a couple of miles away. You were given 25 minutes to change into sports clothes and get there and back, which was impossible, but meant that he could send you again. He only sent me in the first place if it was raining, so the piece of paper was always wet and spoiled and he could question whether I’d even got there.

  I used to peer into the raspberry yoghurt, watching to see if any light of kindness might emerge. But there was only ever anger in Baynes’s boiling red face – in his narrow, watery little eyes and pussy cheeks, which made him look like a crimson gargoyle.

  ‘Do it again, Toilet. Go. Now.’

  Sometimes at night, as I lay in the sopping sheets, I dreamed of killing him. I would show no compassion. Or I would show the same degree of compassion that he had shown to me. It would come to the same thing. Good night, Baynes, I’d say, looking hard into his watery, hating eyes. Good night, Baynes, you, you . . . I knew all the bad words, but none of them was strong enough for my hatred of Baynes. The f-word, the c-word, a lot of b-words . . . The c-word is probably the one I’d have picked. It had a good sound, but it referred to somet
hing else, which wasn’t relevant; it was feeble, really: for power, it wasn’t even close.

  I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything. Sometimes I had a fantasy of my body being found in the morning and the shock it would cause – how Baynes and Wingate and Hood would be chastened and remorseful; how it would be the making of them as men. They would become fine and philanthropic in their lives; they would spread so much happiness among men that the loss of unmourned Toilet Engleby long ago would in fact be a price worth paying.

  But I knew it wouldn’t really be like that. What would actually happen would be that Mr Talbot would ask if anyone knew what the matter was. Keys, the head of house, would officially say I’d been ‘nervy’, but since he’d dosed me with the rules I’d appeared to be ‘settling down’. Ridgeway, my little fag teacher, had got me through the exam and that was all he had to do, so he’d be in the clear. McCain and Francis would say, ‘He seemed fine, sir.’ Batley would scarcely understand the question. Hood and Wingate and Baynes would feel uneasy, but no more. ‘Toilet couldn’t handle it, then,’ one of them would say, later, when Talbot had gone. ‘Yeah, must’ve been trouble at home or something.’ ‘He seemed all right in the house.’ The thing about those three was that they believed – or at least had convinced themselves – that what they were doing to me was part of the traditional experience that Collingham offered; on behalf of the school, themselves and even me, they were performing some semi-official service.