‘Don’t!’ Stubbs hissed, cunningly casting himself as the victim. Next to Dennis, Richard Johnson smirked. We ploughed on through the song’s murky verses.
‘It’s not by the works of righteousness
Which our hands have done
But we are saved by our father’s grace
Abounding through his son’
Stubbs was now thrusting his flattened hand at Jonathon; urging Richard to do the same to me. Johnson tried it – I turned, drove a jab into his gut. His shock spluttered out of him, but was drowned by the swell of the chorus, by Perkins plonking her piano with renewed energy for the hymn’s last spurt.
‘But by the mercy of our God
All our hopes begin
And by the water and the blood
Our souls are washed from sin’
On the downward flow of the last syllable, the children’s voices dwindled, as did Weirton’s thundering baritone. Perkins gave a few lacklustre plinks as the song faded.
‘Sit down children!’ Weirton said.
Skirts, shoes, trousers shuffled in a slow collapse towards the floor. When the hall was quiet, Weirton again started to pace. Now there was no competition from the children’s chatter: the only sound was the rhythmic striking of his heels. His face scrunched, twitched; the smile of earlier was gone, replaced by a frown as Weirton concentrated, as his colour began to deepen. The cadence of those black-shod feet and the hall’s humid air were lulling me into an uneasy trance. Weirton swivelled, flung out his finger, thrust the huge face at us. In a shudder, I jerked from my daze, as did many of the kids around me.
‘I tell you and tell you things till I’m blue in the face!’ The finger waved, the voice bellowed, the face – rather than blue – was a definite red. ‘You should all know what I’m talking about – that accursed pond outside the school!’
The arm propelled its pointing finger in Marcus’s direction.
‘How many times have I told you not to go near that accursed pond!?’
My heart thudded; leaping with each beat higher into my throat. Accursed – what did that mean? Under the gathering cloud of Weirton’s wrath, as I started to tremble, I tried to work it out. I guessed it meant cursed – as in bad magic, wicked enchantments. Weirton was warning us against Marcus. But had he seen us the day before – how could he have?
‘What will I say to your parents!?’ Weirton leaned over the rows; his fist shook; it swooped down, bashed his thigh. ‘When they’re fishing your limp bodies from that pond after you’ve drowned or hauling you dead from its sinking mud!?’
There was another lull as Weirton let his yells echo. The teacher pulled a hankie from his pocket, wiped fat drops of sweat from his face. I cursed Stubbs for leading us astray. My heart thudded harder. Had Weirton really spied us? Would he be leaping into our rows, hauling up those responsible, flexing his right hand?
‘Oh yes!’ The fist waved again as more sweat ran. ‘Mr Davis told me yesterday that twice – twice! – last week he spotted youngsters gathered around there! He wasn’t close enough to recognise any of them, but if he had – I think you all know what the consequences would have been! Whatever this namby-pamby modern world might say, I think you know how I would have responded!’
We knew. But it wasn’t us Davis had seen. My breath surged out with a relief so loud I feared Weirton would hear. The vast eyes flicked towards me, but then they went on panning over our rows. Weirton yelled some more about the deadly folly of provoking Marcus.
‘It would be easy enough for that pond to be the death of any one of you! One little slip or stumble and you could be under those dark waters! Believe me, I know! One slip and you could be drowning in that filthy pool!’
Weirton had to be talking about how Marcus had met his end! What more did he know about it?
‘So, for heaven’s sake!’ the headmaster shouted. ‘Stay away from there!’
Weirton tugged out his hankie again, mopped his face. His breath was somewhat jerky, but he soon had it under control. The face faded from red back to pink; the anger left it as the lips twitched into a smile.
‘Yes, children, please be careful, we don’t want any tragedies …’
A tragedy, I reminded myself, was when something very bad or sad happened.
‘Or, should I say any more tragedies? Children, in a moment, I’m going to introduce you to a … let’s say a rather odd special guest, a most unusual classmate. I’d like you to all close your eyes. Make sure they’re gripped tightly. I really wouldn’t advise you to let me see your eyes open.’
Weirton scanned our seated lines. I screwed my eyes up. A few seconds went by, and I heard his shoes tap as he strode – it seemed – away from us and towards the staff area. The shoes sounded slower coming back, and there was a trundling noise too, like some clumsy contraption being wheeled. There was also an odd clacking, like dry sticks clattering against each other. The trundling stopped and the clacking subsided. After another minute, the voice rumbled.
‘Children, you may now open your eyes.’
I sucked in breath, gawped at the front. I blinked, struggling to take in what I saw. I shook my head, blinked again – the sight wouldn’t go away. Weirton had once more started striding. Like normal, his feet swivelled him round when he reached each wall. I just gazed at the strange apparition, which refused to disappear. At the front, looking out over the cross-legged rows, was a skeleton. The size of the school’s biggest boys and girls, it hung from a metal frame. Its bones were yellow-white; its skull was fixed in a gormless grinning gape. Red and blue lines ran up its arms and down its legs. I went on staring – gazing at the gruesomely long fingers and toes, the awful emptiness of the eye sockets.
Wrenching my gaze away, I glanced around. Next to me, Jonathon stared with huge eyes, his breath jerking in little gasps. I turned, looked at the other kids. Their jaws hung; their eyes bulged. Just a few older pupils seemed less surprised, but they still wagged their faces as if waking from a bad dream and trying to shake it away. Weirton just continued his march forward and back, head tilted down, a smile playing on his lips as our silence gave way to an astonished babble. Weirton let it swell as kids asked each other whose those bones could be, where the ghost was. Weirton halted his walk, twisted his body to face us, let his voice rumble.
‘Children, I’m sure you have all noticed the somewhat extraordinary student who has joined our assembly!’
Weirton grinned; a number of pupils let their lips quiver into smiles.
‘Yes, I’m sure most of you are surprised to see her.’
So – it was a she!
‘Children, I would like to introduce you to – Lucy! Now, several years ago, Lucy was a pupil at this school, just like you all are today.’
She’d been one of us! Now I thought about it, I’d heard vague legends of the body of a girl kept in the darkest part of the school’s store cupboard. And here, revealed before us, was the proof.
‘You may wonder,’ Weirton went on, ‘how poor Lucy ended up in this sad condition. Well, let me tell you a few things about her.’
Weirton allowed a lull. Within me, my heart echoed. What could have turned Lucy from being like the girls sitting around me – clothed in flesh and garments – into that rickety figure? Weirton let his pause stretch.
‘Yes.’ He finally broke it. ‘I’m afraid I must tell you Lucy was a very bad girl, wasn’t she Mrs Perkins?’
‘Ooh, yes, very bad,’ Perkins piped up from the piano.
‘She was naughty!’ Weirton’s voice started to boom. ‘Quarrelled with the other children, never concentrated in class, wouldn’t do her work. And this was the result!’
His body swung – the arm, capped with its pointing finger, thrust at Lucy.
‘Yes, children – look at her! Look and remember her well! This is the fate that awaits the naughty, the disobedient, the idle!’
My heart thudded on – could such a destiny be in store for me? My mind scrabbled to understand. How could insolence o
r laziness lead to … that!? I didn’t know, but the grim evidence before us was undeniable.
‘Children, please don’t let any of you join Lucy in her … her state! Please listen to me and your teachers and parents, and hopefully you will all grow up to be healthy happy adults.’
But, I wondered, even if Lucy had died because of her many sins, why would Weirton and the school keep the body? Wouldn’t her parents want to bury it in the spooky graveyard on the road to Goldhill or in the even eerier one around the church at Salton? Would Weirton even be allowed to store it in his cupboard? A candle of doubt was sparked in my mind – a light which was soon snuffed by Weirton.
‘Lucy’s parents,’ he said, ‘asked the school to keep her body – and to show it occasionally to the pupils as a warning: a warning to others tempted to follow Lucy’s path! Look at it children – it could soon be you!’
I’d heard a legend that without a Christian burial you couldn’t enter Heaven. All our parts had to be preserved so God could raise us up on the Last Day. I couldn’t imagine Lucy clanking to Heaven’s shining gate with just her bones. And how had they got rid of all her flesh? I thought of the pipes and vats and ovens of the kitchen.
‘So remember children,’ Weirton said, ‘if you don’t want to end up like Lucy, please, please listen to us, accept our guidance, learn from our punishments! Now, as well as being a warning to us all, poor Lucy’s skeleton has another use. You will notice some marks have been painted upon it.’
So those lines weren’t natural, weren’t daubed by God on our bones.
‘Do you ever think,’ Weirton said, ‘about how your body works? About how God ingeniously designed it – like a skilled craftsman putting together a machine? I’m going to use Lucy to tell you some facts about how the body functions. So maybe Lucy’s poor misguided life will have some purpose after all, even if that purpose has been achieved after her death.’
Lucy grinned in grim assent, but I couldn’t help feeling her body should have been laid in one of our creepy cemeteries – even if she’d been a bad girl, wasn’t her current use against God’s teachings? Wasn’t Weirton afraid of her ghost? On the other hand, a jolt of intrigue leapt from my stomach, jerked me to attention. We could learn something – at last, some real knowledge rather than the dreary drift of days we usually endured. Skin tingling with guilt, begging forgiveness from Lucy’s spirit, I leant forward, eager to hear Weirton.
‘See these red stripes?’ Weirton’s hand traced their progress across Lucy’s bones. ‘They’re called arteries. Arteries are tubes that carry blood towards the heart, which would be about here.’
Weirton poked his finger between two of Lucy’s ribs then thrust it into where her evil heart would have sat.
‘The heart is a big pump. It pumps blood all around the body: from the brain here’ – Weirton’s knuckles rapped the skull – ‘to the tips of the toes.’ Weirton’s finger pointed to the spookily long toe bones. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’
A few shy heads nodded.
‘Yes, God’s handiwork is truly amazing. That’s why we should respect the bodies He’s given us. Anyway, as I said, these red arteries, they carry the blood towards the heart. You see, the blood’s very tired after its long journey around the body so the heart pumps fresh oxygen into it, which is drawn in by the lungs here.’ Weirton cupped his hands around Lucy’s ribcage. ‘All the body needs it, especially the brain – that’s why you feel panic if, for example, you’re under the water in the swimming pool too long. Now, your heart is always working, and your heartbeat – that’s the movement your heart makes when it’s working as a pump.’
I’d had no idea all this stuff went on inside. I shuffled on my crossed legs forward a few inches – keen to snaffle any more scraps of learning despite my banging heart, despite my shivering fears of Lucy’s vengeful ghost, of God’s anger at how we were using her body.
‘You only notice your heartbeat sometimes – maybe if you’ve been running fast or perhaps when you’re nervous you might get a walloping – but, in reality, it’s constantly working away. Now, these blue lines’ – Weirton again used his fingers to trace them – ‘they’re called veins and they take blood away from the heart …’
Weirton went on – even saying how the blood took food around the body to keep it healthy and stop it falling to bits. I had an image of bow-tied blood cells bearing delicious meals on silver plates. He said the body was like a house – you had to keep fixing it up. That’s why both old people and old houses looked so rundown. But soon he was back onto the subject of Lucy.
‘… and so children, look at her – if you are not good, it might soon be you up here, dangling alongside Lucy as I point out arteries and veins. I can think of a few of you who would make good specimens!’
Weirton’s eyes roamed over the rows – they flickered for a couple of seconds over me, rested longer on Jonathon’s brother and Stubbs. Each of those boys got a stare – as if Weirton were stripping away skin, flesh, clothes, gauging the bones beneath.
‘Yes,’ Weirton said, ‘perhaps Lucy would like a little boy to keep her company in that cold dark cupboard! Think on now and let poor Lucy be a lesson to you all!’
A thought echoed through my mind. First Lucy, then Marcus! Lucy had probably gone first as Marcus had only disappeared last summer and the legends of Lucy had been around for a while. But someone – or something – seemed to be picking us kids off, pouncing from deep shadows to snatch a child and carry them away who knew where, but at least out of this life. Who could that person – or presence – take next? I watched Weirton as he smiled in his dark suit next to Lucy.
We once more scrambled to our feet, again gripping our hymnbooks – the ancient cover of mine flaking in my hands. Who knew how old it was – maybe as aged as the Bible itself? We thundered out another – resoundingly miserable – hymn, mumbled a prayer thanking God for his great mercy, and were soon plodding out of the hall to our classes.
Chapter Four
The rest of the day dragged by – the tedium of our lessons with Perkins only enlivened by the occasional eruption from Weirton, who taught next door. In the breaks, all the kids were chattering about Lucy – who she could have been, who remembered her, how she might have met her end, who’d seen her ghost. Stubbs started tottering around the playground in a stiff walk, being Lucy, clattering into other kids, mouth fixed in a grin as he mimicked her skull’s gape. He got a few guilty giggles and smirks, and Richard Johnson and some daft infants joined with him in his rigid staggers, but most of the kids disapproved – Helen Jacobs saying you shouldn’t make fun of the dead because it wasn’t very nice and you might end up haunted by their ghosts. Stubbs just clacked and grinned at her.
Out in the playground, no one had any doubts about Lucy, but back in the classroom – in the dull quiet of those ticking hours – I did wonder. There were moments when I couldn’t be convinced it was a real skeleton – maybe Weirton had sculpted it from from wood or clay, painted it white just to scare us. But then I thought it would be very bad if a teacher – especially a headmaster – lied so I supposed he must have shown us a real girl’s remains. I couldn’t shake the notion it was sinful to keep them in the school, couldn’t help worrying over how Lucy and Marcus had died. Weirton had to know something about it – the way he’d warned us about Marcus with such certainty, the grim knowledge he obviously had about how Lucy’s bad behaviour had led to her demise. What else skulked in Lucy’s cupboard; if such a fate was due to being naughty, who might be the next to share it? Just last week Stubbs had been clobbered twice; over the years Jonathon’s brother and Darren Hill had copped some whackings so legendary they were permanent parts of our whispered folklore. Surely those lads couldn’t be far off Lucy’s destiny. And, now I thought about it, Marcus had had his share of thrashings too.
The last lesson with Perkins dragged on, but eventually the clock ticked its slow minutes down, and the school day ended. Jonathon and I stepped thankfully into drizzly freedom, i
nto the welcome scent of smoke, manure and mud that flavoured Emberfield’s air. We scooted nervously past Marcus’s pond, turned on the pub’s sour-smelling corner. We walked a little way along our patch of town’s main street and when we got to one house, we reached our hands up and pushed the middle of its wooden door. It opened; a bell clanged. Inside was a shop, with something strangely dusky and death-like about it. It was cool, quiet, smelling of old meat and damp paper. Little light came through the thick high windows, but the odd beam shone – rays in which dust solemnly drifted. At Mr Weirton’s insistence, we’d all studied the Egyptians, and somehow the place reminded me of one of their tombs – the silence, the chill walls. The stocks of food and other items were like the provisions that ancient people had given to their dead for their last journeys. Maybe the sepulchral atmosphere also had to do with the shop’s owner. He’d dodged the grave for long enough. He looked up now as we came in – his face was dry, crinkled like old parchment; his sparse white hair flopped; his jowls drooped; flaps of skin hung on his neck. We walked from the door and stretched our hands up to the counter: a counter thickly carpeted with folded newspapers. I looked at their columns of tiny print, and wondered how many weeks it would take to decipher such documents. Just the bigger words at the top were easier – Te-le-graph, Tele-graph, Ma-il, Mail, Mail, Da-ily, Daily. Just the occasional one said ‘Sun’, ‘Ex-press’ or ‘Times’. I tried the smaller letters, but as I was engaged in this complex decoding, the storekeeper leaned across his counter and looked down at us. His jowls dangled disapprovingly.
‘Yes, boys?’
‘Two ten-penny mixtures, Mr Davis!’ I blurted.
‘Yeah,’ Jonathon sang, ‘two ten-penny mixtures for me too!’
‘Didn’t your mothers teach you any manners?’ The jowls and white hair twitched. ‘What do you say?’
The Standing Water Page 3
