Gentlemen and Players

by Joanne Harris

  Keane grinned. Light and Easy just looked puzzled.

  “I—I’m a part-timer,” said Meek nervously. “I—t-teach m-maths on F-Fridays.”

  Oh dear. If I frightened him, 5F on a Friday afternoon would eat him alive. I hated to think of the mess they would make in my room. I made a mental note to be on call if there were any signs of a riot.

  “Bloody good place to have a pub, though,” said Light, gulping his pint. “I could get used to this at lunchtime.”

  Easy raised an eyebrow. “Won’t you be training, or supervising extracurricular, or rugby, or something?”

  “We’re all entitled to a lunch break, aren’t we?”

  Not just a Jobsworth, but a Union man. Dear gods. That’s all we need.

  “Oh. But the Headmaster was—I mean, I said I’d take charge of the Geography Society. I thought everyone was supposed to do extracurricular.”

  Light shrugged. “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? I’m telling you, there’s no way I’m going to do after-school sports and weekend matches and give up my lunchtime pint as well. What is this, bloody Colditz?”

  “Well, you don’t have lessons to prepare, or marking—” began Easy.

  “Oh, that’s typical,” said Light, his face reddening. “Typical bloody academic. Unless you’ve got it on paper it doesn’t count, is that it? I’ll tell you this for free, those lads’ll get more from my lessons than they would learning the bloody capital of Khazistan, or whatever it is—”

  Easy looked taken aback. Meek put his face into his lemonade and refused to come out. Miss Dare stared out of the window. Isabelle shot Light an admiring glance from beneath her smoky eyelashes.

  Keane grinned. He seemed to be enjoying the fracas.

  “What about you, then?” I said. “What do you think of St. Oswald’s?”

  He looked at me. Mid to late twenties; slim; dark-haired, with a fringe; black T-shirt under a dark suit. He seemed very assured for such a young man, and his voice, though pleasant, had an edge of authority. “When I was a boy I lived near here for a while. Spent a year at the local comp. Sunnybank Park. Compared to that, St. Oswald’s is another world.”

  Well, that didn’t surprise me much. Sunnybank Park eats kids alive, especially the bright ones. “Good thing you escaped,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “We moved down south, and I changed schools. I was lucky. Another year and that place would have finished me off. Still, move over Barry Hines; it’s all good material if I ever write a book.”

  Oh dear, I thought. Not a Budding Author. You get them from time to time, especially among the English staff, and though not as awkward as Union men or Jobsworths, they rarely bring anything but trouble. Robbie Roach was a poet in the days of his youth. Even Eric Scoones once wrote a play. Neither has ever quite recovered.

  “You’re a writer?” I said.

  “Strictly a hobby,” said Keane.

  “Yes, well—I understand the horror genre isn’t as lucrative as it used to be,” I said, with a glance at Light, who was demonstrating a biceps curl to Easy with the aid of his pint of beer.

  I looked back at Keane, who had followed my gaze. At first sight, he showed potential. I hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be another Roach. English teachers so often have the fatal tendency; that thwarted ambition to be something more, something other than a simple schoolmaster. It usually ends in tears, of course; escape from Alcatraz looks positively childish in comparison with escape from teaching. I looked at Keane for signs of rot; I have to say that at first sight I didn’t notice any.

  “I wrote a b-book once,” said Meek. “It was called Javascript and Other—”

  “I read a book once,” said Light, smirking. “Didn’t think much of it, though.”

  Easy laughed. He seemed to have got over his initial faux pas with Light. At the next table, Jimmy grinned and moved a little closer to the group, but Easy, face half-averted, managed to avoid eye contact.

  “Now if you’d said the Internet”—Light moved his chair a few inches, blocking Jimmy, and reached for his half-finished beer—“plenty to read there—if you’re not afraid of going blind, know what I mean—”

  Jimmy slurped his shandy, looking slightly crestfallen. He isn’t as slow as some people take him for, and besides, the snub was plain enough for anyone to see. I was suddenly reminded of Anderton-Pullitt, the loner of my form, eating his sandwiches alone in the classroom while the other boys played football in the Quad.

  I shot a sideways glance at Keane, who was watching, neither approving nor disapproving, but with a gleam of appreciation in his gray eyes. He winked at me, and I smiled back, amused that the most promising of our freshers so far had turned out to be a Sunnybanker.

  4

  The first step is always the hardest. I made many more illicit forays into St. Oswald’s, gaining confidence, moving closer into the grounds, the courtyards, then at last the buildings themselves. Months passed; terms; and little by little my father’s vigilance was diminished.

  Things had not turned out quite how he’d hoped. The teachers who called him John remained no less contemptuous than the boys who called him Snyde; the gatehouse was damp in winter, and between the beer and the football and his passion for scratch cards, there was never quite enough money. In spite of his great ideas, St. Oswald’s had turned out to be just another caretaker’s job, filled with daily humiliations. It took up all his life. There never was time for tea on the lawns, and Mum never did come home.

  Instead, my father took up with a brassy nineteen-year-old called Pepsi, who ran a beauty parlor in town, wore too much lip gloss, and liked to party. She had her own place, but she often stayed at ours, and in the mornings my father was heavy-eyed and short-tempered, and the house smelled of cold pizza and beer. On those days—and others—I knew to keep out of his way.

  Saturday nights were the worst. My father’s temper was exacerbated by beer, and pockets empty after a night on the tiles, he most often chose me as the butt of his resentment. “Yer little bastard,” he would slur at me through the bedroom door. “How do I know you’re mine, eh? How do I know you’re even mine?” And if I was foolish enough to open the door, then it would start; the pushing, the shouting, the swearing, and finally the big slow roundhouse punch that, nine times out of ten, would strike the wall and send the drunkard sprawling.

  I wasn’t afraid of him. I had been once; but you can get used to anything in time, you know, and nowadays I paid as little attention to his rages as the inhabitants of Pompeü to the volcano that was one day to extinguish them. Most things, repeated often enough, can become routine; and mine was simply to lock the bedroom door, whatever came, and to keep well out of his way the morning after.

  At first Pepsi tried to get me on her side. Sometimes she would bring me little presents, or try to make dinner, though she wasn’t a great cook. But I remained stubbornly aloof. It wasn’t that I disliked her—with her false nails and overplucked eyebrows, I considered her too stupid to dislike—or even that I resented her. No, it was her dreadful palliness which offended me; the implication that she and I could have something in common, that one day perhaps, we could be friends.

  It was at this point that St. Oswald’s became my playground. It was still officially out of bounds, but by then my father had begun to lose his initial evangelism for the place, and he was happy to turn a blind eye to my occasional infringement of the rules, as long as I was discreet and drew no attention to myself.

  Even so, as far as John Snyde was concerned, I only ever played in the grounds. But the Porter’s keys were carefully labeled, each in its place in the glass box behind the gatehouse door, and as my curiosity and my obsession grew I found it harder and harder to resist the challenge.

  One small theft, and the school was mine. Now no door was closed to me; passkey in hand, I roamed the deserted buildings while my father watched TV, or went down the local with his mates. As a result, by my tenth birthday I knew the school better than any pupil,
and I was able to pass—invisible and unheard—without so much as raising dust.

  I knew the cupboards where the cleaning equipment was kept; the medical room; the electrical points; the Archives. I knew all the classrooms; the south-facing geography rooms, unbearably hot in summer; the cool, paneled science rooms; the creaking stairs; the odd-shaped rooms in the Bell Tower. I knew the pigeon loft, the Chapel, the Observatory with its round glass ceiling, the tiny studies with their rows of metal cabinets. I read ghost phrases from half-cleaned blackboards. I knew the staff—at least by reputation. I opened lockers with the master key. I smelled chalk and leather and cooking and wood polish. I tried on discarded games kit. I read forbidden books.

  Better still, and more dangerous, I explored the roof. St. Oswald’s roof was a huge, sprawling thing, ridged like a brontosaurus in stony overlapping plates. It was a small city in itself, with towers and quads of its own that mirrored the towers and quads of the school below. Great chimneys, imperially crowned, soared above the crooked ridges; birds nested; rogue elders sank their roots into damp crevices and flourished improbably, dripping blossom into the cracks between the slates. There were channels and gullies and monkey-puzzle ledges leading over the rooftops; there were skylights and balconies, perilously accessible from high parapets.

  At first I was cautious, remembering my clumsiness in school gymnastics. But left to my own devices I gained in confidence; learned balance; taught myself to scramble silently over smooth slates and exposed girders; learned how to use a metal rail to vault from a high ledge onto a small balcony, and there down a thick, hairy elbow of creeper into a sallow-throated chimney of ivy and moss.

  I loved the roof. I loved its peppery smell; its dankness in wet weather; the rosettes of yellow lichen that bloomed and spread across the stones. Here, at last, I was free to be myself. There were maintenance ladders leading out from various openings, but these were mostly in poor condition, some of them reduced to a lethal filigree of rust and metal, and I’d always scorned them, finding my own entrances to the rooftop kingdom, unblocking windows that had been painted shut decades before, looping pieces of rope around chimney stacks to aid ascent, exploring the wells and crawl spaces and the great leaded stone gutters. I had no fear of heights or falling. I found to my surprise that I was naturally agile; on the roof my light build was a real advantage, and up here there were no bullies to mock my skinny legs.

  Of course I had long known that maintaining the roof was a job my father detested. He could just about cope with a broken slate (as long as it was accessible from a window), but the leadwork that sealed the gutters was quite another matter. To reach that, it was necessary to crawl down a slated incline toward the far edge of the roof, where there was a stone parapet that circled the gutter, and from there, to kneel, with three hundred feet of blue-green St. Oswald’s air between himself and the ground, to check the seal. He never did this necessary duty; gave a multitude of reasons for failing to do so, but after the excuses had run dry I finally, gleefully guessed the truth. John Snyde was afraid of heights.

  Already, you see, secrets fascinated me. A bottle of sherry at the back of a stock cupboard, a packet of letters in a tin box behind a panel, some magazines in a locked filing cabinet, a list of names in an old accounts book. For me, no secret was mundane; no titbit too small to escape my interest. I knew who was cheating on his wife; who suffered from nerves; who was ambitious; who read romantic novels; who used the photocopier illicitly. If knowledge is power, I owned the place.

  By then I was in my last term at Abbey Road Juniors. It had not been a success. I had worked hard, kept out of trouble, but had consistently failed to make any friends. In an effort to combat my father’s northern vowels I had tried—disastrously—to imitate the voices and mannerisms of the St. Oswald’s boys, thereby earning myself the nickname “Snobby Snyde.” Even some of the teachers used it; I’d heard them in their staff room, the heavy door swinging open into a fug of smoke and laughter. Snobby Snyde, pealed a woman’s voice. Oh, that’s priceless. Snobby Snyde.

  I had no illusions that Sunnybank Park would be any better. Most of its intake was from the Abbey Road Estate, a depressing block of pebble-dashed council houses and cardboard flatblocks with washing at the balconies and dark stairwells that smelled of piss. I’d lived there myself. I knew what to expect. There was a sandbox filled with nuggets of dog shit; a playground with swings and a lethal scattering of broken glass; walls of graffiti; gangs of boys and girls with foul mouths and grubby, inbred faces.

  Their fathers drank with my father down by the Engineers; their mothers had gone with Sharon Snyde to Cinderella’s Dance-a-rama on Saturday nights. “You want to make an effort, kid,” my father told me. “Give ‘em a chance, and you’ll soon fit in.”

  But I didn’t want to make the effort. I didn’t want to fit in at Sunnybank Park.

  “Then what do you want?”

  Ah. That was the question.

  Alone in the echoing corridors of the school, I dreamed of having my name on the Honors Boards, of sharing jokes with the St. Oswald’s boys, of learning Latin and Greek instead of woodwork and technical drawing, of doing prep instead of homework at the big wooden desks. In eighteen months, my invisibility had changed from a talent to a curse; I longed to be seen; I strove to belong; I went out of my way to take ever greater risks in the hope that one day, perhaps, St. Oswald’s would recognize me and take me home.

  So I carved my initials alongside those of generations of Old Oswaldians on the oak panels in the Refectory. I watched weekend sports fixtures from a hiding place at the back of the Games Pavilion. I struggled to the top of the sycamore tree in the center of the Quad and made faces at the gargoyles at the edge of the roof. After school I ran back as fast as I could to St. Oswald’s and watched the boys as they left; heard their laughter and their complaints, spied on their fights, breathed the exhaust fumes of their parents’ expensive cars as if it were incense. Our own school book-room was poorly stocked, mostly with paperbacks and comics, but in St. Oswald’s huge cloistered library I read avidly—Ivanhoe and Great Expectations and Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Gormenghast and The Arabian Nights and King Solomon’s Mines. Often I smuggled books home—some of them hadn’t been taken out of the library since the 1940s. My favorite was The Invisible Man. Walking along the corridors of St. Oswald’s at night, smelling the day’s chalk and the bland lingerings of the kitchen, hearing the dead echoes of happy voices and watching the shadows of the trees fall onto the newly polished floors, I knew exactly, and with a deep ache of longing, how he had felt.

  All I wanted, you see, was to belong. Abbey Road Juniors had been shabby and run-down, a failing tribute to 1960s liberalism. But Sunnybank Park was infinitely worse. I took regular beatings for my leather briefcase (everyone that year was carrying Adidas bags); for my contempt of sports; for my smart mouth; for my love of books; for my clothes; and for the fact that my father worked at That Posh School (it didn’t seem to matter that he was only the caretaker). I learned to run fast and to keep my head down. I imagined myself an exile, set apart from the others, who would one day be called back to where I belonged. Deep down I thought that if I proved myself, somehow, if I could withstand the bullying and the petty humiliations, then St. Oswald’s would one day welcome me.

  When I was eleven and the doctor decided I needed glasses, my father blamed my reading. But secretly I knew that I had reached another milestone on the way to St. Oswald’s, and although “Snobby Snyde” quickly became “Speccy Snyde,” still I was obscurely pleased. I scrutinized myself in the bathroom mirror and decided that I almost looked the part.

  I still do; though the glasses have been replaced by contact lenses (just in case). My hair is a little darker than it was then, and better cut. My clothes too are well cut, but not too formal—I don’t want to look as if I’m trying too hard. I’m especially pleased with the voice; no trace of my father’s accent remains, but the fake refinement, which made Snobby Snyde such a drea
dful little upstart, has vanished. My new persona is likeable without being intrusive; a good listener; precisely the qualities needed in a murderer and a spy.

  All in all, I was pleased with my performance today. Perhaps some part of me still expects to be recognized, for the thrill of danger was vivid in me all day as I tried not to seem too familiar with the buildings, the rules, the people.

  The teaching part, surprisingly, is the easiest. I have my subject’s lower sets throughout, thanks to Strange’s unique timetabling methods (senior staff invariably get the better classes, leaving the new appointees with the rabble), and this means that, although my timetable is full, it is not especially taxing. I know enough about my subject to fool the boys, at least; when in doubt I use the teachers’ books to help me.

  It is enough for my purpose. No one suspects. I have no top sets or sixth-formers to challenge my superior knowledge. Nor do I anticipate any discipline problems. These boys are very different from the pupils of Sunnybank Park, and I have the whole disciplinary infrastructure of St. Oswald’s to reinforce my position, should I need it.

  I sense that I will not, however. These boys are paying customers. They are used to obeying their teachers; their misbehavior is limited to the occasional missed prep, or whispering in the classroom. The cane is no longer used—it is no longer necessary in the face of the greater, unspecified threat. It’s rather comic, really. Comic and ridiculously simple. It’s a game, of course; a battle of wills between myself and the rabble. We all know that there is nothing I could do if they all decided to leave the room at once. We all know, but no one dares to call my bluff.

  All the same, I must not be complacent. My cover is good, but even a small misstep at this stage might prove disastrous. That secretary, for instance. Not that her presence changes anything, but it just goes to show that you can’t anticipate every move.