Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  session three … well, let’s see:

  Everything is different now. Lynne has written: ‘Mr Wolphram, 68, a retired English and music teacher at top private school Chapelton College, described seeing Zalie Dyer for perhaps the last time …’ A little later, it’s ‘Zalie’s eccentric neighbour, the bachelor Mr Wolphram … has a taste for expensive suits and formal attire …’ Then, in a separate online ‘update’ from twenty-six minutes ago: ‘68-year-old Mr Wolphram chose early retirement when the former all-boys college went mixed, and has lived opposite his old school, in a Georgian mansion close to the iconic City Zoo, for thirty-four years.’

  Gary: ‘You’ve got to admire Mad Lynne. It’s a full house in Perv-News Bingo: girls, boys, an eccentric bachelor, a mansion … all that plus animals!’

  ‘No animals, Gary – there haven’t been any animals there for years.’

  Lynne keeps updating the page, freshening it up, making sure she gets the details in that will help single him out.

  Join the dots.

  Actually, don’t bother – you don’t need to: these are self-joining dots. Watch them stretch out until they touch and make a line. Until they make a story. Until they make a noose. Everyone knows it’s him, and now the press are starting to tire of the fatberg, they’re going to hunt him down.

  We’re about to go in for the third interview. ‘This is basically prejudicial,’ I tell Gary, gesturing at the open newspaper. ‘She’s more or less identifying him before we’ve even charged anyone. People are going to get the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘Prof,’ says Gary in the tone he would use to explain something to his children, if he had any, ‘Prof – this stick only has one end.’

  In we go.

  Mr Wolphram jumps up from the bolted-down desk-and-chair combo when we come in. He looks at me, then at Gary, then back at me, full in the eye;

  finally he sees it;

  says in a new voice: ‘I know you.’ He is standing up now, and seems taller, calmer.

  Danny and Ander

  School is different now. To start with, the newness of it all made every day sharp, jagged. People, places, feelings: all of it was fresh and distinct. Even if it hurt, that was okay, in its way – it took its place in how you felt alive. And you were learning, too. Waking and even sleeping were eventful: the boys who cried out in nightmares or wet their beds then woke when their sheets got cold to the smell of sticky piss and fear, the sound of birds in the early morning, the bottleclink of the milk float at 5 a.m. The sobbing that you heard and that felt far away, a few beds along, in the next dormitory. You listened out and tuned in, wondered who it was, felt sorry for them, then realised it was your face cowled with tears and you’d have to pity yourself as you lay there being a child …

  After three terms, daily life has run through its repertoire.

  They’ve changed classes and moved up a year. At fourteen, they’re in the fourth form. Their form tutor, Mr Moreton, is erratic and sweats alcohol. He’s decent enough when sober, and fair, though more through apathy than any special commitment to justice. But they’ll take that, because it’s when he’s drunk that he starts to pay attention. To them. His nickname is not subtle and not original – Morbender – and nor are his methods: he gropes you and puts his arm around you, and when he decides to punish you he hits you hard but lingeringly on the arse. He puts you over his lap where you can feel his erection pushing into your stomach. It’s muffled but definitely there, and depending on his level of arousal it’s either like a finger jabbing you in the ribs or like a stone you can feel through the sole of your shoe; like those small bumps at pedestrian crossings so the blind can sense them on the pavement. Though his trousers are pressed and look clean – he is ex-army – his groin smells of bins. The children normalise all this because, well, part of being at the bottom of the heap is having someone else define your normal for you.

  Ander has worked out that the big struggle here is not about defining extremes, but about defining the normal, the everyday, and trying make it liveable. It doesn’t come to him as some big revelation, and for a lot of the time, to start with, he doesn’t even know he’s discovering it. But later, looking back, which is what Ander chooses to do early on – long before he’s old enough to have much to look back at – he sees it.

  Morbender has the face of a badly painted toy soldier, the hues a little too rich and exaggerated, and overlapping onto areas they’re not supposed to be. Add the alcohol-blush on the cheeks and the crumbly looking nose with its violet cracks, and you have someone who looks a lot like a dirty puppet. There’s always something that resembles damp breadcrumbs in the creases where the different pieces of his face meet: between jaw and earlobe, nostril and upper lip, eyelid and brow. It’s a yellowish putty at the joins of his features, as if they’ve been mortared together with cheese. Sometimes when he takes off his specs and rubs his eyes to wake himself up you can see the stuff stick to his knuckles. There’s a white paste at the corners of his mouth and when he pushes out his tongue to lick it back in Ander feels sick. Can he actually say – can any of them? – that Morbender has crossed the line? Even if they knew where the line was, that there was a line, could they say anything? After all, no one is hurt, no one bleeds. Some even forget, or push it into the parts of themselves they call forgetting.

  It’s ironic that one of the things Ander most remembers about school is the phrase ‘forget it’. He has heard it in so many ways: affectionate and helpful (put it away, leave it behind, cast it aside and choose what goes into your story), careless or fatalistic (drop it, we’ve all had it, just move on), harsh (you’re nobody, only somebodies remember, only someone who’s someone has the right to memory).

  First, everyone told him to forget; then he started telling himself.

  Maybe that’s why, even decades later, he feels like he has been condemned to remembering, like a child-Faust who cut a deal years ago to make the present bearable: in exchange for spending your childhood imagining a better future, the time will come when you have to hand that future over to your past and go back to live there. That was the pact.

  Ander remembers all the forgetting he’s done, tries to recall what he was like before he came here. What it was like when he was younger and wasn’t yet English. He used to remember it as a film, where the actions and events were continuous with each other, linked up and lived. But that’s gone. He now remembers it as photographs, all broken up, and it’s hard to tell what order they come in or what happened in the spaces between them. He remembers in stills and frames now. He remembers in shards. He remembers in pieces, but even the pieces wouldn’t any longer fit. It’s all broken but now he isn’t sure it was ever whole.

  He has become English. That’s how he writes home: he no longer needs to formulate it all in Dutch and then translate like he did just a few months ago. Now it all comes … naturally (he’s not sure that’s the word he wants; oh, it’s the right word all right, it’s just that he doesn’t want it) in English first. The only time he uses Dutch now is to scribble a few words at the end of his letters home for his sister, who is four years younger.

  When they speak on the phone Sigrid tells him how she can’t wait to come to boarding school in England. He tells them how great it is, how happy he is, what characters the teachers are. It’s what parents want to hear, so that is what he says. His voice in the phone is always so loud and round, theirs always so faint, it’s like they’re draining away. The little perforations in the Bakelite shell of the receiver over the earpiece look like a plughole. The click as their phone goes down sounds wet, like someone swallowing, like Morbender’s mouth when it opens and his lips unstick. Goodbye, he says, Vaarwel, and that’s it for another month.

  The thread that holds him to them is thinning all the time. It isn’t just adolescence and distance. That’s just what parents tell themselves. When he goes home – heim as it used to be – he’s like an automatic child, a machine-boy, doing and saying all the things he used to do and say.
The automatic child eats all the same food and watches all the same shows as the other one, so no one can tell that Ander has been replaced. Anyway, after what happens in school they probably wouldn’t want him back.

  Even his eyes, if anyone bothered to look there, have a painted-on quality. If the eyes are windows into the soul, as he has read, then his are bricked-up windows with windows painted onto them.

  *

  ‘I know you,’ Mr Wolphram says again. There’s something about the way he stands. He looks big, leans forward, puts both hands on the desk so only the fingertips touch the table top, and stares me out until I blink and look away. Gary is at my shoulder, and in my peripheral vision there hulks the big pink blur of his face.

  ‘Do you?’ I ask. As repartee, it’s not top-of-the-range, but I’m still avoiding Gary’s look, and if I don’t ask my questions others will ask me theirs.

  ‘I haven’t yet recalled your name, but, yes – yes I do.’ He seems to be growing as he speaks – it’s like someone is pumping air into him. ‘I can place you, and I can more or less date you. French? Dutch? German? Mid-eighties.’

  Gary interjects: ‘We’re not discussing fucking vintages …’ then, to me: ‘Can we have a minute outside, please?’

  Mr Wolphram says, softly: ‘But there were always two of you, weren’t there?’

  I am about to answer. My mouth is already open.

  ‘Prof! Outside!’ Gary yanks me by the elbow and drags me out.

  Mr Wolphram adds, watching me go: ‘Well, not always. Not at the end.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ asks Gary when we’re outside, and it’s a good question, maybe the best yet. Nonetheless, I’d rather not be answering it.

  I’d have liked to get just a little further, one more trip to his flat, a few more pieces of evidence (evidence of what?), a little more momentum.

  But I have run out of time, so I tell him all there is, that Ander was me, that Ander still is me, though when I talk about me then I think of me as him. I tell myself to myself as he not I. I change pronouns when I change periods inside myself.

  ‘I was there, Gary, at that school. He taught me. I knew him from age thirteen or so ’til I left.’ Gary is shaking his head. ‘It’s nearly thirty years ago,’ I add. I do the sums – I haven’t until now, despite all the thinking and past-foraging I’ve done, actually calculated the time that has elapsed since I last sat in a classroom with Mr Wolphram. I subtract eighteen from forty-seven. ‘Twenty-nine years since I left.’

  ‘And when were you going to tell me? Or maybe you weren’t?’

  ‘I was, Gary, I just didn’t want to cloud things up. It was years ago, and if I was one of the thousands of kids he’s taught, so what? It doesn’t make any difference to what’s happening now.’

  ‘It’s all fucking cloudy, Prof: you’re cloudy. You talk to yourself, mumble bits of poetry at your desk, stare out the window at fatbergs and spend your evenings with an old kook who’s convinced her dead husband is coming back. The only thing you do that might be normal and healthy is spend time with your niece, and you spoil that by playing her old kettle whistles and vacuum cleaner noises.’

  He turns around, looking for something to kick, and chooses the skirting board, leaving a smear of rubbery police-shoe sole-grease. He’s done it before, because there’s a row of scuff marks all down the corridor.

  ‘All true, Gary, all true. I didn’t want to say anything because it was irrelevant—’

  ‘It’s not irrelevant, Prof, you know that – if you’re connected to him you needed to say straight away. Instead you sat there with your vague detective face, listening to him talk about toys he didn’t play with while you listened like some fucking …’ Gary stops, he’s got it: ‘like some fucking schoolboy.’

  ‘It’s how he talked in class, Gary, it was exactly like that: precise, word-perfect – sentences full of commas but always grammatical. He never lost his thread. He’d lay the sentence up ahead like rails and then run the words down the tracks like long exotic trains.’

  Gary puts the back of his hand against his forehead and fake-swoons.

  ‘Oh, the fucking poetry of it … Great, so he’s a master of the English language and the normal rules don’t apply? He’s a suspect, Prof. Murder. You know? That thing where someone gets someone else and makes them die? It’s generally frowned upon, even when poets do it. And who knows what else is in there in that flat? You’ve been in there fiddling about, moving stuff around. And you deliberately kept back your own connection. What if what we found is ruled inadmissible because of you?’

  ‘It’s not a connection, Gary, is it? He taught me thirty years ago – that’s basically a lifetime. I haven’t seen him since; he hasn’t seen me. He didn’t recognise me, even. Until now. I’m perfectly capable of separating that from the investigation.’

  This last bit is not true, but it is what one is supposed to say. I’ve seen it on TV.

  ‘He recognised you just now,’ says Gary. ‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? I mean, he’s seen you for hours, sat in the same room being asked questions, and he only recognises you now.’ Gary looks at me and tilts his head, trying to see what has happened to my face, my manner, my bearing.

  ‘That’s the way it works, Gary. Recognition’s not always a flash, it’s more of a slow dawning—’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about your theory of recognition, Prof. Fact is, when you were in his flat, I thought you were investigating a crime. Actually, you were having a little nostalgic trip back to your schooldays. All that’s missing is your stupid little uniform …’

  ‘Depends what you mean by nostalgic, Gary, but, yes. I’d been down that street, across that gravel, up those stairs and in that flat before, and that was me in those photographs.’

  ‘Jesus. You’d probably been in that fucking bedroom, too, knowing what happens in those schools.’

  ‘No, Gary, there wasn’t any of that stuff with him. Not even a suggestion of it. And, anyway, when any of that stuff happened, it wasn’t their bedrooms they used.’

  There’s a pause. Gary changes tack.

  ‘You know how I feel sometimes, Prof?’

  ‘No, Gary, I don’t.’

  ‘I feel like the whole country is vomiting back the seventies and eighties and we’re the ones cleaning it up. It splatters at our feet, day in day out, and it’s us wiping it up.’

  ‘You’ve been following too much fatberg news …’

  ‘No! No, stay with me on this, Poetry Boy: the whole country sat there for twenty years, gobbling it all down, and it tasted good: the music, the showbiz, the politics … tasted great, sounded cool, looked fantastic. Punk, Mods, Glam, New Romantics … boys with make-up, girls with crew cuts, Top of the Pops, Swap Shop, Blue Peter … okay, so there was a bit of naughty stuff, but what d’you expect? It’s all uncharted territory, we’re all groping our way round …’

  Gary looks puzzled when I laugh at the groping because for once he doesn’t intend the pun. The punner unpunned. Then he gets it.

  ‘Yeah, okay, ha ha, Prof. What I’m saying is this: then it turns out your teachers were paedos, your DJs and presenters and football coaches were predators, your social workers were vultures, schools and hospitals were pervert safaris, your child protection services pimped out their charges, your police weren’t any better and your politicians either doing it themselves or turning blind eyes to it.’

  I don’t correct him. Exaggeration is a language like any other, and Gary is fluent in it. Also, he isn’t finished:

  ‘Now that it’s all coming back up, rancid and nasty and burning our throats as we retch it out, we’re all pretending we didn’t know about it. And now look at us, Prof – you and me: we’re doing a fucking colonoscopy of the whole country, we’re the tiny little camera burrowing through the shit trying to see what’s still caught in there, clogging up the system …’

  Gary is no literary man, it’s true, but he knows where to find his metaphors. ‘Why don’t you start a poetry workshop fo
r coppers, Gary? I’ll see you there.’

  Gary stomps off to have a word with Unmanned, or Ironside, or Deskfish … whatever he’s calling him today. He’ll be asking him whether it’s okay for me to stay on the case, to remain involved with the investigation. I can see them both behind the glass with their jerky, exaggerated film gestures. Finger-jabbing, phone-slamming, bin-kicking.

  Mr Wolphram looks calm. Serene, even. Maybe recognising me has given him something to orientate himself by. He even looks strong. He still hasn’t picked up the newspapers Gary left there. He knows he’s meant to, so he doesn’t.

  We called him The Wolf … says one of the ‘ex-pupils’ Lynne Forester has dredged up. I think back. Is that true? I don’t recall anyone calling him that. But now they are. The Wolf of Chapelton. Just look at the verbs Mad Lynne has lined up: he prowls, he stares, he snarls. Silver hair like fur in the moonlight. They are saying he is vain, unnaturally neat and tidy, strangely formal, expensively dressed, obsessively groomed. They’re calling his flat The Lair and publishing pictures of it against darkening skies. What can you expect with a name like Wolphram? We should have seen it coming. Now, suddenly, little oddments of rumours and stories attach to him, get snagged in his reputation until they become his reputation.

  The Wolf: they’ve turned him into a predator, a sexual scavenger with night-flashing eyes.

  No one ever called him The Wolf.

  We let Wolphram stew, sweat, broil, simmer, caramelise in the interview room with the tabloids and the Evening Post while we all decide what to do.

  *