Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  ‘The Skull maintains an unvarying temperature of seventy degrees, no matter what its surroundings. It changes colour, even against a neutral background. Sometimes it goes a cloudy white, sometimes a dark spot expands until the whole Skull goes black.

  ‘This terrible, beautiful artefact was made from a huge piece of rock quartz, worn down into its shape by efforts that must have taken hundreds of years. The Mayans had no chisels, boys, they did not have so much as sand-paper. What they had was sand. The crystal was worn down by hand. Think of that! The sand wearing down both the crystal and the hands that rubbed it, year after year. They must have been slaves, I think, who did the rubbing, knowing that if they did their work well and finished the task that had been set their ancestors, then the blood of their descendants might moisten the stone and satisfy its thirst …

  ‘This is the Skull of Doom, made by the Maya people of South America. I was led to discover it in 1924. It has knowledge beyond our own. In ancient sacrifice it was used to bring about the death of tribal enemies. The Mayans would spill blood on it to make it work. Human blood.

  ‘Once you have been cursed by this Skull, there is nowhere for you to run to in this world. Or the next.

  ‘One man who spoke out against the power of the Skull developed a fever in three days and died. Another fell down a mine-shaft, a third went insane. One man in Africa was struck by lightning – out of a clear blue sky. Even to think bad thoughts about the Skull can bring sickness and death.’

  The banging with the moaning inside it was getting louder, making a strong contribution to the oppressive atmosphere. I was sure I hadn’t secretly thought anything wrong about the skull, but I can’t say I felt very relaxed about it. While Miss Mitchell-Hedges was talking she let two fingers of one hand, the index and the little, slide down the front of the Skull onto its eye-sockets, interrupting the red light from the torch. The effect was eerie – all right, it was downright frightening. She was covering up the empty eyes of the Skull, but she seemed rather to be producing two searching beams of darkness. The gesture had something in it that was unlike a person touching an object. There was a sensual element, as if flesh was touching flesh, gloating at the contact. She was really milking the mood. If you like a captive audience, the disabled are always going to be at the top of your list.

  ‘As you know, boys, Farley Castle used to be my home. The Skull lived here with me for many years. It knows the building well. It would be wise for each of you to remember that something of the Skull has always been here. Something of the Skull will remain here, even after it returns to its case and travels home with me to Reading.’

  At this point in her spook show she nodded to Miss Willis, who was waiting by the light switch and restored the room to its normal state. Anna Mitchell-Hedges turned off the torch and pressed the Stop button on the tape-recorder. She had a little colour in her face now, as if she had had a transfusion under cover of darkness. She seemed a little drunk, even, on the fear she had summoned up.

  ‘In a moment the brave ones among you may inspect the Skull at close quarters. Do you have any questions?’ This formula always creates a silence. Miss Willis raised her hand.

  The sound in the room which had been bothering me for some time was still going on, but now I knew what it was. Little ‘Half-Pint’ Stevie Templeton, athetoid spastic, who could be jumpy and twitchy at the best of times, was jumping up and down very violently in his wheelchair. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons Mr Wooffindin the English teacher would read to us from The Lord of the Rings, and Stevie would become very agitated when he heard about the Dark Riders, but this was something else again. Poor Stevie! She was pouring fully a quart of anguish into that half-pint pot.

  Little cries and moans of pain and bits of words he couldn’t articulate came stammering out of his mouth. He was sobbing and dribbling with terror. He was knocking his head hard against the metal sides of the wheelchair. There was blood.

  Roger Stott called out from his seat, ‘Miss Willis?’ The look she gave him wasn’t one of her warmest. ‘Roger, you must have the courtesy to wait your turn before you ask our guest a question. What must she think of our manners?’

  ‘But Miss Willis, Stevie is shaking. Really shaking.’

  She didn’t even look over to his wheelchair. ‘I’m familiar with Stevie’s condition, thank you, Roger. To resume: Miss Mitchell-Hedges – Anna, if I may – what is the most useful thing to take with you on expeditions to the wild parts of the world?’

  Stevie Templeton was beside himself, and no wonder. If he was too frightened to stay in a dorm with me after a blown fuse had made a ghost story seem a little too real, then what chance did he have of coping with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ carefully orchestrated spook show?

  Even at that age, I could smell a prepared question, a put-up job. To her credit, Marion must have glanced over to Stevie and seen that something was wrong, just as Anna was getting into the stride of her answer. Anna raised her voice to cover the noise he was making.

  Boiling without fire

  ‘Yours is a good question, Miss Willis, and one to which I have given much thought over the years. My answer is the same as my father’s: Eno’s liver salts. It is useful in two ways. It settles the stomach and is a tonic to the system. But it can also serve in an emergency to impress savages. Nothing makes a greater impact on the primitive mind than the white man’s ability to make water boil without using fire. That is how they understand the effervescence of the salts. If any of your audience remains unconvinced, your ability to drink the boiling water you have made without being scalded will certainly do the trick. If you decide to administer the salts to a native for their original purpose of soothing an upset stomach, you would do well to intone a spell beforehand, to account for the coldness of the liquid. Anything sonorous will do for a spell. On such occasions my father would recite the Twenty-third Psalm, not for sense but for rhythm.’

  A handy tip in its way, but by this time few of us were resonating on Anna’s wave-length. Even while Anna Mitchell-Hedges was answering her question Marion started to sober up. At last she saw that Stevie Templeton was doing more than shaking in the ordinary way and she whisked him from the room. She didn’t appear again, but I can’t say that Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges seemed to miss her. She had thoroughly enjoyed herself.

  I wasn’t sure about taking up the offer to inspect the Skull at close quarters, but I certainly felt the artefact’s fascination. Everyone else seemed to be giving it a wide berth. At last I Wrigleyed up to the desk which Miss Mitchell-Hedges had used for her nasty son et lumière. She smiled at me. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘have you come to consult the Skull of Doom? You may touch it. You may speak to it.’ I found I wasn’t afraid. I came right up to the desk and gazed at the object. There were still people in the hall, but they melted away and then it was just Mitchell-Hedges, the Artefact and Me. She whispered, ‘In fact there is no need to speak. The Skull is fully telepathic. If you merely think towards it and listen carefully, you will hear what it has to say. Simply gaze on eternity.’

  The Skull was very deep and beautiful. I looked at it, touched it, caressed it and felt very honoured. The witch from Reading murmured in my ear, but I wasn’t really listening. As I gazed at the Skull, I felt the pain of Stevie Templeton, now dying away, and I knew without having to ask that the Skull would never have an interest in frightening a nervous little boy who had a huge task simply getting from one end of a day to the other. The Skull wasn’t baleful in itself, though it served Miss Mitchell-Hedges well in that respect. There was any amount of knowledge hidden away in that crystal chamber. Things seen and unseen swirled within its depths. As the Skull’s aura resolved more clearly in my mind, I began to have the surprising thought that it was actually female rather than male. In some strange way the Skull was a lady.

  For a moment I thought of owning the Skull, but only to be able to spend time with it alone, and to give it a less ominous name. At the same time I realised the emptiness of treating it as
a possession. I communed so deeply with the artefact that I began to think Miss Mitchell-Hedges knew nothing about it, apart from its ability to amplify her fantasies of control through fear. She was really just another Judy Brisby, a Miss Krüger too fastidious to touch her victims, and I had grown beyond the reach of such people.

  From my vantage-point I could also see that the Skull was not in fact made from one piece of crystal. The lower jaw was detachable, held on with a piece of wire. At some stage an upper tooth had been chipped, one next to a canine. I wondered whether a clever dentist might not be able to make a little quartz crown for it.

  Anna Mitchell-Hedges wrapped the Skull in cloths before putting it back in its case. ‘I wonder where Marion has got to?’ she asked, but she didn’t really seem concerned. She seemed pleased with her afternoon’s work. Her act was essentially ventriloquism, with the element of misdirection being crucial. Archie Andrews would have been shocked, though, by what was really going on. The crystal jaws of the Skull didn’t move, but everyone was looking at it, and meanwhile Anna Mitchell-Hedges had bitten into a schoolboy’s bone marrow, while Miss Willis looked foolishly on, pleased to have a friend who had cut the toe-nails of the Duke of Windsor, until the damage got out of hand. It was clear that she got a kick out of the fear and pain she caused Stevie Templeton. It couldn’t have been more obvious if she had gone over to him and licked the blood from his wheelchair.

  She packed the Skull away and drove it back to Reading. With no real idea of where or how she lived, I visualised a gingerbread maisonette with a garden whose herbaceous borders were decorated with arrangements of children’s bones, and a basket in the hall for the Skull like a dog’s, except when it was allowed up on Anna’s lap while she watched Bruce Forsyth presenting Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

  Abrasive enterprise

  The Skull of Doom had been shaped over generations by sand held in the hands of slaves. For years now I had been engaged on an abrasive enterprise of my own. Ever since the interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted without needing to apply, I had been determined that I would go to a proper school, a normal school, a grammar school. I’d realised by now that there had never been a possibility of being sent to Lord Mayor Treloar. I was one of the best students in the school. It meant something to me, too, that Jimmy Delaney/Kettle thought I would go mad if I stayed at Vulcan.

  The lump of rock quartz that I needed to abrade into shape was Dad’s resistance. I needed to wear down a mass of No into a sliver of Yes. My only tool was my tongue. I had to keep on at him. It was bad enough from his point of view when I pestered him for dry ice or square balloons, but now I was committed to the campaign of attrition. I wouldn’t let it go. All I needed was a recently built grammar school. Then it would have lifts. Dad might claim that there was no dry ice and no square balloons to be had in any shop, including Harrods, but he could hardly maintain there were no grammar schools in Berkshire with lifts. Sooner or later he was bound to say, ‘I’ll make this phone call if it means I get some peace. If it means you’ll finally shut up …’

  It helped my cause that Dad was back in employment. Through old RAF contacts he had landed a job in the Personnel Department of BOAC, our national airline. Broadly speaking he was in a good mood. It suited him down to the ground. It was as close to a Services job as could be had on Civvy Street, stiff with officiousness and protocol.

  I knew that Miss Willis wouldn’t be happy to see me go, but I hadn’t prepared my arguments. The summons to the sole principal’s study was peremptory. She was hoping to catch me off guard, and to nip my independence in the bud.

  I found it odd to be there without Raeburn. His presence was still strong. If anything she seemed to be trespassing on his sanctum. This after all was where Raeburn had given me some of our walking lessons, told me about the Aztecs and their enlightened ways, and asked me whether I had sensation below the waist. This was also where he had given two sexually experimental boys their small glasses of sherry, and told them that they must be discreet and not worry Miss Willis, who was old-fashioned about such things. Behind her I could still see the spine of Civilisation and the Cripple.

  ‘I think you have been happy here, John, so I don’t know what to make of this misguided idea of changing schools. What is it that you want, John? Really?’

  ‘I want to go to a proper school.’

  ‘This is a proper school.’

  ‘I want to go to a grammar school.’

  ‘This is a grammar school in all but name. Our educational programme is ambitious. It’s odd that I should have to make mention of the fact to someone who has benefited from it for some years now. Vulcan has a precise name, corresponding to a precise function. This is a special boarding school for the education and rehabilitation of severely disabled but intelligent boys. And you are severely disabled, John. You need a high level of care. You are also intelligent, but not more intelligent than a number of boys who have gone on to success in their exams, and who have started to find their place in the world. Are there subjects you would wish to study that are not provided for here?’

  ‘Chemistry, Miss Willis. Chemistry is an important subject. And I want to play the piano.’

  ‘If you are serious about chemistry I will see what can be done. As for the piano, it is not Vulcan School that disqualifies you from it. You can’t simply ignore your limitations if you are to make the most of the opportunities you have.’

  ‘Miss Willis, I want to go to a normal school.’

  Marion smiled. ‘No school that is able to meet your needs could be described as normal, John. I am an educationalist, and you must trust my expertise. If there was the remotest possibility of disabled boys thriving in any old school, do you think that Mr Raeburn and I would have gone through our various ordeals to set up this one?

  ‘You are already a pupil at an exceptional school. Why throw away what we have achieved together? Is it perhaps that you want the academic company of girls? Because I can tell you that girls may be a disappointment, if you are hoping for special friendships and tender sympathy.’ She was barking up the wrong tree there, of course. Perhaps she was referring indirectly to her own school-days. In her bleak smile could be read a certain amount of suffering.

  ‘I want to go to Burnham Grammar School. Not because there are girls there.’

  ‘And who will devote themselves to your care at this school? To put it at its most basic, who will take you to the lavatory there?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  Marion said, ‘John, I’ve come to know you better than anybody over the years, to understand your qualities – which are considerable – and also your limitations.’ She settled back in her chair. ‘John, you know your little adventure in the woods? The time when no one could find you, after your “accident”? It was as plain as plain that you were just begging for attention. I said nothing about it. Perhaps you don’t realise that I have to divide myself into many little pieces to look after you all. And perhaps this application to another school is an exercise in the same vein, a way of making yourself important.’

  In a sense I’d never before had a conflict with authority. I’d been indoctrinated by Mum and sensitised by Dad to his withholding of feeling. I’d been tortured by two generations of carers, by Miss Krüger at CRX and Judy at Vulcan: strong hands had held me under the surface of the hospital pool, strong hands had dangled me over the school stair-well. In my time I’d been scolded, roughly hugged and taken under a few wings. I’d had passing battles of will with Granny, which had been invaluable training, but this was actually the first time a whole personality had been nakedly opposed to mine, on something like equal terms.

  Miss Willis expected the force of what she said, or simply the authority she embodied, to carry the day. To prevail because either she was right or because she was Miss Willis. It was almost intoxicating, to have her voice address me at its deepest, with the Kathleen Ferrier throb giving her an extra authority, and her clean-and-not-really-like-a-f
at-person’s smell taking me back to the time she broke my fall on the steps.

  Of course she was right that I craved attention. She wasn’t stupid. Even in my days of bed rest, with my day-dreams of having a steel ball in the room, which I could move around with the force of my mind – the whole point of the fantasy was that everyone would be impressed. Not that I had powers, but that everyone knew about it. In the absence of acclaim a steel ball was a duller toy than most.

  The Little Mermaid had always been one of my favourite stories, but I always bridled at the bargain she made, to walk in agony and have no one know her suffering. I had no objection to suffering in silence, as long as everyone knew about it.

  The weather-vane of Marion’s rhetoric changed quarter. I had stood up to the breezes of reproach and wheedling, now she would try some colder blasts. Her voice took on a hard edge. ‘In a school other than this, you would not be treated with understanding. You would be humiliated and mocked. Never accepted. I have watched you spread your wings here, with our help, but that doesn’t mean I must watch as you throw yourself off a cliff and try to join a flock which will peck you to death. You can’t judge the world outside by our splendid ABs. It can be a cruel place, and weakness is no protection. Weakness can even be an incitement to cruelty.’

  Of course, it spoiled her case that the world over which she ruled was crueller than she knew. Judy Brisby hadn’t been detected in her various assaults. She had left the school as an unspotted professional, as a loving wife and mother-to-be.

  In fact there was only one person reprimanded for bullying in my years at Vulcan, as far as I know, and that was me. We were used to our own little tortures. Chinese Burns were common currency, given and received without much comment. I was almost proud of the first one I got. It was painful but also a mark of belonging, like a phantom bracelet. Eventually I found someone even weaker than me, a worthy person to receive an amateurish sort of Chinese Burn in his turn (my hands not really being up to the task of twisting the skin of the wrists in two directions at once) – and I got a proper scolding for it. It even turned up on my report: ‘John really must stop bullying boys weaker than himself.’ Unfair, unfair! The action was technically difficult and it was quite a feat to manage it at all. But oh no, suddenly grassing people up is perfectly all right and I’m a menace to society. Never mind that no one ever got a word in their reports about the Chinese Burns they’d given me.