The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  'A jackdaw, sir, a young one. I found him in the woods.' That was all I said.

  The headmaster could hardly suppress a snort of derision. He would have snorted whatever I'd said, this boy who'd been foisted onto him when all the rest of the boys had gone home. 'That's what I said, isn't it? A crow, a jackdaw, what's the difference?'

  'A kind of crow, yes, sir. A bit smaller than a carrion crow or a rook and . . .'

  'Yes, yes,' the man said. It seemed to annoy him – indeed, it was almost beyond the bounds of possibility – that a twelve-year-old could presume to know something that he didn't. 'Don't you think you should have left it where it was? It'll die, won't it, tied to a perch in a dusty old stable?'

  'It would've died in the woods, sir,' I answered, imagining its inevitable end as a sodden, feathery rag enmeshed in thorns. 'I think I can mend it, sir. I've read about it, in one of the books in the library. I can mend its tail feathers and it'll be able to fly again.'

  'Well, that's nice, Alan,' Mrs Kemp said, again to forestall her husband, who would have countered in one way or another, unable to defer to a white-faced, red-haired, skinny child sitting in front of him. 'Here, let me take these away from you.' And she reached for my glass and plate, wheeled herself away from the fireside, towards the foot of the staircase at the far end of the hall, and disappeared into the headmaster's study.

  Dr Kemp sat on the sofa, so close to me that our knees touched. 'You know, we can turn the situation to your advantage,' he said conspiratorially. 'This is a good opportunity for us to do some work together.' He gestured at the honours boards. 'They all had the gift that you have: Stuttaford, Radcliffe, Pryce, Maundrell, Inkin, Barry-James – a rare gift, the gift of perfect pitch. And that gift conferred on them a duty, a responsibility, which they undertook and fulfilled under my guidance and instruction. When I was a boy a good teacher found the gift in me, and worked me and pushed me and guided me. Unfortunately, I could never fulfil my promise, but now they are yours, the gift, the duty . . .'

  And, exactly as I knew and dreaded he would, the man stood up suddenly and said, 'Now, I want to hear you sing. Come along' and he strode away from the fireplace to the piano in the corner.

  I felt my whole body, my whole being, go rigid with hatred of the man. Not just hatred, which might have been a manageable, single emotion, but also a colossal crash of boredom: that the man should do and say just what I knew he was going to do and say; and anger at the injustice that I should have been abandoned there, in the gloomy great hall at Foxwood Manor, on that night.

  'Please sir. No sir. I . . .'

  Mrs Kemp emerged from the study at that moment. She had heard what her husband had just said, and she must have seen the flush of anxiety on my face. 'Oh dear, Alan doesn't want to sing tonight,' she said. 'Of course he doesn't, he's tired and a bit fed up and . . .'

  She might as well have slapped her husband in the face.

  'What do you know?' he blurted at her. 'Of course he doesn't want to! None of them want to! It's nothing to do with what he wants! What do you know? When you can't even tell this –' and he crashed the nastiest, ugliest dischord on the piano '– from this!' and crashed another horrid, ugly chord. 'I mean, what do you know?'

  There was a long silence. Wagner broke it by struggling to his feet and limping from the fire to the foot of the stairs, where he collapsed in a heap beside the wheelchair with a terrible groan, as though the effort had nearly killed him. Mrs Kemp blinked, speechless for a moment. Then she had the gumption to lean down to the dog, rumple one of his grizzly ears and say, 'Well, Wagner old boy, I know exactly how you feel. Me and you, I guess we're both ready for the scrap-heap.'

  Dr Kemp recovered himself quickly. He smoothed back his hair and then wiped his hands down his face, as though washing his anger away. He cleared his throat and inspected his nails carefully, unable to look across the room and meet his wife's eyes or indeed the eyes of the small boy who was sitting on the sofa.

  'You're right, of course, my dear,' he said at last. He tried a joke. 'Not that you're ready for the scrap-heap – neither you nor Wagner for that matter. I mean, it's been a long and rather hectic day for all of us, and we're all tired.'

  He closed the lid of the piano very gently and crossed towards the fire. 'Go upstairs to your dormitory now, Scott. Get yourself undressed and washed and ready for bed, and I'll be up in five minutes. Go on now.'

  I stood up. As I paused at the foot of the staircase, from which I was usually forbidden, Mrs Kemp took a quick, gulping breath and said, 'Perhaps Alan would like to stay with us, in our spare room? It must be awfully dismal, on his own up there in the dorm.'

  There was a prickly silence. Dr Kemp swivelled a bilious eye from his wife to me and back again. 'Don't mollycoddle,' he said. 'The boy won't come to any harm. I'll look in from time to time to see that he's all right.'

  She sighed, pursed her lips, and said, 'Well, Alan, for a few days, try to think of Foxwood as your home, if you can. Goodnight, sleep tight.'

  She smiled so beautifully at me that my heart seemed to rise into my throat. Hoarsely, I said, 'Goodnight, Mrs Kemp,' then trod up and up the stairs and into the darkness.

  I stopped on the landing, turned and looked down. Dr Kemp was kneeling in front of his wife's wheelchair. With the same hands which had banged the piano so cruelly a moment before, he removed her shoes with the utmost tenderness and began to massage her feet.

  The man bent to his wife's feet and kissed them, as though seeking her love and forgiveness. She placed her hands on his head, loving, forgiving.

  It was bitterly cold upstairs. At best, during term-time, the huge iron radiators gave a feeble warmth. Now they were cooling, groaning and sighing like dying beasts. In order to save fuel through the Christmas holiday, the headmaster had turned off the boiler as soon as the boys had all gone home that afternoon. I was in the bathroom, wearing only my blue-and-white-striped pyjama bottoms. Reflected in a tarnished mirror, I looked very thin and small in the big room: skinny white body, tufty red hair, bare feet on bare lino. I leaned over one of the rust-splashed basins – there was a row of fifteen of them, each with its own little mirror in front of it – and brushed my teeth in the icy water. Behind me there were six deep, yellowy enamel baths standing on clawed feet, their taps gleaming in the glare of a single unshaded overhead bulb.

  Of course I was alone in the bathroom. In term-time, every night was bath night for one of the dormitories, so that every boy bathed twice a week – and then the room was noisy and steamy, with naked slippery bodies splashing and shouting whenever Miss Hayes allowed them the leeway to do so, or if Mr Buxton was on duty and the boys played up. And sometimes, when Dr Kemp came tip-toeing along the corridors after lights-out and heard the boys whispering when they should have quietened down and gone to sleep, he would burst into a dormitory and demand that whoever was talking should get out of bed, put on slippers and dressing-gown and follow him to the bathroom – where the offender would lean over one of the baths, lift up his dressing-gown, drop his pyjama bottoms and be beaten very crisply with a cane or with the flat of a wooden clothes-brush.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the room in the reflection. For a few seconds I remembered with equal vividness the warmth of the comradeship I'd shared there, and the whistle and sting of the cane.

  The door swung slowly open.

  I watched it in the mirror. A boy stood in the doorway, in pyjama bottoms, barefoot.

  It was me, it was my reflection. But then it wasn't me, it was a boy I didn't know. And when I turned he'd gone. There was no one, only the black mouth of the corridor and the wintry breath it exhaled.

  Shivering, I turned off the bathroom light and stepped into that darkness. I padded past the empty dorms, past one of the lifts, almost the length of the old house, and came to my own dormitory. It looked even barer and bigger than it had in the afternoon, when I'd sat and watched from the window as the other boys left, because now the curtainless windows were
black, just mirrors of my own swift and silent movements around the room.

  I had myself for company. No ghosts: although for a moment I wished there had been one, to dispel the utter vacuum in which I was marooned. Again I seemed to catch in the corner of my eye a ghost of myself, a flicker here and a glimmer there of a small boy in stripy pyjamas, a swift, silent figure moving through a row of tall black mirrors.

  I pulled back my counterpane and was about to slip into bed when I felt a lump under my pillow, and I took out the little transistor radio.

  With a furtive glance over my shoulder, where the door of the dorm was ajar, I adjusted the ear-piece into my ear and switched the radio on. It whistled and crackled and hissed, until I turned the tiny dial with the tip of my finger. And then suddenly – like a signal from another planet far beyond the empty cold room in the empty cold school, light years away from the dark woodland which surrounded the school and stretched for miles and miles into the distance – there was a blast of pop music.

  It filled my head – so here it comes, here comes the night – it flooded my body. I closed my eyes, shut out the room and the school, and was nowhere.

  So I didn't hear the footsteps coming along the corridor towards the dorm, didn't hear them come closer, didn't sense the opening of the door . . .

  Dr Kemp came in. He must have seen me standing in the furthest corner and been surprised that I didn't turn to acknowledge his presence; surprised that I ignored him, tapping my foot and twitching my hips in an oddly provocative way.

  He crossed the room. Too late to try and hide the radio, I saw his looming bulk reflected in the window.

  I froze, unable to choose between a futile attempt to disguise what I was doing or a simple admission of guilt. He stood so close behind me that his breath was hot on my cold wet hair and neck, and he seemed to pause and inhale the scent of my body. And then he heard the tiniest sound: a tinny persistent beat, so faint it could almost have been the flutter of a pulse inside his own head.

  He listened. We both held our breath. He saw the wire running from my hand to my ear; he saw the radio. 'Scott!' he barked.

  He yanked the wire and the ear-piece popped out. I dropped the radio onto my bed. The music was suddenly loud, and I stared up with horror, to see the man's face so close to mine, to smell his breath and the peppery odour of his body. Dr Kemp barked again – 'What do you think you're doing!' – and grabbed for the radio, picking it up with a look of disgust as though he were handling a toad. He tried to turn it off, but his fingers were too big and clumsy for the dials and the volume went up and up until – 'Damn the horrid thing!' – he banged it onto the floor with sudden impatience.

  The music stopped. The silence was very cold.

  We both looked down at the little plastic machine on the floor without saying anything. At last Dr Kemp cleared his throat and wiped his face with his hands, and he said, 'I don't suppose it's broken,' in an odd, soft voice which was probably the closest he could come to saying he was sorry for what he'd done. I bent down and picked up the radio. It fizzed in my hands until I switched it off and put it on my bedside locker.

  'Time for the prayer,' the man said.

  Every night, just before lights-out, Dr Kemp would come to all the dormitories, one after the other, and say the same prayer while the boys stood in their pyjamas by their beds. The same short prayer: I'd heard it several hundred times during my years at Foxwood. And still, each time, I puzzled at the words. Now I put my hands together and closed my eyes.

  Dr Kemp said, 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Amen.'

  That was all. I pulled back the counterpane and blanket of my bed and slipped between the sheets. What perils? I wondered. What dangers? I'd sometimes been miserable at the school, and often I'd felt the almost physical pain of homesickness, a hurt inside my chest and an ache in my throat when I thought of my mother and father and the faraway warmth and familiarity of home. But what were the perils and dangers I needed to be defended against? That from time to time a big bullying man would burst into the dormitory and march me down the corridor to the bathroom and beat me on the backside with a clothes-brush? That the same man might sneak up behind me and snatch my radio and throw it on the floor and smash it? If so, the prayer hadn't worked. Now I looked up at Dr Kemp, who had turned towards me and was leaning close.

  The man touched me. He'd never done so before, but this was the first and only time that I had been alone in the dorm with Dr Kemp. With my blanket pulled up to my chin, I watched wide-eyed and afraid as Dr Kemp came closer and the man's right hand came down to touch my head. For a long moment the hand was heavy and still and very hot. Then, as both of us held our breath, as though neither of us knew what was going to happen next and had no way of controlling it, the hand moved very slowly and gently to my cheek and down to the scratch on my neck.

  Dr Kemp suddenly straightened up and stepped back. His voice was curiously hoarse, so that again he cleared his throat as he said, 'Your hair, I thought your hair was wet.'

  He crossed to the window and stared out: there was nothing but blackness and his own reflection. I watched him without moving my head, because I didn't want the man to look back at me and maybe come looming close again. And, mixed into the dislike I had for the man, I remember I felt the tiniest and oddest twinge of pity for him – perhaps, I wondered, it was strange and sad for the headmaster too, to be alone in the dormitory with just one small boy, now that all the others had gone home and the big old house was all but empty. Another term was gone. Another year was nearly over. Dr Kemp looked older and sadder. From the corner of my eye, I saw how the man appraised himself in the black mirror, saw that his hair needed cutting and his clothes looked a bit too big for him. For a few more moments, the two of us – the man at the window and me sheathed into my narrow, cold bed – held our breath and waited in the stillness of that room, so utterly different from one another, except that we were human beings alive and breathing in that mid-winter night, cut off from the rest of humanity by miles and miles of deep, dark woodland.

  He moved to the door, faraway at the other end of the dormitory. He clicked off the light, said, 'Goodnight,' and closed the door. I heard his footsteps soft and slow, down and down the corridor. Then silence.

  I lay on my back and stared into the darkness. Not even a streak of light came under the door, because this time the headmaster had flicked off the switch at the far end of the corridor.

  The window rattled a little, as a gust of wind stirred the trees of the forest. An owl hooted. Silence.

  And just then, the only comfort I could find – for the ache in my throat and the hurt in my chest were almost more than I could bear – was to reach to my bedside locker and feel for the transistor radio. I held it close to my ear, clicked it on and turned the dial. Even this little bit of solace was denied me. There was nothing. A crackle of hope for a split second, a pop and a faint high-pitched whistle – then nothing but a hiss in my ear.

  Was there nobody out there? Nobody? Was I alone in all the world with Dr and Mrs Kemp?

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and quite deliberately, not in a daydream or a blurry reminiscence, I recalled my father. It was Christmas Day, my birthday, a year before, and my father had given me an air pistol. We were in the hazel copse at the bottom of our garden, and he'd arranged a stack of empty tins – golden syrup, rice pudding, custard powder – to do some target practice. It was a clear, cold morning: no snow but a dusting of frost. My father was wearing brown corduroy trousers and one of his green army pullovers; in the sunlight which fell through the trees his hair was coppery bright, and his eyes shone with the joy of giving his son such a grand present – a Webley & Scott .177 – and showing me how to use it. His hands on the pistol, strong and lean and very white, moulding mine to the matt-black heft of it, teasing one finger to the trigger; his voice, calm and quiet, as I aimed at the tins and fired; the soft, plosive puff of
the pistol and the ping of the pellet on the can. We'd practised for an hour, my father and I alone together in the most secret part of the garden, and then, when he stopped for a smoke, I'd slipped down to the stream with the pistol – where, as I waved it carelessly around me, up into the trees and into the undergrowth, for something different to shoot at, I spotted a vole which was plying from one bank of the stream to the other. I sighted on it, as my father had taught me to sight on the tins. I took a breath and held it, as he'd told me to do. I gently squeezed the trigger . . .

  'No, Alan, lower the pistol, do not fire.' My father's voice was in my ear, actually inside my head, not shouting, but perfectly firm in the certainty that I would obey him. The vole swam to the bank of the stream and climbed out of the water. It was slick and sleek like a rat, until it shook off a shower of droplets and fluffed up like a cuddly toy. Its eyes were black. Its bead of a nose twitched at me. As I lowered the pistol, the vole turned away and disappeared into a dark tunnel.