The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  My bird was in the furthest stall, tethered to the iron framework of a horse's manger.

  It ducked and bobbed and stared, as I approached with the lamp. It hopped as far as the leather jesses would allow, and a little bell tinkled as it hopped. I shaded the light with my other hand and crossed the stall very slowly, with hardly a sound of my feet on the cobbled floor.

  'Ssshhh,' I whispered, 'my little imp.'

  When I set the lamp down on a long wooden bench, the bird stared at the flame as though transfixed. And its eyes were bright and black, like pinpricks of darkness. It shuffled its feathers, shivering and bristling. It hissed like an owl. Like an owl, it angled its head from side to side, the black eyes unblinking.

  Not an owl. A jackdaw, with a head too big for its poor, scrawny body, its feathers dull and dishevelled. A cripple, a cringing hunchback, it sprang along its perch on one black scaly leg. It snorted through bristly nostrils, so that a tiny bubble of mucus stood up for a second and then burst.

  'My imp,' I whispered again.

  The bird peered at me, askance. Its eyes fixed on the lamp and then swivelled to watch me as I bent to the floor and straightened up again.

  I'd picked up a feather, one of the jackdaw's own tail feathers. So gently that at first the bird could not have felt the slightest touch, I caressed its breast with the tip of the feather. Then, with a soft insistent rhythm, I stroked from the tip of the beak to the softest spot on the belly, down and down the one leg to the sharpest tip of each claw. I stroked and stroked, and the bird just stared at me. It felt the movement and pressures of its own feather through the movements of my hand, and it heard the gentle hypnotic rhythms of my voice.

  It felt the warmth of my breath on its face as I whispered, 'I love you I love you . . .'

  TWO

  It was Wednesday, 21 December 1966, the last day of the Christmas term. The whole school, boys and teachers and parents, had assembled in the little chapel. The last light of the shortest day of the year fell feebly through the stained-glass windows, so that the reds and greens of the school crest and motto were a splash of colour on the cold stone floor.

  'Sing up, Scott,' the headmaster whispered, leaning so close that I could smell the mixture of sherry and mint on his breath, the bitter odour of his body and the pomade on his thinning, slicked-back hair. 'This is an honour for you.'

  And then, signalling with a twitch of his ivory baton that everyone should stand up for the beginning of the carol service, Dr Kemp waited for a moment and swept the room with a smile of welcome. Forty-nine boys between the age of seven and twelve, in short trousers and grey jackets, their hair neatly cut for the special occasion; seven assorted teachers and a matron, dutifully attentive; at the back of the chapel, the parents, shivering in stiff dark overcoats, who'd driven to the school for the service and to take their sons home for the Christmas holiday; they all stood up at the flicker of the headmaster's baton and flinched from his smile.

  Cold, as cold as a tomb.

  In the middle of the aisle, Mrs Kemp sat in her wheel-chair, the fur collar of her coat turned up to her throat, a rug wrapped tightly around her legs. A gleam of scarlet from the stained glass coloured her fine blonde hair and the pale skin of her face. She seemed as fragile and as beautiful as the glass through which the wintry sunlight fell.

  At her feet there lay a very old black dog. He groaned so loudly that everyone in the chapel could hear it, and some of the boys giggled. At a glance from Mrs Kemp, the slightest lift of an eyebrow from Dr Kemp, the room was silent again.

  'So,' the headmaster whispered, turning back to me. He adjusted the baton into the crook of his fingers and he caressed my knuckles with it. He pinged a tuning fork so softly that only I could hear it. I took a deep breath and started to sing.

  Unaccompanied, I sang the opening verse of 'Once in Royal David's City', pure and clear in the icy air of the chapel: Alan Scott, twelve years old, head chorister at Foxwood Manor School, scrubbed and polished in a clean cassock and surplice, my ruff starched and stiff around my throat. With an anxious white face, a sprinkle of freckles and a bristle of red hair, I stood on the front row of the choir with the other choristers beside and behind me.

  And a curious thing happened just then. The tiniest prickling on my palms began. Not enough to make me itch them, but enough to bring to my mind the face of the boy I'd seen in that dream: the boy I'd thought at first was me, who became a boy I didn't know.

  He was there with me. He was inside my head, as though a droplet of icy water had splashed onto my scalp and trickled down my neck. It was he who was singing, not me. In the purity of his voice all the lives of every living thing in the chapel stopped still – his was all the breath in the room and there was none left for anything else. Even the dust, which had swirled through the shafts of sunlight with the movement of people standing and shuffling, hung still, motionless sparks of red and green, and the breath that had trickled from the mouths of all the people present stopped for those few moments, while he sang.

  Dr Kemp stroked my knuckles with the baton, keeping time. For everything and everyone else, time stood still.

  I came to the end of the verse. Dr Kemp waited for the final breath of the last note, and, in the hush which filled the chapel, his eyes held mine. He frowned, as if he'd noticed something different in my voice, and he pressed the baton on my knuckles as if to prolong the moment by pinning me to the choir-stall. Then, turning to the body of the chapel, with a wide sweep of both arms he brought the congregation and the rest of the choir into the second verse.

  I sang too, relieved that my big moment was over. I turned over my hands, half-expecting to see the faintest of stripes on my palms. But there was nothing, and the prickling had stopped. The boy had gone.

  I touched the purpling scratch on the side of my neck, where the bramble had snagged me, and, still singing, I moved my hand from the scratch and felt for a tiny ear-piece I'd tucked into my ruff. I angled my head so that the headmaster couldn't possibly see it or the wire that ran into my ruff, and I adjusted the ear-piece into my ear. Then I dropped my hand to my pocket and pressed the switch of a little transistor radio.

  The music erupted in my ear, so loud that it felt as though my head would explode.

  Still I mouthed the words of the Christmas carol, especially angelic whenever Dr Kemp turned and caught my eye. But inside my head it was the Kinks, 'you really got me, you really got me –' raw and ragged and blasting hard, '– you got me so I don't know what I'm doin' . . .'

  Through the rest of that Christmas carol, I tapped my foot and swayed to the driving beat, and just as the chapel echoed with the last note of the last verse of 'Once in Royal . . .' I felt in my pocket and switched the radio off.

  The congregation sat down, coughing and shuffling. Dr Kemp turned to the choir and gestured at us to sit down too. 'Good,' he mouthed at me. For a horrible split-second, he narrowed his eyes and stared at my neck. I touched it with my hand and felt a trickle of blood runing from the scratch to the perfect whiteness of my collar. At the same time, I took out the ear-piece and snuggled it into my ruff.

  Upstairs in the main house, along the corridors of the first floor and the second floor, it was the noisiest afternoon of the term.

  In every dormitory the boys were crushing the final items of clothing or boots or shoes into their trunks and struggling to close them. Some were helping one another, one standing or sitting on the lid to force it shut while the other squeezed the clasp shut or tugged at belts and buckles to get it closed. The matron was on the first floor, Miss Hayes, a dumpy middle-aged spinster, usually a stickler for quiet and orderliness in the dorms but this time relaxing and allowing herself a little smile as she reminded this boy or that boy to strip his bed properly and fold the sheets and blankets neatly, to remove the pillow slip and fold it carefully on top of the pillow, to check the cupboards and drawers and the wardrobe to make sure nothing was left behind. Upstairs, at the top of the house, Mr Buxton was on duty
, balding, effete, so genuinely nice that the boys took advantage of him in equally nice ways which had, over the seven years he'd been at Foxwood, made him an almost completely ineffectual teacher. He wandered from dorm to dorm and smiled gamely at the boys as they shoved and hustled around him, no doubt wishing with all his heart that they'd soon be gone and he could go too. It was chaotic, but the end was in sight as, one after the other, the trunks were shifted out of the dorms and manhandled along the corridors, then bumped down the stairs to the ground floor.

  Some of the dorms were already empty. It was nearly dark, only three o'clock on a midwinter's afternoon.

  There was a jam in the second-floor corridor. At the top of the narrow stairs a couple of trunks were stuck, as a number of boys jostled with Mr Buxton to turn the corner. Someone shouted, 'Come on, what's the holdup?' and another voice, shrill with excitement and emboldened by the thrill of this longed-for moment, called out, 'Hey, let's get out of this dump!'

  A sudden silence followed. Mrs Kemp had emerged unnoticed from her door at the further end of the corridor and wheeled herself towards the confusion.

  The boys who'd cried out were embarrassed, and one of them, a fat boy with a silly fat face, said lamely, 'Sorry, Mrs Kemp,' as she spun her wheelchair up to the lift door. 'Sorry, Mrs Kemp,' he said again in the hush which had fallen, and, contrite, he came forwards and helped her open the door of the lift and eased her chair inside. She smiled up at him – the shy, foolish, harmless boy who'd blurted so loudly and was sorry to have upset her, just as he was going home for the holiday – and she said, 'Thank you, Jonathan.' The boy glowed with relief. He stepped out of the lift, closed the door, and everyone, Mr Buxton too, watched and waited as the lift went down. Then the shoving and the bustling resumed, the jam unjammed. The school was emptying fast.

  Mrs Kemp went down in the lift. She emerged at the ground floor, tugged the door open and wheeled herself out, spinning the chair with great expertise. She accelerated sharply along the corridor, the tyres hissing on polished brown linoleum, and she pressed harder with her arms to negotiate the ramps which her husband had had fitted, where previously there'd been a step or two. The lifts had been installed especially for her, two of them, one at each end of the house, so that she had access to every part of the building, even the attic space in the roof. She sped along the corridor, past the library and the staffroom, towards the crowd of parents and boys in the old hall.

  The hall was the heart of the school, and now it was full of people. There was a fire burning in the great stone fireplace, and a Christmas tree in the far corner, behind the grand piano. A wide, elegant staircase, usually out of bounds to the boys, curved into the room, but today, for the special occasion of the carol service and the presence of all the parents, some of the boys were using this route to get their trunks downstairs. Dr Kemp was standing in the doorway of his study, a short powerful figure, middle-aged but somehow ageless, the headmaster, the figurehead of Foxwood Manor School. He was talking to some of the parents, taking the opportunity, on this special day at the end of another year, to remind them of the school's motto – 'to strive is to shine' – and encourage them to apply it to the progress of their sons. He turned with a smile as his wife rolled towards him.

  I watched from the landing of the staircase, from high up on the top floor of the house.

  I was alone in the darkness, still wearing the suit I'd worn under my cassock and surplice for the carol service. I could smell the smoke from the fire; and the resinous pungency of the tree reminded me of my family and home and the Christmases I would never enjoy again. The murmur of many voices rose up the staircase, strangely muted and distorted, but I could still make out the sharp little barks of the headmaster among so many strangers – the parents of all the other boys in the school, who sipped a sherry and warmed the backs of their legs at the fire, who moved awkwardly around the hall and looked at the faces in the faded school photographs, who stared upwards to the honours boards and the names of long-ago pupils of Foxwood Manor who'd progressed to higher and better things.

  I leaned on the banister at the top of the stairs and I watched. I saw the knot of people far below, at the foot of the stairs, next to the headmaster's study, move away and out of sight, and I knew that gradually everyone would make for the front door of the hall and go outside.

  I moved slowly along the corridor. All the dormitories were empty now, all the lights switched off. I went into my own dorm, and crossed to the window.

  Outside it was quite dark. There were still a few cars on the gravelled driveway: a Rover and a couple of Vauxhalls, an Armstrong Siddeley, the bulbous mass of a Mark 10 Jaguar looming in the shadows of the copper beech which overhung the lawn. I watched as boys and parents manhandled their trunks into the boots of the cars and said their final goodbyes to Dr Kemp. Headlamps flicked on, slicing into the darkness of the surrounding woodland. Cars moved off and around the school, their tyres crunching on the gravel, until only three or four were left. Dr Kemp moved among them, in and out of the light, waving away each departing car, then running his hand over and over his grey, oily hair. From my vantage point at the window, I could just see Mrs Kemp's feet in the front door, and I knew she was sitting there in her wheelchair, so charming and somehow so lovely, and so much younger than her pawky, curiously graceless husband.

  I eased the window open. Dr Kemp had stopped a boy who'd pushed past him on the driveway, and he was leaning down to talk to him. The man's voice, and the threat in it, cut through the cold, clear air. 'Listen, boy, and remember,' he said. 'On the first day of next term, I want to hear you play for me. I'll know if you haven't been practising. I don't like to be disappointed. Go.'

  The boy spun away, and for a second the light from a car's headlamps fell on his cowed and anxious face.

  The last car left. It rolled across the gravel, turned the corner of the school house and disappeared. Dr Kemp stood there, alone, his hands hanging loosely by his sides, and he waited and listened, as I did upstairs. The noise of the engine faded, the headlights cut this way and that among the dark trees, and all of a sudden there was silence.

  The only light was the light that fell from the front door of the school. The only sound was the ticking of a wren somewhere in the woodland. The air seemed to prickle with cold.

  I withdrew my head from the window. As I did so, I banged it on the frame, just hard enough that Dr Kemp glanced up at the sound. For a second, he looked up at me, and he frowned as though he couldn't remember why one of the boys was still in the school. Then he marched to the door and inside. As the door shut, the slab of light which had fallen onto the gravel and across the lawn to the trees beyond was gone. There was nothing but blackness.

  After closing the window, I crossed to the door and switched on the light. The dormitory was bare and empty. There was a row of nine beds, each one stripped to the mattress, the blankets and sheets folded neatly, the pillow slips folded on top of the stained, stripy pillows. But in the corner, one of the beds was still made up. On the iron frame, a piece of paper stuck with sticky tape said SCOTT A.

  I moved to the bed and sat down. I took a deep breath and prised off my heavy black lace-up shoes without undoing them, and dropped them, thud thud, onto the floor. I shuffled to the wardrobe, my stockinged feet silent on the bare linoleum, and opened it. There was a row of wire coat-hangers, all empty except one. It had a tag, SCOTT A., on it, and it was still hung with clothes.

  I stripped to my vest and pants, my body thin and mottled white as I shivered and shivered and reached for the corduroy shorts and grey flannel shirt and grey woollen pullover from my coat-hanger, and I dressed as quickly as I could.

  I thought that my heart would burst with sadness. Alone in the great rambling house of Foxwood Manor School, alone with Dr and Mrs Kemp. All the other boys had gone, settled into the warm interiors of softly lit saloon cars, breathing the scent of leather upholstery and the familiar perfumes and colognes of their mothers and fathers, cuddling w
ith little brothers and sisters.

  I had no brothers and sisters. My mother wasn't coming. My father would never come.

  I felt as though my throat would burst with aching. I sniffed very loudly. When I felt for a handkerchief in the pocket of the suit I'd flung onto the bed, I found the tiny transistor radio I'd had in the chapel.

  I settled the ear-piece into my ear, cupped the radio in my hand and switched it on. It fizzed and whined. And in the second it took me to adjust the tuning, I caught a movement in the corner of my eye and spun round in horror as the dormitory door creaked slowly open.

  I froze, with the ear-piece in my ear and the radio in my hand. The door fell wide open.

  But there was no one. An empty blackness, the tunnel of the corridor yawned into the far distance. No one. An icy draught had fingered its way through the school, as though feeling for any residual warmth from all the bodies that had recently vacated it – and, pushing open the door of the dormitory, it had found me, the only living and breathing body left behind.

  With a sigh of relief and another glance over my shoulder at the empty doorway, I stuffed the radio under my pillow. I hung my suit in the wardrobe, kicked the black lace-up shoes inside and slipped on my indoor shoes. I clicked off the light in the dormitory and padded from one end of the dark corridor to the other: past one of the lifts, past the other dormitories, past the bathroom and another dormitory and then the other lift, to the landing at the top of the stairs.

  Music, I could hear the music before I reached the landing. Someone was playing the piano, down in the great hall. No, not someone. I knew it was Mrs Kemp. Quite different from the ease and swagger of the headmaster's touch, Mrs Kemp played as though the music were a kind of delicate, difficult jigsaw puzzle she was trying to make sense of. She was playing softly to herself, strumming really, the first few lines of 'While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night', and it was beautiful, the sound of Christmas and a feeling that the holidays had come and there was a release from the humdrum business of running a school and the lives of forty-nine small boys. Beautiful, although for me, as I involuntarily cupped a hand behind my right ear, there was a tiny imperfection in the tuning. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, the music eased the sadness in my heart, and, without thinking that I should not, I started down the staircase, down and down towards the hall.