by Tony Telford
First published by Lodestone Books, 2017
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Text copyright: Tony Telford 2016
978 1 78535 178 5 (ebook)
ISBN: 978 1 78535 177 8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936924
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Tony Telford as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Quotations on p.81 from ‘The Moon and a Cloud’ by W.H. Davies.
Quotations on p.44 from ‘The Night-Ride’ by Kenneth Slessor.
Design: Stuart Davies
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For M, R & E
1
I spent that night under a hedge. It was too cold to sleep, so I sat propped up against my rucksack, staring out over grey patchwork fields. God it was cold. I would’ve frozen to death up there without my old woollen coat. Even the stars looked cold, like little beads of ice in a dark lake. And all the time in the distance there was that faint low rumble that you often hear at night, like some huge machine chugging away just over the horizon.
Of all the nights I slept rough, that was the longest. Everything was so still, as if the whole world was being held tight in a great big icy fist. The only animal I heard all night was a tawny owl, deep in the forest. Strix aluco, that was him. Then there was Erithacus rubecula, Turdus merula, Vulpes vulpes, Sciurus vulgaris… I knew I was probably saying the names all wrong, but I loved their strangeness on my tongue. After Latin names I tried to think of songs with ‘blue’ in the title. I dozed off after 24, ‘Blue Monday’, but woke again, shivering and coughing like mad. My coat was so stiff with frost I could hardly move my arms.
Finally, when I was starting to think the night would never end, the sky suddenly got a bit lighter and I could make out the shapes of twigs and branches. I undid the top button of my coat and peeped inside. Two big eyes were looking up at me.
‘Time to get moving, Boo.’ I undid the rest of the buttons and she sprang out onto the white grass, trembling from head to foot, her tail tucked tight over her skinny bum. Whippets weren’t made for the cold, especially tiny frail ones like her.
I got to my feet, groaning like an old lady, and hauled on the big rucksack. It felt like someone had added a couple of bricks during the night.
‘Come on, Boo. We’ll be warmer once we get moving.’ We set off along the edge of the forest, the grass crackling under my boots like that plastic straw they use for packing. Boo had become a ghost dog in the strange pink light.
Soon we came to a narrow road. I checked my compass and followed the road south for about half an hour until we reached the edge of the forest. Across the fields I could see rooftops and a church spire.
‘We’ll get something to eat there, Boo, okay?’
By the time we got to the village the sun was shining brightly, but there was no warmth in it at all. The place was called Fieldtown. Cars and vans and lorries pelted along the main road, passing within inches of the little stone cottages. Another nice place ruined by the traffic.
I bought a pack of chicken sandwiches in the village shop and sat eating them on the green. As usual, Boo had most of the chicken. Traffic was whooshing by all the time. The people in the cars looked like kids on a disappointing fairground ride.
I took out the map and checked my route for about the zillionth time. It was only, what, a month since I’d run away, but it felt more like three or four. In the first few days I’d just wandered aimlessly. I was in a bad way then. Wasn’t that much better now, to tell the truth, but at least I had a plan, a target. I was heading for the City, that humungous great labyrinth of concrete and steel down there in the south. I couldn’t believe it, actually. All my life I’d wanted to go to the City. It was like some place out of a story or a dream, and now here I was, five or six days’ walk away from it. If I could find a job there I might be able to afford somewhere to live, and then maybe I could start getting myself together again. There was no way I could stay out here in the country, anyway. It was getting colder by the day, and the roll of notes in my satchel was as thin as a cigarette.
So far, I’d done most of the journey on foot. Not very sensible, I know, but I was so scared of running out of money. I slept under hedges, in bus shelters, train stations, shop doorways. About every second day I managed to wash my hands and face in a public toilet, but I hadn’t had a shower since I left home. It was a shock when I caught sight of myself in a mirror. Seaweed hair, bony face, huge staring eyes. At least it kept the men away. Well, most of them.
I felt bad about leaving home, but I didn’t really regret it. I’d been living up in the Midlands with my Aunt Lucinda. She’s my mother’s sister. She took me in after Mum died, when I was just a toddler. My father was an alcoholic who couldn’t look after himself, let alone a young child. He disappeared not long after I went to live with Aunt Lucy and no one ever heard from him again. My grandparents are all long dead and the only other relative I know about is an uncle who emigrated to Canada or somewhere. So that left me and Aunt Lucy.
Living with Aunt Lucy was like being stranded in the middle of some play where it’s always autumn and everything’s grey and damp and hopeless. Her husband ran off with someone a couple of years after they got married and, well, that was the end of the show as far as she was concerned. I got on okay with her, though. We didn’t argue much, anyway, and she always looked after me, always did her duty. But that’s all it seemed to be for her—a duty. So when all those things started happening at school there just didn’t seem to be any reason to stay.
Even before all that stuff happened, my life at Brook Lane Secondary School wasn’t what you’d call a hoot. I was always an outsider there. Not that that was a surprise. After all, I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t have a computer or a phone. I wasn’t into movies, or fashion, or celebrities, or alcohol… The list of unticked boxes went on and on. ‘But what do you do every night?’—God knows how many times I was asked that by classmates. ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘I read, and think about things, and write stories, and listen to music, and write songs, and go for a walk…’ The questioner would nod, and smile ironically, and then their eyes would creep back to their phone or their tablet.
It’s always seemed weird to me how teenagers are so obsessed with digital media. I mean, when you’re a teenager you want to be free, don’t you. But how can you be free if half your thoughts are being fed to you by some screen?
I suppose I could’ve been like that myself if I’d had a different upbringing. When I was little, I used to pester Aunt Lucy to play games with me and read me stories, but she was always too busy, or tired, or depressed. All she really wanted to do was drink and watch TV. That’s how she got through each day, I suppose. Chat shows and cookery programmes in the morning, romantic serials in the afternoon, MGM classics at night—that television was hardly ever off. But it was always a solitary thing for her. A bottle of gin and a Paul Newman movie was all the company she needed. So, although I was living with a TV addict, I never managed to pick up the
bug myself. Instead, I did what kids used to do a couple of generations ago. I entertained myself. I did my own thing. Pretty soon I got used to making up my own games and songs and stories, and I’d resent it whenever my imaginings were crowded out by the telly. An hour stuck in front of the TV was an hour when I hadn’t been me.
By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I loathed TV. I hated the way it interfered with my thoughts and dominated everything that was going on in the room. There’s something creepy about it. Creepy and sad. Have you ever walked along a suburban street at twilight, just before everyone closes their curtains? The first thing you notice is the screens. In nearly every house there’s at least one of them, like a big, luminous shrine sitting smack bang in the middle of people’s lives, televisionising everything they do. And it’s the same everywhere. Millions of people escaping to a non-existent paradise on the screen while the real, wonderful world is slowly burning. ‘How did this happen?’ I whisper as I walk by in the dusk. ‘Why does it have to be like this?’
But I was telling you about school. Besides being a social failure, I was also a pathetic student. This was a huge mystery to my teachers. Typical conversation:
Teacher: What’s going on, Pearl?
Me: What do you mean, Sir?
Teacher: Well, you should be getting top marks in this class, but look at this—C, B, C, C. You’re barely scraping through.
Me: What difference does it make?
Teacher: It’ll make a big difference if you can’t apply for the job you want because you haven’t got the qualifications.
It always ended up with that. Employment and qualifications. ‘Is that all there is to it, then?’ I wanted to say. ‘Is that all English or History or Geography is about? Getting the right qualifications, finding a job?’
My problem, you see, is I just can’t help feeling there must be something more.
Only one person at Brook Lane would’ve known what I meant by that—Mrs Worthley. She was my English teacher, a small, melancholy lady with grey hair and one droopy eye. Dear old Mrs W. There was something different about her, something real. You always felt like she was on your side, somehow, and when she talked about books her face lit up and she seemed just like a young girl.
It’s funny, though, other people didn’t like her at all. They said she was a relic, a fruitcake. And it’s true, she could be unpredictable sometimes, but to me that just made her more interesting. Every now and then she’d have one of her Off The Record lessons, when we did stuff that wasn’t on the curriculum. One time, for instance, she brought in a box of old fountain pens, one for each of us, and got us to write a letter, poem or diary entry with them. Another time, we had to write poems in Icelandic.
But what I most remember about Mrs W is something she said to Nicky Hendricks one day when he was playing up. Nicky was a pain. He was always pushing his luck with teachers. This particular afternoon, we were supposed to be doing a mock exam, but Nicky couldn’t see the point.
‘It’s stupid,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit stupid, Miss? I mean, next thing we’ll be having a mock exam for the mock exam.’ He skimmed his notebook across the desk and onto the floor, then looked at Mrs Worthley to see how she’d react. She took no notice, so he tried something else. ‘Miss,’ he said in a whining little schoolboy voice, ‘Miss, when you went to teachers’ school did you have to, like, march up and down a lot?’
‘No, Nicky,’ said Mrs Worthley. ‘We didn’t do any marching.’
‘Oh come on, Miss,’ he went on. ‘I bet you did. And I bet you all had to chant as you were marching—“Vee vill make education BORING! Vee vill make education BORING!”’ The whole class cracked up, especially all the girls who fancied him, so of course he kept doing it. ‘Vee vill make education BOR-ING!’
Mrs Worthley just stood there watching us with one arm cradled in the other, waiting for the laughter to die down. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet I only just caught the words. ‘Do you think this is about education, Nicky?’
One or two people laughed uneasily, then a few more joined in, and then there was a sort of rolling murmur of appreciation, as if Nicky had been caught out believing in some truly pathetic delusion. It was the first time I’d seen him stuck for a comeback line. I kept watching Mrs Worthley expecting her to say something else, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something. But then she seemed to change her mind and just turned back to the whiteboard.
All afternoon I kept thinking about what she’d said. Not about education—was that what she really thought? More importantly, was it true? It was as if, just for a second, someone had lifted the corner of a curtain and given me a tiny glimpse of what was behind. Trouble was, the glimpse didn’t make any sense. If school wasn’t about education, what was it about?
One day not long after that, I was browsing through a book about the ancient Greeks in the school resource centre. I’ve always been fascinated by the Greeks, especially their myths. At the top of one page there was a quote from some Greek philosopher. Just five simple words: ‘Only the educated are free.’ I stopped reading and looked around at the resource centre. Until recently, this place had been called a library. Now, most of the books had been sold off and the few remaining reference works cowered in one corner like the survivors of some tribe on a reservation. In place of the old wooden bookshelves there were just rows of computer screens. I looked at the people sitting in front of the screens—watched them as they flicked between webpages and scrolled through endless content. Somehow they seemed different in the presence of the screens. More ordinary. More…passive. As if someone had figured out a way to subdue them. Once again I remembered what Mrs Worthley had said to Nicky. Was that what all this was about, then, all these power-point lessons and targets and endless exams—to keep us in line, to plant the right thoughts in our heads …
God. Sometimes I thought I was going mad…and sometimes I felt like I was waking up from a long sleep.
Needless to say, I never mentioned any of this to my classmates. What was the point? They were too busy. And too content. That was what really gave me the creeps—their contentment. Sure, they had the usual teen hang-ups, family problems, et cetera, but basically they were satisfied with the kind of life they were living. They never seemed to stop and think that it could all be different. To me, their contentment was like a prison. A prison with invisible walls. I’d given up trying to talk to them years ago. Not that they were bothered about that. I was nothing to them. A nobody. A phantom in the shadows.
I’d lived my phantom life for so long it was hard to believe that anything would ever change. But it did. Within the space of just a few weeks, everything changed.
It was the start of Year 13, my last year at school. There was this guy in the same year, a tall, skinny, pale guy with long black hair and dark green eyes. His name was Bernard O’Hare. He was older than the rest of us, so I guess he must have been kept back once or twice, which was strange because everyone said he was really smart, maybe even a genius. He wasn’t in any of my classes, but I often saw him around the school. There was something unsettling about him, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. He always wore the same black overcoat, whatever the weather, and when he passed by it was like the sun had gone behind a cloud. Everyone seemed wary of him, even the teachers. And there were all these stories about him, especially about this robot he was supposed to have built. I was always hearing about the robot. There was one story about a chess game that went on all day and all night, O’Hare versus the robot. In the end, as the sun was coming up the next morning, O’Hare realized he was going to lose. In a sudden rage, he picked up the robot and hurled it down the stairs, smashing it into a thousand pieces. When he saw what he’d done to his own creation, he nearly went out of his mind. Someone said he punished himself by doing terrible things to his body. Someone else said he tried to kill himself. But no one seemed to know for sure what had happened, or even if any of this was really true.
One day in History, I heard Becky Straw telling her friends about how Bernard O’Hare roamed the streets at night, looking for stray dogs to experiment on.
Nicky Hendricks knew all about it. ‘Yeah, what he does is, he saws off the top of the dog’s skull, right, then he bungs in the old neural implant, and then he just glues the skull back on, and that’s it, he’s ready to boogie. ’Course, his phone’s got a Wi-Fi connection to the implant, and there’s all these cool icons on the screen—you know, “Bark”, “Wag your tail”, “Play the piano”. It’s just like using a remote.’
‘You’re so full of it, Nicky,’ said Catherine Scott. But some of the other girls seemed to take this stuff quite seriously. Someone even said that O’Hare himself had a ‘neural implant’.
I didn’t really believe any of these stories, but I could understand why people kept telling them. Creepiness leaked out of O’Hare like radiation from a nuclear reactor.
The weird things that I mentioned started one lunchtime, when I was sitting on my favourite bench in the little garden behind the music department. Like I said, this was early on in Year 13. I always had lunch in that garden. It was sheltered from the wind and no one else seemed to know about it. I’d just finished lunch and was settling down to read my book when I became aware that someone was watching me. It was Bernard O’Hare. He was standing by the corner of the building, just staring at me. I pretended not to notice and continued reading, and when I looked up a few minutes later he was gone.
But the next day I saw him watching me again. I was waiting outside a classroom and there he was, standing nearby, just staring at me. From then on it happened nearly every day. I’d be walking between lessons, or sitting on my bench in the garden, or buying lunch at the canteen, and suddenly I’d become aware of those green eyes fixed on me. Once or twice I pulled a face at him but it didn’t make any difference at all, he just kept staring. I couldn’t understand it. If he fancied me, why didn’t he smile or try to talk to me? Not that I would have been interested, of course. He was quite good-looking, in a way, but he always gave me the creeps.
