The Standing Water

by David Castleton

  Davis turned his face back to his jars, the trembling tongs dipped into one, captured a shrimp.

  ‘You mark my words,’ the voice quivered out, ‘with the likes of Dennis Stubbs and Richard Johnson and young Mr Browning here, who shoved his brother off a bridge …’

  I glanced at Jonathon – his Cain’s mark stood out brightly in the dusky store.

  ‘Lads like that need discipline, good regular thrashings! Otherwise, they’ll be running riot! Not one he’s given out, not one …’

  And so the old voice chuntered until our bags were plonked by the wrinkled hands on the counter.

  ‘You mark my words –’ the ancient gaze again held us ‘– some parents are far from happy about what’s going on at that school. Had your mum in here, young Browning, complaining about Mr Stone’s laxity. It’s all very well making cards and drawing pretty pictures and telling kids strange facts that are too big for their little minds. But what happens when they’ve grown up and had no discipline? What happens when they start mugging old ladies?’

  The withered palm reached out; we placed our ten pence pieces on its papery skin.

  ‘What would the likes of Mr Stone do then? It’s his sort that are setting this country on the road to ruin! Plenty of people here can’t wait for Mr Weirton to come back! Good old Mr Weirton, I do hope he recovers. Last of a dying breed –’ Davis shook his head ‘– last of a dying breed.’

  ‘Not one,’ Davis murmured as we left, eager to swap the sepulchral air of his store for the smoke and dunghill scent of outside, ‘not a single one to brighten up me day …’

  Leaving the shop, we passed the Old School, pitched in some sweets for the poor kids, if indeed those kids were there. Then, stuffing our mouths with candies, we made for our homes. We supposed there was no point in trudging up to Marcus’s pond to throw any to him. I got back to my house, watched some cartoons. A little later, Dad came home and we were all soon seated round the kitchen table. Davis was right about our parents being unhappy with Stone.

  ‘That Mr Stone’s useless! Kids need discipline!’ Mum said. ‘Especially young lads. Dread to think how this country would be if the likes of Mr Stone had their way.’

  ‘Like it’s becoming now!’ My father glanced darkly around our chomping table. ‘Lazy, idle loafers on the dole, and even a lot who’ve got jobs, instead of being grateful, are going on strike for more tea breaks or whatever! Kids sniffing glue and mugging old ladies and dyeing their hair all the outlandish colours under the sun! The bloody bleeding hearts letting all these niggers and Pakis and God knows what flood into our cities! If you want a vision of the future, look at all the bad things now and times them by a hundred! That’s what it’ll be like if the bloody liberals and socialists have their way! This damned miners’ strike, Scargil’s Red Guard – it’s just the start, just the start!’

  ‘An age is ending.’ Mum shook her head. ‘If Mr Weirton doesn’t come back, we won’t find another like him. Even in Emberfield, it seems, we can’t keep the modern world at bay – more’s the pity!’

  Chapter Fifty

  As the days went by, we heard little about Weirton. He was in hospital in Goldhill, and – apart from a note he sent to thank the school for his card – he had little communication with anyone in Emberfield. Then somebody said they’d bumped into him in Goldhill – he was out of hospital, not looking too bad, he’d seemed affable enough, but had dodged any questions about what was wrong with him. Nevertheless, certain words were tossed around our part of Emberfield – ‘heart attack’, ‘nervous breakdown’. I knew a heart attack was when something very bad happened to the heart – I’d seen people having them on TV, writhing and bucking on the ground. I was amazed Weirton could have survived such a thing, even if Marcus hadn’t been in the pond. As for a ‘nervous breakdown’ – what was that? Was it when someone got very anxious because their car stopped working? OK, Weirton liked his car a lot, but why would a breakdown be such a problem? Couldn’t he have just gone to a garage?

  Things plodded on as our wet spring dragged itself towards summer. Stone went on teaching our class, we all got better at our work, and still there came no yanks into the air, no palms pounding backsides. There was less fighting among the kids too though, of course, it didn’t stop completely. The parents and Davis went on complaining about Stone, went on longing for the return of the headmaster, but the sprightly hope that had earlier sung in their voices had been swapped for laments about the good old days of Mr Weirton that they feared were vanishing. In fact, things got so steady under Stone life became almost dull. I didn’t miss Weirton, but it was strange to see the days happily trickle by with no eruptions, no reverberating yells, no shuddering build-ups to explosive wallopings. Our cheerful monotony was broken when a computer appeared in the school. Stone set the thing up in the school’s small library, and a queue of kids formed outside – hushed, faces lit with awe – waiting to be allowed to lay eyes on, to touch even, that incredible device. But Jonathon and I now knew there was no need to steal it, and our robot was simply left to rust under its shroud in Jonathon’s shed. In fact, there was no need for any of Jonathon’s inventions, no need for any ark as – though, of course, it rained often – heaven wasn’t pounding all its fury on us. Jonathon mostly contented himself with looking through his encyclopaedia, with reading the books on science Stone ordered through the school and lent to him.

  Most excitement, indeed, came from outside Emberfield. My dad at our table, Jonathon’s father in his armchair would wave their fists, shout out words like ‘bloody leftie miners, blasted strike, hang the bastard leaders, unions, banned’. In his shop, Davis spoke of ‘prison, the cat, bringing in the bloody army’. The papers in Davis’s store – which I could read so much better by now – talked of ‘communists’ and ‘subversives’. I didn’t know what communists and subversives were, but from what the papers said I thought they must be very bad. On telly, policemen marched in ranks like a big army – many even had shields, like those of knights, though they were made from plastic not metal. They faced mobs of what my father called ‘strikers’ – burly men who wore jeans and rough shirts rather than the suits and ties of my dad and Weirton. I hadn’t known there could be so many police in the world – we only saw them wandering in twos round Emberfield. But there they were – pushing back the strikers with their shields, waving long sticks called truncheons, like bigger and smoother versions of the clubs Stubbs’s gang had beaten me with. My father cheered as those truncheons smashed down on strikers, as the TV showed their shocked bloody faces. Sometimes the police chased strikers on horseback – again looking like knights of old, wielding their truncheons like swords. Dad would shake his fist, yell to urge those hooves on.

  ‘Go on, get that lefty bastard! Crack his bloody commie skull for him!’

  As the strikers stumbled, were trampled by those mounts, Mum would say, ‘Remember the children! Mind your language!’

  But as my father roared in triumph, he barely noticed her; he continued to shout as the voice from the telly went on quavering over its strange round vowels.

  May arrived and we had more news about Weirton. It was news that caused wide grins to break over Jonathon’s face and mine; news that caused the adults to scowl, more bitterness to sound in their complaints, that even caused some to say they felt ‘let down by’ the headmaster.

  ‘Maybe this blasted modern world has even infected our good old Mr Weirton!’ Dad said, giving his head a shake at our kitchen table.

  Not only had we found out Weirton wouldn’t come back to the school, we’d also discovered the teacher would be moving far away – to the north-west of Scotland. He’d bought a cottage and tiny farm – up a mountain, some said, on a remote island, said others. My grin had inched higher as I’d pictured the vast stretches of land between Emberfield and the headmaster’s new home – the spreading wastes of plain, hill and mountain, the barriers of jagged peaks, wide lakes and huge rivers. I was sure it would take weeks to cross such a wilde
rness. I also smiled when I thought how cold Weirton would be in his cottage so far north, when I thought of the year-round ice and snowy blasts he’d have to contend with. But that was not all the news. Weirton – and this had really got lips tutting, tongues clicking – and his wife were getting divorced. They’d sold their house, split the money; the wife and son would move into a flat in Goldhill.

  ‘And I always thought Mr Weirton was a bastion of traditional values!’ Dad shook his head again as we went on munching. ‘It’s like some absurd, irresponsible hippy dream – drop out, get a bit of land, flee your duties!’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘He’ll be dancing naked round standing stones next!’

  I didn’t know what standing stones were, but such an image of Weirton summoned so much laughter I almost sprayed my family with the food I was chewing.

  I was in Davis’s store when the ancient shopkeeper leant over his counter, murmured to a customer, ‘Always thought there was something not quite right about our Mr Weirton. He upheld discipline pretty well; I’ll give him that, but some other things …’

  With shakes and shuffles, the shivering body inched itself further across the counter before Davis whispered, ‘Had a chequered past, you know, gallivanting around the world. And when he started fishing in that pond … just confirms what I’d always said about him not being quite all there. And now what do we have? Another fatherless child! Wouldn’t surprise me if in seven or eight years’ time that lad’s running wild, mugging old ladies! I’d like to see how those rascals would turn out –’ the old head nodded at Jonathon and me, ‘– without a father’s discipline!’

  Weirton’s resignation meant the school needed a new head. Perkins and Stone both went for the job. The parents were all praying Stone wouldn’t get the post. In Davis’s shop, in the houses of Emberfield, also – I guessed – in the foul-smelling pub, there were rants and laments about Stone’s ‘lack of discipline’, about how ‘the school would descend into chaos with that joker in charge’. But, in the end, it was Stone who got it. (And, even better, it was confirmed he’d go on teaching our class when we became upper juniors.) The rumour was the vicar had put in a positive word for him – something I found strange considering Stone’s sighs and shooting eyebrows whenever we sang our sacred songs.

  A joyous summer passed. With no Weirton to return to, we could really enjoy those endless weeks which, nevertheless, didn’t seem quite as endless as the previous year’s. But still we had sunny days, blue skies scattered with fluffs of cloud. The holidays ended, and Darren, the brother and all their year started at the Big School. They were surprised to find no one’s head was plunged into a lavatory. Darren even tried the infamous cream cakes, and – rather than spending a week locked in the loo – suffered little more than mild indigestion. As for kids getting lost and wandering for days in the Big School’s vast knot of corridors, nobody seemed to lose their way for much more than one hour.

  Quite a few of our own myths also disappeared. Maybe a couple of weeks after the new term started, Jonathon and I were walking past the Old School. Like always, it had its high foreboding windows with their spikes of blackened glass, its cracked flagstones and grassy tufts in the yard. But that yard was full of men – men with loud voices, in rough jeans and overalls. With no apparent fear, they strode about, called to each other in the school’s dread enclosure, as if it was the most natural thing to march beyond those forbidden walls and shout and linger in that playground, which until then had been the territory of spooks. Over the next days, things got even worse. Showing no terror of the ghostly teacher and her cane, they actually entered the school building. They knocked out the shards in the windows, and even started ripping objects from the inside. A pile of dusty, ancient-looking chairs and desks was one day in the yard. A couple of days later, there was a mountain of tiny toilets, loo seats, lavatory doors and old-fashioned tanks with chains. We soon saw heaps of torn-out blackboards, rotting beams and rafters. Jonathon and I watched all this goggle-eyed. I’d no idea what would happen to the poor kids and their teacher. Would they simply float away over the fields, try to find another school to haunt? Why didn’t the teacher catch one of the men, give him a good whacking with her see-through cane? But those men just went on ripping stuff out and shifting it away then it was all churning cement mixers and ladders and paintbrushes and new windows being put in. The Old School was turned into a house called – very imaginatively – ‘The Old School’. A couple moved in. As far as I knew, neither had their sleep disturbed by enraged teachers, wailing kids.

  There was also what happened with Marcus. His pond had nearly dried up in the summer, but the autumn showers had given it back some strength. Around the time school restarted, its dark waters would have probably covered the floor of my bedroom. Despite Weirton’s escape from the pond, Jonathon and I still sometimes wondered if Marcus might be in there. Perhaps Weirton had somehow slipped out of his clasp. And we hadn’t seen the teacher – it was possible his body bore gouges where teeth had ripped his flesh, that that body was streaked by savage maul-marks. But then – one early October afternoon – we saw a sight that made my jaw plummet, my heart hammer. A man, in overalls and long wellies, was standing – was actually daring to stand – right in the middle of the pool. Though the man was tall, and Marcus’s waters were diminished, I was shocked those waters only came up to his knees. The man was dangling some kind of measuring device into the pond. We went on gawping as he stood there for maybe two minutes before striding out, utterly unharmed. The next day, walking to school, we saw a strange machine parked on the pond’s shore – some sort of engine growled and thumped, a hose went into the pool, a hose that led to a lorry that looked like a petrol tanker. As that engine hummed and thudded, as it shivered and shook, my mouth fell open, my eyes bulged. The water was going down fast – as if that hose was a straw some greedy kid was sucking and the pond a glass of drink. More pupils joined us, staring as the last of Marcus’s waters disappeared, the hose even making a noise like a child slurping up his last bits of cola. All that was left was a crater of sludge. My heart banged; my lips wobbled; cold prickles of disbelief ran over my skin.

  ‘But what’s happened to Marcus?’ I stammered.

  ‘Well, if he was ever in that pond, he must be in that lorry now.’ Stubbs nodded towards the tanker.

  The following day, I watched an even more incredible event. A digger – all massive wheels, roaring engine, shuddering steel limbs – scooped out all of Marcus’s mud. With just a few lunges of its shovel, it then went beyond Marcus’s crater, carving so huge a trench that – in a matter of minutes – it was impossible to see where his pond had lain. Over the next days, as men strode and shouted, as machines growled and puffed, that trench was filled with rubble, sealed with smooth tarmac, swiftly becoming a road. Those men and machines were soon crawling over the field beyond, and, during the next year, houses – their red brick shinier, more modern than that of our homes – gradually grew from the earth. But, a couple of weeks after we’d watched Marcus’s pond drained and gouged, we had some news about that boy. The brother knew someone who played football for the Big School. His team had played another school from far, far away. And, apparently, on that side had been a lad called Marcus Jones.

  ‘Really!’ I said, in the Brownings’ lounge. ‘Are you sure it was him? Our Marcus!?’

  ‘Dunno.’ The brother shrugged, raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his Cain’s mark. ‘But there can’t be too many boys around called Marcus Jones.’

  ‘Did your mate say how he looked?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I did ask him. Did sound a bit like Marcus – freckles, dark hair, but the lad didn’t say much more than that really.’

  ‘If that was Marcus’ – Jonathon spoke, nodded slowly – ‘that means he was never ever in the pond!’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, my lips starting to quiver, my heart starting to bash. ‘We know there’s no Drummer Boy, no witch’s hand, no Lucy. There were probably no ghostly kids in the sch
ool, no Marcus in his pond. Maybe that also means that on the way to Salton there are no sleeping Scots, Knights Templars’ curses, Henry VIII …’

  ‘What!?’ said the brother. ‘You don’t still believe in all that stuff, do you? I could maybe understand believing in Marcus and the spooks in the Old School, but not in all that!’

  He lurched up from the – still forbidden – sofa. Face crinkled in a sneer, he strode out of the room.

  Many other things changed as that term went on. It sometimes seemed every week brought new revelations that – like swinging hammers – cracked, hacked holes in our old world. This even happened with the most sacred of all possible things, our religion. With Stone in charge, the songs we sang in assembly altered. We roared out less hymns, Stone preferring folk and country tunes, and those hymns we did sing were more upbeat than the dirges we’d rumbled through under Weirton. Perkins struggled at the piano, plinking those fast merry notes, trying to keep up with the cheery swell of our words. As for me, I have to say I missed the gloomy old hymns: the melancholy soaring of the kids’ voices, Weirton’s baritone shuddering beneath, Perkins bashing out her heavy chords. The new songs, though fun, seemed to have something missing: they lacked a vague yet deep connection the others had had – a connection that echoed from the dark heart of all things, that summed up all the suffering in our world.

  Despite our musical disagreements, I’d never – of course – have swapped Stone for Weirton. Even the vicar’s lessons changed under him – something that, at first, puzzled many of us greatly.

  ‘Now you’re a little older,’ the vicar said, standing at the front of our class as Stone sat at the side, ‘there’s something I need to tell you about those wonderful old stories we were looking at last year from Genesis.’