by George

by Wesley Stace

  “Excuse me?”

  I sat bolt upright but said nothing.

  “Excuse me?” the fearful whisperer asked again, even more surprised than I. “Does Matron know you’re here?”

  “Go back to sleep,” I hissed. There was silence. I pictured us both lying there with our sheets pulled up to our necks.

  “I’m Smith-Price,” he said, confident that I offered no great threat. “I had chicken pox, but I’m not contagious anymore. I’m out tomorrow morning.”

  “Good. Go to sleep.” I was a grown-up and should be obeyed. I certainly didn’t owe him an explanation. I could hear him thinking, preparing for a midnight chat.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m the new groundsman. I got lost.”

  “What happened to Mr. Murdoch?”

  “I took over. What time does Matron come round in the morning?”

  “She comes here first, about six forty-five a.m.”

  “Look,” I said, “it’s kind of embarrassing that I got lost. I don’t want you to mention it to anyone, and it’s important that I don’t see Matron tomorrow.”

  “I can set the alarm on my digital watch if you like, for six-fifteen.”

  “Thank you, Smith-Price. Don’t tell a soul.”

  “Mum’s the word. It’s nice in here. They have a whole pile of comics.”

  “Did you read the adverts in the back?”

  “Yeah, but my dad says they’re all rip-offs. We bought some sea monkeys, and they were a dead loss.”

  “It’s good just to imagine the possibility.”

  There was a long silence, during which each knew the other was wide-awake. It was Smith-Price who spoke first. “Can you tell me a story?”

  “Promise not to scream?”

  Smith-Price was still dead to the world when I woke. It was time for breakfast. Making the bed with a minimum of fuss, I picked up George and walked down the corridor. Seeing no one, I went back downstairs. If someone called out to me, I would keep walking. If someone approached me, I would dart down the nearest corridor.

  The family in charge of the kitchen was already hard at work: 200 eggs, 200 pieces of fried bread, 15 huge teapots. This was their cherished hour before the bell clanged and the inconvenience began. They were easy to avoid as they scuttled back and forth to the dining room with vats of milk and plastic containers of cutlery. I stuck my hand in the back door and stole a loaf of bread and two hard-boiled eggs.

  Heads down, we sauntered from the school towards the new assembly hall, where I found a comfortable corner upstairs in the balcony, leaving a mess of crumbs and shell that I swept under a radiator, hiding what I hadn’t eaten. Beneath me, the hall was a giant romper room of wall bars, basketball hoops, and competing courts — badminton, five-a-side, indoor hockey — each marked with different coloured tape on the ground. The boys ambled down to the conker trees, exchanging the time-honoured diurnal greeting with Hartley before they settled in for breakfast, after which there was a march towards the hall. I was quite safe in the balcony. The boys filed in first, standing in rows, largest at the back like chess pieces; then the masters (Poole, tick; Bird, present; Morris, tick; Hessenthal, yes, sir; but no sign of Potter or Wilding) in front of the wall bars. Last to come in was Hartley, looking not a day older behind his beard. He gave a brief address and announced that the first eleven were playing St. Anselm’s in the Cup that afternoon: support was always appreciated and in this case compulsory.

  With everyone safely in class, I took George back to the pavilion. The room looked much better: tools in order, junk outside, neatly piled, awaiting removal. I sat George in his box and talked to myself as I went about my work. There was a lot to do: the spongy buffers on the rugby posts, the swimming-pool cover. Nobody had bothered to replace the weather vane on top of the pavilion, and I made this my first job. After hammering its feet out on the concrete, I found a way to jimmy the north-south arrow so it didn’t need welding. I propped the ladder against the back of the pavilion, and within a few minutes the weather vane was in its rightful place, turning acceptably. In the distance, a member of staff, seeing nothing amiss, offered me a friendly wave, which I returned.

  Back in the pavilion, I inspected and mended the nets, and set about getting the cricket cradle ready for next summer. I was making improvements. The morning went quickly. Heaven knows what this Mr. Murdoch was up to.

  By lunchtime, I was hungry and climbed my favourite tree to plan my next forage. From this perch, I was able to take in my previous night’s handiwork for the first time.

  What had I been thinking?

  The finger of suspicion pointed directly to the pavilion, the origin of a crazy, mazy white line that finally terminated in a comically large centre blob, the size but not the shape of the Rank gong, where much of the marker paint had either leaked or spilled. I winced when I realized that I had neglected one of Don’s first lessons: a wheelie was necessary to ensure you marked only where you needed lines. Nor could I tell where my supposed practice ended and my work began: some of the “circles” were better than others, but none was in the right place. The first-eleven football pitch was now an unplayable nightmare of irregular shapes, like the floor of the new assembly hall done in white, resembling a controversial new piece at the Tate. I had meant to help, but under the influence of the darkness and Murdoch’s single malt, I had got carried away. On top of the pavilion, the weather vane, which had seemed so sturdy only an hour or two ago, had fallen to one side, one of the arrows — it had been north-south, now it was up-down — spinning helplessly.

  I had nearly made it to the back of the pavilion through the copse when I saw an elderly red-faced man in denim dungarees, Mr. Murdoch, I presumed, roll up for his day’s work. Murdoch, scratching his head with amusement, called over an assistant as he looked at the junk piled outside the back room. The young man indicated the telltale white trail, and Murdoch scurried off on his paper chase, leaving his sidekick to poke through the bric-a-brac like a bargain hunter at the church fête. I could do nothing, so I went back into the assembly hall and retrieved the rest of my breakfast from beneath the radiator.

  After lunch, a surprise assembly effectively penned me upstairs. The awed murmur among the pupils, not to mention the exemplary muster of staff, established the curiosity and gravity of the event. Poole took a mental roll call, eyeing his charges beadily as he counted them in.

  “The Vandals were an East Germanic tribe who captured Rome in 455 AD,” said Hartley, speaking at speed as he walked in, shadowed by a disgruntled Murdoch. “Their name is proverbial for barbaric plunder and destruction.” He ground to a halt at his lectern, his eyes firmly planted where his text would have been. “Why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because today, the spirit of the Vandals lives on at Upside. The first-eleven pitch has been vandalized. We’ll do it the easy way.” He looked up for the first time. “Anybody?” I surveyed the assembly from my crow’s nest: Poole’s dandruff-specked shoulders, Bird’s tiny head. “Or perhaps I do you wrong . . . ,” Hartley continued when no one volunteered. “Perhaps I misjudge you. Perhaps none of you is the trickster in question, the jolly scamp, the wag responsible for this jape.” A nervous murmur of laughter hung about the rafters. “But if one of you knows who, how, or why this happened, then I advise you to come forward immediately. I will ask one more time.”

  A timid voice piped up. “Sir?” Boys turned towards the speaker and then backed away as if Smith-Price were still contagious.

  “Fresh from sick bay, we welcome a boy not previously celebrated for his criminal genius, Edward Smith-Price,” said Hartley, momentarily a game-show host. “Smith-Price, shoot!” Silence. “Or would you rather speak to me alone?”

  “I think it might have something to do with the new groundsman, sir.”

  Hartley flinched. Murdoch bristled. Poole rocked on his heels.

  “The new groundsman?”

  “The new groundsman who took over from Mr. Murdoch. He got lo
st last night and slept in my room in the sick bay.”

  Hartley spluttered. I didn’t hold it against Smith-Price. I’d have done the same.

  “The new groundsman, you say, who took over from Mr. Murdoch, who got lost last night and slept in your room in the sick bay. Does anybody else know anything about the new groundsman who took over from Mr. Murdoch, who got lost last night and slept in Smith-Price’s room in the sick bay?”

  Hartley made private speculations on the previous night’s sleeping arrangements, saw how this might read in letters home, and dismissed the assembly, which parted before him, dissolving into chatter as lesser members of staff turned usher.

  “Do what you can, Mr. Murdoch, whatever you can,” called Hartley. “Perhaps the under-eleven pitch?” His voice echoed around the empty hall. “Now, Smith-Price.” Only the two of them remained. “What on earth happened and why didn’t you tell anyone?” Hartley quickly discounted any darker nighttime crimes, relieved by Smith-Price’s blithe explanation.

  “Can you describe this rogue groundsman?”

  “Well, it was dark, sir, and he didn’t turn the light on. He was very nice. We talked about comics and he told me a bedtime story. One thing, though, sir. He had a little person with him.”

  “A what?”

  “I saw him on the chair next to the bed. A little person.”

  “A dwarf? A homunculus? Tiny Tim?” Smith-Price shook his head. “Toulouse-Lautrec? Thumbelina? The monkey from the Rue Morgue?”

  “Not a real person and not an animal.”

  “What on earth are you blithering about?”

  Just then, Murdoch’s assistant arrived back at the open door, out of breath, his boss following just behind.

  “Come ’n’ see, Mr. Hartley,” he said. “Come ’n’ see. I’ve found something.” Hartley looked up, displeased with everything around him. “The pavilion’s been completely cleared out. And there’s something that wasn’t in the pavilion before. A ventriloquist dummy.”

  Fuck. George.

  “A vent . . .” Hartley was just about to express complete bafflement when he smiled. “Ah! The fog lifts.” He put his palm on Smith-Price’s head and, swivelling him bodily 180 degrees, pushed him towards the door. “And there we have your mysterious midnight mini-creature. Well done, Smith-Price. You may go. Mr. Murdoch, all is revealed. A criminal signature left by a nocturnal groundsman. Show me this ventriloquist dummy,” said Hartley. “The game is afoot.”

  Caught red-handed in the pavilion.

  My hands were clammy as I watched George surrendered. Hartley held him in as dignified a manner as possible, while daring schoolboys pointed in amusement as George and his unlikeliest partner disappeared towards Upside. Murdoch made comical attempts to ready the pitch for the game as the St. Anselm’s minibus parked by the Green Court. Soon twenty-two boys were limbering up on the touchline, while the groundsmen screwed hooks into the crossbars and posts of the under-eleven goals, shortly to be graced with nets for the first time.

  Interest in the match was at an all-time high. The rumour of the phantom groundsman (vastly preferable to Murdoch) and his act of wanton vandalism had captured the student imagination. A stream of pupils, shooed away by teachers stationed for this specific purpose, was unable to resist the urge to wonder at the mysterious white crop circles. Hartley emerged to mollify his visiting counterpart, who swung a shooting stick disdainfully over the surface of the new field.

  When the game finally kicked off, I made my way down, across the Green Court and back into the school. It was time to get George. Keep walking straight ahead, I told myself. If you see a child, bark an order or ask the way to the games fields — he’ll assume you’re a visiting member of the St. Anselm’s staff. If you see Poole or Bird, walk very slowly in the opposite direction.

  Hartley’s lair was my starting point. The door was open, his study even more heavily smoked with the passing of time. I saw the same chair, the same cane among the bouquet of umbrellas, the same books on the same shelves. Hartley was cheerleading, Mrs. Hartley preparing the postmatch tea: there was no chance of seeing either, but I tiptoed through the sitting room and up the back stairs, past the same telephone where the same picture of the Hartleys stood in its seashell frame.

  Had they hidden George or was he bait? The room where I had slept throughout that odd half-term was more of a storeroom than previously, but the bed was still there, hemmed in by neatly packed boxes. I lay down.

  The bedside clock ticked over slowly. Distant chants trickled from the field, and my eyes were drawn to the towers of folders and the fat spines of the books lying flat on the shelves at the foot of the bed. The first was marked School Pictures (Chronological). I remembered the day ours was taken on the Green Court, 1973. Out of curiosity, I got the book down: our year was the first immortalized in colour. The photo revolved around the Emperor Hartley in his purple gown (alone worth the upgrade from black and white), his great bear grin sparkling above a selection of trophies. Either side of him, his generals, ready for battle, sat in the row to which every Upside adult was admitted, though their importance diminished towards each end: matrons and under-matrons, menials, kitchen staff, music teachers, groundsmen. There was Donald, in an unusually smart jacket, looking away from the camera, eyes down. Above were the regular troops, the rank and file of Upside, but beneath them the cannon fodder, the poor little boys, unarmed, not even issued long trousers, amongst whom I had been made to sit. And there was I, smiling at the camera, thinking of my last view of Frankie waving on the platform, unaware that Donald was gazing at me.

  I flicked back through for the photographs when Donald himself was a schoolboy. There he was, easily found — happy, confident, smiling as I had been. What had happened to him since? What, come to that, had happened to me? This remarkable year was also the last year of Hartley’s prebeard days: there he was, a junior master, to the right of the headmaster, looking ahead, planning his whiskers. By the sound of the cheering outside, the home team had scored. Inexplicably, I felt proud.

  Several of the other photo albums were catalogued: Marcia, Paris 1970, Outward Bound, Donald. I had no choice.

  The order of the service for the funeral was neatly photo-cornered to the inside front cover, but on the first page the photos went back to the beginning: faded black and whites of a baby in his crib; one of the three kings, in a red dressing gown, bearing gifts at Christmas; a three-year-old football player, one foot on an oversize leather ball; his period parents pointing out the Eiffel Tower as he gazed at an ice-cream stand; and next, the ice cream smeared over his smiling face, dripping from his fingers. And later, growing up as a junior master’s son at Upside, playing for the team, handsome in creased whites; his newly bearded father tossing down a long hop to him in the nets that Donald would later end up mending; picking up a book on prize-giving day. And beyond, in front of a large archway on his first day at college; a heavily panting cross-country runner taking a final corner, St Catherine’s 72 safety-pinned to his chest, cheered on by one lone damp spectator. And summers at home, the facilities of Upside at his disposal, not abandoned as I had been, but free to use its swimming pool and slide, the heir to his father’s kingdom, he and his younger sister its only citizens.

  There were no more of his school, no more sport, no graduation, no mortarboards, no shaking hands with the teachers. Time has passed, and there he is again, sitting with a blanket across his lap in a garden, but not at school. Everyone around him is older. Someone points the camera out to him, and Donald smiles reluctantly. I fill in the gaps: a breakdown, his first, a year of rest. Above me, the titles of the same books that surrounded me that half-term so long ago now tell me a story: Depression and Its Causes, The Tao of Mental Health, Answers to Suicide.

  And then, a recovery, a second chance — he looks older, gaunt but unexpectedly handsome, a student teacher perhaps at a comprehensive, where he is overseeing some kind of gym class: no, of course — those books in the corner again — a drama class,
where his students are apparently under instruction to be trees. And another, where he is showing someone how to walk with a crutch, as though he is missing a leg.

  Amongst the last of these drama photos, he is onstage, drawn but happy, alive, on an empty stage in front of rudimentary scenery; and there is a woman with him in rehearsal, with whom he studies a play script — he is biting the skin on the knuckle of his thumb as he listens to her point of view, seeming to ask her, with his index finger, what she is recommending. And she is beautiful and blond, a little boyish, her hair cut in a smart bob that cannot hide her charming smile.

  And she is my mother. And I am theirs.

  And the page swims before me, my tears heavy like honey. And I cannot bring myself to look away or close my eyes, because I fear that if I do, this knowledge — that I could not admit to myself, that I lied to myself about, but that I now, for this very moment, know — may be lost to me forever; that I will be back at square one with the Father of a Thousand Faces, anything I wanted him to be, rather than the Father of Only One, my own. Finally, my eyes close of their own accord. I keep them tight shut, and when I open them, the photo is still there.

  I flick forwards, keeping my finger marking the page. On the next is the only picture I was sure would be there: me declaiming at the school concert, witnessed by a proud father, a grandfather. And there are more: Donald with a pint of beer; Donald pushing the roller across the field, the familiar school tie around his waist; Donald receiving a Christmas present. But he is rarely in company, nor does he ever smile. His soul is withdrawn, giving nothing away. He is growing invisible. Finally, a picture of him smiling: the one I took of him on top of the pavilion.

  I got up, a ghost who could move unhindered, unseen, who could walk through walls, and floated through the apartment. Children were screaming and distant doors were banging, like the ones in the haunted house, which opened and closed, opened and closed. I came to rest in Hartley’s office on the large armchair, clutching the album, thinking of Sylvia’s bruised knuckles. I had watched my mother on television in this very room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against this very armchair. That was before I met my father.