‘What are you doing here, boy?’
He looked at me as if he suddenly knew who I really was.
‘Just talking, Sir.’
‘Get a cloth and clean that up off the floor, then get yourself to lessons. You should be with me now, shouldn’t you? And you,’ he turned to face Lee, ‘Report to head of year now. Tell her you’ve been caught playing truant again, and smoking. And you can give me those now.’
I went to the lesson and Mr Eliot appeared a bit later. I don’t know what he did in the meantime, but I thought it was probably something to do with me and Lee, and it made me nervous. In fact, I was particularly tense for the rest of that lesson, while Mr Eliot just stood at the front of the class, teaching in his normal, iron-rigid manner, as if nothing had happened. I was so tense I didn’t even try to stop time for a bit of light relief. I suppose I just wanted the lesson to go. There was something else, too. It was the proximity of truth, of exposure, of everything I most dreaded in life. I don’t know why I should have felt it then particularly. Maybe because Mr Eliot was a maths teacher and represented someone who might hold a concrete key to my secrets. His factual presence loomed like my nemesis. The truth, facts—it all added up to something angular and sharp-edged, like this desk I had to sit at, something that would dig into my ribs, stretched out flat and tense as this unendurable tedium. I watched the minutes of the clock, myself quite as taut as the ticking workings behind that bleak face. Somehow I felt I would have to take daring measures if I wasn’t to meet calamity. I tell you all this, but then it was almost a superstitious feeling; I had no hard evidence that Mr Eliot could even imagine the truth about me.
Lesson ended. All the other kids got up and left. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but after wavering slightly I got up to leave with them. Safety in numbers, or something. But then that voice kind of fell on my shoulder.
‘Where do you think you’re going, Buzzacott?’
I stopped and turned around, didn’t say anything. I kind of sniffed and sighed, you know, and cast my eyes upwards, looking nowhere in particular. Mr Eliot was putting on his jacket and taking his briefcase from the chair.
‘I haven’t time for you now. Come to my office at ten past twelve tomorrow.’
Ten past twelve. That meant I didn’t have time to eat dinner first, but that I’d be kept long enough for the dinner queue to be ridiculously long when I did finally get there. Why did he have to be so arbitrarily precise?
Well, I didn’t forget. I went, just like he said. The door to the office was wide open, but there was no one there. There was a little passage leading to the office proper, with all these really dull-looking books on shelves from floor to ceiling, and I just waited there, really pissed off. I looked at my watch a couple of times. Five minutes late. Ten minutes late. Since he was so precise about me being there at ten past, I thought it was just blatantly arrogant and insulting for him to be late. Either he’d forgotten or he was deliberately playing me for an idiot, trying to teach me some sort of lesson. Maybe it was because I had been skipping his class. This was his nasty little form of lateral-thinking punishment. He was in a staff-meeting somewhere, occasionally looking at his watch in self-satisfaction and imagining me standing here. Maybe he wasn’t going to turn up at all. If there’s one thing I hate it’s people taking me for a fool. I thought about the growing dinner queue and, rather than make elaborate time-stopping arrangements for the sake of such mundane, irritating things as Mr Eliot and dinner, I left.
Next morning, in tutorial, after register was taken, I got a note from the tutor saying that Mr Eliot wanted to see me at dinnertime. So he hadn’t forgotten, anyway. Mr Bradley, the tutor, hinted with some disapproval what it was all about, like he had to get his own two pence worth. Refusing to submit to a teacher’s punishment is like assaulting a policeman. They all get offended, and the penalties are higher than for any normal transgression. Justice? I think not. More than anything else teachers crave that pupils should take them seriously. Very, very seriously. It’s a pathological concern with them. I took the note, and I took a deep breath. I felt myself squaring up to the daddy of all squares. This would take some preparation. Dib, dib, dib, and all that.
So I get there, twelve on the dot, and under the circumstances I can’t help looking a bit surly. I’m bracing myself. Clearly this guy has engineered the whole thing to give himself maximum license to let rip. This time he’s there already, making out like he’s doing something else other than just wait for me. He lets me just stand there a bit, feeling like a tit, then he finally puts his book down on his desk and says, ‘Well?’
Now, what we have here is a perfidious iron fist up the jacksie. This is the type who was the backbone of good old Perfidious Albion.
‘Well?’ he says, like I’m the one who’s got to explain why I’m there. Oh yeah, he’s airtight, this fucker.
‘I got this note, Sir.’ I start to unfold it. He just looks at me.
‘Would you like to explain why you failed to keep your promise to meet me yesterday?’
‘Well, for a start, I didn’t promise anything. You told me to be here at ten past twelve, and I was. You didn’t say anything about after that.’
He stood up and came round his desk. I almost expected him to hit me and I think I unconsciously took a step back. But he didn’t hit me, he just scrutinised me, like, really contemptuous. But it wasn’t just contempt, I don’t think. He looked like he was trying to work something out. He was practically sniffing me.
‘If I tell you to come at ten past twelve you come at ten past twelve and you wait for me to arrive. It’s not optional. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it. I am the teacher and you are the student, understand?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
But this didn’t satisfy him.
‘Buzzacott, what’s happened to you? You stand there hunched, you grunt instead of talking, you’ve got long hair and bits of metal in your ear like some sort of caveman. Where’s your dignity? What is it, boy? I mean to find out.’
I don’t know what he was thinking. He looked kind of suspicious and maybe he thought it was all drugs or something trite like that. Anyway, he was definitely getting personal, and I was getting bored of it. Time to fight fire with fire; if he was trying to squeeze me into the image he had of me as a caveman, then I’d get personal, too. I’d squeeze him very firmly into the image I had of him. In fact, I had a great many images of him.
‘Well, Sir, I’m afraid that knowledge can be a dangerous thing. For instance, does your wife know about your liaisons with sixth-formers? Now, how did I know that? Ooh, spooky! Ooh, don’t like it! What else do I know?’
Suddenly he had me by the shirt front.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy! You think you can try and mess me about? You don’t stand a chance!’
‘Get your hands off me you fucking child molester!’
Now I was furious. I threw him on the desk. I took the Polaroids out of my shirt pocket and extended my hand.
‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to do this kind of stuff right here in this office, you fucking pervert!’
I suppose my sudden confidence must have inspired doubt in him, because he reached out to take the photos and with that one fatal action doomed himself. The look on his face was everything I had hoped for. My estimation of him had perhaps erred on the side of caution, and the measures I had taken constituted overkill. He visually crumpled before me, all that iron certainty evaporating in an instant, leaving his face and body limp.
‘These are fakes. They must be!’
He was practically blubbing.
‘I like the way you say, “They must be!” We both know they’re not. Your victims might possibly blank out the trauma, but I don’t think you can deny what you’ve done. Besides, if these children were examined I’m sure forensic evidence would find traces from you. Not only that, there are all sorts of bits and pieces belonging to the children around this office, some of them micros
copic.’
I had seen a threat and I had felt the need to crush it at all costs. The stakes in my life had become very high, and maybe this had also made me unnecessarily paranoid. Who knows? All I can say is that Mr Eliot had seemed to me like reality’s chosen champion to try and put me down. I had to make an example of him to reality and to myself. It’s true that I had felt an almost insupportable sickness and dread while handling those children and making them do what was necessary, as if I was invoking an invincible demon that would turn on me. But I did it because I had to. It was a gamble I had to take, a utilitarian gamble, and no cruelty was intended. I sincerely believe the children knew nothing of it, even if it was real, even if it was sick and perverse and all my doing.
The efficacy of my method had vindicated all this. The demon was trapped safely inside a pentagram of my devising with Mr Eliot, and he was the only one to suffer. I had even had the wit, the aplomb, to include loving little details such as the ‘Teachers do it to young children’ T-shirt I had Mr Eliot wear in a few of the photos. Obviously he knew that something very much beyond his ken was taking place. That was the beauty of the whole thing. If he’d thought I was just some shrewd little black-mailing opportunist his steely rationality might have prevailed. I so wanted to know how it felt for whole sections of his world view suddenly to be taken away with nothing but void to replace them, it made me wish that I had the power of absolute empathy as well.
‘What do you want me to do?’
It sounded as if he would do just about anything.
‘Nothing, particularly. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got most of what I want already. I’ve seen another side of you, and I think you’ve seen another side of me. Tell you what, though, there is something you could do for me. I just want to know for sure that you’ve understood that I am better than you, that I am right and you are wrong.’
‘Yes, you are better than me. I’m worthless. You are right and I am wrong.’
‘Now get down on your hands and knees and say it.’
Slowly, stiffly, he did as I said.
‘And it was very perspicacious of me to see that at heart you are just a dirty old, hypocritical kiddy-fiddler, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, you were right about that, too.’
‘Good. Now, if you’ve got any more complaints about me, you can just go and suck your own cock. You can keep the photos, too—a souvenir. Oh yes, by the way, there’re plenty more of those photos hidden at random in books and things around this office. Maybe even in your house. See if you can find them all, eh?’
And then I walked out of the office, leaving him to crawl on the floor like a beetle.
So, that was the first and last time I’d deliberately used my powers to set about destroying another human life. And it was very successful. Mr Eliot could never look me in the eye again. He’d bow his head whenever he passed me. Sometimes I’d spit right in front of his feet while other people were around, and he’d just try to pretend he hadn’t noticed.
That was a sort of turning point, and the closest thing to an ending that I can give to my story. I had a kind of reaction to my immaculate success. I became even more withdrawn, and I felt constantly uncomfortable, almost dry-mouthed, as if I was being pricked with thousands of needles of embarrassment. I tried to be on my own as much as I could.
I’d already begun to realise that when I stopped time it had only really stopped for the rest of the world. My own body and mind were still passing through a flow of tachyons, or whatever. Maybe that’s why Mr Eliot sensed something odd about me. I was taller and more haggard than I should have been considering the year of my birth. But it wasn’t just that. I had literally accumulated more years than anyone else had since that year. My years were concertinaed, theirs were straight. Perhaps it also showed in other subtle ways I wasn’t aware of.
So I decided to stop stopping time. No, I didn’t succeed, exactly. It’s a bit like these ciggies, here. Every time I smoke one it takes about five minutes off my life—apparently. So I decide I ought to give up. But it’s not so simple. I’m addicted. Whenever something gets me down I think, fuck it, who cares if my life is five minutes shorter?! Whatever way I think about it I get depressed, and when I’m depressed I need consolation. It’s a vicious circle. I’ve been living that struggle ever since. I haven’t kept account of all the time I’ve used up, either, so I don’t even know how old I am. Maybe you can help me there, what do you reckon? . . . About forty-five, you say? I should be twenty-seven.
Oh well, I suppose I’ll have the same time one way or another. You’re looking at me now and you think I’m just some sick burn-out with no poetry in my soul. But I tell you, sometimes I’m tempted to stay in that stopped-watch universe forever. Magic! Magic, you understand? I felt it the first time and I feel it now. It’s a beautiful thing, man, to stop time and just gaze at someone’s face. What’re you wincing for? It’s true! Oh, I see. Well, I’ve almost finished, I promise. You can go to the toilet then, can’t you? Can’t interrupt me in mid-flow. So, yeah, sometimes I just look at someone’s face and weep! I weep! A silent world, everywhere, everyone perfectly still—‘perfectly’ being the operative word. You can feel unlimited potential in that silence, and the most beautiful thing of all—freedom. And you know once you let time start again people are going to spoil the beauty of the in-between spaces at the earliest available opportunity, by holding to their stupid opinions, lying and fighting and making a noise—all the bullshit that they dignify with the word ‘human’. That silence matters more than anything else in the world. But they’ll never hear it.
Life, eh? What is it? ’Tis nothing but a bag of piss. It’s fucking ridiculous, really.
So that’s it. I know what you’re thinking now, too—Terry, that old deviant, he doesn’t half spin a yarn. But, here, have you got the time? What? I’m sure you had a watch a minute ago! Yeah, so now you think it’s just sleight of hand. Well, in a way it is. You want it back? I haven’t got it! You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe my story, either? Look, honestly, I haven’t got it. Why do you think you’ve been sitting so uncomfortably?
The Tattooist
Not all great artists are famous. Not all great artists explain themselves, or have a public to explain themselves to. Some, wrapt in a spell of inarticulacy, wordlessly follow the phantom of their private vision into the misty dissolution of Death, and see their dreams curling round the bars in the unlocked gates of a quirky paradise, and not another human being notices. Such an artist was Shane. His themes, if he could be said to have had such, were ephemera and sensuality. And thus he worked in the appropriate medium of tattoo. His satisfaction in his work was deep and of varied nature. Nobody had to go to a gallery to see his work. It was walking the streets of the world, mixing with crowds, worn as the costume in countless private dramas, pressed close against the sweating skin of a lover in the act of sex. Also, he lived an artist’s life, among those who inhabit the fringes of society, and his studio was frequented by the living canvases of bodies. Flesh for him was part of the atmosphere of daily life. There was something else too; he had a theory, an idea, that his work always came back to him somehow.
Make no mistake, Shane was a great artist. He was silent as a carpenter, and gentle, and so often seemed a simple man, but his work was eloquent. As a genuine old master can be told by the brush strokes, so Shane’s work had a shimmering, iridescent texture, much like sweeping brush strokes, that could be reproduced by no other tattooist. Shane was more a craftsman than a thinker or a talker, but he did attempt once to put words on paper. He set about the task with all the draughtsman-like thoroughness and artistry that he applied to his tattoos. And just as he had to execute his tattoos perfectly the first time, so he wrote this piece once only, with no revision. This is the story he told.
***
I remember the first time I saw the Boy as if it were my first memory, as if I did not know who I was until his arrival. The seasons are appointed and regular, but beyond the seas
ons, above the level of normal human life, other irregular events are appointed like strange conjunctions of the planets or the appearance of comets.
Summer had come early and on a midweek afternoon I waited in the shop for customers. I was happy just to doss about, since I’d already made pretty good takings that week. All the doors were open, letting occasional sighs of wind relieve the baking heat, and Barry, who was masquerading as an apprentice and business partner, was loafing in a swivel chair next to me, taking advantage of our friendship and generally lending the place his own threatening and untidy brand of charm.
At the front of the shop, the waiting room where the walls are lined with designs to choose from, I saw a slender grey shadow hovering uncertainly. I saw this out of the corner of my eye and for a moment I felt uncomfortable, naked. I could not account for the feeling. I looked up to see a young boy standing there, as if he had been sent on an errand by a teacher and had lost his way. I can’t help saying ‘young boy’, but I suppose strictly speaking he was a young man, in his late teens, early twenties. The Boy waited, weaving his head inquiringly, as if in need of rescue. I get customers from all different backgrounds, but still he managed to look painfully out of place. Then it suddenly occurred to me that he would have looked out of place almost anywhere on Earth. His uncertainty made me uncertain, so that I didn’t know what to say on my very own premises, in my very own business. I allowed the situation to hang suspended for a while, and then I said, ‘Have you come for a tattoo?’ The words sounded dull in my mouth.
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