The envelope containing her essay and his invitation – written ten days before – lay on the lectern in front of him. Conveying it this far had been easy. Getting it to her would be difficult, maybe impossible. She was trying not to look at him. Her thin-fingered hand was at work on a sheet of paper. Fine blond hair concealed her face; the long neck, unnaturally pale against a smudged school pullover of navy blue, was all that he saw of Sharon’s flesh. She had opened her soul to him, but the soul is incarnate and she was now, inescapably, flesh to him. The thought caused him to break out in a sweat. Maybe he should tear up the note he had written. Just hand back the essay without a word. Maybe that’s what he should do.
He decided not to decide. And for a few minutes he felt better. He realised that his sentences had become vague, slurred and incoherent. He began again with the topic of Ariel and the idea of a spirit imprisoned in a tree. Imprisoned spirits, he told the class, were of great importance to the alchemists, who specialised in capturing and releasing them. They were a symbol of power and freedom. Once released they were nowhere and everywhere, disembodied but with powers beyond the reach of human bodies.
Suddenly she looked up. There was a light of enquiry in her eyes. He sent a quick involuntary smile in her direction. She blushed and turned back to her work. Soon he had reached the point when he could set the topic for an essay; he had already decided on ‘Ariel: his character and powers’. But her blush had changed everything. He asked them to write about compassion in The Tempest, and the many forms it took. They packed up their books and filed out into the upper corridor. Sharon didn’t linger, but went quickly through the door that another girl held for her.
Stephen tore open the envelope, took out the note and pushed it into his pocket. He dropped the essay in his briefcase and left for the staff room. His hands were trembling, and he walked jerkily, like a puppet. In the corridor outside the staffroom Jim Roberts waylaid him, pushing him by the elbow through the door. Most classes had not yet finished and the staffroom was empty. It had a sad, end-of-day feeling. The out-of-date maps on one wall, the broken clock on the neo-Georgian mantelpiece, the portrait in oils above it of the Headmaster, The Rev. Father John McMurty, who founded the school, the worn Edwardian chairs in turned oak and leather, the modern coffee machine on the bench beneath the window of leaded glass and Gothic mullions – all these were already imbued for Stephen with an aura of defeat. This was a place where hope and belief were set aside and where truth prevailed – the truth that must be hidden in the classroom if you were to get through the day. He read this fact in Jim Roberts’s lurking eyes and jabbing finger. Jim turned to Stephen and made as though to pin him to the wall.
‘It’s about Sharon Williams,’ Jim said.
Stephen froze. His letter of resignation formed quickly in his mind. Send it now, send it yesterday, send it before all this madness arises!
‘What about her?’
‘Some information we need…’
Jim tailed off and looked from side to side, as though suspecting eavesdroppers.
‘Information?’
Her blushing downturned face. Her small sweet blemished mouth. Her dreams of Ferdinand. ‘Chains of enchantment’. He felt sick at heart.
‘Well, she’s in your class. I thought you could speak to her.’
‘About what?’
In the rush of relief he looked eagerly at Jim, willing to oblige, to do his schoolmasterly duty in anything, even to speak to Sharon Williams!
‘Angel Towers again. Social housing, bloody hell. Anti-social housing rather. The long and short is, the social workers were called in, on account of a shindy involving the woman she calls her mum. Turns out Mrs Williams is not her mum at all, but someone who thought she could make a few quid as a foster parent, when the council were offloading children they had taken into care. Now they have put her on a list of children ‘at risk’, as they put it. Every fucking child in Angel Towers is at risk. But before they do anything, or rather nothing, as is their usual game, they have asked us to make discreet enquiries – you know, do you love this slut who screams at you and are you happy with her latest cokehead of a boyfriend who is always trying to get you into bed and kicking the shit out of your brothers, who are not your brothers at all but feral primates rounded up by some joker of a social worker who is waiting to release them on the middle classes at election time. Just the kind of job for which you are suited, Stephen, squeezing the secrets from a traumatised child.’
Jim laughed cynically, and jabbed Stephen twice in the chest.
‘And supposing she talks to me,’ Stephen replied, attempting hesitation. ‘What then?’
‘We have to provide any information we can gather, to be put in the file, to back up the general decision to do nothing. So that when the girl has been gang-raped, sold into slavery and finally done to death somewhere in Saudi Arabia the social workers can say they did what they could, and in any case they are overworked and underfunded and it is all the government’s fault. That kind of thing. When were you born for Chrissake?’
He gave Stephen a few more admonitory jabs, and then swung away with a sigh.
‘How did you learn this?’
It occured to Stephen that the story was an invention, maybe a trap. You couldn’t be a secondary school teacher for as long as Jim Roberts without wishing for revenge.
Jim looked up at him through tangled eyebrows.
‘How do you think? Did I go round to Angel Towers, ring the bell outside a door from which the howls of an abused and abusive menagerie assail my ears, as ready with my polite enquiry as an old Etonian canvassing for the Conservative Party? Or did the social worker turn up in my classroom this morning, leading Ryan Williams, not by the earlobe as I would have done, nor by the scruff of the neck as was once recommended, but by the elbow, with sweet lovey-dovey pushes and melting official empathy, as they call it, asking me to excuse the poor little mite whose absence from school for the last three days could be easily explained if I would grant her a word in private? I mean how the hell does a teacher get involved in this kind of mess for Chrissake?’
Stephen thought for a moment.
‘Why is Sharon Williams at risk? Who is threatening her?’
‘Who, you mean, apart from the rapists on the eighth floor, the drug-addicts on the sixth, and the slave-dealers in the basement? Could it be, frinstance, mum’s latest boyfriend, the knife artist from the defunct Romanian circus that ran out of cash last Wednesday, or the Afghan fathers who are so keen to preserve the virginity of their daughters that they kidnap fatherless girls for their sons to play with, or, let’s see…? For fuck’s sake, you know the kid. Why don’t you ask her?’
‘Ask her?’
Yes, ask her, save her, protect her. Stephen was trembling again.
‘Why not? She’s a sweet kid. Probably sweet on you too: after all, you are the only human being she has ever met. The only gentleman, at least – fancy that!’
Jim’s cynical laughter dwindled quickly to a mutter, as he crossed the room to toy with the coffee machine.
‘I’ll look into it,’ Stephen said. He pretended to search for essays in his locker. He snapped shut his briefcase with a business-like flourish. He slowly and laboriously writhed into his overcoat. He sucked air into his dry mouth, and uttered a stifled goodnight. But Jim turned away, and merely smiled.
She was waiting for him in the alley behind the car park. Without a word she fitted her steps to his. They walked for a while in silence. He looked at the wall to either side of them. A smear of yellow light lay along the glazed brick coping. Once this had been the back alley to terraced cottages, housing the workers for a smelting works. Now it shielded a group of warehouses, which lay silent amid pools of darkness like beached ships of steel. Stephen was going beside her into the unknown, with no one to call on for help.
He carried the briefcase away from her in his left hand, and buried his right hand in the pocket of his overcoat. They entered the car park, and still th
ey had not spoken. Then, slowly, softly, she put her hand into his pocket and wrapped her fingers in his. They walked on a few more paces. It was Sharon who broke the silence.
‘It’s OK though innit, sir, me thinking about you and me. I mean there inna no harm in it.’
‘Not if we don’t take it any further,’ he answered, and at once regretted the words. ‘We’ made him part of what was happening. And he realised that she had been hoping for that very word.
‘Actually, Sharon, it’s best not to talk about it.’
‘That’s OK, sir. I dunna wanna talk about it neither. Just write it in essays, cause they go special from me to you.’
‘But there is something else we need to discuss.’
They were outside the block of flats. The unfriendly door of glass and steel stood before them. To go through it, shutting her outside, would be to make the barrier between them absolute. And he sensed the desolation she would feel, turning away towards Angel Towers. It could not be wrong to invite her in.
He unwrapped his fingers from hers and searched his jacket pocket for the key. He unlocked the door, pushed it ajar and turned to her. She was watching him, her clear blue-grey guileless eyes fixed on his.
‘Do you want to come in for a moment?’
She nodded and ducked quickly beneath his arm. He noticed that her feet hardly sounded on the concrete steps, as though she drifted above them in the air.
Chapter 8
You have washed yourself in the sink, again and again. Your shirt is wet and clings to your collarbone. Your breasts are sore from those hateful hands, and you flinch as you fasten the bra. A wave of nausea sends you back to the bathroom, and then you finish dressing and sit for a long time on the bed, wishing to die.
You again recall your mother in her corner, fixing you with guilty eyes, as though it were her fault he died of a heart attack on your fourteenth birthday. Between that time and Cambridge you hardly grew. Life retreated to some recess deep inside you. You were not to be touched, not to be opened, like some present beneath the Christmas tree, waiting and waiting until Mick arrived and set the tree aflame. But you worked. Nobody worked as you did, at school, at Newnham College, at the College of Law, at the desk where you sat each evening studying accountancy. You would be the angel daughter, shining into the place of darkness where he lay. One after another the certificates came; one after another the promotions. And not even jealous Mick could put a stop to it. But now this! You go tight and hard inside. The tears slide from your cheeks and your hands tremble. Hatred twists and turns like a knife in your stomach.
You have been sitting on the bed in that posture for half an hour when the door opens, admitting a bent old man with pale skin, white hair and electric blue eyes. He is carrying a tray, which he puts down beside you on the berth. On it you see a roll of dark bread, some slices of sausage, an apple and a can of coca cola.
‘Can you take me to the captain?’
‘No speak English,’ the man replies. ‘Sorry much.’
He looks at you. His bright blue eyes are prominent and staring, as though painted above his cheeks by Lucian Freud. But his manner is soft. You sense that he pities you, as he has pitied all the girls to whom he has come with food after their ordeal. You begin to cry again. That it has come to this! Now you have only one thing for which to live, and that is revenge.
You get up from the bed and duck quickly past him, seizing the handle of the door. He reaches out for you but he is not quick enough. You are in a tunnel between cabins. At the end is a flight of metal steps, twisting upwards out of sight. You hear voices somewhere above you, and the sound of seagulls. You are running towards the steps, but you slip on the wet floor beneath you and the old man is close behind. He is shouting in a language that sounds like Russian. Now you have a hand on the stair-rail, you are pulling yourself up, two steps at a time. He stretches out to you, he can reach your ankle, but he hesitates to touch and withdraws his hand. You turn to see him crumpled, almost penitent, at the foot of the stair.
You look around. You are on a white metal deck with capstans and hawsers. It is cold. The grey light of morning is stretched like a membrane across the motionless sea, and on the far horizon is land, your land, the home that made you and which you may never see again. You are on the stern of the ship: the propellers churn the sea beneath you and above is the white superstructure of the bridge.
From this angle the ship seems like a doll’s house, with vistas into the secret life of adults, as imagined by a child. On each side of you, raised onto the deck by metal casings, are doors, which open and close as though at the touch of some giant finger. In one direction they reveal an officer in a white canvas uniform rigidly seated at a desk, in the other a neat workshop with tools fixed on brackets to the wall as though placed there on display. Above the first door is a wooden plaque with the words Kabina Bosman in plain black letters. Above the other door, written directly onto the white metal, are some scribbled words that look like Polish.
There are steps connecting the deck to the bridge, and two men have descended them, gripping the gunwale as they advance towards you. One is young, Asian looking, scantily dressed in jeans and cotton shirt and with short black hair. The other is more Russian in appearance, square faced and burly, with a smudged white sailor’s uniform from which his shapeless pink hands emerge like glue from a tube. You back up against the central capstan shouting ‘keep away’.
Fastened to the deck beside you is a metal box, and on an impulse you kick open the lid. Inside are hooks, a hammer and an electric drill. You pick up the hammer and wave it before you. The young one frowns, while the other laughs and comes slowly forward. His face is large and sheer like a fortress, with arrow slits for eyes and a great wide drawbridge of a mouth. You decide to hit him between the eyes, but your hand trembles as you raise the hammer and he easily knocks it away. You scream as he grips your wrists, and your legs collapse beneath you. You lie crumpled and sobbing on the deck, the cold metal stinging your thighs as he holds your arms above your head.
‘It’s OK, man, leave her.’
It is the young one who speaks. He has a Yorkshire accent and he moves towards you with an air of concern. The other loosens his grip and your hands fall to cover your face. The sobbing will not stop, but comes from deep inside you, from a place beyond the reach of your will. The young man reaches down to touch your arm, and you start away from him.
‘Don’t touch me,’ you say, and between your fingers you see him hesitate. His face is regular, with nut-coloured skin, clear brown narrow eyes and prominent cheekbones. From such a face the Yorkshire accent seems like the work of a ventriloquist.
‘We inna going to hurt you,’ he says. ‘We just need you back below. Sod it, man, you’ll catch cold up here.’
‘Leave me alone,’ you say, and he looks at his companion, who laughs, a contemptuous, grating sound that is clearly his only conversation.
For a long time you stay where you have fallen, your skirt ruffled onto your thighs, which are raw from the cold metal of the deck. You are propped against a capstan, your head sunk and your arms beside you, like a broken doll. The men have withdrawn a little, and are looking at you. You try to believe that this is not happening to you, that you will soon wake to your bedroom in Camden Town, with the view of chimney pots and old slate roofs, and The Wind in the Willows on the bedside table.
As a child you often prayed, not just ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’, but the lists of your daily needs for God’s perusal. In Church, side by side with Father, you had decanted your soul into the care of angels, and you knew that he did the same. God must be true if Father believed in him, and so you believed in him too. But Father died regardless, and all prayers died along with him. You think of the unanswered prayers of recent times – prayers from people rattling to their deaths in cattle trucks, from peasants starved in their villages, from the emaciated slaves in the labour camps. Dr Goldmark, a wizened Hungarian Jew who was your history tutor, had ask
ed you to study these things, always ending his tutorials with the words ‘you see, Miss Markham, that there is no God. But concerning the Devil I am not so sure.’ What purpose, after the futile prayers of a million dying children, to report to the Almighty a mere case of rape? You shudder and lie still.
The air is damp; there is a smell of diesel oil. You hear the ostinato throb of the propellers, dragging the shrieking seagulls with the ship. In the distance a spring mist has arisen, hiding the land. Your world is slipping inexorably away from you, and like the slaves on the slave-ships, as they lost sight of Africa, you cry aloud in desolation. You do not resist the men as they lift you. You drag your feet along the deck and down the steps to your prison cell, and when they push you through the door you grasp weakly for the berth and pull yourself on to it. The tray of food is still there. The trapped air smells of paint and grease and vomit. The large man turns his armoured face in your direction, smiles horribly, and leaves with a chuckle. The young man stands by your berth. You try to meet his stare, but are overcome by shame, and hide your face from him. He pulls your hands away and looks at you.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
You shake your head in silence.
‘Look, I inna gonna hurt you, man. You be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you, OK? Like, is there anything you want right now? Frinstance.’
You open your eyes and look at his face. You want to hate him as you hated the others, but something – a stirring of dependence, perhaps, a longing for protection at all costs, maybe just that little flicker of vulnerability that you read in his blinking eyes – stands in the way.
The Disappeared Page 5
