The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  The voice droned on, but it was as if a small red window had opened in Ralph’s mind. He had never thought before that his mother had known his stepfather before the marriage which had taken place so suddenly. What if in fact there had been something going on between them while his father was still alive? He shivered as if he had been infected by a fever. He couldn’t bring himself to think of his mother and stepfather in bed together, which was why he had asked for his own bedroom to be changed, so that he would be as far away from them as possible.

  But suppose there had been a liaison between them. After all, they had both been teachers and they must have met. True, they had been at different schools but it was inconceivable that they hadn’t met.

  O God, how dull his stepfather was, in his cloud of chalk. How different from his father who inhabited the large air of the theatre. What a poor ghostly fellow he was in his white dust.

  But the idea that his mother had known his stepfather would not leave his mind. How had he never thought of it before?

  That night, his stepfather being at a meeting at the school, he said to his mother,

  ‘Did you know . . . your husband . . . before you married him?’

  ‘I wish you could call him your stepfather, or even refer to him by his first name. Of course I knew him. I knew the family.’

  ‘But you married my father?’

  ‘Yes. And listen, Ralph, I have never said this to you before. I made a great mistake in marrying your father.’

  He was about to rise and leave the room when she said vehemently, ‘No, it’s time you listened. You sit down there and listen for a change. Did you know that your father was a drunk? Do you know that he twice gave me a black eye? The time I told everybody I had cut myself on the edge of the wardrobe during the power cut, and the time I said I had fallen on the ice? Did you know where he was coming from when his car crashed?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ Ralph shouted. ‘If you say any more I’ll kill you. It’s not true. You’re lying.’

  For a moment there he might have attacked her, he looked so white and vicious. It was the first time he had thought of hitting her; he came very close.

  Her face was as pale as his and she was almost swaying on her feet but she was shouting at him,

  ‘He was coming from one of his innumerable lady friends. I didn’t tell you that, did I? I got a message from the police and I went along there. He had told me he was going to be working late at the theatre but he was coming from the opposite direction. He was a stupid man. At least Jim is not stupid.’

  He raised his fist as if to hit her, but she didn’t shrink away.

  ‘Go on, hit me,’ she shouted. ‘Hit me because you can’t stand the truth any more than your father could. He was vulgar, not worth your stepfather’s little finger.’

  He turned and ran out of the house.

  Of course it wasn’t true. That story was not the one his mother had told him before. And for all he knew the two of them might have killed his father, they might have tampered with the brakes or the engine. After all, a car crash was always suspicious, and his father had been a good if fast driver. His stepfather couldn’t even drive.

  He went to the Nightspot where some boys from the school were playing snooker, and older ones drinking at the bar. He stood for a while watching Harry and Jimmy playing. Harry had been to college but had given it up and was now on the dole. Jimmy had never left town at all. He watched as Harry hit the assembled balls and sent them flying across the table. After a while he went and sat down by himself. He felt as if he had run away from home, as if he wanted to kill himself. He was tired of always being in the same room by himself playing records. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to talk to his stepfather. The two of them were together, had shut him out, he was like a refugee in the house. He hated to watch his stepfather eating, and above all he hated to see him kissing his mother before he set off for school with his briefcase under his arm. But then if he himself left home where could he go? He had no money. He loathed being dependent on them for pocket money, which he used buying records.

  He hated his mother as much as he hated his stepfather. At other times he thought that they might have been able to live together, just the two of them, if his stepfather had not appeared. Why, he had loved her in the past and she had loved him, but now she had shut him out because she thought he was being unfair to her husband. He was such a drip: he couldn’t play snooker, and all he did was mark essays every night. The house felt cold now, he was rejected, the other two were drawing closer and closer together.

  ‘How’s old Sniffy,’ said Terry as he sat down at the same table, Frank beside him. They, of course, were unemployed and Terry had been inside for nicking stuff and also for nearly killing a fellow at a dance.

  Then they began to talk about school and he had to sit and listen. Terry had once punched Caney and had been dragged away by the police. No one could control him at all. Frank was just as dangerous, but brighter, more cunning.

  ‘Have a whisky,’ said Terry. ‘Go on. I bet you’ve never had a whisky before. I’ll buy it for you.’

  The snooker table with the green baize brought unbearable memories back to him, and he said,

  ‘Right. Right then.’

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Terry. ‘Old Sniffy’s a poof. I always thought he was a poof. What age was the bugger when he got married? Where was he getting it before that?’

  Frank didn’t say anything at all, but watched Ralph. He had never liked him. He had belonged to the academic stream while he himself was always in one of the bottom classes, though he was much brighter.

  ‘A poof,’ Terry repeated. ‘But he’s having it off now, eh, Frank?’ And winked at Frank. Ralph drank the whisky in one gulp, and tears burned his eyes.

  ‘Old bastard,’ said Terry. ‘He belted me a few times and I wasn’t even in his class.’

  The two of them took Ralph back to his house. Then they stood around it for a while shouting at the lighted window, ‘Sniffy the Poof, Sniffy the Poof.’ And then ran away into the darkness. Ralph staggered to his room.

  ‘What was that? Who was shouting there?’ said his mother. ‘Some of your friends. You’re drunk. You’re disgustingly drunk.’

  But he pushed her away and went to his bed while the walls and ceiling spun about him and the bed moved up and down like a boat beneath him.

  He heard his mother shouting at his stepfather, ‘What are you going to do about it then? You can’t sit here and do nothing. He’s drunk, I’m telling you. Will you give up those exercise books and do something?’

  Later he heard his mother slamming the door and heard the car engine start, then he fell into a deep sleep.

  At breakfast no one spoke. It was like a funeral. He himself had a terrible headache, like a drill behind his right eye, and he felt awful. His mother stared down at the table. His stepfather didn’t kiss her when he left for school: he seemed preoccupied and pale. It was as if the house had come to a complete stop, as if it had crashed.

  ‘You have to remember,’ said his stepfather when talking about Hamlet that morning, ‘you have to remember that this was a drunken court. Hamlet comments on the general drunkenness. Even at the end it is drink that kills Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude. Hamlet is at the centre of this corruption and is infected by it.’

  His voice seemed quieter, more reflective, as if he was thinking of something else. Once he glanced across to Ralph but said nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at the end of the period, ‘I meant to return your essays but I didn’t finish correcting them.’ A vein in his forehead throbbed. Ralph knew that he was remembering the voices that had shouted from the depths of the night, and he was wondering why they had been so unfair.

  ‘Something’s wrong with old Sniffy,’ said Pongo at the interval. Ralph couldn’t stand the amused contempt the pupils had for his stepfather and the way in which he had to suffer it. After all, he had not chosen him. His stepfather never orga
nised games, there was nothing memorable about him.

  When he went home after four, the door was unlocked but he couldn’t find his mother. She was neither in the living-room nor in the kitchen, which was odd since she usually had their meal ready for them when they returned from the school.

  He shouted to her but there was no answer. After a while he knocked on her bedroom door and when there was no response he went in. She was lying flat out on the bed, face down, and was quite still. For a moment his heart leapt with the fear that she might be dead and he turned her over quickly. She was breathing but there was a smell of drink from her. She had never drunk much in her life as far as he knew. There was a bottle of sherry, with a little drink at the bottom of it, beside her on the floor. He slapped her face but she only grunted and didn’t waken.

  He didn’t know what to do. He ran to the bathroom and filled a glass with water and threw it in her face. She shook and coughed while water streamed down her face, then opened her eyes. When she saw him she shut them again.

  ‘Go way,’ she said in a slurred voice. ‘Go way.’

  He stood for a while at the door looking at her. It seemed to him that this was the very end. It had happened because of the events of the previous night. Maybe he should kill himself. Maybe he should hang or drown himself. Or take pills. And then he thought that his mother might have done that. He ran to her bedroom and checked the bottle with the sleeping tablets, but it seemed quite full. He noticed for the first time his own picture on the sideboard opposite the bed where his mother was still sleeping. He picked it up and looked at it: there was no picture of his father there at all.

  In the picture he was laughing and his mother was standing just behind him, her right hand resting on his right shoulder. He must have been five or six when the photograph was taken. It astonished him that the photograph should be there at all for he had thought she had forgotten all about him. There was not even a photograph of his stepfather in the room.

  And then he heard again the voices coming out of the dark and it was as if he was his stepfather. ‘Sniffy the Poof, Sniffy the Poof.’ It was as if he was in that room listening to them. You couldn’t be called anything worse than a poof. He heard again his mother telling him about his father. A recollection came back to him of a struggle one night between his mother and father. She had pulled herself away and shouted, ‘I’m going to take the car and I’m going to kill myself. I know the place where I can do it.’ And he himself had said to his father, ‘Did you hear that?’ But his father had simply smiled and said, ‘Your mother’s very theatrical.’ For some reason this had amused him.

  She was now sleeping fairly peacefully, sometimes snorting, her hands spread out across the bed.

  And his stepfather hadn’t come home. Where was he? Had something happened to him? At that moment he felt terror greater than he had ever known, as if he was about to fall down, as if he was spinning in space. What if his mother died, if both of them died, and he was left alone?

  He ran to the school as fast as he could. The janitor, who was standing outside his little office with a bunch of keys in his hand, watched him as he crossed the hall, but said nothing.

  His stepfather was sitting at his desk on his tall gaunt chair staring across towards the seats. He was still wearing his gown and looked like a ghost inside its holed chalky armour. Even though he must have heard Ralph coming in he didn’t turn his head. Ralph had never seen him like this before, so stunned, so helpless. Always, before, his stepfather appeared to have been in control of things. Now he didn’t seem to know anything or to be able to do anything. He had wound down.

  Ralph stood and looked at him from the doorway. If it weren’t for his mother he wouldn’t be there.

  ‘Should you not be coming home?’ he asked. His stepfather didn’t answer. It was as if he was asking a profound question of the desks, as if they had betrayed him. Ralph again felt the floor spinning beneath him. Perhaps it was all too late. Perhaps it was all over. It might be that his stepfather would never come home again, had given everything up. His gaze interrogated the room.

  Ralph advanced a little more.

  ‘Should you not be coming home?’ he asked again. But still his stepfather retained his pose, a white chalky statue. It was his turn now to be on his own listening to his own questions. Ralph had never thought of him like that before. Always he had been with his mother, always it was he himself who had been the forsaken one. On the blackboard were written the words, ‘A tragedy gives us a feeling of waste.’ Ralph stayed where he was for a long time. He didn’t know what to do, how to get through to this man whom he had never understood. The empty desks frightened him. The room was like an empty theatre. Once his father had taken him to one in the afternoon. ‘You wait there,’ he said, ‘I have to see someone.’ And then he had seen his father talking to a girl who was standing face to face with him, wearing a belted raincoat. They had talked earnestly to each other, his father laughing, the girl looking at him adoringly.

  No, it could not be true. His father hadn’t been at all like that, his father had been the one who adored him, his son. What was this ghost like when compared to his father?

  He couldn’t bring himself to move, it was as if he was fixed to the floor. There was no word he could think of that would break this silence, this deathly enchantment.

  He felt curiously awkward as if his body was something he carried about with him but which was distinct from his mind. It was as if in its heaviness and oddness it belonged to someone else. He thought of his mother outstretched on the bed, her hair floating down her face, stirring in the weak movement of her breath. Something must be done, he couldn’t leave this man here and his mother there.

  Slowly his stepfather got down from his desk, then placed the jotters which were stacked beside him in a cupboard. Then he locked the cupboard. He had finished marking them after all and would be able to return them. Then he began to walk past Ralph as if he wasn’t there, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him. He was walking almost like a mechanical toy, clumsily, his gown fixed about him but becalmed.

  Now he was near the door and soon he would be out in the hall. In those seconds, which seemed eternal, Ralph knew that he was facing the disintegration of his whole life. He knew that it was right there, in front of him, if he couldn’t think of the magic word. He knew what tragedy was, knew it to its bitter bones, that it was the time that life continued, having gone beyond communication. He knew that tragedy was the thing you couldn’t do anything about, that at that point all things are transformed, they enter another dimension, that it is not acting but the very centre of despair itself. He knew it was pitiful, yet the turning point of a life. And in its light, its languageless light, his father’s negligent cheerful face burned, the moustache was like straw on fire. He was moving away from him, winking, perhaps deceitful. He saw the burden on this man’s shoulders, he saw the desperate loneliness, so like his own. He felt akin to this being who was moving towards the door. And at that moment he found the word and it was as if it had been torn bleeding from his mouth.

  ‘Come on home,’ he said. ‘Jim.’

  Nothing seemed to be happening. Then suddenly the figure came to a halt and stood there at the door as if thinking. It thought like this for a long time. Then it turned to face him. And something in its face seemed to crack as if chalk were cracking and a human face were showing through. Without a word being said the ghost removed its gown and laid it on a desk, then the two of them were walking across the now empty hall towards the main door.

  Such a frail beginning, and yet a beginning. Such a small hope, and yet a hope. Almost but not quite side by side, they crossed the playground together and it echoed with their footsteps, shining, too, with a blatant blankness after the rain.

  The Ring

  In my secondary school in those years long ago, when I wore shorts and could feel the wind on my knees, the main romance was that between Mr MacColl (whom we called Frothy) and Miss Simpson. Mr MacColl taught ma
thematics and the reason we called him Frothy was that when he got into a rage, which he often used to do because for instance we couldn’t understand the (to him) pristine obviousness of Pythagoras’ Theorem, he foamed at the mouth so that if you were sitting in the front seat spittle beaded and bubbled on the desk. His face would become a bright red, like a cockerel’s, and then after a while white as chalk. Strangely enough, for all his angry outbursts, we rather liked him, for we knew that his rage was not directed at us personally but rather at the abstract beings who had failed to learn that which was so evident to him; but who could however still be saved. And indeed on good days, he would be quite cheerful and even joking, and we would feel protected and secure in his world of triangles and circles and parallelograms. At the same time we thought of him as a comic figure whose trousers were always above his ankles; and sometimes he would say ludicrous things like,

  ‘Watch this blackboard while I go through it again,’ and we would smile and giggle behind our hands; and I could swear now, looking back, that these clumsinesses were intended, or if not intended, that he himself saw them as being as funny as we did. All in all, we liked him as much as we liked any teacher in the school, though he belted us quite often, for we knew that in his own way he loved us. Yes, I think I could put it as high as that.

  Miss Simpson on the other hand I was never taught by, for I didn’t take science, but I remember her as being short, rather squat, and yellow-faced. I have a vague memory that she was also splay-footed.

  The romance between the two of them, for they must have been well over forty when I first knew them, had been a source of gossip and merriment in the school for many years, and indeed I had heard even my older brother talking about it. Sometimes a boy or girl would come into Frothy’s room with a note: Frothy would study it for a while and then write an answer making sure that it was well sealed. We could tell from his later behaviour whether the note had contained good news or bad. The messenger would smile significantly at us while Frothy was reading the note, and then we knew it had come from Miss Simpson.