by Wesley Stace
He knew.
“Because you can’t become great at anything unless people like you. And that is the problem, Joe, your problem. It hurts me to tell you this, and God knows it must be my fault somehow. This is your problem — and I tell you this because I love you.” Her voice was measured and took on the air of a valediction. “With you, there is nothing there, no personality, absolutely nothing. I’m sorry. And I don’t think it can come, because it simply isn’t within you, because there is none of the world in you. The technique is fine, but technique will get you nowhere if they can see right through you. You are not believable. You are not interesting. There’s nothing there.” She added, although it wasn’t an afterthought: “It’s not a bad gimmick. You should talk only through the boy. Let him take over entirely. He’s the interesting one, not you.”
And she was right. That was the worst thing. I was the interesting one. He had tried to impress her, and she had laughed at him, ridiculing the technical perfection that was the acme of his dreams, the idée fixe of all his writing; he had tried to beat her at her own game, and she had crushed him.
The moment she closed the door behind her, his fingers gripped my spine in fury. He wrenched my head from my body and hurled me towards the door.
I flew across the room like a tomahawk: a blunt, useless, poorly aimed tomahawk.
Fisher the Ventriloquist
“The Fisher men are not to be relied upon, never were. Only the boys, only the boys.” He’d heard her say it so often; George loved to be one of her boys. He had beaten her at life, just like she had said.
Half-term was upon them. George passed the last few days in distraction, angry not because he wasn’t going home but because he hadn’t bothered to read the stupid green book in time to thank her.
Plans crystallized around him, but he paid no attention, quietly resigned to this misfortune in much the same way he submitted to his daily mauling on the games field. A moment’s hope that half-term might be spent with the Morrises, visiting some relation in France, was scotched: George didn’t have a passport — Fisher holidays were generally tied to Frankie’s summer season.
Did he even react when he first heard that he would be staying with the headmaster and his wife, sleeping not in an empty dormitory but in a spare room in their annexed apartment? By the time he heard about it, all was decided. He vaguely remembered saying thank you.
Not going home on Sunday was bad; not going home for half-term was unheard of. With some detachment, he watched the other boys turn giddy with freedom. The final night was odder than any other: the teachers more irritable, their wards wired and unable to sleep, ready to push the enemy further.
After the last assembly, they cheered and ran, spurred by specific instructions to the contrary. Teachers and pupils alike knew that nothing could stop it now, not with all those Jaguars and Range Rovers queuing up in the driveway.
George hid in the library, the one place you were sure not to be found. In the dim natural light, he sat by the big arch windows that overlooked the back lawn. Here, for the first time, too late, he opened the cover of Evie’s gift, Valentine Vox by Henry Cockton. He considered the unprepossessing cover: florid black ornamentation on a leaf green book, the name Valentine Vox etched in gold. He flicked through: 512 pages of close type. A dull half-term unfurled before him. At least there were illustrations: opposite the title page, there was an intriguing plate of ten museumgoers in various states of astonishment, standing around an Egyptian tomb, the centrepiece of which was the head of a sarcophagus. The caption read, “How’s your mother?” as though the statue were asking. Perhaps it was a comedy, a book you couldn’t judge by its cover. How was his mother? She had known throughout the interval and said nothing.
“And lo!” called Hartley as he burst in. “God said, fiat Fisher . . .” He flicked a switch. “And erat Fisher.” He called back down the corridor, “Eureka!” Hartley sat down, immune to the library’s overwhelming disorganization, clapping both hands firmly against his knees in a gesture that said, let us begin. “We’re going to have a fairly good half-term, you and I, Young Master Fisher. The situation has been forced upon us, but we will not be found wanting. What are you reading?”
“Something I found on the shelf, sir.” George slipped it among other tatty books. He’d get it later.
“There he is,” said Hartley’s wife as she came in. George saw a kindness in her face that he had not spotted in the previous five weeks. It was pity. “Well, come along, then, let’s put him in his room, and we’ll see what we can come up with for him this afternoon.”
Could she possibly refer to him in the third person all half-term?
Despite their best attempts, the Hartleys knew no more what to do with George than he knew what to do with them: two hundred boys was one thing, one quite another.
Even television had the air of homework, so he escaped to the library whenever he could. He liked to associate himself with this room in the headmaster’s mind, for it was part of his master plan to duck games. Emboldened by the superior quality of the food at the Hartleys’, George took the first step over dinner on the second night.
“Sir, I was thinking . . .”
“Were you, by Jove?” Hartley mopped up some gravy with the crust of his French bread.
“I was thinking, sir, I’d like to work on the library.”
“I’m listening.”
“Order the books. Put them in a system so they can be found. Put the Dickens together. Under D. It’s a big mess.”
“You’d like to spend your half-term being a librarian?” He didn’t look at you, George realized, and when he did, he looked through you. “And that’s how you get your . . . kicks.” He was speaking a vernacular he seemed to think George would really understand. “I can’t have you inside all day, you know. I have been entrusted with your entire body, not just your mind. All work and no play makes George a dull boy.”
“And then I was thinking, if no one else wanted to, that I could be the librarian, perhaps looking after the library during games, with lending time immediately afterwards.”
“Whoa, cowboy!” Hartley weighed the options. “Look here. Donald is marking out the fields for the second half of term.” Everyone else called the groundsman Old MacDonald. “If you’ll help him outside, then we’ll leave you to organize whatever you want inside.” His eyes met George’s. “But there’s no arrangement yet on being the librarian. Do we have a deal?”
“We have a deal.”
“Let’s shake on it.”
Since bed was only minutes away, there seemed no harm in one further suggestion. “I was also wondering: do you play cards, sir, or Mrs. Hartley?”
“We play bridge . . . and canasta,” said Mrs. Hartley distractedly, assuming he would never have heard of such adult pursuits.
“Eleven take one or thirteen take two?” asked George.
There was a pause. The head let out a polite belch as he polished off his large glass of red wine.
“Clear this lot away, and let’s to it,” he said.
Next morning, George set about the library. The head checked up on him once or twice, as he had expected, so he made sure to be whistling while he worked.
“We’ll get the place cleaned up a bit,” said Hartley, inspecting the accumulation of greasy dust on a swiped finger. “You’re sure you want to do this? We must be clear that I’m not making you.”
“Would you like it in writing, sir?”
“I rather think I would.”
There were multiple copies of many titles: seven Last Mohicans, fifteen Men in a Boat, three hundred and three Dalmations, and more Musketeers than you could shake a stick at. Many more books were defaced, lacking covers, bereft of their illustrations, or in desperate need of rebinding to save them from disintegration. These George put in separate piles for his presentation.
By morning’s end, he had the library down to its bare essentials: books that could actually be filed and read. There were so few that he r
eclaimed some of the least damaged from the discard pile to make the holdings look slightly more respectable. The most popular author in the revamped Upside library was Frank Richards, the author of Billy Bunter, edging out Rider Haggard by two.
At lunch, he put on his Wellington boots and trudged out to the playing fields, where he found Old MacDonald leaning on an antique white-marking machine.
“Poor sod!” said Donald when he was within earshot. “Why aren’t you home?”
“Great-grandmother died.”
Donald pursed his lips and nodded to show he had taken the fact on board. Despite his nickname, he wasn’t an old man at all, perhaps in his early thirties, though he did look rather like a farmer, even with the school tie he wore as a belt. He had an intelligent, piercing stare, but the rest of his face was gaunt and weary, from the minute veins that twitched beneath his eyes to his uneven teeth and the patches of stubble on his oddly taut and translucent skin. It was as though he were becoming invisible.
“Poor sod! They all call me Old MacDonald. And you can call me that.” He spoke carefully, barely opening his thin lips, as if reluctant to impose too many words or too much noise on the world, as if speaking itself were something of a chore. George was surprised at his gentle manner. He’d expected more of a yokel. There were rumours, evidently false, that the groundsman, who had been spotted tippling from a flask, was a bit simple. “Or Donald, Don, whichever.”
“I’m George.” George offered his right hand confidently. Donald considered shaking it but only got as far as wiping his hands on his trousers.
“Right.” He looked around. “Lines for the rugby and hockey pitches. Can be done by one, easier with two.”
Don was a methodical man, not looking for a shortcut. He worked slowly, meticulously explaining as he did: how to do the wheelie that ensured you marked only where you needed lines; how to stretch the string taut across the grass to ensure the line was straight; why the white marker, which smelled moreish like an indelible felt-tip pen, was better for the field than creosote. It felt momentous, as though Don had to pass on knowledge that would otherwise die with him. Regularly, he stopped, cleared his throat, reached into his top pocket, pulled out his tin of rolling tobacco, and rolled a cigarette thoughtfully between his thumbs and fingers. While smoking, he sat in total silence, not inviting conversation, gazing off into the distance, barely seeming to notice the cigarette, let alone the rest of the world. Then he put the butt into a little pewter travelling ashtray, worn smooth with years of use.
“Tea break over,” he said. Don took a swig from his flask and then wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “I’m not giving you any of that,” he said and smiled.
When they were done, they gazed in satisfaction over the completed hockey field. Apart from anything else, George thought, it was nice for Donald that he was there; otherwise no one would appreciate the effort that had gone into the geometrical lines.
“Best bit,” said Don. “Centre spot. Go on.”
George dunked the sponge-on-a-stick into the basin of the marking machine, then daubed it dead centre.
Don produced a striped packet from the recesses of his jacket, which hung on three practice stumps in the pavilion. “Same again tomorrow, George,” he said, and handed him a fossilized Everton Mint that had merged with its wrapper.
“OK. Same again tomorrow, then.”
George felt grown-up, as he did when he was with Frankie in her world: nothing like he ever felt at school.
Queenie couldn’t visit. George twisted the curly telephone cord around his fingers until the base of the phone rose into the air.
“I’m sorry I can’t come. It’s Evie’s funeral. It was the one day we could have the service, and people are coming from all over. It’s Frankie’s only day off. You don’t want to come anyway,” said Queenie. He decided to agree. “She’s left you some special things, very special things. Frankie has them for you at Christmas. We’re going to have a very lovely Christmas. A family Christmas.” But no Good Old Des this year, no Evie. “Are you there, George?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see the obit in The Times? Just small, and a wonderful one in The Stage. I’ll send you a copy.” Above the phone, there was a mantelpiece of bibelots. Among them was a frame surrounded by seashells, in which was a photo of the Hartley family — mother and father and two young children, boy and girl. “George?”
“Yes? Oh, sorry. Will Sylvia come?” He’d had a sudden vision of her long brown hair; the question had asked itself.
“No” came the abrupt, surprised answer, before a pause of recovery. “Well, I shouldn’t think so. She and Evie, you know . . .”
It made him sad to remind her of this never-mentioned unhappiness, and he added, to please her, “I’m reading that book Evie gave me. Valentine Vox.”
“Oh, yes. Your grandpa’s favourite. She thought you might like it too.”
Forgoing the nightly game of canasta (to the relief of all three of them), he lay in his bedroom and noticed the bookshelves for the first time. The books were neatly divided: a large colour-coded selection of children’s Ladybird books, some drab white-spined books on health by authors who paraded their qualifications, and a small corner dedicated to stagecraft and acting, probably for the school play. George had a new appreciation for the careful method of their shelving.
Cleaners mined the lost treasures of the school library: chocolate (hidden and forgotten), coins, an essay on Sir Thomas Wolsey dated seventeen years ago, even a prehistoric packet of cigarettes. The headmaster approved the cataloguing system, a primary rainbow of sticky coloured dots was bought at the local stationer’s, and reshelving began.
Afternoons saw George continue his work with Don. He looked forward to their conversations. Don didn’t say much about himself, but George had ascertained that he was thirty-six, single, and lived on his own in the compact school-owned bungalow at the end of the driveway. He gave the impression of being perfectly content working at Upside, as handyman, groundsman, dogsbody. Regularly, he would call a tea break, when he sat in blissful silence with his cigarette, a good advertisement for smoking. They talked only when they worked.
“Like books, eh?” Donald called down to George from the top of the pavilion, where some tiles beneath the weather vane had blown loose. George was swinging a hammer around his head, supposedly monitoring the pulley system. “Are they making you tidy up that library?”
“No. I want to be the librarian. It’s my plan to get out of games.”
“That library’s been a black hole for years. So, what are you reading?”
In fact, George wasn’t reading anything in particular. The library had given him a good excuse to put Valentine Vox aside. Yet he had an urge to say something that Donald hadn’t heard of, to impress him.
“It’s called Valentine Vox.”
“What’s it about?”
“Well . . .” George realized he didn’t know. “I have to read a bit more and then I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“OK.” Donald was dependable: he wouldn’t forget that George had promised a description. “Hey, there’s an instamatic in the pocket of my jacket. Take a picture, and then winch it up here: what you did on your holidays. How’s this?” Donald stood on the apex of the roof, one foot on the weather vane, and stretched his arms wide.
At first, progress with Valentine Vox seemed less than likely, enjoyment out of the question, but he was determined to make headway: for himself, for Evie, and for Donald. The publishers couldn’t have tried to make the book any less appealing. The typeface was crammed onto the page in such a way that, he worked out, they could fit an average of about seven hundred words on each page. Seven hundred! Yet somehow, by the end of chapter 3, George was hooked. It certainly wasn’t the telling of the story — that was almost counterproductive; it was the events themselves that caught his fancy. He told Donald the next day as they painted and rebuffered the rugby posts.
“It’s about a boy, a ventril
oquist, who can throw his voice. He makes fun of people, by pretending to be another voice, and they don’t realize it’s him.”
“How?”
“He practises in the fields and does a lot of training. And then in six months’ time, he has total command of his voice.” The explanation in the book had been wilfully obscure, and George couldn’t quite remember it. “I don’t know how he does it, but he can do any voice.”
“Like an impressionist.”
“There’s a funny bit where he upsets an election.”
“And everyone falls for it?”
“Yes.”
“Kids’ book, is it?”
“No . . . well, I don’t think so. It’s old. The print’s pretty tiny, but there are pictures.”
