Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  But none of that helps him because Danny hasn’t said anything. He’d report Danny straight away if there was anything to report. O God, yes. Some people find it hard to lie because they’re honest. Jonny Kebab finds it hard to lie because he doesn’t have the imagination to stray beyond the truth.

  ‘I’m not sure, Sir,’ he says, ‘we haven’t really spoken about it.’

  ‘I mean did you hear the accused comment on his sympathy for the atrocities committed by the Irish Republican Army?’

  Lansdale has never heard anything of the sort. Anyway, if Danny ever had said anything like that, he wouldn’t have said it to Jonny Kebab. What Danny did say was something else, but that doesn’t matter in a show trial. And Jonny can’t even really remember it, let alone work out what it meant.

  What Danny said was, ‘What do they expect? It’s a war.’ And he said that to Ander and Neil and a couple of others over lunch. He’d thought nothing of it – didn’t even know who the they referred to.

  ‘Like what, Sir?’ says Jonny Kebab. What he means is feed me the line and I’ll say yes and then you can let me go back and fade into the crowd. I can’t invent a lie, but if you build me a stepladder of untruths and hold my hand as I go, I’ll climb it as high as you need me to climb.

  ‘It’s obvious, Mr Lansdale: did you hear him say anything about how they had it coming, that it served them right? Comments that revealed support for the bombing? There are other witnesses, so your testimony is not strictly necessary, but of course it would help clarify the question.’

  Jonny thinks it over. The Doc has done two things to push Jonny across the line: first he has told him what to say, and second he has said that there are others who will do the same. That way, Jonny is reassured that whatever happens happens regardless of him – being helpless and irrelevant is a huge relief to Lansdale.

  ‘He said they deserved it.’ Jonny is relieved to be of help. He looks at Danny, who shakes his head but doesn’t protest. ‘I heard him.’

  ‘Can you remember the context and the specific date of the conversation?’ asks the Doc.

  Jonny Kebab hasn’t had time to manufacture either the context or date of anything. He is a liar without a script. He looks lost. How can one be specific about a day and time for when something didn’t happen?

  ‘Just after it happened.’ He blurts out. ‘The day after the bombing. When it was on the news. He said it after assembly. Then he said—’

  The Doc cuts him off before the lie becomes too obviously implausible. ‘Thank you, that’s enough. Were there any witnesses to what you heard?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It was after assembly so there were lots of people around.’

  ‘I heard it, too,’ says Vaughan, always ready to help the Doc.

  ‘And me,’ shouts Hugh Lewis, who goes where Vaughan goes.

  There’s excitement at the back as the sadists and bullies start to call out and jeer. Then come the followers and the plodders, the herd sensing the direction of movement. Their chairs screech on the floor as they adjust their positions for a better view, or for more of the Doc’s attention. The hands go up chaotically, like rifles in a Dad’s Army parade. They heard it all, yes, that’s what he said, and he repeated it later, said they had it coming, good for them … ‘He supports the IRA, Sir,’ someone calls out. ‘His dad’s a terrorist!’ ‘Kneecap him!’

  Then: ‘SHOULD BE FUCKING SHOT!’ someone snarls, but Ander can’t make out who it was. Strange, because he knows all of their voices from having listened to their accents in order to learn his own. That snarl doesn’t correspond to anyone in the class. Anyone in the entire school. It’s from somewhere else altogether. He looks them over: Lewis, Vaughan, Dumbo Daniels, Midgley, Paul, Tristan, Cobbleson, Roger Bowden and a few others at the back or on the margins of the class. But none of them have the voice he’s just heard.

  Ander thinks that maybe all the hate in those words – the real, adult hate, the kind that makes people kill and torture each other, burn down people’s houses while they sleep – required a different voice, a voice other than a child’s, though it was a child it must have come from. He thinks maybe something possessed one of the boys and took his mouth for itself. Full-throated, burning blood-hate – it flashed there for a moment and then went. But not away. It never went away.

  Or he thinks that he invented it, that it was all in his head.

  Ander never heard it again at school, but he’s heard it since, seen it at work, on streets after pubs close, in houses where men beat women, and at EDL rallies and football matches. He’s almost familiar with it now; he can recognise it. It’s the sound of hatred looking for an object to fix itself to. Roving hate. It all comes through the police station and goes out one of two ways: into the jails or back on the streets, back into homes and bedrooms and kitchens. Back behind closed doors and drawn curtains. He hears it a lot now, and though the people it comes from differ, it’s the same hate he heard back then, back there. Back when he was a child.

  Ander must be the only one to have caught it that day, because none of the others show any sign of having heard it. If they had it would have stopped the room. Even the Doc would have called it all off. He wonders if Danny heard it.

  ‘They’re lying,’ says Danny struggling to stay calm, ‘that isn’t what I said.’ His face burns, his neck especially, pocked with bright red marks like countries on a map.

  The Doc: ‘There are several witnesses, all of them credible, and all of them agreeing not just on the general gist of your remark but on the details of the words you used.’

  ‘They’re lying,’ repeats Danny. ‘What I said was different.’

  ‘Be quiet: you’ll have plenty of time to defend yourself as the trial progresses,’ the Doc snaps. Danny still scares him. ‘You can call some of your friends as defence witnesses as soon as the case for the prosecution is made.’

  For the next twenty minutes, the Doc calls his witnesses. They say the same things, following the Doc’s simple script: IRA sympathies, support for the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four. Not just about the Brighton bombing anymore, but enlarging into a more general sympathy for Irish terror in all its forms, all the way back to the beginning. McAlinden hates us. His people hate us. And here we are giving them jobs and scholarships. Lewis, Vaughan, Carter and some of the others come up with a few sound bites about McAlinden’s ‘history’ of IRA support. ‘He’s got form,’ says one. Then they add a series of satellite charges – ‘He’s gay’, ‘effeminate’, ‘he’s one of those queers, Sir’, ‘poof’, ‘intellectual’ …

  They’re throwing it all in now, everything they hate and fear and envy about him.

  How Danny sits through it Ander and the others will never understand. He trembles and bites his lip. He looks at the class and shakes his head, looks at his friends as if they are onshore and he’s on a boat being carried out to sea. But he doesn’t cry.

  ‘What have you to say in your defence?’ the Doc asks Danny.

  ‘I said it was a war.’

  ‘According to these witnesses you said it served us right, that we had it coming. Do you deny that?’

  ‘I said What do you expect? It’s a war. Those were my exact words. Nothing else. I didn’t say anything else on the subject. I didn’t say anything about anyone deserving it. No one answered me, so there wasn’t anything else said after that. Ander I think it was just changed the subject.’

  Ander gets up and says, ‘Yes – that’s all we heard, that’s all he said, then we talked about something else.’

  Neil Hall gets up and says, loudly and calmly, looking at the Doc: ‘That’s right. I was there. I heard. And, anyway, this isn’t right. This whole show … it’s gone too far, Sir.’

  Gwil: ‘Get a grip, Dr Monk, this is out of control!’

  Dave Sweeting: ‘Stop, Sir, please – it’s all wrong.’

  The Doc ignores them and addresses Danny: ‘So you were indeed expressing support for the Irish Republican Army and their atrocities?’ He sa
ys it in the tone that prosecutors in legal dramas have when they have someone cornered, when they have taken their words and ransacked them for meanings the accused never intended. ‘Let me remind you of the facts: five people were killed on 12 October last year, and dozens wounded, and scores of innocent people have died in previous bombings – not just soldiers and elected politicians but ordinary people going about their daily lives in cities all across England. This is, in effect, what you support.’

  Danny is starting to behave as if he really were on trial. He acts like a careful witness measuring his words. Ander thinks it’s a mistake to appear to accept a situation that is as absurd as it is sinister. Just go! he thinks, Get up and leave! he shouts inside his head, hoping that somehow Danny will hear him from inside his.

  Danny knows the Doc wants to trap him. Maybe Danny thinks he can write his own script to set against the Doc’s? He speaks slowly, commandingly but not so loud that it’s hard to sustain his pitch over several sentences, and enunciates every word: ‘I said that the IRA thinks of it as a war and the British state does, too. You just don’t admit it’s a war. You call it terror. But if one side thinks it’s a war that’s enough – it’s a war. To them the British government is the enemy.’

  ‘The Enemy? Really? Whose enemy?’ asks the Doc leeringly, ‘You mean your enemy?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t mean that.’ Danny looks like he is about to say something, but doesn’t.

  ‘You are telling us that the enemy – as you put it – is the British. Your enemy, is that right? Your words, not mine. Are we your enemies, Mr McAlinden?’

  Danny is silent.

  ‘Let the court note the defendant’s refusal to answer. What,’ asks the Doc, pausing for effect and starting again, ‘What is warlike about blowing people up in train stations, putting bombs under cars or killing people – civilians – in pubs in London and Birmingham? That isn’t war, it’s terrorism.’ There’s a cheer from the back. ‘The Irish Republicans are no army – to call them that is an insult to armies the world over …’ There’s a slight froth at the corners of Monk’s mouth when he’s excited, and it acts as a lubricant to the toy-debating-chamber eloquence he learned in Oxford. It is less sticky than Morbender’s, more aerated, and if you look closely you can see tiny bubbles of saliva fizz and burst as his lips move. He wipes his mouth quickly and sets his jaw at a Churchillian jut, the way he used to do at Oxford after landing a bon mot on his opponent.

  ‘Dr Monk,’ says Danny shakily, trying to hold his own against the rising chorus of jeers, ‘all armies kill civilians, whatever they tell you … however advanced they are.’ A scrunched-up ball of paper coated in ink hits his face as he speaks, then falls onto the front of his shirt. He has a blue splatter on his cheek and a smear down his neck and collar. The Doc turns around and walks to his filing cabinet, and while he has his back to them Vaughan walks up to Danny and spits into his eyes: ‘Clean it off with that.’

  By the time the Doc has returned to face them, Vaughan is back in his seat, asmirk and with his arms crossed: a proud worker surveying a job well done.

  The Doc has something black in his hand, something velvety that shines like some animal’s rich pelt. It’s sleek and ripples like mink. No one can make out what it is. Perhaps Danny can, as he’s closest, but he has other things to worry about right now.

  ‘You are saying, are you, Mr McAlinden, that there is equivalence between the bandits of the Provisional IRA and the British Army? And are you saying that Republican terror is justified and that you support it?’

  Danny looks lost. He doesn’t answer. He blinks. Quickly at first and then slowly and at longer intervals, hoping to open his eyes on something different, something other than this.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re asking me,’ says Danny, ‘what’s any of it got to do with me?’

  ‘Answer the question, Mr McAlinden: are you justifying the actions of the Irish Republican Army? Are you supporting those actions as alleged by your fellow pupils? And do you wish to dispute the evidence put before the court? This is your last chance before we proceed to sentencing!’ The Doc is almost shouting now.

  ‘I said it was a war. That’s all I said and it’s all I meant. It’s not an equal war and they aren’t equal armies, but they’re armies and they’re at war. You’re seen as an occupying army. Their army doesn’t have tanks and planes and uniforms. But they’ve got guns and they’ve got bombs. Your army shoots people in the streets and gives weapons to death squads who kill people in their homes. It’s a war, whatever name you give it. That is what people there say. I never thought it before, I always tried to stay away from it, it’s got nothing to do with me because I’m here and I’m English … but when I see you doing this to me I understand why they think the way they do.’

  Nobody speaks. Nobody moves or breathes. No one knows where that came from. Danny has never said anything like it before, not like that. Danny himself, even as he speaks, looks half amazed to hear the words come out of his mouth. It comes from a place inside him that no one, maybe Danny included, ever knew existed.

  ‘Well, well,’ says the Doc, ‘your army, you say? Your newspapers? I think the court has heard enough. Occupying? Right? I think we have enough to make up our minds.’

  Danny has given the Doc what he wanted. True, Danny didn’t break down – there’ll be time for that soon enough, thinks the Doc – but he gave him plenty. It was as good as a confession. No – actually, it was better than a confession, because a confession places the onus on the judge to be lenient. A confession works in the accused’s favour by displaying honesty and contrition. This was defiance, and, though it has surprised the Doc as much as anyone else, it has also given him something even better than what he wanted.

  No leniency called for here.

  The Doc reaches for the black velvet cloth on his desk and lifts it up.

  It is a hood, or a bag, with a little drawstring around the base where it can be closed to keep the light out, or the darkness in.

  Ander gets up and leaves the room.

  He runs down the corridor. As the sun streams in through the high windows he sees the skids of thick polish that the janitor has forgotten to work into the parquet flooring. The downstairs toilets are open and he sees the cubicle doors, all of them ajar, smells the permanent odour of a sewage-lagoon. The urinals jammed with chewing gum and cigarette butts macerating in piss. The toilets where there’s always one obstinate stool lodged at the bottom of the bowl, rusting in flushwater like a submarine corroding on the seabed. He wants to go to the headmaster’s office and tell him to come and stop it. But at the man’s door he realises he won’t stop it, because the head is the Doc’s protector, and the Doc is the head’s representative on earth, or at least this bit of it, and he turns back. In that great corridor, gravy-brown floor and walls the colour of dirty custard, he wobbles and hesitates, then runs in the opposite direction, back whence he came and up the stairs to English.

  He listens at Mr Wolphram’s door – the low rumble of words, a laugh, the kind you only hear when the joke is literary, a little cognoscenti-chuckle – then he knocks. The talking stops but there is no reply. He knocks again, harder.

  The slow, deep-voiced ‘Come in’. He stands there before a class of sixth-formers. They’re doing a poem. Obviously. Mr Wolphram is standing up and has the book open in his hand, the spine balanced on his palm, the covers resting on his spread fingers and thumb. Ander notices again that Mr Wolphram has the handspan of a concert pianist. He holds the book almost at arm’s length as he reads, and high up, as if he is about to release it into flight …

  The sixth-formers look older and cooler. They’re relaxed, too. And interested, engaged in what he’s saying. Mr Wolphram doesn’t insist on them wearing their jackets or ties in class, so some of them have unbuttoned their shirts and hung their ties on their chairs. A few have tucked their ties inside their shirts, between the top button and the second in the manner of the day’s pop singers. The hea
d hates it, which adds the tang of defiance to the prestige of fashion. Wolphram doesn’t care about stuff like non-regulation cardigans, thin ties and Bowie-haircuts. When he showed the fifth-formers Quadrophenia they spent the rest of the term trying to look like Mods, tapering their trousers, wearing the thin ends of their school ties forward, swapping their crappy school moccasins for sharp lace-ups with pointed toes.

  They’re all looking at Ander.

  ‘Well?’ asks Mr Wolphram. His eyes are wide open, eyebrows so high they’ve almost disappeared behind the fringe.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. There’s something happening in Dr Monk’s room and I … it’s not right and we need help.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ asks Mr Wolphram. But Ander gets the feeling Mr Wolphram knows, or suspects, or has been here before.

  ‘It’s a trial,’ says Ander helplessly.

  Mr Wolphram snaps the book shut and turns to the class. ‘Carry on without me—’

  He motions Ander to leave the room with him, slowly shutting the door behind. Suddenly, he is quick, taking the corridor and then the stairs at a strangely athletic pace. It’s not running, more of a fast hovering walk that Ander has trouble keeping up with. Ander starts to try to explain things to him but he’s breathless and realises Mr Wolphram isn’t really listening. Anyway, how do you explain putting a child on trial in a classroom with his teacher as judge?

  As they approach the Doc’s room, they hear the crack of what sounds like a bullet. It tears the air in half and then echoes along the corridor. Then silence.

  When they reach the Doc’s room, they see Danny in a chair, the black hood over his head, Vaughan and Lewis holding him by the shoulders. He’s shaking so hard that even as they press him down, their hands shake with him. In front of the class a small circle of backrow bastards stands like a police cordon, pushing Neil Hall and Gwil and Rich Nicholson back. Gwil has his hand at one of their throats but the scene is still as a painting.

  Jonny Kebab and several of the others are in their seats looking down, waiting for things to finish. They are people of the crowd, the great grey average. They are what’s left when you’ve done your sums of good and evil. They know it and they are okay with it. They won’t pull the trigger or put the noose around your head, but neither will they give you the keys to your cell or hide you in their cellar. The school produces them, too; produces mostly them, in fact. They are its human plasticine. As Wolphram told them once: ‘While you may not have the talent to succeed, you can take comfort from the fact that your mediocrity will stop you from failing.’