"If that is indeed the case I find it doubly unfortunate." The headmaster changed his tone to incredulity, which he appeared to think was generous of him. "Are you genuinely unable to call anything to mind?"
"Is it about what they did to those two guys, sir?"
"Which two, which two persons?"
Marshall felt entitled to sound incredulous himself. "The guys who killed my dad."
"Ah, I see. Yes, of course." The headmaster touched his forehead and reached beneath the desk before fingering both ends of his collarbone, then rested his fingers on an envelope in the exact centre of the blotter. "A very bad business. Deplorable in many ways. I hope it was made clear to you at assembly how much sympathy was felt."
"Sure," Marshall said, though he remembered having felt surrounded by as much embarrassment as outrage when the headmaster had talked about his father's death.
"But you have certainly been present at assembly when I have had occasion to reiterate the principles of the school. I trust you will acknowledge that is the case."
"I guess. I mean, yes, sir."
Mr. Harbottle relinquished one line of his frown. "No guessing need be involved. You will have heard me say more than once that there is behaviour which Bushy Road will not tolerate, no matter what the circumstances."
"Three times, sir, I think."
Marshall's attempt to be precise went down less than well. "And yet you would have me believe you are in some doubt as to my reason for having you in."
Wasn't having you in a British term for playing a joke on you? No, that was having you on. "Yes, sir, because I don't," Marshall protested. "I mean, I still haven't figured it out."
"It grieves me to hear you say so," Mr. Harbottle said in a tone which promised Marshall the grief. "Not fifteen minutes ago I had the regrettable duty of speaking to a Mr...." He bent his head to read his scribble on a pad, and the blurred skittle fell and immediately righted itself. "A Mr. Bandapaddhay who had occasion to complain about the behaviour of a boy from this school. Given his description and the particulars of the incident, I think there can be no question as to the identity of the boy responsible."
"I don't know anyone called what you said, sir. I mean, if I do I didn't know that was what they were called, and I truly don't think I've done anything—"
"Are you deliberately setting out to try my patience, Travis?"
"No, sir."
Mr. Harbottle examined that answer for concealed impertinence, raising his chin so that the skittle teetered. "Then I can only assume you are deluding yourself that you performed your act of vandalism unnoticed. A very stupid view to take, and not one I would have looked for in a boy of your previous calibre."
"Vandalism, sir?"
"Vandalism. Or has the word fallen out of fashion where you come from?"
"Sure we had vandalism, but I never did any of it. Sir."
"Then get it into your head that it is wholly unacceptable here, whatever reason you may have considered yourself to have."
By now Marshall had grasped what they were supposed to be discussing, but not how to acknowledge that without admitting guilt. "If it's about the notice, sir..."
"Ah, so you're not entirely unaware of your own actions after all."
"It was insulting my mom."
The skittle wobbled as the headmaster opened and closed his mouth before speaking. "Granted that the language used to sell some newspapers may err in the direction of simplicity, I must say I encountered the notice in several locations and saw nothing contrary to the truth."
Anger and hilarity at the antics of the skittle were fighting for control of Marshall's mouth. "The paper made my mom say stuff she wouldn't ever have said."
"In that case she should take it up with the editor, although one might then feel bound to query whether she is quite so enthusiastic about freedom of expression as she would have us think. But inaccurate reporting is no excuse for anarchic behaviour, Travis, for hooliganism."
He gazed at Marshall, apparently inviting a reply, but Marshall hadn't a word in his head, nothing that would let him shape his mouth. The headmaster picked up the envelope as though Marshall was presuming on his patience. "Please hand this to your mother when you go home."
"What is it, sir?"
The headmaster narrowed his eyes and pushed out his lips. That might have been the whole of the response he felt Marshall was entitled to, except that he then said, "It will invite her to make an appointment to discuss your behaviour."
He stood up to thrust the envelope at Marshall, who saw the skittle spring upward as though the mechanism of a bowling alley had had enough of it. He pressed his lips against his teeth with one hand as he took the envelope with the other, but a snort escaped through his nose. Mr. Harbottle glared at him. "I warn you not to take this lightly, Travis."
Marshall rubbed his lips hard and lowered his hand and succeeded in mumbling, "I'm not, sir."
"I rather think you may be persisting in the belief that your action was in some way justified. A very dangerous attitude, and one that will not be tolerated at this school." The headmaster seemed to think he'd asked or at least implied a question, because he raised his eyebrows and prolonged his stare at Marshall. At last he said, "Perhaps you should remind yourself that the men responsible for your tragedy appear to have felt justified too. If they hadn't had the excuse of defending themselves they might not have gone so far."
The envelope in Marshall's hand was cold and thin and hostile. He could twist it like a neck, he thought, or rip it like a face, except that it belonged to his mother, and he wouldn't destroy anything of hers. "Yes, Travis?" said the headmaster. "Is there something you wish to say?"
There was, but Marshall's gritted teeth were shredding it. He moved the burden of his head from side to side until Mr. Harbottle said, "Please make certain that you—"
The lunchtime bell cut through his voice. He was reminding Marshall to deliver the letter. Perhaps he felt he'd broken some rule of his own by referring as he had to Marshall's father; he let Marshall turn his back and walk out of the office without responding. Marshall shoved the letter into his blazer and kept walking, through the flood of boys that was being swollen by each classroom, out of the school and across the crowded yard and through the gates.
The master whose turn it was to police the yard was busy interrogating two boys as to why they wanted to return to the building. He didn't observe Marshall escaping without a lunchtime permit, not that Marshall would have cared if the teacher had. Tom and Ali and Trevor had noticed, but Marshall looked away from them. As he reached the sidewalk Marshall knew where he was going-—where he might be able to release the emotions which were knotting themselves into a hard heavy lump in his guts.
He glanced back as he arrived at the main road. Nobody was following him except a boy of his own age a good distance away, who would have been in uniform if he was from the school. A few older boys outside the shops were wearing the uniform, but they couldn't know that Marshall wasn't supposed to go home for lunch. Once he'd left them behind he stared straight ahead, hearing his footsteps become part of his surroundings along with the large aloof houses and the rush of traffic. After a mile or so he dodged into a side street guarded by a bus shelter whose glass had been shattered into an unmelting hailstorm on the sidewalk.
He hadn't located the church spire when the street frayed into three streets which veered away haphazardly, narrowing the sky. A van that sounded rusty headed left past him, jouncing over a roadway patched with tar, and his instincts led him after it, past parked cars with selling prices handwritten on bits of cardboard inside their rear windows, and houses that left little room for the meagre sidewalks, and walls sprayed with graffiti such as ROB THE RICH NOT THE POOR in letters bigger than his head. All the downstairs rooms he glanced into reminded him of storerooms, cluttered with stuff which soaked up too much of the light, but in more than one room he saw figures crouched over some kind of work, presumably the only way they had to make the nex
t best thing to a living. Apart from them the sole signs of life in the whole of that street were gunshots which paced him intermittently for several hundred yards, accompanied by so many ricochets that he could tell they were in a Western on half a dozen televisions. The shooting ceased as the street divided, extending one half of itself toward a crossroads boxed in by more houses and the other between fewer of them, its stump of potholed roadway ending at a gate beyond which a bunch of red figures pelted by, yelling at one another. They were footballers, and Marshall remembered seeing such a field over the hedge at the funeral. Before he reached the gate he saw the church beyond the hedge at the opposite side of the field.
He walked around the outside of the field in case there wasn't a gap in the hedge that would admit him to the churchyard. Houses flapped washing above their back fences at him as he followed a cramped path worn down to bare earth between knee-high grass and weeds blossoming with varieties of litter. Ever since passing through the school gates he'd felt as though he was being followed, but the only other person on the path was a boy whose head was carrying a pair of earphones along the hedge toward the last corner Marshall had turned. The sunlight was gathering in the black material of Marshall's blazer and weighing his shoulders down, the narrowness of the path pressed the heat and the unruly greenery against him, but he didn't mind how far he was being forced to walk when it would bring him to his father.
The end of the path was blocked by a supermarket trolley which someone had almost succeeded in bending in half. Marshall lifted it out of the way and walked alongside a high wall holding back a mob of houses, to the gates in the shape of halves of an arch. A wide path wearing a thin coat of moss led him between them and past a silent church.
A fallen ornamental urn lay like an unexploded bomb among the pockmarked monuments. A band of tipsy crosses turning green surrounded a statue of Christ which had sprawled on its back, one hand raised from chest level as though beckoning to passersby to assist it to its feet. The red footballers beyond the hedge had been doubled by players dressed in green, but because of the distance the running clump of them was smaller than ever. The diminution of their shouts struck Marshall as respectful. He was remembering the funeral, to which he and his mother had been accompanied by his father's parents and by everyone from the party except the crime novelist and her husband, and by other people he'd never met before. He'd felt slowed down by the crowd, and unable to release his feelings, but now he was walking slowly because it seemed right and because he was thinking what to say to his father.
"Dad, I've come without mom this time because I wanted to talk. Maybe I can tell you stuff I'd rather not say to her, you know, stuff we'd rather not worry her with. I don't know if you can talk to me. I'll understand if you can't..." He was murmuring to himself as he walked the length of an impenetrable rank of bushes which separated the old graves from the new. Maybe he would have to say it all again, but it didn't matter. He came to the end of the bushes, whose foliage was such a dark green it looked shadowed by the open sky, and saw the field of white headstones. He knew exactly where his father's was, and opened his mouth to greet it. But all the memorials were lying on their backs except for his father's stone, which wasn't there at all.
His legs jerked him toward the spot where it should be. He was moving so uncontrollably that he couldn't avoid treading on a beer can, several of which were scattered among the toppled headstones. He heard the metal beginning to uncrumple itself as he stumbled to the row where the newest graves were. His father's memorial had been smashed against another, leaving bits of words on chunks of marble littering the turf. ALD TRAV HUSB FATH MUCH LOV. Worse still, some of the mounds had been kicked apart. One was his father's, which smelled of urine.
"Dad, I'm sorry," he mumbled. "Look what they did." Surely it didn't matter that his words couldn't force open his lips, which felt as swollen as his eyes were growing. "You're okay, though, aren't you? I mean, you're still there?"
A raucous cheer went up from the football field and vanished into the indifferent sky. Marshall thought of the urine seeping down through the earth to his father, and then couldn't bear to think of it. What he was imagining could never have taken place, which had to mean his father wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere. Marshall turned away from the destroyed grave and began to walk very fast toward the other exit from the graveyard, as if he might outrun the memory of what he'd just seen. That route led home eventually, but he didn't know where he was going: certainly not back to the school. Perhaps he would never go back.
18 Not There
Susanne thought she was addressing the question of how to communicate the banality of violence. If she didn't teach the course she had undertaken to teach she would be letting her students down. She'd found she couldn't use commercial movies, at least not yet; the violence in them seemed too cartoonish and stylised—too much of a betrayal of the reality she knew. Even films by Godard and Bergman had struck her as playing at violence, and so she'd borrowed documentaries from Bea in Modern History. Now she was showing footage of riots in Africa: no stunts, no exaggerated sound effects or dramatic makeup, no excitement or even audience involvement with events which had already and unalterably taken place, just the dull squalid spectacle of people injuring one another, unceremoniously falling down when shot or trying to protect themselves from blows with parts of themselves that would only break. Captions ran along the bottom of the screen, and a commentator's voice described the political context in greater detail, but the words were irrelevant to the dismal fascination of the images. This was how life was, this was how people always would be. The film repeated a scene of a man covering his head with his hands as he was clubbed to his knees, this time in slow motion, and then the credits began to crawl off an otherwise blank screen. Susanne watched them all, then sent the tape forward and waited until it rewound to zero, and switched it off, and stood up to face the dozens of students who were gazing at her—somewhat warily, she thought—from their folding chairs lined up across the square white almost featureless room. "Depressing, wasn't it? Not the kind of thing to watch if you're feeling suicidal, right? But that's the way violence should be, on film, I mean. That's what it's like, grubby and mindless and pointless."
She hadn't planned to say any of that when she'd stood up. It was her way of approaching her theme, she told herself. "I'm not saying every film should be like that. Realism in fiction's a convention like any other, we've talked about that, haven't we? Yes. But I'm coming around to wondering how much we should expect anyone who makes a movie to be true to their own experience, which maybe should include watching the kind of material we've just watched..." She sensed herself drifting off her chosen theme again, and brought her mind back to it and talked for a while, though she had an odd sensation of not really hearing herself. "Listen, that's enough from me," she said abruptly. "Anybody any thoughts?"
Her students shifted, trying to be unobtrusive. Some of them uncrossed their legs, their bare knees hiding to some extent in holes in their jeans. The class wasn't usually so hard to rouse; what could she say to enliven them? Even Liu was gazing at her hands, crossed in the lap of her ankle-length black dress. She glanced up, and then around her, and parted her lips, but that was all. "Yes, Liu?" Susanne prompted. "You were going to say?"
"Sus—Mrs. Travis?"
"Susanne is fine, but Suse is out," Susanne said, meaning to help. "Sure, go ahead."
"I was only..." Liu glanced at her neighbours again. "Well, I only thought that if, let's see, you might want us to, I don't know, watch films by ourselves for a while and write about them, we could."
"Why should I want that, Liu?"
"Well, certainly, if you don't, of course..." When Susanne continued gazing at her, unsure if she'd finished, Liu had another try. "It was only an idea, but if you'd rather not watch them..."
"Because it makes you feel uncomfortable, you mean?"
"No, it isn't that. That doesn't bother, well, any of us, I shouldn't think."
; "I wouldn't say that from your faces. Are you going to let Liu do all the talking? If I've been embarrassing you I'd rather you let me know."
That made most of them look anywhere except at her. "Okay, come on," she said with a roughness that was intended to demonstrate they needn't be reticent. "I know you didn't sign up for me to put you on the spot like this, or to listen to me going through therapy either. I'll try to do my job better if you'll allow me the occasional rant, is that a deal?"
There was an outbreak of uneasy surreptitious movements after which most of the students nodded in agreement—encouragement, even. "We weren't embarrassed," Liu said. "We were just worried about you."
"You've been doing fine," said Pik, the solitary white of the African students. "My father didn't do half so well when the bomb, when we lost my mother."
"You needn't try so hard for us unless you have to for yourself," Rachel said.
Susanne felt her own silence filling her throat. For the moment she was too emotional to speak, especially now she'd belatedly noticed that Liu had been wearing black for weeks. The knock at the door couldn't have been more welcome, and nearly everyone turned gratefully toward it as Alice, the departmental secretary, let herself in. "There's a call for you, Susanne."
"Who is it, do you know?"
"It's from the school."
Susanne experienced a twinge of nervousness which seemed more automatic than meaningful. "What about?"
"She didn't say. The secretary, that is. She'd like you to call her back."
"Do you mind if I call her now?" Susanne said to the class. "I'm sure it can't be anything much, but..." They were smiling and shaking their heads and holding out their hands like stepping-stones for her. "Thanks for being you," she told them. "See if you can tell me something I don't know about the movie we watched when I get back."
There really was no reason for her to hurry, and so she didn't, not much. It wasn't like the day of the verdict, when she'd felt compelled to race to Marshall, only to realise belatedly that he wouldn't have wanted his friends to see his mother picking him up from school at his age, never mind telling him what she had to tell him. She unlocked her office at the end of the corridor and went to her desk in the room full of books. She glanced at the topmost page of the pile of essays she had to grade, and then she dialled the school. Hurrying herself into a nervous state was one thing, but deliberately taking her time in order to reassure herself there was no urgency didn't quite work. As the phone at the school began to ring she made her hand relax on the scrawny plastic neck of the receiver. This time the secretary allowed the ringing several repetitions before she put a stop to it. "Bushy Boys?"
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