Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  Doc Monk is short, sanctimonious and has the soul of a school prefect. Or of someone who wanted to be a school prefect but never made it. People like him teach in schools so they can reach, a second time around, the heights of power they were too scorned and marginal to reach the first time. They teach so they can take revenge, so they can keep on perfecting their mis-hit childhoods when they’re adults. These schools are strewn with such people. Everyone recognises them: as teenagers they were the last to be befriended, the last to buy booze and get invited to gigs, the last to get fucked.

  So now they’re back, haunting their lives while thinking they’re reliving them: the grievances of children moving through the world in adult bodies.

  Monk has a special bond with the headmaster, Mr Goodship, who he aspires to be in this life, and with the prefects, who he aspired to be in a previous one. Monk enforces discipline by proxy, and, as deputy head, he is the one who metes it out, using the phalanx of prefects as his instruments. Sometimes the punishment is official – like a hundred lines, detention, toilet cleaning – and sometimes it’s a little more under-the-counter.

  Chapelton College is a mini-state, and, like all such schools, is based on the colonial model: a pyramid of percolating authority, where the top consists of an oblivious headmaster buffered from reality by a small group of deputies holding the levers of power. Below them are the normal teachers, uninterested in discipline and who just want to do their jobs, or get away with not doing them. The next layer is a rigid internal hierarchy of boys, starting with prefects who in turn command using a stratum known as ‘powers’ or sub-prefects – a crew of yes-men-in-waiting, physically imposing intellectual cowards, and pocket-sadists on the climb. Below them: everyone else.

  Monk’s special gift is ‘turning’ troublemakers. He has found that ex-rebels make the best enforcers, and he prides himself in being able to sniff out the conformist inside all of them. In exchange for the small privileges he gives them – advance warning of which pubs will be patrolled so they can avoid them, finding them a place to smoke, paying them in booze or cash, taking them out in his sports car – they take care of discipline for him. He picks the beefy and the stupid, the vicious and the cunning, the stunted, the thwarted and the pathological. But he always picks the right ones. He can read them.

  Ander’s English is misshapen, ungrammatical; a jumble-sale language. But he learns fast, takes on the accent so quickly that within a year he’s a natural. But when he speaks English he still feels like he’s trying on a dead relative’s clothes. It has the smell of charity shops, the feel of folded things.

  Ander cannot remain himself for too long in a place like this, not on the surface at least. So the surface must change; he must paint a new self onto the glass so he can go on living behind it. He thinks of the stained glass in the cathedral in Ghent, a few streets away from the school he was at before: dull and dark on the outside, but aflame on the inside, from where it’s really meant to be seen. Glass was never transparent for him, so it is no great feat to come here and imagine it opaque.

  He takes on the mimic-pronunciation he hears around him, or on the radio, which some teachers still call the wireless. This helps him, too: he can imitate anyone after just a few seconds of hearing them speak. He knows immediately how useful that will be. The boys like that and find it funny. The teachers don’t. There is something unnerving about being imitated, having your own voice returned to you, caricatured but unmistakeable; it is mockery by ricochet.

  Doc Monk’s adenoidal voice crackles and changes pitch when he’s angry or excited, which is mostly. The boys compete to imitate him, because his voice is so exotically, complicatedly absurd. But only Ander gets it right.

  To start with, there are problems, because Ander begins his sentences like an English boy, but the words don’t come, the gaps begin, the holes in the language he has not yet learned to fill. It is his and not his.

  For the first weeks Ander and Danny think they pass unnoticed. Under the radar is the phrase Ander learns. Danny teaches it to him. Ander thinks it’s also like another phrase he heard, in a war film: no sudden movements. Stay low, stay down. But Danny being Danny simply is a sudden movement: he’s confident, suave, articulate.

  They know about the boy who was dangled over the bridge once after games. He was already alone – thin, sad, underfriended. They never saw this, but they heard about it: one day as everyone walked across the bridge back from football, some of the fifth-formers waited for him and launched him over the parapet, holding him by the ankles, still in his sports kit, and let the air batter him as he flailed in the weightlessness. One detail stands from the endless tellings of the story: how he shat himself, but because he was upside down the shit sprayed out and ran down his back, his neck, his terrified face. His hair. He was heavier than they thought so it needed four of them to hold him. They thought they’d lose him. When they pulled him back he was covered in shit and piss and lay crying and vomiting on the walkway.

  He was gone the next day. A car waited for him outside the school gates while his wordless father, an Old Chapeltonian himself, came to take him home, probably to send him somewhere similar after a few days.

  Danny and Ander and the rest of them know the signs of bullying as they gather on the horizon. A storm brewing, goes the cliché, but really it’s more like an orchestra tuning up: a note here, a note there, an off-note, then two instruments in synch; then the rest joining, spreading; then a pause, you think it’s over but it’s not over, because they’re just drawing breath, everyone draws breath, then it starts, properly starts: slow or fast, whether it builds or unbuilds, it’s there now, always, there’s no way out except out …

  … is how Ander remembers it.

  If only he could have that time again, take a different turning. Take no turning at all – that would have been enough.

  All this is for later. In his mind he keeps making incursions into what’s up ahead, the life he might have when he’s left here, and into what’s just behind him – the life he had before his father’s job changed, before the family moved halfway across the world. Anything to get out of the present, to take some time out from the now. Yet he knows that’s wrong, that you can’t mix up the tenses like that. They can’t touch, or it all short-circuits.

  Ander is tall and uncoordinated and not in charge of his body. Danny is different: he’s lean and easeful and looks like he should be dancing or miming, not ankle-deep in mud with his socks rolled down to the lip of his trainers. He’s still bad at sport, but in that way that suggests he’s good at something else, not like Ander, who’s good at nothing that involves, or mainly involves, having limbs.

  No one uses the word, because it feels a little sexual, arousing, and some of them don’t know it, and even if they did there’d be no occasion on which to use it, but Ander knows it. Ander uses it, but only in his head, he won’t speak it out: Danny is graceful. He has a face like a girl. Hair black and shiny as the paint on the railings of the bridge and skin that’s the colour of cream. There are no girls in this school, not until a few years later, so any resemblance the boys find with persons, as the saying goes, living or dead, is accidental and, biologically speaking, approximate. But Ander knows what they mean; he feels it, too. If the others mock Danny it’s in that fearful, hands-off way that betrays how much they want to touch him. And they do want to. Danny knows that – there’s a lot he knows. It’s like he’s had another childhood before this one, one he half remembers and whose moves he’s always half repeating.

  In class they compete, but not on each other’s terrain. Ander is better with numbers, Danny with words.

  Behind the school is the ‘Medway City Zoo’, though these days zoo is putting it strongly. It’s more like a sparse menagerie, a ramshackle library of animals. Built in the 1930s to entertain wealthy locals and day-trippers from London, it now staggers towards closure, one animal at a time, as the city spreads around it. No new animals have arrived since 1981, and those that remain ar
e not replaced when they expire. The zoo squats, with its art deco dome, its modernist reptile house and hushed aviaries, on prime building land. Developers eye it like an old relative whose death will make them rich. Quietly, the animals seem to know it, too. ‘Death Row’, Mr McCloud calls it. The gift shop sells faded postcards of the zoo in its roaring heyday, end-of-range souvenirs of its famous buildings, and sweets you have to blow the dust off before eating. The old lady who runs the shop has cataracts so some of the boys steal defiantly before her eyes, knowing she can see what they’re doing but not who they are.

  The back of Chapelton College looks out onto the monkey house, the penguin enclosure and the concrete hillocks where a thin, nicotine-yellow polar bear pads in figures of eight behind the moat that separates him from the public. Most of the big animals are single now, unpaired, mateless. Just out of sight, behind the high barbed-wire wall, are the seals, and when it’s cold, which it is that first October term, the smell of fish guts haunts the air long after feeding time. Sometimes it’s enough to make you sick, and the boys hold their noses as they pass. You’d think the cold would kill the stink but it’s the opposite – it sharpens it, makes it jagged. In the summer they don’t yet know, the smell will be more copious but softer.

  *

  ‘I wonder what his lessons were like,’ says Gary. ‘Imagine looking into those big staring eyes …’

  I don’t wonder and I don’t imagine it so I don’t reply.

  ‘I can’t see him managing in my school – not with some of the kids we had. We were taught English as if it was a foreign language. It certainly felt that way with some of the poetry we read.’

  He picks up a book and leafs through it. ‘I remember this from school – the way teachers would stick little bookmarks in so they could find their page year after year, until the book just fell open by itself.’

  What book is that? I ask Gary in my head.

  ‘Listen to this’: he clears his throat, puts his hand on his chest in his poetry-declamation-posture, and reads:

  It seems to him there are a thousand bars;

  and behind the bars, no world …

  ‘Sounds like one of those all-inclusive holidays for young people, you know, Club 18–30 … a thousand bars, behind the bars no world …’

  ‘It’s about a zoo, Gary,’ I tell him bad-temperedly.

  ‘I know Prof, I know … just trying to cheer you up a bit.’ He puts the book down and tries to be serious: ‘You know, we should probably get onto some of his pupils and colleagues. I mean, just for background info … before the papers get there and before they’ve been fed too much stuff about him. Build up a picture of him before it gets totally distorted.’

  *

  Halfway through their second term, they study a poem about a caged panther with a new teacher. He seems to come from another world, somewhere to the side of this one. He hangs up his coat, and they notice how he takes out a handkerchief and wipes off the chalk before placing his hat carefully on the desk. They notice the way he styles his hair, and they can’t decide whether he’s hopelessly out of date or cresting the wave of some new retro fashion. He has sideburns and hair that is older than he is; flat and straight and the colour of mercury, it comes down to just above his eyebrows. He is lean, angular, exotic, but no one mocks him, even in this world, where teachers have only two ways of dressing: cheaply badly or expensively badly. It’s not that he lacks mockable traits – on the contrary, there’s plenty there, from the hair to the hat and the drainpipe-trousered suit with the red tie, the tie-pin and the sharp-toed shoes – it’s just that as soon as he speaks, all the boys’ mutinous courage drains away.

  The teacher asks the class what the poem is about. He asks in a certain tone of voice which Ander thinks of as the ‘poetry discussion voice’: heavy and serious but at the same time slippery and indirect. It’s not about a panther, he tells himself. ‘First law of thermo-poetics’, Danny tells him later, when they’ve left the classroom, ‘it’s not about what it’s about.’ He decides he might actually get to like this stuff.

  The teacher reads it aloud first. Important, he says, to hear it, to read it out. He emphasises the out and makes a gesture of throwing something towards them. The man is lean, thin-framed, long-fingered. When he speaks nothing prepares you for that deep baritone of his, like the bottom of an expensive whisky barrel or the bowl of a pipe. It clears a space for itself in the middle of any noise. Even the low-level rioters at the back of the class stop punching each other, farting and squirting ink cartridges at each other’s collars.

  The classroom smells of cheap floor polish, overapplied deodorant and badly wiped arse. Bottle that and you’d have a whole country’s 1980s in the form of a spray. Minus the smell of girls. The new teacher has opened all the windows despite the wind gusting outside. The boys can smell the zoo, hear the animals. When they look across at the monkey house, where the monkeys jump, fight, lope around and wank, it is more like a mirror than they think.

  The new teacher is a one-off. He has taken over from the regular one, Mr Trundley, who makes them write notes in silence from his overhead projector, onto whose plastic sheets he has photocopied extracts from books. His lessons are assault courses of tedium. ‘Hypnos’, McCloud calls him, after the Greek god of sleep, because even the other teachers endure him with heavy eyelids. They’ve never heard the new teacher speak, but they’ve seen him around the school. He only teaches the older boys, and you never see him refereeing sports matches or taking the boys out for drizzly runs. He doesn’t jog around, wheezing, in a wretched track suit blowing whistles at the remedials, where Ander and Danny can be found every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, playing whatever sport is in season, and doing it so badly that it’s only by the shape and size of the ball you can tell what it is they’re meant to be playing. He doesn’t make stupid jokes like McCloud and try to be chummy with you, or attempt to look cool with football references or pop music trivia. You never see him slinking in corners, or shuffling around, or on the street, or looking lost and dorkish in shops, badly disguised as a civilian. He’s either there, imperiously, visibly, centre-of-the-situation there, or he’s gone. Ander thinks he too is graceful, because he never loses his temper or trips up, drops things or says the wrong word. The last thing especially. He has a way of speaking – it’s like a book. But a book you’d actually read, says Danny.

  He dresses … it’s hard to describe because it’s so unlike his colleagues; let’s say he dresses with a kind of tightness and consistency that probably counts as style – among teachers anyway. He’s not like the others with chalky old jackets, frayed ties and shoes that give extra support, or extra comfort, that squeak down corridors like unoiled hinges. Nor is he like the Oxbridge brigade with their brogues and blakeys and their college ties, their spiel about the boat race and ‘the other place’, who are fake even when they’re real, who don’t realise that the reason they are fake is that they’re real.

  He listens to Wagner and watches films that have subtitles and last four hours. Ander and Danny find that out later, when they’re invited to his after-school culture club. Even the term ‘Culture Club’ would sound dickish if it wasn’t him running it. They’ve heard that he plays The Who and Bob Dylan records to the sixth form, that he plays Bowie songs on his guitar or the school piano and discusses the lyrics as if they were poems. If you go to his house, they say, he’ll make you listen to Nick Drake and then William Byrd and compare the chords. He hums when he plays, so it feels intimate, like you’re inside his head, behind his voice.

  Ander eavesdrops and gathers all these titbits of information. He eavesdrops on teachers, on sixth-formers, on conversations in buses or in shops. The native hears, but the foreigner overhears.

  But for all that Wolphram is not cool and he doesn’t want to be. He is stern, and he doesn’t do pleasantries or waste words on what is evident: the weather, the food, the school sports results. He looks fragile and dislocated everywhere except his own classroom.
His fastidiousness is absurd: his spotlessness, his expensive, out-of-place clothes – as McCloud puts it – ‘like someone who walked out on a band just before they made it big’. So that became a rumour, too: that he was poised for stardom and then lost out, that his bandmates are all millionaires and he’s stuck here teaching English and music.

  He never leans back in his chair or forward onto the table, and some days he teaches class after class standing up. He has a way of being, of walking and sitting, where he seems to be trying to touch the world with as little of himself as possible.

  He gets left alone even in that cruel little world of school where you find what someone’s trying to hide then rip into it because that hiding place is where they’ve put all they’ve got left of themselves. You take what they care about and hold it hostage. But not Wolphram, despite his daft suits and his hats, his foreign films and his records. Maybe the definition of being cool is that no one gets you for the bits of you that aren’t cool, thinks Ander. So how would Ander describe it? Mr Wolphram sort of … hovers above the everyday stuff, the assemblies and classes and milk-farts, the shouts and the dirty tracksuits, the bog-door graffiti and the smell of stale wanks … just high enough for it not to touch him.

  Basically, Ander thinks, everything Mr Wolphram does, everything he says, is like it’s in italics. He is in italics.

  Ander doesn’t know what’s meant by respect. The closest he’s come to defining it is being a little afraid of someone while having no specific reason to be. Perhaps that’s all respect is anyway, he thinks, or at this school at least: a fear of someone who just hasn’t (yet) given you cause to fear them. But maybe respect is the right word for this teacher, since he’s not the kind of teacher you exactly like, but at the same time you wouldn’t want to disappoint him either. You don’t want to give him a reason to think less of you. Ander is getting to grips with the lingo of the school, he likes deciphering it, and Danny and he spend their afternoons laughing at it. Leadership qualities, for instance, they’ve worked that one out: it means bully, the sort of boy the teachers give responsibility to so they can abuse it and exert the low-level oppression they call ‘discipline’. The new teacher isn’t like that. His authority comes from his words, yes, but also from patience.