Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

  ‘I’m looking for a Mr Levermore – do you know how I might be able to track him down,’ Annabel said.

  ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

  ‘Did you buy this place off him? If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone by that name but I do mind you asking.’

  A woman overheard Annabel’s story and walked over to explain the owner’s paranoia. She said he was expecting bailiffs from all over the country to find him there eventually. Added to that, there were problems with the tenancy. Don’t take it personally, she said. She asked who it was we were trying to get hold of. She didn’t recognise the name herself but when Annabel mentioned he had owned the cinema the woman said, as if it were a revelation, ‘This used to be a cinema!’

  A payout rang through the next aisle. Annabel sat down and watched a punter stumble off with his winnings. Her blonde hair was shady and then orange in the bubblegum glow of the machines. What I didn’t realise was that all this renovation was having more than a superficial effect on her. If I had, I might have been more careful with what I said that afternoon.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know’, I said. ‘We’re not collecting any winnings, I know that.’ I stared over at the machines.

  ‘You mean I’m not. Do you pity me?’ she asked.

  I didn’t understand the question. I left her long enough to pick up her own thread.

  ‘You pity the way I think. Sometimes it’s like you’re putting up with me, like you think I’m simple. I don’t mean dumb-simple, just like . . . I’m kind of basic. Simple way of thinking. That’s what this is like.’

  She had gestured towards the shifting lights of the room.

  ‘You mean hanging around in a casino that’s about to be repossessed. I sort of enjoy it,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess you do. Because this is what you want to do anyway, but doing it with someone like me, that makes it OK for you.’

  I told her it had been her idea to drive out to the coast.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, let’s forget it,’ she said.

  I was still waiting on that snow, blown in from Russia. On our way back to the hotel we realised even the rain had stopped. There was the heavy damp along the beach walls that would turn into frost overnight. In our room, Annabel paced around twisting the heater dials over and over, impatient for them to come on. I left her wrapped in a blanket and bought a bottle of bourbon from the bar. Whilst we sipped from plastic cups she played songs from her phone and looked down at the carpet.

  ‘Imagine if you were pulling my clothes off and you saw a tattoo.’

  ‘A tattoo of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. A tattoo of anything.’ She suddenly went wide-eyed. ‘A dragonfly running down my back. How would you feel about that?’

  Whilst she left this question hanging in the air, she kept her body entirely out of sight, motionless under the mound of blanket.

  ‘If I hadn’t told you, how would you feel?’ she said.

  ‘Have you got a tattoo?’ I asked.

  ‘No – you saw me naked earlier, or were you thinking of someone else?’

  She sipped some of her drink. I laughed.

  ‘I wasn’t. I don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She raised an eyebrow and bit into the lip of her cup. ‘My point is it’s my body and I can change it.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of having plastic surgery?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’re getting a tattoo?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Because I don’t mind dragonflies.’

  ‘That’s not the point. You’re missing the point.’

  She got up then, holding the blanket around her and dropping her empty cup onto the floor. I wanted to look out the window but it was impossible to see anything in the darkness behind the nets. She tucked the woollen blanket into the towel rack with minimal effort. It dropped to the floor. She was nonplussed at this and pulled down her jogging bottoms. She half-turned and tucked her thumb under the hem of her underwear.

  When she had stripped completely she sat down on the toilet and looked up at me as the sound of piss hitting the bowl rang out. I could have reached out to her then, across that tiled floor between us. Maybe I should have told her that simplicity, and the basics, were important, that I wasn’t scared of that. Instead, I squeezed my plastic cup, watching the level of the bourbon rise as she reached forward and found the door handle. She pushed the door towards me and the pissing sound changed pitch.

  About a month or so after Christmas, Corinne gave birth to a boy. She had sent pictures of the scans in silver envelopes. They were addressed to both of us and Annabel kept them on the windowsill or pinned up on the fridge. I didn’t really look inside. I looked at the embossed lettering on the cards and wondered who the father was. The news of the birth came on the phone but, of course, Corinne sent a picture of mother and bouncing baby boy not long afterwards, in another silver envelope. I looked at that one. I half expected Seb to be in those pictures, leant against the rails of the hospital bed and smiling proudly, but he wasn’t. When I asked Annabel how Seb was doing she seemed distracted.

  ‘He’s fine. Fit and healthy. Breastfeeding. 8lb 6oz.’

  4

  I BEGAN GETTING up at 5am. I made myself toast and a fruit salad. For about an hour I would prepare to leave the flat. I spent that hour lying on the sofa and listening to the growing sounds of traffic. Franz von Papen’s memoirs lay in my lap. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I just left them there. After a five-minute nap I would claw at my briefcase, sit up and straighten my tie. Then I descended the airy staircase through two floors and crossed the road.

  It was a five-minute walk into the city centre and I shortened it to three. I headed for the tram stop. All around me were university buildings with their panelled decor. The library was opposite the station. It was more stately, standing about as tall as a medium-rise, with long glass windows on every other floor. They reflected cloud and showed little of the interior. At that time in the day there were no students around. It was just suits like me.

  On the tram I occasionally got a four-seater to myself. That’s when I’d spread myself out and pull the battered red hardback out of my briefcase. The memoirs still had a county library sticker on the inside cover. I had already read them but I used to flip to my favourite passages. A few years before the First World War, when he was a military attaché on a trip to Mexico, Papen went to the Northern Provinces, to where the revolutionary bands were really troubling the Mexican government. That particular intrigue ended in Papen being chased and shot at by a soldier in a local citadel. He had only just finished a friendly conversation with the young man and had turned his back to walk away. Franz had no business being there though. I looked up from the yellowed pages and the city centre was gliding by. More people were moving about but all the shops still had their shutters down.

  After twenty minutes of travel through the tightly packed streets, the buildings gave way and revealed a more sombre Sheffield. It seemed caught in the valley rising either side. When the tram had cleared the first overpass I put my book away and disembarked by the cramped newsagents with papers on display. The shopkeeper’s greeting got warmer every day. I bought a paper, exchanged some pleasantries with him and went to wait at a bus stop. It was twenty minutes on the tram and then another half-hour on the bus.

  I thought of Annabel whenever I waited at that bus stop. Looking up at the hills dotted with council flats I thought of the warmth in the passenger seat of her Peugeot. I tried to imagine that seat remaining empty. I couldn’t be sure it was. She had told me were on a break. It was worse in the mornings, thinking about that.

  Soon enough the bus would arrive and I let anyone else waiting get on first. In the windows wild young
faces would emerge out of shadow, with three-year-olds standing on seats, bouncing up and down. At the back schoolkids in blazers were throwing Coke cans at each other. Some of them knew my name. When we got stuck in traffic, the rate of their blows only increased.

  And sure enough, once they had got bored of saying my name and giggling every morning, small objects started to hit me on the back of the head. It might have been a single crisp packet or a piece of balled-up notepaper at first but it became pretty regular. They all seemed to hold their breath after the impact. Papen didn’t run from that citadel in Mexico because he was a meek soldier frightened by the sound of gunfire. He ran because he had no jurisdiction in the provinces of Mexico. He also, probably, didn’t have a firearm.

  I remember one day of torrential rain. Everyone rushed onto the bus and sat panting, relieved to be crammed into the lower deck, dripping from their anoraks and umbrellas onto the floor. A tall guy got on and didn’t pay. He brazenly stood at the bottom of the stairs when the driver called him back. The driver switched the engine off and said he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The guy, in his early twenties, wearing a vest, spat onto the floor, mixing phlegm and muddy rainwater with his foot. He explained clearly that he had already shown his daysaver and offered to speak to the driver outside of his cabin. We all sat watching, occasionally looking at the time. When a chorus of boos sprang up from the impatient school kids at the back the tall guy stormed off into the rain, bracing his shoulders against it.

  The bus pulled away and we all heard a loud clunk. The guy had kicked the bus, around where the engine was. The kids all jumped up and got excited. It was as if some of them had taken the force of the kick themselves. They didn’t shut up about it for the rest of the journey. Amongst the other entertainments were a family made up of about thirteen children and one mother. I never saw them all getting off the bus but I’m sure she lost one or two a day in the process. She could replace them quickly enough. There was of course an almighty, always sweating, fat man. He had a bag full of cassette tapes that I gazed into whenever I had to sit next to him. I think they were motivational tapes.

  I went into St Edwards through the main entrance. As I passed the front desk I waved to the receptionist. Mandy was a widow with a flat top of tightly curled black hair. She had lived in Sheffield all of her life and had excellent elocution. Sometimes I glimpsed Annabel moving between offices in the background. Everyday Mandy said hello back to me and told me if I had any post. Annabel opened a filing cabinet and asked Mandy where she could put the paperwork. She looked at me and always gave a half-smile. We were on an indefinite break.

  The map loomed over me between lessons. From my desk I could see Eastfield Drive over a row of oak trees. It was a quiet cul-de-sac with identical, sand-coloured houses curving around an island of poorly laid tarmac. There were still one or two cars parked in the drive in the daytime. People in oversized T-shirts would come out and move the cars out of the drive or into the drive. I didn’t know why. My gaze often settled over there, out of that window in the corner of the room. It was half covered by a blind descending from the ceiling that rattled whenever a door slammed in the next room. Because some of my worst kids would gravitate to that window-seat during lessons, they thought I was giving them the evils. I was just staring though.

  After 3pm, when St Edward’s exhaled all of its pupils, every corridor of the school seemed to relax. That was when I sat down to my class lists. I would spread them out in front of me, shuffling the pages backwards and forwards to try and remember events of the passing weeks. Shaun Rafter, one Thursday morning, had landed a punch on his classmate’s arm and tried to kick him out of his chair. The fight didn’t get very far and had arisen out of some perceived slight that had been written on Shaun’s notepaper. When I tried to get to the bottom of it I found the offending page had been ripped out and cast into the ether, probably out of the corner window. I looked down onto the portakabin roof below and saw numerous things: pens, condom wrappers and lots of balled-up notepaper. When I spoke to Shaun alone I advised him to learn to control his aggression. He sighed, got out his mobile phone and started for the door. He told me he was ringing his mother.

  I wrote Will grow up to kick buses by Shaun’s name on the class list. Then I crossed out ‘buses’ and put ‘automobiles/anything’. Shaun would kick any machine. I daresay he would kick a pram or a wheelchair if it got a rise out of him. There are people who feel their anger like that. Anything that has direction and momentum, anything going somewhere they are not, is worthy of a few blows.

  As for Jodie Tatham it took me a little while longer to nail it. My entry for her was the result of general perception rather than an actual event. For instance, whenever I told her to stop turning around she’d go bright red and pull the neck of her jumper partly over her face. She was a little paranoid that people were talking about her all the time and it got her into a muddle. She had also wrinkled her nose a few times when I was talking about the Middle East. I recalled her dad was once a football coach at St Edwards. There was general consensus that with his constant masquerading in a St George’s shirt, his aversion to ethnic players and his emphasis on long-ball football, Jodie’s father was a BNP-sympathiser. For Jodie I had to capture this pride. I put The inevitable product of an overachieving island nation.

  Charlotte Baines was antsier than James Watt. Smart, but probably incapable of contributing to any revolution, industrial or otherwise.

  For Charlotte’s sister Kelly I could not bring myself to state the truth, at least not in words. Instead I drew a single pram spilling over with babies. I drew a pile of trainers behind. I added to that pile whenever I was stuck for something else to write.

  An hour later and the cars had come back to fill up Eastfield Drive. They covered most of the tarmac. I leant against that corner window, opening and closing the blinds that hung further up. Before leaving I’d scan the map from corner to corner. The southern hemisphere was in a dire state. Graffiti covered a little bit of every continent and scrawled figures were bunching up in the sea. I smudged some of the markings with my thumb. There was a blue smear across my hand and I held it up into the light. Before the caretaker could arrive at the top of the stairs I collected up my class lists and packed them into my desk drawer. After I locked it I pulled at the handle, just to be sure.

  Alex Blake and his scrawling on the world map came back to me months after the incident. One day in March I sent two year 7s with a message for Mr Lancet, a teacher who used my room on Fridays. When they didn’t come back I left my class to look for them myself. They weren’t in the playground or the sports hall. I mounted the staffroom stairs to see if anyone had noticed them wandering around, doe-eyed and suggestible. By the staffroom there was a noticeboard which was usually empty. That day a page of scuffed notebook paper pinned there caught my eye. I recognised the terrible handwriting. A set of squashed numbers ran down the side and people’s names were written alongside these.

  Shaun Rafter.

  Mrs Yeoman.

  Pythagoras.

  Some of the names were incomprehensible but most of them were teachers. A few numbers had no name assigned to them as if those places were still under deliberation. I pulled the note off and went into the kitchenette, where Greg Cope, a Maths teacher, nodded at me and put a sandwich on the side. I asked him why the paper was up there.

  ‘This is the much fabled Hit List. Apparently it got pulled off a year 10 in Angela’s class.’

  ‘Year 9,’ I said. ‘It’s Alex Blake’s.’ I knew this because I could recognise the kid’s handwriting anywhere. It was so distinctly looping and messy I couldn’t see his test papers being accepted by the exam board next year. That was unless we could get permission for him to type them. I tapped the paper and looked up at Greg. ‘What is it meant to be a list of? What is it for?’

  ‘You know, who he’s going to kill first, with a machete or a Beretta.’ Greg brief
ly simulated a Valentine’s Day massacre shootout and sprayed bullets against the far wall then stopped abruptly. ‘God knows.’

  I pointed to number 2 which was Mrs Yeoman’s position.

  ‘This is brilliant.’

  ‘Yeah, it also might be police evidence soon, so you’d better leave it on the board. Sarah is taking it seriously in light of . . .’

  In light of Andre Miller. The boy had disappeared in a veil of social services and police intervention. All that might be left of him was a ‘fuck you’ which had ripped through part of Antarctica on my classroom wall. Greg saw the enjoyment I was getting out of Mrs Yeoman’s unpopularity and hastened to point out my name was also on the list. I was annoyed, surprised, to see it there, albeit in the lower regions at number 19. I laughed to make a point of not feeling threatened. Then I tucked the list into my shirt pocket. Greg took an eager bite and shook his head. He waved the sandwich at me.

  ‘Matt, I wouldn’t mess with her on this one.’

  ‘Why?’ I held the list up. ‘You’ve got to agree going to the police is ridiculous.’

  He shrugged and began laughing. This was probably for my benefit. I knew if anyone was looking for the note he wouldn’t hesitate to point them in my direction.

  I was planning to put the Hit List back once common sense had prevailed at the school. At that moment I put it in the back pocket of my trousers and buttoned it. I was marking coursework at my flat when I remembered it again. I had decided to put a wash on and threw my trousers in as an afterthought. In the time it took me to load the washing machine from a cracked basket, roll a cigarette on the sideboard, make a cup of coffee and traipse across the wooden flooring to sit under the halo of my desk lamp, I remembered the Hit List.