BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
The Last Hundred Days
NON-FICTION
Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory
POETRY
The Canals of Mars
Jilted City
Contents
A place where it’s always now
20 December
Big Pasts, Small Pasts
The Fatberg
Danny and Ander
Tributes
Vera
Lynne Forester
Danny and Ander
European Cinema
A Broken Herat
Danny and Ander
Parktown Again
The Doc
Squeeze the Day
The Headmaster
The Trial
A Hand down the Nation’s Pants
Danny
A Letter to the Newspaper
Interview
Dating
Small-screen
Returnity
When I die, throw me to the wolves. I’m used to it.
Diogenes
A place where it’s always now
Near the school is a bridge. To get to the playing fields on the other side of the estuary, the boys have to cross it. They do this three times a week, rain or shine. It has to be pretty wet for any match to be cancelled – even the crummiest remedial game. ‘It’s corpore fucking sano time,’ says Mr McCloud, the heavy-smoking, whisky-perfumed form teacher who talks to the boys like mates from the pub and discusses historical figures as if he’d known them personally. He can tell you how their breath smells, what they have between their teeth; how they walk, what their fingernails look like. The boys like him, though he’s tetchy and unpredictable, and when he’s angry he’s feral and looks like he’ll bite. He’s big and barrel-shaped, and wheezes like an old accordion when he bends over to tie his laces or pick up some chalk or a dropped cigarette. He remembers nothing, mixes up their names, turns up late and leaves early, but the boys think he tells good jokes. What they mean is that he tells dirty jokes. Some of the older boys go to his house at night to smoke and drink and watch films. When they come back they smell of adults.
They all have their reasons for going to the bridge: mostly it’s to smoke the cigarettes and drink the vodka or gin they can buy from the corner shop; later it will be to meet girls or just for the view. One boy, now a successful entrepreneur, collects the pages of porn magazines from around the bridge, and from the caves and crags near the cliffs, that have been thrown out by passing cars or hedgerow masturbators. Unless he’s very lucky, they’re usually damp and dew-soggy, so he takes them back and dries them out on the school radiator so that he can sell them. There is a price list: the whole pages are expensive, and there are discounts for the shredded or lopped-off partials. They are available to rent, too.
We are not far from the port, from which the ships, whose foghorns you can hear when the wind points the right way, haul their tonnes of containers across the English Channel. This is a watery county, veined with tributaries, fringed with inlets and estuaries, the chalky coast harried by the waves, its rivers draining into the sea. It is a county of bridges and piers and viaducts, and it is hard to go anywhere for long without facing the fact of water. Sometimes, when the waters are high, the bridges seem to be combing the river rather than crossing it. McCloud took them to see the Medway viaducts once, where three lines of trains and traffic cross the river and where soon they’ll build a tunnel to France that McCloud tells them will make the ferries obsolete.
The bridge joins the two halves of the city – one side genteel and residential and upper-crust, the other a spread of housing estates, industrial zones and low-end shopping complexes. There are B&Bs for travellers who arrive too late for their crossings, and pubs for those who arrive too early. ‘Two cities separated by one bridge,’ McCloud jokes each time they cross it: ‘Got your passports, boys? Had your jabs? We’re heading into the dark continent now …’
The temptation to look down into the brown sludge of estuary, the glistering oyster grit and the silt, the little drain ditch of trickling water, thin as rain coursing down guttering, is hard to resist. In the sunshine the mud flexes and ripples. It doesn’t need much light to look alive. And inviting – a cushion of shimmering brown silk. It’s tempting to jump.
The schoolboy is fascinated by the smell that rises and catches on the wind. It’s the smell of estuaries: on the one hand, drains; on the other, the open sea. They should clash, but here they seem to go well together, like sweet-and-sour cuisine: one is blockage and rot and stasis, the other escape and freedom and drift. He recites the rosary of port names – Zeebrugge, Ostend, Calais, Cherbourg, Dieppe, Rotterdam …
And you can always jump. You can jump anytime you want. Mostly it’s curiosity rather than suffering that makes you look down and find yourself wanting it, sending your mind up ahead to imagine what it’s like to fall; to fall and fall and fall. The boy feels hypnotised by the view, by its completeness. Not many things feel so total as what he sees when he looks down here. It’s not dying in itself that’s attractive – he’s nowhere near unhappy enough for that, though he likes to imagine precisely how unhappy he’d need to be: what sort of dosage, millilitre by millilitre of unhappiness climbing the notches of the desolation-syringe, degree by degree in the sorrow-thermometer … No, not dying so much as its hypothetical nature. It’s the idea of seeing yourself afterwards that draws you in, lifting off, peeling away from your body like a pen nib rising from the letters it leaves on the page, then looking down at your shell as you leave it, then at the people in the distance. Though really it’s you in the distance; you are the distance; dead, you’ve become it.
He imagines death as one of those aerial shots in a war movie like the ones they show at school, where they have to leave some soldiers behind and rise in their helicopter, and the soldiers run but can’t catch up and they shout and cry out and stretch out their hands for their comrades, fingers meet and grip and hold on and are prised apart; and the helicopter rises, shakily at first, and then steadies and pulls away, sticky and reluctant, and the soldiers get smaller and the enemy catch up or mow them down, and everyone becomes a dot and then everyone is gone; then it’s all jungle and then all just sky.
And, well, there’s also the advantage of just not having to drag this beast of a body around with you, no longer being shackled to the burning animal you are.
There is a legend of a Victorian woman who jumped from the bridge and lived, as the saying goes, to tell the tale, thanks to her big dress ballooning out into a crinoline parachute. She had been jilted, she was lovestruck. But if suicide has an opposite, it’s what happened to her: she survived, went on to meet someone else, got married, had three children and lived deep into old age.
There’s little possibility anyone would survive the fall today, the boy knows, since 1) the velocity at which you hit the water would kill you outright; 2) your heart would explode from fear long before, the way dormice burst inside when you pick them up; or 3) you’d hurtle so deep into the mud that you’d suffocate. It’s the lady’s image the boy has in mind when he and his friends peer down, or drop balls of paper, sweet wrappers, handkerchiefs or coins over the edge and try to time their descent.
A few feet up, water is hospitable. It opens up and lets you in. After about seventy it is like stone. It will break you as if you’d hit a quarry floor. They learned that in physics.
Another reason it’s tempting to let the mind play with the idea of falling is that it’s so banally possible: the parapet is only a little over four feet high. For most of the boys that means barely shoulder-level. One modest high-jump, using the wood of the handrail fo
r leverage, and you’d be up and over, over and down, down and dead. Maybe then the fall would feel endless, though it would take just a few seconds. You could live a whole lifetime backwards in those seconds: back to birth, as the myth goes, the dying watching their lives rewind before them. You’re interested in whether the same story told backwards is the same story at all.
Back then, back there in the then, back on the bridge, you think it’ll take a few seconds and a whole lifetime to reach the estuary silt; the cool, shiny, hourglass-fine sand. Maybe you could change a few things too, second time around, who knows? Make corrections.
The boy sometimes takes his introspection, which, like the rest of him, needs exercise, for a walk there. It’s probably the only part of him, even in that sporty school, that gets any genuine exercise. There’s always someone else on the bridge, and though he thinks of it as a place of extreme loneliness, he realises, years later, that never once was he actually alone on it. There were always others, sometimes as many as half a dozen, all doing the same thing: looking out and over and down. Once he saw someone writing the number for the Samaritans, whose notice is posted on the buttresses at each end of the bridge, on the back of his hand with a biro. For now, the boy leans over, dangling his arms, the handrail wedged in his armpits. His grandmother is a dressmaker, and she made him his school suit. The way the wind nips and tucks at his clothes like a tailor reminds him of being measured for his jacket and trousers. He’s being measured for a suit of air, so he can be sleeved in the rush of falling.
Years later, he comes back to the bridge. The Samaritans number used to be local; now it’s an 0845 number – like insurance companies, mobile phone operators, telesales. The parapet is the same height, but now it has been supplemented by a four-foot grille of wire that curves inwards at the top. To jump off now you’d need a ladder.
Going back in time is like climbing into an old photograph. He imagines it in sepia tone; remote as an old postcard. But it’s a postcard of his life: the treacly air, the heavy school furniture, the gelatinous glaze of things seen through a syrup of time and tears. If he dived into the photograph now, or ran his fingers along its surface, it would be the texture of cream, not the hard floor of water below the bridge. He remembers the wooden desks with their – even then – long-disused inkwells, rims impregnated with black and blue spillages. Cocks carved with compass-points and fuckwords etched into the grain, past the varnish and into the pulpy meat of the wood. All that stuff looks a little prehistoric today, as far away and tribal as bison on cave walls. You can get the desks now on eBay – ‘Complete with graffiti,’ the sellers announce, by way of authenticating them.
For all the tonnes of iron and steel, the bridge looks delicate as lace, the cables taut as harp strings. Sometimes you can hear the wind pluck them and fancy you hear a song. It is the song of the air which is the sound of falling. The boy thinks he’d like to hear that song through to the end, that he’d like a long, long fall so he can hear it over and over and never hit the ground.
20 December
‘My childhood?’ He looks amused.
‘I didn’t have a childhood. I think of it more as a childhood-themed infancy. I mean, there were plenty of toys, but my relationship with them was more curatorial than anything else – I was more like a museum attendant than a child. I polished them and looked at them and put them away. I stacked and tidied them and laid them out. But did I actually play with them? I don’t think so.’
He pauses, looks around the room as if assessing the colour-scheme: grey eggshell with a perspiration gloss. ‘Also, I kept the boxes.’
Gary tries to cut him off, but he’s already finished. Our timings are all wrong; it’s all out of kilter.
Gary: ‘We don’t give a shit about your childhood, you sad clown, we want to know about that poor girl, how you killed her and where you dumped the body!’
The body or her body? And why the difference? Why do I keep asking myself these tiny questions, like the thin end of a doorstop: you start with grammar – her or the – and end up with a fat wedge of darkness. It’s the body now. Wherever her her was, it’s not there anymore.
‘Gary – let him finish.’
‘You did ask about my childhood, you know you did; it was in the question, if not strictly the question.’
We say nothing, so, in his own time, confidently and with a top note of mockery, he goes on:
‘There’s a picture of me looking at the underside of one of those rides you find outside supermarkets. In some seaside resort, the tautologically-named Gravesend probably. I don’t suppose it matters where, even to me. I’d put the money in, kneel down, then watch the mechanics of it, the axles turning, the cogs biting … The undercarriage I think it’s called – funny word that, smacks of Carry On films … I’d play with the idea of playing, but I don’t think I ever played. Does that mean I toyed with the idea of toys? Perhaps.’
‘J-e-e-e-e-sus,’ Gary seethes through clenched teeth. Mr Wolphram looks up at the ceiling, breathes in, samples the closeness of the air, breathes out, starts again:
‘I’ve never thought about it. Just because you’re the people with the questions it doesn’t mean I’m the one with the answers.’
The key to interrogations is leaving the suspect time, giving them an unfenced, shelterless acreage of silence to get nervous in. But he’s doing it to us. Staring us out in turn: me, Gary, the confused officer guarding the door behind us. Then, when he’s ready:
‘Anyway, why do you ask?’
Why did I ask? Maybe because it was my childhood I wanted to know about. Because, though the man we were questioning does not know or cannot remember, he was there.
*
Mr Wolphram, cold sheen on skin so pale it was almost blue; the colour of a vein deep below the flesh. Marble. Or salt. Yes: the blueness of salt in a salt mine. Huge eyes, perhaps black (it’s not that I can’t see, it’s bright in here, it’s just that they won’t give up the precise tinge of their darkness): steady, ironic. He hardly blinks. This isn’t a game, but still, he’s playing. If we give him too much slack, he’ll run us in circles; if we close him in too tightly, he’ll enjoy the constraint. As soon as there are rules, anything becomes a game.
He speaks in long, fluent, perfect sentences. Grammatically flawless, he talks from an inner thesaurus where everything is tinged with something else, every colour seeping into the next. It’s like a posh paint catalogue: no black, no white, no red, no blue – just a sequence of in-betweens with double-barrelled names.
And that voice: when your nightmares come out as an audiobook, he’ll be the narrator.
He has paint on his hands. I only notice this now, though I was the one who fingerprinted him. Later, when we send the samples for analysis, we’ll know the name of the paint: Mole’s Breath, a velvety brushed grey.
His every emotion is undercut, adjusted, infused by something else. By what? By something that isn’t emotion. Does he know too much to feel? Is that what it is? Does he have no feelings, or does he know them so well that he no longer feels them? Childhood-themed infancy … where does that sort of phrase come from? From learning the words for things before you know the things themselves, that’s where.
But does it matter, in the end, what order you learn them in?
The room is stifling. Gary sweats, losing both temper and weight.
Does he recognise me? I’m not that different, and it wasn’t so long ago.
Actually, it was, if you’re measuring it in clocks-and-calendars time. But if you’re measuring it in … what? Inside-time? Heart-and-blood time? Lining-of-our-lives time? … in that case it’s yesterday. It’s always yesterday there, in the lining of our lives.
He hasn’t changed. He’s got that briny sameness some teachers have, even decades later: onion skin, see-through almost, like wet cigarette paper. His hair is the same cinder-grey as it was thirty years ago; straight and shiny, fringed to just above his eyebrows and so fine that it expresses the contours of his skull
. If he has aged, it is somewhere other than here, somewhere other than the face. The clothes are the same, too: maybe it’s even the same suit, the same red tie on the same black shirt. His wrists rest on the edge of the table, and he seems to be rolling something very small between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
There’s some kind of counsellor or shrink in the room, professional and frowning bureaucratically. I’m not sure if she’s watching him or watching us.
*
He used culture like a flick-knife. That’s what I remember. One stroke of the blade was enough. You didn’t feel the pain until you saw the blood. Even then you didn’t feel the pain until you realised the blood was yours. He’d pick someone, anyone, slice them, and for the rest of the lesson they’d be like a wounded shark, sniffed out by predators for miles around and hours to come. It was like that – blood coming out like smoke in water.
His moods were fire behind ice.
I told them this later.
*
Reading the red-tops that morning, there was the usual fare: a footballer’s wife’s breast implants explode on a flight to Dubai; a mouthy celebrity auctions her silence on Twitter; something reality-show-based, where iPhone- and iPad-addicted teenagers go to live with some kind of Amish in Derbyshire. Light stuff, tabloid-spume: no-news news.
Upwind of all that are the self-styled ‘qualities’. Gary knows that there’s no upwind anymore, that we’re all in the same rank draught. He’s heckling an opinion piece in The Times about what to do with your children when your nanny goes back to Eastern Europe to see her family. ‘Another article by some horse-faced Sloane called Camilla or Imogen about the cost of cleaners in Fulham and rising school fees. What planet are these people on?’
‘Planet Them?’ I offer limply, just to be part of a dialogue. It’s going to be a long, sad, grinding day and we need to keep it lubricated with good fellowship.
‘It’s all Planet Them, Prof … As far as the eye can see – Planet Them.’
Throw Me to the Wolves Page 1
