“What’s your interest?”
Will shrugged his shoulders. “I’m writing a version of it. It would be interesting for me to know your opinion, seeing as you are so close to the subject. Sharing a name as you do. A story, certainly, although I hope it is not as tragic as theirs.”
“Are you not in love yourself?”
Will thought about this a moment. “I’m too old,” he said, finally
Romeo looked back at the book and then stood up. “I’ll try it,” he said. “I can’t promise anything but I’ll try it.”
Will nodded. “Until the morrow, then.”
“And yours?” Romeo asked, on the threshold. Behind him a gibbous moon was sliced by the misty night sky
“My what, lad?”
“Your play?”
“Oh, I have some of it written, most of it here,” Will replied, tapping a dirty finger to his temple
Romeo shook his head and tapped his chest. “Should be here,” he told his teacher. “In your heart.”
Friday
1
Kizzie and Zak watched Gillian walk away into the foggy darkness which covered the playing fields. Far away, the windows of the Main Building floated like lights from a ghost ship. Although she tried to hide it, burying her head into the scarf she had wrapped around her face, it was obvious Gillian was crying
“I don’t get it,” Kizzie said, turning to Zak and laying her head against his chest. They were at The Tree, the furthest point from the school they could be while still on the grounds. “It’s not such a big deal.”
“Are you serious?”
“What? A dinner and dance. What’s the problem? It’s not like we even have a choice about going or not going. We have to go.”
“You really think she’s worried about going?”
“Well, what’s she worried about then?”
Gillian had now disappeared completely, eaten up by the fog
“What’s she worried about?” asked Zak, taking a step backwards. “She’s worried about having to go with him. With Alain bloody Verne.”
“So what? I still don’t see the big deal. It’s just business. Everyone’s happy!”
“You’re happy, you mean. You keep Verne happy, which keeps Fermin and the Magistrate off your back while poor Gillian gets hung out to dry.”
“Why?” Kizzie faked exasperation. “What’s so bad about going to a crappy dinner and dance with someone? It doesn’t mean anything! It’s not like she has to marry him!”
“She’s already married!”
“Ha!”
“What?”
“Oh, come on, Zak.”
“What?” Zak had a weird, steely look in his eye that seemed to affect the air around them. “Are you laughing at the wedding ceremony you presided over now?”
“Wedding ceremony?” Kizzie shook her head but there was no escape. She lifted her hands. “No. OK. I know they meant it, but come on. It wasn’t like it was in a church. She just met the guy. And, besides, I told you, he wasn’t even real. I knew that. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I was trying to make her happy.”
“You’re so cold sometimes,” Zak said, backing away. He walked in small circles opening and closing a Zippo lighter he’d pulled from the pocket of his overcoat. “Why did you take me into the library to see The Book? You’re like a criminal that keeps going back to the scene of the crime. You shouldn’t act like you don’t care, Kizzie, you haven’t got the heart for it. Just be a nice person.”
“Don’t do that. Someone’ll see us.”
“So?” Zak lifted the lighter, popped the lid and sparked the flame
“Very cool.”
“At least tell me that somewhere you feel sorry for her.”
“For who?”
“Who do you think? For Gillian! For what you did.”
“Of course I do.”
“She was in love with that guy, Kizzie.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Kizzie suddenly became as serious as Zak. “Of course I hate what I did – are you stupid? I just want everything to go back to normal. I want everything like it was. Who knows? Maybe she’ll fall in love with Verne and they’ll make the perfect couple and everything will be OK?”
“Where did they send him?”
“Verne?”
“Romeo.” Zak raised an eyebrow as he said the name. “You know what, it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it still sounds weird.”
Kizzie took her chance, smiled, and moved in again. Zak let her back into his arms. “I don’t know where they sent him.”
“And there’s nothing you can do to get him back?”
Kizzie shrugged but she couldn’t make herself say “no” out loud
“Or send her there?” Zak sniffed. It was getting colder now by the second. “Just anything to get them back together.”
“No!” said Kizzie
Zak held her away from him. “No?” He looked right into her eyes. “That doesn’t sound like a real ‘no’.”
“It’s nothing.”
“What?”
“No, seriously. Zak, no. Don’t ask me this. Drop it.” Kizzie walked away, her eyes wet and Zak watched her, surprised but weighing her up. Was she faking her emotion? The tears? He didn’t think so
“Wait.” He caught up. Through the dense bracken and tree trunks, white and red lights slid by on the wet bypass. “Tell me.”
“No.” Kizzie was upset. She tried to cover her face with her hands. “Leave me alone, Zak. Seriously.”
“Kizzie!” Zak turned her to him. “Tell me.”
Kizzie struggled but Zak was strong and somewhere, deep down, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him that there was a chance. A small chance. But the consequences of taking it – well, that she could never tell him. Everyone had their secrets, didn’t they?
“There is something,” Zak said
“I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t think it would work.”
“What? Kizzie! Tell me what.”
Kizzie unzipped her jacket and reached down under her scarf and pulled up a small locket she had hanging around her neck on a gold chain. “There’s a small scrap of paper in here. From The Book,” she said. Just saying the words made her turn her head and look back in to the dark swirling mists. “It’s only enough for a few words. One sentence. I kept it because …”
“If you write on it, you think it’ll come true?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” Kizzie wiped her tears with the back of her glove. “I just kept this in case I needed it. I didn’t tell anyone.”
Zak blew out a steady stream of air. “Do it,” he said. “Send her to him. Get them back together.”
Kizzie began crying. “But I don’t know what that would mean. For her parents. Her family. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“You did it when you were happy to do it,” Zak told her sternly. “Now you should do it to clean up the mess. Send her to him and that’s it. Let the rest take care of itself.”
“But you don’t know what that means,” Kizzie said, bursting into tears, her face changing, crinkling up like a child’s
“I don’t care!” Zak cried
Kizzie rested a hand on his cheek and looked into her eyes, shaking her head sadly. Behind the tears her eyes sparkled and swam. “Oh, my poor baby.”
Zak was thinking, I’ll never understand women. “I don’t get this, Kizzie. If you know something’s right, you just have to do it.”
“Just tell me you love me,” Kizzie told him
“And you’ll do it?”
“Just tell me you love me. Hold me close, as tightly as you can, and tell me you love me and that you’ll always love me, whatever happens.”
“Why are you suddenly like this? What’s up?”
“Because I waited so bloody long for you to come and now I need to hear it. I need to feel it!”
&n
bsp; “But why now?”
“Just say it!”
Zak felt her shudder against his chest and he kissed her hair and told her he loved her and that he would always love her, whatever happened
Instead of making her happy, though, this seemed to make Kizzie more upset. She cried hard, clinging to Zak as though her life depended on it
2
‘Tis truly bleak midwinter, Will thought as he trudged out into the snow. His toes were already numb although he’d stuffed blotting paper between his disintegrating socks and the well-worn leather
The allotment plots were ridged and bare and the animal pens empty. Drifts had blown high up the wire fences and the pathway was black with ice
Mrs Sharpe opened the door for Will but she was too tired to be rude, ushering him upstairs with little ceremony. The bottom floor was alive with animals and stunk. There was food and faeces on the floor but it was warm
“Sir,” Will said, pulling off his cap as he came up the last rung of the ladder and stood in the loft. He had to duck at the sloping roof and could smell something sweet and sickly, which might have been a tincture or ointment Mrs Sharpe had made or might just have been the smell of the old monk. The Master was lying on a low bed of straw in front of a window which glowed grey-silver from the snow falling between the black, bare fingers of the trees
“Sharps-spear?”
“Will Shakespeare, sir. Yes, that’s me.” Will came over to the bed and it seemed only right to kneel
The old monk looked shockingly ill and close to death. His face was very pale and lined with tiny red cracks; his nose purple and stained; his eyebrows and the hairs, which sprouted from his nose and ears, brilliantly white. His eyes were now completely pale blue, as though painted, and the sides of his mouth were very tight, as though drawn back on steel strings hidden somewhere behind his neck
“Are you making progress with the boy?” the monk managed to say
“I am, sir, I am.” And Will did his best to ignore the monk’s ravaged condition and spoke about his young pupil, about his Latin and learning
“And you’ve been writing also?” the monk asked, when Will had finished
“I have, I have.” Will was rather startled to hear this and wasn’t sure if it meant he was in trouble
Later, when he remembered this scene, Will would never be sure quite how The Master had spoken to him, whether it had been with his own voice or whether he had simply thought the words aloud. There had been no doubting that words had passed between them, and that Will had heard them but, when he thought back, it seemed strange that a man in such bad condition would have been able to speak so eloquently and clearly. But all that was by the by. It had happened and it happened like this:
“You will be rich and famous, Will Shankspire.”
“One lives in hope, sir.”
“What you have learned here will cause your name to echo down through the ages. You will be famous across the land and across the world, in schools and on stages.”
“I will be eternally grateful for your giving me a job here, sir. And for letting me use your magnificent library.”
“Your fate will always be intertwined with ours, my young friend.”
Will, who was kneeling, glanced up at The Master. The old monk was lying on his back, his eyes staring up at the termites quivering like white jelly in the low beams
“How so, sir?”
“To leave your past behind and go to your bright future you must sign your name on the moon and watch it disappear.”
Will stood up and leaned so close to the prone, dying man that he smelled again the tart, otherworldly smell he’d noticed when he’d entered the room. It was the old monk’s breath. “I beg your pardon, sir? I don’t understand.”
“Sign your name on the full moon, Will.”
“Sign my name on the moon?”
The monk reached out and laid his transparent hand on Will’s own. The monk’s skin was dead cold. “You will always be here with us, as will I. It is written. I have written it. You must write on the moon before you leave here – before you can leave here. A part of you will always be here with us, as will a part of me. Neither of us shall ever truly leave. Myself in spirit, you in words and deeds. Write on the moon and watch it disappear, Will. Write on the moon and watch it disappear to make the future bright.”
Will shook his head. “I don’t understand, sir.”
“Ours is not to understand,” the old monk replied, almost smiling. “You must realise this now, Will. We cannot understand everything. We are a part of everything and that is enough. It is not our place to understand. Understanding is beyond us, as it is all the animals, all the creatures, all of creation.” The monk turned his head and as he began to cough a weird, yellow mixture, thick as custard but dotted with red globs, dripped out of his mouth and emerged from his nose to stain his filthy pillow. Spluttering, he managed to say, “I shall watch over you all. When I die, I will become the Guardian Spirit of this school, Will. So it is written, so it will come to pass.”
“Shall I call for help, Master?”
“This school is my dream,” the dying monk told him. “This is my dream you are in.”
By now Will was alarmed by the old monk’s condition. “I’m going to call Mrs Sharpe.”
“No!”
“But, my Master, sir!”
“Promise me you will write on the moon, Will, and I will give you the stars!”
Will heard himself saying, “I will, sir. I will. But please let me go for help!”
Will’s reply seemed to calm the old monk but he wouldn’t let him go and beckoned the young man closer. When Will was so near to the man’s face he felt physically sick at the smell, The Master whispered, “Take the book which is under my bed and hide it well. Hide it somewhere nobody will ever find it. Not for years.”
“The book, sir?”
As Will turned his face to look at the monk, the dying man suddenly grabbed Will with the force of ten men. In a deep, terrifying voice, he screamed, “HIDE THE BOOK!” down Will’s ear and dug his sharp, old, yellowing nails into the young man’s shoulder, breaking the skin
Will yelled out in pain and pushed the dying man away, standing stooped under the rafters as more vermillion vile slime seeped out of the old monk’s ears, nose and mouth, while his pale blue eyes remained staring impassively up at the ceiling
“Mrs Sharpe!” Will cried, throat filled with phlegm. “Mrs Sharpe!”
The yellow liquid pooled on the bed and began to drip down onto the dirty reeds and straw on the floor and, shaking, Will ran to the top of the ladder and shouted down, “Mrs Sharpe! Please come quickly!”
He ran back to the bed and was startled to see only the monk’s cowl on the threadbare sheets. There was no sign of a body – no sign of The Master at all. Puddles of yellow slime shrunk and disappeared and the horrible smell faded away with the mess. Will leaned over the bed and unlatched the window and winter rushed into the room, snow with it, sniffing out every corner of the loft
The Book.
Will crouched and looked under the bed. He saw a large, red, ledger-like tome and pulled it out, held it to his chest and crossed back to the ladder. At the foot of the steps he turned to see Mrs Sharpe standing in front of the fire with her hands buried in the front pockets of her apron. “Gone then, is he?” she asked
“He is,” nodded Will
“You’d best be doing as you were instructed to, then, young man.”
“Aye.” Will pulled his hat on and let himself out into the falling snow. It was settling so quickly he couldn’t see his own footprints but he walked out anyway, back towards the ruins, hoping, for once, he wouldn’t see anyone before he’d had a chance to hide the book
It was only when he was halfway across the white lawn, sloughing through snow, which sneaked up to his knees, that he realised all of the animals in the house had been dead calm when he’d come down the stairs and spoken to Mrs Sharpe. They’d all been standing as th
ough stuffed: breathing, staring, very still
Saturday
1
It began at twelve, on the stroke of midnight
In Dorm Three the girls slept as Gillian slowly dissolved
The steel frame of her bed seemed to fizz. The faded green duvet cover melted away into darkness. Kizzie snored, Angela dreamed and Priya muttered no, no, no.
Gillian felt nothing and soon she was gone: her clothes too, and the postcards of the kissing couple in Paris and a Helsinki Christmas market. In the laundry basket by the door her dirty clothes vanished and everything else slid down to take their place. Her shoes left only their dirt, in lines which crumbled under their own weight. Her fingerprint smudges smoothed over on the door handle and windowpanes. All traces of her evaporated, the atoms taking another shape, escaping, becoming something else
Downstairs where the school photographs hung in frames around the walls, Gillian’s image faded away. In some she was replaced, in others everyone was simply moved along. The first year she’d been there she’d been sitting cross-legged in the front row alongside Kizzie, both of them barely recognisable, both proudly sporting digital watches. In one of the later photos Gillian’s face was scarred with spots and she had her chin tipped as low as she could, desperate not to be seen, not to be photographed. From these and more, her image slowly faded away
In the staff room the name on Gillian’s books, notes and folders morphed into other names in other people’s handwriting, other fonts. In the school server her records changed, emails with her name were altered, her files reformatted. In the classrooms and library her name and initials and graffiti and notes dissolved, and a wet sock under a bush on the playing fields with her name sewn into it was eaten by a fox with naughty, glinting eyes
A table in a piazza in a small town on an island off the Italian coast was empty, the waiter standing nearby in a white shirt and white waistcoat picking his teeth with a toothpick. Behind him, inside the bar, was a rowdy party. Mopeds buzzed by. Time moved so slowly he could watch the stars come out
Fourteen years earlier, in the granite, lamp-lit streets of Aberdeen, a woman in a long raincoat and headscarf stepped into a pub, out of the lashing rain, and realised she’d come to the wrong place, the wrong pub. Instead of deciding to stay anyway and ask if she could use the telephone at the bar, she turned around immediately and went back out into the storm. She walked to the other pub, in the other street and met the man she’d been supposed to meet, her boss at the office. They would go on to have three children together, none of them Gillian
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