The sound of her heels scraping the uneven ground reminded him of the clatter of shoes at lunchtime when everyone raced to beat the queues in the canteens. The fear of corporal punishment chased many of those feet. Teachers could get away with all manner of brutality back then. He remembered one of the maths teachers, a Mr Nelson, who doubled up as a PE teacher when needed. He was a nasty bastard. There was some poor soul, Dobson his name might have been, who roused Nelson’s ire one day for whatever reason. Nelson dragged him around the changing rooms, clouting his knees against the metal lockers, slapping his face against the tiles. You looked askance at a pupil these days and there might be legal action. He didn’t know what had happened to Nelson, or Dobson for that matter. Nelson had probably retired because you weren’t allowed to knuckle heads any more. Now he thought of it, he didn’t know what had happened to any of the teachers from his time at the school. He dug for their names, some of them probably in the ground twenty years now: Jarvis, the music teacher; Latham, the physics teacher. Manton, who taught French. He couldn’t remember the name of his form teacher for his last year. She was coming to the end of her working life then, he guessed, and she wore her hair in an old fashioned way, a tight bun with a crimped edge like a pie top. It must have taken her an age to prepare every morning. Mrs Dunbavin, was it? Dun-something, anyway.
He wondered why the school had closed in the first place, but surely the writing had been on the wall for some time. Even when he was in his final year, revising for exams he would not pass, standards and results were both falling. The annual intake had diminished year on year, despite the school being in a good catchment area. Truanting had been a problem (he’d done his own sterling work to add to the absentee list) and towards the end of his time there, he’d sometimes see the teachers doing the crossword, or leafing through a magazine in front of a class of children whose apathy was almost militant. The overriding attitude seemed to be that if the pupils weren’t prepared to learn then the teachers weren’t prepared to teach. It was an impasse that could only have one outcome.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He thought the girl might faint. “Do you want me to get help?” And following on from that: too late…way too late.
He wondered what she was doing here, and how she had fetched up on the old school grounds. The site must be closed off at all points to prevent trespassers, yet there must be a breach somewhere; he couldn’t imagine this girl vaulting over a fence, or crawling under one for that matter.
She stared at him with those large wet eyes and a hand flew to her scarf where it trembled like that of a magician about to perform a reveal. Instead she fingered the ragged edges of the wool and shook her head slightly.
“Can’t you speak?” he asked, stopping to look back at her. He thought it might be laryngitis. He thought of vocal polyps or vocal cord paralysis.
The devil was a midwife and when I was born I screamed so hard I ruptured my voice box. She kept walking and every baby step threatened to send her falling into the hardened wedges of mud.
Siddall made to laugh but he managed only to send a mouthful of spit down his chin. He felt very keenly the spur of his heart.
How could he know this girl? She was much younger than him. Maybe she just reminded him of someone he had been at school with. Someone who was now his age, working hard to put food on a table for her family.
You know. You know very well.
He stared down at the ground and watched his boots press on across the perilous terrain. Where the canteens had stood was now so much long grass. He stared at it for a long time. A fence marched off deep into what had once been the school fields, marking the boundary of a new housing estate. The only thing that remained was the three-step stone staircase that led up from the road as if swept around the corner of the Home Economics building. It looked utterly out of place now, like an ancient artefact exposed during a roadworks excavation.
The road followed an incline down to the south entrance on Clapgates Road. To the left were the shattered remains of the science labs; to the right, the gymnasiums. Seeing them again, albeit partially denuded by the claws of the excavators, unlocked memories in a rapid procession: Muzz hawking and spitting thick green phlegm (myeloperoxidases, he thought… he thought of chest infections and pneumonia) into the cracks between the science lab brick walls “to keep it from falling down”; Jacko finding a Polaroid of an erect penis in the froth of dusty nettles fringing the gymnasium courtyard; Mank being chased across the paved area in front of the headmaster’s office by his fifth year peers when they found out he had a French pen pal.
The girl followed at a distance but he was always aware of her and the wet rattle of air as it chicaned through the ruin of her throat. She unnerved him. I swallowed a mouthful of crushed glass; somebody tried to strangle me with barbed wire; as a toddler I fell on to an opened pair of scissors. Every few minutes there was a different story, as if she was testing his resolve, or practicing lines from a grim play in which she was due to appear.
There wasn’t much in the way of ambient sound to distract him from her breathing, or the fibs that spooled by. The shock of a magpie’s cackle or the distant cough of an engine as it started in the cold morning, little else. It sounded a bit like the badly-maintained cart the rag-and-bone man used to steer around these streets, something creaking and groaning, all leather and waterlogged wood complaining of the pressures it was being forced to bear. He tried to ignore it, for the sake of nostalgia; he didn’t want his recollections to be spoilt though he had yet to muster anything pleasant. It was hammered into you that school days were the best of your life, and maybe you believed it after a while, especially if everything afterwards was so grim. But already he was regretting his decision to come here.
He picked carefully through the rubble, forcing himself to try to remember the rooms that had stood where now there were only foundations, and half-bricks, and drifts of cement dust, forcing his mind away from the girl, and the impossibility of her. The diggers stood among them frozen in positions of attack, fangs stained by the red clay in the undersoil. The offices of the headmaster and his deputy had been here, hadn’t they? Pale brick extensions to the venerable deep red of the original building. A trophy cabinet and the smells of Brasso and Windolene. Panoramic photographs of the school population. He remembered sitting in drowsy hot mathematics classes, grizzling over impenetrable equations. Mr Sankey in his fug of coffee breath and nicotine; chalk dust motes hanging in the daggers of sunlight. Staring outside and wishing the bell would go, trying to impel the second hand more quickly around the clock using the power of his mind.
What do you want to be when you grow up? He wondered about the other children in his class, and what they were doing now. He had seen a man of around twenty leaving a noodle restaurant the other night. He had been wearing a three-piece suit. No person under the age of forty ought to be wearing a waistcoat, he thought. It just didn’t look right. It looked like you were going to a fancy dress party. But Siddall couldn’t talk. In his life he’d worn a tie twice—a clip-on affair borrowed from a security guard acquaintance—to his parents’ funerals.
What do you want to be?
His dreams of becoming a surgeon had been dashed, not because of his academic performance, although soon enough that would reveal itself as wanting, but because of an unexpected squeamishness. It had nothing to do with blood though. What had put him off was the thought of operating on limp, unresponsive bodies. A general anaesthetic was often necessary, he knew, especially where invasive surgery was concerned, but the thought of slitting someone open with a scalpel and seeing no reaction bothered him beyond words. It didn’t matter how many machines were on hand to display vital life signs: in effect he would be operating on a dummy, and he knew he could not cope with that. He thought that growing up was as much about coping with the loss of such dreams, and the concomitant brutal realities, as anything else.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked, and his voice was a fain
t, frightened thing curdling in the morning air.
Now it was her turn to laugh. Or at least that’s what he thought it was. Any alternative was too horrible to consider.
It struck him that he was very afraid, that the cold had nothing to do with the shake in his legs, or the stiffness in the skin of his face. Here he was dredging through the nonsense of his youth because he didn’t want to acknowledge the dawning of a realisation that could not be possible. The girl. He remembered the girl now. Of course he did. Her name was Alison. Her name had been Alison. Did you lose your name because you died?
He heard a change in the quality of her step. A decay, as if she was somehow diminishing, perhaps because he had fully acknowledged her at last, perhaps because he had put some distance between them. He had certainly increased his pace in the last few minutes. But when he checked behind him she was still there, six feet away, as she had been since they began this long tour of the dead zones of his childhood. Their childhood.
Houses were rising where once had reached five acres of playing fields. A four-hundred metre running track had been scorched into the grass. There were half a dozen soccer pitches and a couple of rugby pitches. The goal-posts remained throughout the year. In the summer, a cricket wicket was shaved close to the ground. He had carried his bat for 56 runs one glorious summer evening. In the wind and the rain he had scored two goals in an eight-nil thrashing of their local rivals. He broke a decades-old school record when he jumped one metre forty in the high jump. The deputy headteacher had leaned in close during the assembly when he received his certificate to whisper that the irony of winning in such a discipline was not lost on him. Now there were new roads with new names and houses that all looked the same built on the ghosts of all that sporting endeavour. Where was the proof any more of what he had achieved? All the record books and trophies and framed certificates on that hallway wall. Where were they now? Were they just so much debris at the bottom of an excavator’s bucket? The kiss he had stolen from Michelle Carter on the way down the steps from a geography class in the third year. Had that actually happened?
He suffered a brief disoriented moment when he couldn’t be sure he was where he believed himself to be, that there had never been a school here, that he was trespassing on alien soil. But then the girl’s foot crackled in a shallow, iced puddle and he saw the old school crest on her blazer, the comically large knot in her tie, the way they had all worn them back then. She was close enough now for him to see the flawless sweep of the skin on her face, and the ruptured veins that reddened her eyes.
A subconjunctival haemorrhage is blood that is located between the conjunctiva and the underlying sclera.
She was lifting her hands from her pockets now, but they were balled into fists, knuckles white against the skin, so tight he thought they might split open.
“I tried to save your life,” he said.
“In doing so you ended it.”
“How was I to know? If we’d stood and stared—and we all did, all except me—then you were dead anyway.”
It had been an autumn day; hard winds blew dry curls of leaves and litter across the fields. Siddall had been late to the lunchtime queue. He hated not being among the first in line. It meant a plate full of cooling, staling things. It meant having to sneak on to a crammed table and feeling many pairs of eyes willing him to go elsewhere. All of the chips were gone by the time he made it round to the food. There was a tray of minced beef and a tray of mashed potato. Cold carrot coins. At least there were some Devonshire splits left for afters.
At the table (Chilts, Baggo, Cudge, Foz, Warbz, Graffy) he asked for the salt and Warbz slid it his way. Siddall positioned the cruet over his food and watched as the top fell off and a small hill cascaded on to his pool of mince. Laughter all round. He laughed too. Good one. Bullseye. He didn’t have enough money left to buy a fresh serving. He scraped away the excess as best he could but it was ruined. He bolted his mash, intending to leave as soon as possible and eat his dessert in the playground.
Curious sound.
Cole, the laboratory assistant, was sitting at the staff table pouring water from a plastic jug into a beaker, but it wasn’t that kind of gurgle. This was more … organic. He felt his heart leap at the fractured rhythm of it. Soon it was obscured under other noises, of panic and alarm. He turned in his chair and saw the girl, Alison?—she was in the year below him—bending as if looking for something she had dropped under the table. Her knife and fork fell from her fingers and the sound of them hitting the floor shut everyone up. She was bowed like the rod of an angler who has hooked a big fish. Into the silence flooded the sounds of her choking. It seemed such a private sound, something that nobody ought to be privy too. It was ugly and staccato and utterly breathless. Ropes of saliva hung from her distended jaws. Her skin was turning blue.
Siddall went to her as if in a dream. His decisiveness caused others, even the teacher, to stand back. He lifted her upright from behind and jammed his hand under her breastbone, gripping it with his other. He yanked his hands towards him, exerting pressure at the base of her diaphragm, jerking her off her feet in the process. He expected to hear the surprised snap of her lungs, a chunk of food to fly from her darkening lips but there was nothing now, not even the slightest squeak and snarl to suggest any procession of air in the shrinking O of her windpipe. Again he tried it. Again. But either he was performing the manoeuvre incorrectly or the morsel in her throat was stuck fast.
The significant forces involved in this procedure, even when done correctly, can cause bruising, but also more serious injuries such as fracture of the xiphoid process or ribs.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” Cole, his face ashen, said to nobody in particular before shouldering his way out of the throng that was growing around Siddall and his stricken patient.
Siddall was aware of unblinking eyes, like a parliament of owls, watching his every move in complete silence. Alison had lost consciousness now. There might be enough oxygen in her lungs to keep her alive for another minute or so. He shrugged off his blazer and laid her down upon it. He positioned her head so that her throat was proud. With his finger he felt below her Adam’s apple for a second bulge: the cricoid cartilage. He clamped his teeth on the end of his Bic Cristal and withdrew the ink tube and then the stopper at the bottom of the barrel. He held the pen in his fist, pointed end down, making sure there was about an inch of plastic showing, then he rammed this into her throat. He was vaguely aware of some people fainting. He was aware, on some level, of voices being raised. There might have been a siren in the distance. He watched blood fill the barrel of the pen and begin pulsing out of the end. He’d gone in too far; he hadn’t gone in far enough. He didn’t know what to do. Through it all Alison watched him with one eye open, lazy, frosted by senselessness.
Some of the problems that can occur as a result of a tracheotomy: air trapped in the pleural spaces around the lungs (pneumothorax), the presence of extraluminal air in the deeper layers of the chest (pneumomediastinum), subcutaneous emphysema, oesophageal trauma, injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve that moves the vocal cords.
And bleeding. Don’t forget bleeding.
He had stood up. His blazer was puddled with blood. The pulsing of it had ceased. He knew what that meant.
Now he felt his own breath catch in his throat as she reached out to touch him. She was colder than freezer burn. He saw horrible movement beneath the scarf as if she was still struggling with the piece of food that had killed her. The smell of cooked meat drifted to him and it was all he could do to quell his rising stomach. He wished he had not come here. What could he have hoped to achieve beyond a pang of regret? He thought a glimpse of his old school might act as some sort of tonic, but it only put him in mind of a long-lost family life that he had no hope of replicating. And of a girl he had wanted to save with a knowledge that was nothing of the sort.
The school was gone, but both of them were still bound to it. She had been the lucky one, he thought as he turne
d his back on the demolition site and trudged towards the exit, his fingers tingling with the memory of her body arching beneath them. She, at least, had escaped.
THE WATER KINGS
Manish Melwani
THE FIRST TIME SANJAY SAW US WAS THE night Dad passed. He only glimpsed us for a second, though; he didn’t quite understand what he’d seen.
Only this: smoking on the verandah of Dad’s mansion, staring across the low fence into his own neighbouring villa, Sanjay had noticed the light on in his half-renovated kitchen. And seen a strange man standing there. His head like a beak: long, curved and ocean-green. Sanjay, numb from grief and lack of sleep, stared as he took a drag from his cigarette. In his lungs, smoke curled around the anemone-strands of his cilia, slowly necrotising tissue: making him cough and retch and avert his gaze. He looked up, but the man had vanished.
Confused, Sanjay rubbed his eyes. The man’s impossible, crocodilian silhouette an afterglow; a fissure in his mind. The light was still on next door, but the kitchen was empty; the apparition gone. Unbidden, a half-forgotten Hindi word from his childhood bubbled up through the murk: Magar. Crocodile.
Sanjay put the cigarette out. He walked past the shared swimming pool and went through the gate, the threshold between Mum and Dad’s house and his own. Dad had bought the adjacent property years ago. Sanjay had taken over its mortgage, but the renovation, like so many other things, had come to a halt with Dad’s sudden illness. The villa loomed half-gutted in the night. Sacks of sand, ladders and other construction tools rested outside. Sanjay opened the door to his unfinished home, imagining reptilian shadows dripping dark water on exposed floors. Then a more pedestrian horror: Sunil Uncle, breaking into his house, parading vengefully and inexplicably with an umbrella over his head.
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