Gary drinks the dregs of his bad coffee and wipes his mouth. ‘Now that I think of it, one of the episodes in your friend’s detective series is about three blokes who capture their ex-teacher, stick a bag over his head and put him on trial for all the shit he did to them when they were kids …’
‘Do they kill him?’ I ask.
‘No spoilers, Prof.’
I laugh for the first time in days. (They do, yes. It is grisly, drawn-out and gratifying. I’ve seen it twice.)
‘I don’t want you to think it was all like that. The younger you were the worse it was, but it got better. There were a few good things, good moments. And in places like that the good things mean more than they actually are, because it takes the edge off the shit. We had some normality. Eventually. Girlfriends, bad half-sex on benches, fingering up by the bridge, pubs, cigarettes, buying drug wraps that turned out to be shoe polish in tinfoil and being too scared to go and complain … I think we were normal. I got a girlfriend, I was happy as I could be in that world. We could travel, go to the coast, go to Brighton, Canterbury, London. Eventually, I left. Well, I stayed, but in a different way.’
‘Sure, Prof, staying is the new leaving, haven’t you heard?’
‘I changed, too – my name I mean: I’d started out as Ander but by the time I was sixteen I was English, like I’d had a transfusion. Of words, of language, a whole new childhood. When I was around fifteen people started calling me Alex and Alexander and that stuck. By the time I left school I had a different name and spoke a different language from when I’d started. Wolphram was a good man and a good teacher. I owe him my English. He told me the dictionary would be my best friend.’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed much competition for that accolade …’ says Gary. ‘In my school your Doc Monk would have got walloped before he even got started. And I mean walloped by the teachers—’
‘I think about that all the time, Gary: what would have happened if someone had just gone up to him and smacked him in the face, if we’d all just got up and walked out … but you don’t do that, or you didn’t then, it was like there was software in our heads that made things that seem obvious now completely unthinkable – literally unthinkable, I mean: you really didn’t think them …’
‘Yeah, I know, Prof – I’ve heard versions of that. Maybe without the poetry, but I’ve heard it …’
Gary spent two years investigating abuse in a care home in Oxford. He learned a lot in Oxford, he says, all of it bad. Gary was on the Iffley House case, and even the name, Iffley House, sounds like a posh prep school. But it wasn’t: it was a home for vulnerable teenagers who were pimped out by the people paid to look after them. Part of the investigation involved Gary staying in a guesthouse, undercover, and biting his tongue while he heard kids being plied with booze and pills and turnstile-fucked in the rooms around him. He still wakes up to the sounds he heard at night in the Meadow Lane Bed and Breakfast. So I don’t have much to teach him about that side of things.
‘And people pay for this shit? They actually look back on it and say those were the days? It’s like wanting old dentistry methods back, or fucking leeches and lobotomies …’
‘Back then we accepted all kinds of stuff which – if we’d thought about it – was absurd and damaging and probably abusive …’
‘Daringly innovative use of the word probably there, Prof.’
‘Well, afterwards, when you’ve left and got some distance from it and you’ve realised the world wasn’t made like this and other people live differently, you think: this was my life – for three years, five years, ten … this was the world I lived in and these were the rules I lived by and this was the normality … But you only think that later, when you’re free, and maybe some of them aren’t ever free. Some of us.’
‘Hard to tell with you, Prof. If you’re free or not, I mean. If you’re one of the them.’
‘Hard for me to tell, too – some days I’ll feel completely separate from it all – seeing the school as I drive by or recognising the odd ex-teacher in a shop, the kids in their uniforms crocodile-filing down the road … doesn’t have any effect on me. It’s like I was never there. Other days I feel like I’m watching myself from outside, like there’s a faded photo or film of someone doing all these things, going to school, sitting in class, getting touched, smelling the breath, watching the bullying, tasting the tears, feeling the pain, wiping off the spit … and I feel sorry for the poor kid and I shake my head – I actually shake my head, Gary, at what they went through and I’m sad on their behalf …’
I realise that my voice keeps cutting out as I speak, that something has been dislodged in me. It’s only faint, but Gary can tell, too.
‘It’s okay, Prof, I don’t need to hear any more, I’ve got the gist—’
‘ … and then I look closer and think he looks familiar … and I look more carefully, and watch the way he turns inwards, closes up, talks a little sometimes, but only to himself, and I realise it’s me, and I’m looking into a mirror and all those things I was examining from the outside are on the inside, and I’m so broken I’m actually looking at myself from outside myself, that I’ve been split off inside, that I can only approach what happened to me side-on, like you creep up on animals so they don’t run away or attack you … tiptoeing around inside my own head in case I wake up the inhabitants. Does that explain it?’
‘Not to me, Prof, not really, but that’s part of the point, isn’t it? One generation looks at another and thinks: How did that happen, how did they let it?’
‘Well, that’s what it was like back then, back in the eighties … for all I know it was even worse before, in the seventies and sixties and fifties … and these boys, many of them, had parents who’d been through the same thing, some of them, like Lansdale, in the same school, same house, among the same furniture, writing on the same bog walls, albeit a couple of coats of paint later. Often the same teachers. Imagine that! You can’t go crying to your parents because they’re the ones who put you there—’
‘Yeah, well, that’s why this country is the way it is. If you want to know how they work, those people, what makes them tick up there in their houses of parliament, their banks and country houses, their judges’ benches and their newspaper soapboxes … my theory is that under all that finery they’re still wearing a pair of little school shorts …’
Gary chucks his cup into the bin. ‘What about Jonny Kebab – I’d like to pay him a visit.’
‘On what pretext?’
‘Curious, Prof, just curious. Though to tell the truth I’m mostly curious about how many teeth I can knock out of his mouth …’
‘Well – it was in the papers a few years back, maybe even an article by Mad Lynne, come to think of it – Lansdale’s got bought up but kept its name as part of the deal. Jonny K sends his two boys to the school, so he must have liked it, if only in retrospect. These days he tries his hand at various little businesses, sits around opening restaurants in the latest up-and-coming area—’
‘Yeah, and closing them soon after … I’ve read about him – a posh hipster with a wanker’s drawl. Carpetbagging gentrifying tosser. But deep down he’s still selling shredded jazz mags. Now I realise why so many of the upper classes are so kinky, why those MPs and judges and hedge-fund managers always get caught with rent boys or in massage parlours or strangling themselves with suspenders with oranges in their mouths … It’s because when they were kids their first exposure to sex was torn-up pornos, bits of elbow or foot, or half an arse on a scrap of wet paper. Generations of upper-class men turned into fetishists by people like Lansdale and the schoolboy wankonomy …’
I start to laugh and then realise that, actually, it isn’t such an implausible explanation at all. You take sexual shame and sexual frustration, you top it up with wealth, hierarchy, and mental and physical violence, then serve it in a large glass called entitlement, and you get … well: you get what we have.
Danny
When Danny’s mother di
es, it is a surprise. We are surprised by what we expected, because if there’s one thing worse than being unprepared for the death of someone you love, it’s being prepared. You hate yourself for it: getting ready for them to die while they’re still living. They’re still fighting, but you’ve already signed your treaty, up ahead, with the illness that will take them. You watch them: they sit up in bed, ruck up the pillows and lean forward, try to walk to the shops or to the living room. Sometimes they have a good day, or pull a sudden burst of appetite from their wasted body, their caved-in belly. One day they’re even well enough to come and visit, though they shakily grip the rim of the car door as they climb out, their hands are all chalky knuckle and joint, their muscles just tendon-gristle. They tire fast, but they’re here and they’re battling on. You’re not. They are so thin that when you help them back into the car it is like folding a deckchair. Meanwhile, what have you been doing? You’ve been having talks with the enemy behind their backs, that’s what.
You’ve been preparing.
Those weren’t the exact words Danny used – we didn’t have exact words then, because unless you were Mr Wolphram the words came fuzzy and too late – but I am pretty sure it’s how he felt. Danny had been ready for some months. But he was not ready for how it made him feel to be ready.
His mother’s illness had many false dawns – a medication or a treatment that extended this or managed that – and many false sunsets too: a fall, a sudden dip, a death rattle that wasn’t, a final decline that became the next swerving pull-back from the brink. These last weeks, however, she has been in a palliative ether, the kind designed to smooth the passage from life to death, so the chasm that separates them becomes no more than a ridge, a speed bump between worlds.
Danny’s last words to her were spoken into the receiver of the public phone in the school corridor on Tuesday. There was a queue behind him, other boys waiting, grumbling, telling him to hurry up as he fed his coins into the slot. They were 2p coins back then, and they’d weigh in the boys’ pockets as they headed for the phone, and we’d stack them up and watch them dwindle as we spoke. It wasn’t a phone booth, just a receiver hung on a wall, so we developed an odd, semi-private, semi-public way of speaking to our parents or family, knowing we were being listened to. It was another way, along with the letters, of making familiar relationships formal. What could you say to your parents in a corridor with boys watching, listening, waiting, laughing, telling you to hurry up? Sometimes the phone queue was so long they were at your elbow as you held the receiver. You couldn’t cry in public, and they had made it so you couldn’t cry in private.
It is the Doc who tells Danny. He calls him into the classroom and makes him stand on the other side of the desk with the Latin primers and the bound slab of doctoral thesis he leaves there for people to see. He doesn’t ask him to sit down. Why would he? With news like this you’re afraid that if you ask someone to sit down they’ll never get up. Besides, Danny is ready, he’s been ready for some time, the Doc informs him. ‘This won’t be a surprise to you,’ he begins. But it is. Danny holds the front of the desk as the Doc speaks. He steadies himself. It is the same desk at which he stood just a few weeks back, at his ‘trial’. The Doc is trying to show sensitivity, and Danny can tell. But he won’t stop hating him.
He is ready and not ready. He feels like he will fall, faint, blank out in the face of the fact of it. He feels that all that readiness won’t help now – now that what he was ready for has happened. There’d have been plenty of time to be ready when it was too late; now he suddenly hates himself for spending that time when she was alive preparing for something he couldn’t ever prepare for, for wasting what little time she had left by habituating himself to a future that would come whether he was ready for it or not. It’s not the past that haunts us, it’s the future, he thinks. He is desolate and angry and silent.
In Doc terms it’s probably a sympathetic interview. It must be, because Danny is ‘let off’ the rest of the day’s classes. It’s a Friday. This coming weekend he’ll be allowed to go home and stay until the funeral. A notice goes up on the school board, telling us that Danny has lost his mother. It is signed by the headmaster. Sympathies are extended as if they were deadlines, which is what they are for people like him. And whatever can be extended can also be retracted.
Mr Wolphram’s class that day is muted, because, though not everyone likes Danny, this is as close as they want to come to bereavement. It is as if everything they discuss has changed scale: the doll’s house of literature, with its doll’s-house people with their doll’s-house furniture and feelings, has suddenly become a real place you walk into and find yourself lost and small and alone. The books don’t work anymore, full of paper people leading lives of ink. The word death has stopped being a few letters in a poem or a story. Now it is a hole in the page you fall into and never come out of.
Mr Wolphram knows this. He speaks softly, but still his voice has no problem carrying. He goes off-syllabus today, gives them a humorous short story to read by Damon Runyon, makes them each read a paragraph and try their hand at a hip American accent. Ander is by himself in the front row beside Danny’s empty seat, because the others have pulled back, afraid of grief’s contamination. Ander carries the spores.
He does not see Danny again that day. He looks for him in the usual places – out by the cricket fields, near the school theatre, up on the Downs and along the bridge, which he crosses several times.
Danny is not there. Nor is he in his bed in the dormitory. Ander sees him once more, a week later. He has come to get his trunk and clear his locker. It is Mr Wolphram who takes him to the station, and Ander’s last view of Danny is in the front seat of the car, the same car Mr Wolphram owns today and which is now at the auto-forensics laboratory. Danny looks at him and looks away, then looks back and half waves, half brushes it all away: their two small years of friendship, and it is something like a childhood that he wipes from behind the window.
A Letter to the Newspaper
‘That Irish kid – what was his surname again?’ Gary interrupts.
‘McAlinden. Danny. Daniel.’
‘Well, he’s obviously taking an interest. Come and look.’
Gary leaves me his seat and points to the computer screen. It’s the lead letter in the Guardian.
Dear Editor,
I was lucky enough to have been a pupil of Michael Wolphram’s at Chapelton College in the 1980s, and I remember him as an excellent and generous-minded teacher who gave his time unstintingly to pupils who were interested in ideas. I knew him well at school and stayed in touch with him afterwards.
This doesn’t put me in a position to know or give an opinion whether or not he killed Zalie Dyer (I have the quaint notion that maybe the police and courts can help with that), but it does mean I know the claims made about him both in the tabloids and in the ‘quality’ papers are outright lies, and that he has been tried by the media for looking, sounding and being different. In today’s Britain, this seems to disqualify one from being innocent until proved guilty. It also seriously prejudices the Dyer family’s hopes of seeing a fair trial.
But it’s not just the redtops and the gossip mags who have shown their viciousness. The posh curtain-twitching neighbours who queued up to get on TV to berate his ‘strangeness’ and ‘oddity’, the school’s spineless headmaster whose first response was to claim that no one at the school knew or remembered him, the anonymous but scandal-randy ‘Old Chapeltonians’ who lied about him for a quick tabloid buck … all of them remind us that when it comes to persecuting people who are different, British society can overcome the class divide and really get stuck into a common cause.
Yours,
Daniel McAlinden
Newcastle
I read the letter and wish I’d written it.
‘Bet you wish you’d written that, Prof.’
*
The drive to Hastings takes us along the motorway, which is a white-van cloggage of junctions and busines
s parks, of skip-lorries layered with bathtubs and doors, of catering vans, taxicabs and airport-bound people-carriers. I am at the wheel, and Gary is staring fiercely at the dashboard. I drive too slowly for him, but Gary gets road rage just looking at pictures of roads. The word ‘road’ makes him angry. It is one of his triggers, as we’re learning to call them.
Sometimes we see birds of prey – kites, maybe, or hawks, it’s not as if Gary or I can tell the difference – scrutinising the tarmac for squashed mammals from their speed-camera perches.
‘Why are we doing this again?’ he enquires through clenched teeth, enviously side-eyeing the traffic going in the opposite direction, which, like all traffic going where we aren’t, is moving faster and more smoothly than us.
‘Because we want to, because it’s our day off, and because we’ve been told not to.’
He seems satisfied with that. This was his idea anyway.
We smell the sea before we see it. The Salvation Army Hall is close to the beach where the fishermen’s nets and tackle are strewn messily around their huts, interspersed with boats that have been dragged up and which now loll on their sides in the wind. There’s plastic everywhere – plastic drums, twine, binbags, balls of fishing line blown like tumbleweed along the shingle – and a stink of fish guts and fish heads. Gulls caw and swoop down for offal, or hang in clouds just above our heads, looking, Gary says, for a nice shiny police car to shit across.
When we arrive the volunteers are unbagging donated clothes from bin liners and setting a long trestle table for the Christmas lunches they’ll be serving up until New Year. The notice by the door, chalked onto a sandwich board, invites the homeless, the friendless, the poor and the abandoned to eat with them. A couple of sullen-looking reporters are staking it out in the cold; another is peering at the entrance from behind the flipped-open lid of a pizza carton. Whatever they’ve come for, they haven’t got it.
Throw Me to the Wolves Page 22
