Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

  Despite most of Wolfencrantz’s colleagues knowing that he had had a penchant for boxing in his twenties, only rumours gave us any context for this. One of my favourites was that he boxed at the Salford Lads’ Club, the one made famous by The Smiths, with Morrissey posing in front of the dilapidated building. Wolfencrantz wouldn’t have played up this association. We knew he had grown up in a rough area of Britain, but whether it was Salford, Moss Side, Handsworth, Bow or Walthamstow, it really didn’t matter. He came from all of them and none of them. He came from a generation that captured self-cultivation. So he bled on the mat and read colonial literature, stuff like Kings Solomon’s Mines, and his approach was to intimidate people with either of these habits, alongside his slow but sure delivery of English.

  His lack of a regional accent was the most cultivated thing about him. I remember his dismissive laughter when a new teacher asked him where he skied in the holidays.

  He was on my interview panel. He offered me a drink. I don’t remember anything of the others. I directed my answers to Wolfencrantz because he kept nodding and smiling. The invitation to interview said there would be the Headmaster, the Department Head and some sort of pupil advocate in the room with me. I told my friends it went terribly. Wolfencrantz seemed impressed but I thought he was the advocate.

  It turned out that Wolfencrantz was to St Edward’s Secondary what Franz von Papen was to the Weimar Republic. In the same way that Papen underestimated Hitler and gave him a foothold in power, Wolfencrantz sacrificed his own influence to a shocking deputy. I was under no illusion – and I don’t think he was in the end – that Mrs Yeoman wanted his chair, his office, the respect he had from staff and ultimately his salary and flexible hours. Wolfencrantz was happy to let her run the school to the letter of every guideline sent from Government. She pinballed around, chasing down kids, blowing her top before she understood any given situation, generally shitting herself about everything. And she had it in for me. Not before I had it in for her.

  It was Mrs Yeoman who took back my class list with the pictures. She came with a walkie talkie clipped to her belt. She folded the sheet curtly and put it in a file with all the others. It was Mrs Yeoman who pushed for Andre Miller’s expulsion before she had even sat down in the case meeting. She seemed to demonise everything he had ever done, which was not much, not much fighting, not a lot of pranks, almost no homework. Andre became a demon for doing nothing at all till he brought that knife out with him at half-term. And god knows, when Social Services went into that house they found a whole lot of nothing there too, no food, no toiletries, no recognisable parenting.

  I was telling Annabel all of this whilst she grated carrot into a small bowl. Her flat was warm. She had her back to me. Sweat clung to her shoulders. She was in her vest again. I stood up on my chair and pushed open the window. Then I closed the exercise book in front of me with its tatty handwriting. It went back on my pile. Annabel paced back and forth, looking for things to put in the salad, thinking.

  ‘Who’s Franz von . . . Whatsit?’ she said.

  ‘Papen. He was the guy I told you about. He got off at Nuremberg.’

  She shrugged. She pulled the plastic wrapping off a cucumber and sliced it in half.

  ‘She’s definitely got a thing for you,’ she said, turning and grinning. ‘Mrs Yeoman definitely wants some.’

  3

  IN THE MEADOWHALL Shopping Centre the mannequins had been draped with tinsel. People dipped their heads reverently, as if they were passing an altar. In fact, they were the last shoppers of those late openings, rushing to catch the remaining buses or trams back into town.

  Annabel pushed a bag into my hand and looked for her car keys. We were getting some shopping before we made a trip to the coast that weekend. It was three or four days before Christmas. Her family had regularly gone to Scarborough for Christmas breaks as well as during the summer. She asked if we could go again this year. Annabel was in one of her stranger moods the night we set off. She was trying on spontaneity.

  ‘I don’t fancy that drive tomorrow morning. You know what, Matt, let’s just drop this stuff at my flat and leave tonight. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep anyway. Do you care if we can even get a hotel?’ she said.

  We got back to the flat and picked up some badly packed bags. My toothbrush got tangled in my joggers. A razor clipped a page of a novel Annabel was reading. She threw towels at me, flannels and a squash racket. After this whirlwind of gathering, she disappeared. I found her in the kitchen, standing on a chair in darkness. Her lithe silhouette was leant against the frame of the tiny window. She was looking down onto the street.

  ‘I lied earlier,’ she said. ‘It’s because I like driving at night.’

  Her voice cracked a little. I asked her if she was sure she wouldn’t be too tired.

  ‘I don’t know. I can wake myself up.’

  My eyes adjusted to the dark. I could see exactly where the grain of the chair ended and her legs began. I felt my way to the table, pulled myself up and stood on the chair with my arms wrapped around her. She moved forwards a little to accommodate me. Out of the window you could see a snatch of undergrowth by the side of the road. One shadow paced by and ghosted into the bus stop. The lamplight cast a milky film over the night. I was staring at the freckles on her neckline more than anything.

  She got dressed quickly and ran both our bags down to the car. Then she rushed back into the room and landed in my lap. I was watching an episode of Come Dine With Me that had been filmed in Finsbury Park. A woman was cooking for the other contestants in her basement. As the woman opened a pressure cooker, Annabel began kissing me. Her mouth tasted metallic, her lips cold. When I went down to the car there was a can of Red Bull on the dashboard. I held it for most of the journey, making sure it didn’t spill. When she tapped my leg I passed it to her and she took a few swigs.

  She told me about the last trip to Scarborough. Her dad’s back was getting so bad that it looked like he wasn’t going to keep his job. Every time he climbed in the car he let out a pain-filled grunt. He had the seat set vertically, almost tilted forward over the wheel. In the hotel he sat around all day watching TV. Annabel and her mom went down to the seafront. They offered to stay but he waved them off.

  ‘Just go, I promised I’d bring you. No use coming to the coast just to sit in a hotel room.’

  The two of them went out there and practically forgot there was anyone else in their party. Annabel was looking in a rockpool, collecting shells, when she heard her mom scream. She had taken her shoes off and stuffed the socks inside. Out where the waves were just breaking, she was wading and bracing herself for their impact. She had rolled up her leggings. That beach was all pebbles. Annabel slipped over, trying to catch up with her mom. The rocks pressed into her heels. Later, they went for dinner and her mom asked her about the boys in her class. Without her dad around she acted differently.

  ‘Your father wanted a son, you know,’ her mom said. ‘I’m so glad we had you. I know it’s selfish but I wanted a girl so I had someone to talk to.’

  Most of the things on the menu were in Italian so her mom told her the dishes to pick. She also ordered large glasses of red and pushed them over to Annabel when the waiters were out of sight. She told Annabel how selfish and unfaithful her grandfather had been. She told her details about her grandad’s life that didn’t make sense. Her dad was asleep when they got back.

  ‘I learnt most of what I know about my family from that last holiday,’ Annabel said. ‘I learnt how much they needed to keep secrets.’

  Before that night, all their holidays had been a succession of stupid arguments about what time they were going to have dinner. Every year she befriended other kids who were staying in their seafront hotel.

  ‘I told this boy I’d kiss him with tongues if he gave me a pound to play Street Fighter,’ Annabel said. ‘I played as E Honda and the boy watched me lose four tim
es. He waited there, for the kiss, but I kept asking him if he had any more money.’

  Annabel laughed. I shook my head. Her charms might have kept the boy in tow, feeding her his finger-smudged 50p coins, but losing so many fights as E Honda was unthinkable. All she had to do was ‘the hundred hand slap’. I explained to her that you got that move by repeatedly pressing punch. I don’t know why she hadn’t resorted to button-bashing. In the event of doubt and, feeling especially put upon, your only option is to button-bash. Her attention started to drift and she reached for the radio.

  ‘How could you lose with E Honda?’ I said and kept shaking my head.

  From the seafront, we could see the dark outline of the castle’s keep up on the cliff. Then the rest of it formed out of the darkness. We both went quiet and watched the brooding landscape. Instead of finding somewhere to park, Annabel just kept driving around the town. She let the wheel slip back through her palms after every turn, seeming to just enjoy the sensation. An Audi passed us and flashed its lights.

  ‘He’s just turned around,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea.’

  ‘I’m just driving, stop worrying.’

  ‘Oh, well, now he’s following us.’

  She eyed her wing mirror. ‘Let him, he’s not going to ram us off the road.’

  ‘And when are we going to sleep? Now we have someone following us.’

  ‘Do you need to sleep? I don’t need to sleep. There’s plenty we can do.’

  The car came to a set of traffic lights. There was a screech of tyres as the Audi pulled out from behind us and into the adjacent lane. The driver turned towards us and lowered his window. He gestured for Annabel to do the same. We could see him more clearly now. He had cheeks raked with acne scars. A hand with a gold ring or two tried to prompt us with little circles in the air. Seeing no reaction, he stopped gesturing but kept his eyes trained on Annabel, his lips on the verge of a smile. There was the sound of a door clicking. Someone got out of the backseat, someone who had been out of view.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘The door’s locked!’

  The other man was now leant against our car. We could see his white T-shirt underneath a leather jacket. He was pulling the door handle. Then he crouched down and gave the window a wry knock. Annabel gave him two fingers back. She revved the engine as he kicked the side of the car. Before we ran the red light he had another kick, this time at the wing mirror, and managed to take it off. It scuttled underneath us. Annabel was laughing as she sped through the empty streets, whipping past arcades and bus shelters. She looked over at me.

  ‘You were shitting yourself.’

  She let the steering wheel straighten out. It slipped through her hands after a sharp right turn. Her finger was still pointing towards me. She brought it down and found my leg, which she patted.

  ‘We almost got carjacked,’ I said.

  ‘I know. The door was locked though. Wasn’t it exciting?’

  ‘Wasn’t it fucking stupid?’

  ‘No . . . of course it wasn’t – I knew I had you here to protect me.’ When she laughed this time, she patted my cheek. I brushed her arm away.

  ‘You actually wanted to hang out with those guys, didn’t you?’

  She pulled away. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that must have felt like a trip down memory lane.’

  ‘Well, fuck you too . . .’ she said. After a long pause she added, ‘We need to find somewhere to park.’

  When we pulled over, I could see the stub of the mirror had two or three wires hanging out of it. She had to look over her shoulder as she reversed into a space along a street just off one of the main roads through town. We were in front of some proud terraced houses. The pavement was lined with grey bins. As she switched the engine off I sat wishing we had some keys to one of those houses. It was about 5am.

  ‘Your mirror is broken.’

  ‘I know.’

  She started adjusting the stub. The wire twisted and swung in the darkness. It was like a phantom limb now. There was something pathetic about the slow whirring that started when she turned the switch.

  At the age of seventeen Annabel worked Saturday shifts at a newsagents by a traffic island. After work Corinne caught the bus with her and they went back to Annabel’s house. They passed her father watching TV. Corinne helped her put on the concealer and mascara. She checked herself out in the mirror and adjusted her white bra. Corinne rushed her out the door. They put their alcohol in plastic Coke bottles. They met up with some local lads. She tagged along for joyrides in their modified cars.

  More than once this ended with one, or both, walking home in the cold in a mini-skirt. I don’t know whether Annabel got scared about being left on a kerb, watching the car pull away with all the exciting people in it, watching them speed towards a dual carriageway and out of sight. Maybe she did.

  A newsagent told us that a severe weather warning had been issued for the north-east. He said this cold front was coming in from Russia. We checked into our bed and breakfast under a steady drizzle. When we walked down to the seafront the rain went crazy. Small huts lined the promenade and ducking into one meant sudden proximity to strangers. We stood, watching the water streaming off the corners of the roof, alternately swelling and thinning again. Then we took our chances and moved on.

  I told Annabel that I didn’t mind severe weather. I wanted it to snow. I had always wondered what snow would look like over the sea and on the beach. Further across the promenade two homeless-looking men stood at a cockle stand. One made a vain effort to cover his tangled hair with some newspaper. The other might have been bartering but we were too far off to hear anything but raised voices.

  We went to a Wetherspoons and waited inside. The staff seemed surprised to have customers. Soon after we sat down they forgot about us. A group of waitresses talked openly near our table. When a thick-set man emerged from a door and put two plates of food on the bar, one of the girls said, ‘Who’s that for?’

  We walked down a street, passing two or three greasy spoon cafes, and stopped in front of an amusement arcade. Beyond the four-seater tables, and past the girl serving, nervously biting her nails by the till, the lighting changed to horizontal bars with an orange glow. These hung over a few sombre slot machines. One old man was slumped into the stool, feeding coins into the machine. He looked up and through us.

  Annabel was sure the place we were looking for was on that street but it definitely didn’t appear to have been turned into one of the cafes. The wrong shape, the wrong feel, she said. Eventually, whilst we were sheltering outside a novelty shop, pressing ourselves out of the reach of the rain and against the creaking plastic of a rubber dingy suspended from the extended roof, she spotted the relic of an old sweet shop, now a Subway. She recognised the shape of the old building and touched the wall with affection.

  ‘I used to come in here before we’d go to the cinema. I always got those hard-boiled sweets, cola, or rhubarb for my dad.’

  I was feeling really hungry by then. The smell drifting out was making me worse. I asked her if she wanted to look inside. She managed to reconstruct the sweet shop whilst we queued. She told me where the floor-to-ceiling fridges had been, where there was a cleaning cupboard and where that had extended straight through into the owner’s house. It had surprised her once when he turned around to grab at some dead air on the shelf – a missing tub. Then he lurched out and she saw he had a prosthetic leg. That was why there was always a walking stick propped up behind him and a handrail fixed to one wall. He went back and was gone for five minutes before he found what he was looking for.

  She had asked then, in a brash way, what had happened to his leg. Her mom crossed the store and quickly reprimanded her. The guy shrugged and said It’s fine. But it wasn’t fine enough to give her an answer.

&nbs
p; We were heading to a cinema by the south beach. Back then, Annabel said, it only had one screen. Somehow it had survived like that. Mr Levermore, in braces and a rippled flannel-shirt, would be leant over the counter slumped into his hand until someone arrived. Then he would give a synopsis of the film they were screening at the time, summarising the action sequences with his own voice-overs. There was rarely anyone stationed at the popcorn stand so Levermore himself got her popcorn. She asked for one tub and he always gave her two, faking some kind of misunderstanding then saying with a shrug, ‘Your money is worth twice as much to me.’

  When we came to the cinema building Annabel was disappointed to see an amusements sign in red lights. Inside, where the foyer had been, where she could remember Levermore’s synopses better than any of the films themselves, a wall had been knocked through. Machines were lined up from corner to dark corner. We split up and realised that there were many, many more people in there than the coast had so far revealed to us. A woman in thick make-up with permed hair glided past me and called out to the staff. I could smell her strong and cheap perfume. She got the worker’s attention by going up on her tiptoes and wrapping her fur scarf around the back of his neck. I carried on and walked down the aisles of slot machines.

  The men playing, old before their time, were alternately lit up and then plunged into a bleaker darkness. Their eyes broke from communion with the machine to watch me stroll past and I seemed to bring too much of the outside with me. They returned to the lurid colours and lights, coughing or grunting with reticence. The machines made constant noises themselves. There were spurts of phaser fire and recorded sounds of falling money. I was struck by the fact that one large cinema screen had once held everyone’s attention. Now attention was divided up between each machine, along each row. All the light was galvanising to the senses but debilitating to the body.

  I saw Annabel talking to a worker at the payout desk. I walked over and heard her asking questions. She wanted to know if they had any information about where Mr Levermore was now. The worker listened to her enquiry and said he needed to talk to the manager. I saw a tense conversation between him and another man with long black hair. That man came out next and asked if he could help her.