Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  Waggoner was watching the match. He ran onto the field, and I followed.

  I tried to stand in one place. In an eleven-a-side match, that wasn’t so hard. Waggoner leapt around. Mr. Rushden, as always, was playing as well as refereeing, running up and down the pitch, twisting and turning around the others, passing at the last minute with a look of you take over, oh you missed. Waggoner was man-marking him. I realised that now they could see Waggoner instead of me. That was something he could decide to allow. Mr. Rushden, and everyone watching, must have thought I’d suddenly started playing football with enthusiasm, molded by his discipline, hard but fair. Every time Mr. Rushden got the ball, Waggoner was on him. ‘Man on!’ shouted Mr. Rushden, turning this way and that, dummying, waving for kids to get into place for him to pass to them.

  But Waggoner hangs on, hems him in, turns it into a dance. He stops Rushden getting past the centre line, weaves around and around, always back towards the penalty spot in front of Mr. Rushden’s side’s goal. In that goal, Fiesta is watching like he’s a bystander at the scene of the crime. ‘That’s it,’ Mr. Rushden is shouting. ‘Don’t give me a chance!’

  They’re twisting around each other on the penalty spot now. The rest of the players have gathered around close, both sides waiting for the pass. Rushden hops the ball up into the air. He’s intending to head it to Fiesta for a safe catch.

  Waggoner windmills his legs up into the air. A muddy stud misses the ball.

  Mr. Rushden screams.

  Something white is flying through the air. A trail of blood. The mass lands on the penalty spot.

  Mr. Rushden fell to the ground, still roaring, his hands clutching the left side of his face. Everyone ran over to see. We looked down at him curled, his hairy legs pushed up to his chest. From over the other side of the playing fields, Mrs. Parkin was running over, yelling questions.

  I went to see. I bent down, my own wound aching, to look at it more closely. The eye was broken, the blue amongst the white, a trail of dangling nerves impossibly tiny against the grass. A splash of dark blood and a mess of other colours. Water was falling on it, drops running across the eyeball, washing the stuff into the ground.

  Mrs. Parkin made us all stand back. She helped Mr. Rushden to his feet.

  We were all looking at the eye. Waggoner stood beside me. There were expressions of amazement, whispers. The others were looking awkwardly at me. They didn’t know what to make of me now, what was going to happen to me. Lang laughed, turned it into a cough in his hand. Waggoner raised his foot and showed me the gore on his studs.

  Mrs. Parkin took out her handkerchief and bent down, gathering up the eye. ‘I’m going to get Mr. Rushden medical attention,’ she said. ‘Get your training shoes back on, go and change, and then go back to your form room. Quietly!’ We went back to the bench as she led Mr. Rushden away, yelling to one of the girls to go and call an ambulance.

  Everyone started talking as soon as they were out of earshot. Some of them ran straight to the penalty spot and stared at it. Did you see that? His whole eye! Sharpened studs! Waggoner did it. (They meant me.) Do they know? Who’s going to tell?

  ‘Did you mean to do it?’ asked Goff. ‘Were you out to get him? Was it a professional foul?’

  I didn’t answer. Waggoner was silent too. He went to join the crowd at the penalty spot, came back. I felt like I was going to fall onto my face and sleep. Only my empty stomach stopped me throwing up again. Some of the girls had started to come over to see what was going on. I could feel Angie’s eyes taking everything in. She knew there was something wrong. It disturbed her in a different way than it should. She was considering, not shocked. Her friends stood with her, frowning. I looked over to them and saw Louise looking past me, to one of the other boys, then away again. She nervously licked her lips. She and Angie and the others looked weirdly like detectives observing the scene of the crime.

  The football kids went to look again at the penalty spot as everyone headed back to the changing rooms. They exclaimed at something. I went to see. Into the penalty spot had been shoved a Panda Pop lemonade bottle, top first. In that moment, the sun broke through the clouds and the bottom of the bottle shone, a flame on the ground, like something alive had been planted.

  Someone said that maybe they should pull it out, but nobody wanted to touch it. I heard the voices of Angie’s friends, asking questions, growing fainter behind me as they walked away. Louise’s voice, asking what did it mean?

  I stayed for a moment. Waggoner grinned at me and put his thumbs up. I wouldn’t have to have a shower now.

  * * *

  Mr. Rove met us on the way to the changing rooms, and said he’d called my dad, who would come to collect me. Everything would soon be back to normal. I didn’t know if I was in trouble or not. I was put in the car, with Waggoner. Mr. Rove closed the door, and I watched Dad carefully nod at everything the teacher had to say. He finally got back in, raised a hand to Mr. Rove and drove away.

  ‘Hard tackle, was it?’ He said it like he and Mum said a lot of things, like it was a slightly absurd line in a movie and they knew it. Mum and Dad always seemed to be waiting for bitter laughter to undercut them. This got more pronounced when they were angry. It was a bit like what I got a lot of at school, people mimicking your voice, saying something that was important to you in a funny way. Only Mum and Dad did it to themselves.

  I said it was an accident. He nodded. He drove badly. He yelled at someone who overtook him on a narrow lane. In the end, he didn’t say anything else to me about it.

  * * *

  Mr. Rove called me into his office first thing the next day. There’d been a phone call at home that night. Dad had been loud as always, but it was just him agreeing, and then thanking Mr. Rove, a couple of times. He called Mr. Rove ‘Mr. Rove’ throughout.

  Mr. Rove even seemed to blink carefully and precisely. He smelt like something pressed in an old book. I couldn’t imagine him being Rove’s dad, of him coming home to find Rove watching The Magic Roundabout or sitting across the table from him at tea.

  He asked me if I had deliberately attacked Mr. Rushden. Before I could start saying anything complicated, Waggoner said no, he’d been worrying about it all night, sir, it had been an accident. He wasn’t that good at football, and he’d gone for the ball–

  Mr. Rove said he could see I was upset, and that I shouldn’t worry. Because I was in the clear. Now everything was back to normal.

  * * *

  We were told at that morning’s assembly that Mr. Rushden was in Chippenham hospital. Lots of people looked at me. Apart from Mr. Rove, onstage, who was looking straight ahead.

  Selway said it had been an accident, that I wasn’t tough enough to do that. He said that to me, like I’d argue. Drake was silent. But he looked right at me once, like he was puzzled. Something in his world didn’t fit now. I was the wrong person to have done that, especially after what he’d done to me.

  * * *

  The last lesson that day was Physics. Mr. Brandswick lit up a cigarette and blew it into a tank to show smoke particles being battered by all that was invisible around them. I had to keep my lips together and take tiny breaths through my nose. The smell of it got into all the interesting pieces of equipment that were never used. I was grateful to be sent, with Waggoner, to get an extra pipette from the Portakabin. I saw Mr. Rove and Mr. Coxwell ahead of me in the corridor. I could hear the whispers. Was it punk? There was that album cover. That band are local, aren’t they? Someone who’s good at art? He’d left it intact for the police. Was it to do with what happened to Scott? They saw me, and stopped. Mr. Rove asked me if I knew anything about the vandalism on the football pitch. I said I didn’t.

  Once we were outside, Waggoner set off before I could stop him, towards the football pitch. He waved for me to follow. I could see there was something different as I got closer. There were lines everywhere.

  I stopped. The white line marker trolley stood beside the pitch. It had been used to do this. In
the penalty spot, the bottle was still there, afternoon frost on the glass. Around it had been drawn a four-sided shape, with a couple more lines sticking out the front. It went right across the box, ignoring the older, duller lines underneath it. The white paint was shining almost as much as the penalty spot. From there, a long curve. There were branches and isolated lines out towards the other side of the pitch. It was white on the white of the frost. It took me a second to get it. Not until I took a step back.

  Around the place where Mr. Rushden had lost his eye, there was now painted the shape Waggoner had seen on the downs, the shape of an ancient chalk horse.

  Ten

  When I was a kid, Mum and Dad would talk about how things would go missing from our garden, or from the garage, or from Mum’s jewellery box. They used to call the people that supposedly did this ‘the intruders’.

  Dad was in Burma in World War Two. In the loft at home he keeps a samurai sword, with the jewels torn from its hilt. He got it off an officer, he used to say. Sometimes he shot that officer, sometimes he bayoneted him, sometimes he throttled him with his bare hands. Sometimes he said he never saw any action. Americans stole the gems. He could have made a fortune. He still occasionally suffers symptoms that are like malaria, and also vivid nightmares that he can’t be woken from. The two for him are tied together, and no malaria treatment stops them happening. These days Dad would have a complaint, a name for his problem, a course of therapy. I think that could be good. He would think it bad.

  The last time I went down there, they still had everything from my childhood in my old room. Even my old posters were still on the wall. I’m sure they’re not waiting hopelessly for me to return, it’s just that what’s put stays put. Old is good, as long as it’s dusted.

  Whenever I used to go home, I’d sleep not in my old bedroom, but on the sofa in the lounge, with a chair shoved up against the door. Mum would knock on the door in the morning, and I’d move the chair aside so she could bring me a cup of tea.

  * * *

  On the night after the horse was painted on the football pitch, lying in bed with Waggoner, I asked him if he’d done it, and why. I hoped terrible things weren’t going to happen to everyone I was angry at. That wouldn’t be justice.

  ‘I didn’t do it by painting the lines,’ he said. ‘You can change the world by sacrifice. An eye for an eye. It had to be done to someone. It’s the first big step towards your revenge on the kids that hurt you.’

  * * *

  The bell for the end of Friday didn’t feel as great as it usually did. I saw Angie and her three friends going to their buses, glancing at me and then not. Louise was carrying a plate of what looked like homemade biscuits, which they were sharing, each taking one before they separated, nodding to each other like this was the most serious thing in the world.

  I sat on the bus and listened to the fighting. Always fights on Fridays on the way home, something being let out.

  When I got home, I sat on the edge of my bed and put a hand to my mouth. Mum and Dad hadn’t heard yet about the horse painted on the pitch. They didn’t know the parents of the other kids.

  In the end, I did what I did most Friday nights. I stayed up late with a Pot Noodle, watching The Old Grey Whistle Test, and then flicking between what had just become four channels during Newsnight. I stayed up for two things: The Outer Limits and masturbation. I hadn’t tried to come since I’d been mutilated. But it had been twelve days. Normally, I’d wank two or three times a day. It seems amazing now, the teenage boy’s sheer monkey capacity for sex. Now I had an almost permanent, painful, erection, of the new and terrible shape. The association of Friday night and release from the tension of school was dragging me towards doing what I had to do, whether or not I was going to injure myself in the process.

  The Outer Limits was a weird American black-and-white show that began with a voice saying, ‘We control the horizontal, we control the vertical’. Aptly. There was always a monster. Since that night on the downs, there’d been no Outer Limits on, because of the snooker. Now I really wanted to see another monster.

  I could hear Mum and Dad arguing through their bedroom door and through the lounge door and the chair. They always seemed to yell at each other on a Friday night, usually about money. After an hour or so, they were quiet.

  Waggoner and I watched weird Eastern European animation during a prog rock track on The Old Grey Whistle Test. I still didn’t feel able to touch myself. I’d been trying to avoid it when going to the toilet, holding myself between my knuckles. I’d already managed to make a ragged spray of urine into a steady stream by hitching one part of my skin at an angle and standing in a certain way. Now I couldn’t let myself do what I wanted to do. Something might burst. Perhaps not everything was connected up any more. Maybe there would be sudden, guilt-fulfilling pain.

  Every time I felt like touching myself, I smelt again the tobacco on Drake’s breath, felt his hands. Now he was part of what coming was for me. Maybe I was a poof now? But Drake wasn’t a poof.

  We waited through Newsnight, which was mostly about Yuri Andropov now being in charge in the USSR, and how that made nuclear war, the three minute warning, sudden light bursting in to reduce us all to dust and shadows, a little more likely.

  That night’s episode of The Outer Limits was ‘A Feasibility Study’, which was about a small town where people kept seeing monsters. The edge of the town was a barrier of mist, and out of the mist came more and more of the monsters, masses of bulbous flesh, closing in on the humans. I found that my hand had closed around my cock, and it was okay; there was no new pain. The monsters invaded the town, and it turned out that the town had been secretly relocated onto their alien world. There was a model shot of it sitting there amongst craters and weird mountains. The townspeople were brought before the head monster, who looked like he was grown out of the rock. The townspeople held hands and decided to make a heroic sacrifice. The monsters closed in with their bulbous hands and their eyes at odd angles.

  I looked at the monsters and I came and came and came.

  Eleven

  When I was a kid, going for a glass of water in the night in my family home, running, eyes half closed, I’d scare myself by glimpsing myself in a mirror in the hallway. I still have trouble with mirrors. My tie can never form a correct sort of knot. My shoes cannot be made shiny.

  * * *

  On Monday, Mr. Rove announced in assembly that the football pitch would be out of action for the rest of term.

  The walls of the main hall displayed coats of arms of the three houses of Fasley Grange School: Igdale, Lawston and Trevor. We were never told who those names originally belonged to. I was in Trevor, so I suppose Waggoner was too. There were boards of winners’ names beneath the coats of arms, but the lists stopped in the 1970s. The three houses used to compete, it looked like, for the Trilateral Cup. The Cup was now kept in a case in the office of Mr. Clare, the bursar. Mr. Rove brought it onstage once at a special assembly, and said that the Cup wasn’t the most valuable object in his charge (although it had been valued at over three hundred pounds); that was the collective brains and bodies of his pupils.

  ‘And I hope that pleases the louts who did this,’ said Mr. Rove from the stage now, ‘that they have spoilt it for all the rest of you.’

  * * *

  They came for me at first break, as we headed out into the playground. Again they led me away. I had to stop myself from yelling and fighting them just at the touch. Waggoner grabbed my shoulder, reassured me. Wait. Where were they leading me? Not to the woods. Just around the corner of the building. They stopped and stood in a circle around me. ‘You’re so tough, mate,’ said Blewly, ‘you fouled Rushden, so we’re going to see if you can be part of our gang.’

  He said it like it was possible he meant it. Blewly was always coming over to see our lot, to talk to Surtees. He’d ask what our favourite football teams were.

  ‘Bristol City!’ Fiesta had blurted out once, making us all cringe. Blewly had laug
hed about that in a matey way, while something in his expression said that he was licking his lips and saving that one up to mention later.

  I had a book, The Making of Alien, which Dad had found in a charity shop and put in my stocking one Christmas. Blewly had asked to borrow it. After a couple of weeks, I started asking him about it. He said he’d bring it back. Then he asked me, because I’d been talking about them, if I had any Avengers comics. I brought them in for him. After a couple of weeks, I asked him about those too.

  ‘They’re only comics,’ he’d said, getting a snort out of Surtees.

  He kept asking to borrow stuff. We’d lend him things. He’d keep them. Then he’d stop hanging around with us for a while, then come back again. It never felt like I had a choice about lending anything to him. He never made any threats. That’s another impossible thing I remember from my time at Fasley. I have no idea why a thinking person who could draw conclusions would keep on giving items they owned to Blewly.

  After he’d helped mutilate me, I’d waited for Blewly to ask to borrow something else, so Waggoner could say no, but he never did. Every time Blewly had come over to our lot, I thought about the things of mine he had, things Mum and Dad had bought me. I could always have told them. They would have gone to Mr. Blewly. ‘It’s The Mighty Avengers,’ I could hear Mum saying. ‘The one with Ant Man on the cover.’ Thinking about them having to get into the detail of that, that was the worst part.

  ‘No,’ said Selway now, ‘we really are.’ Lang sniggered.

  I managed not to say that I didn’t want to, thanks. Or ta, I’d have said ta. Or maybe cheers. I’d have dropped my accent a couple of notches. They’d have laughed at that. I stayed silent.

  ‘We’re going to test you,’ said Rove.

  ‘’Cos you’re not gonna tell, we know that,’ said Drake. ‘You’re not going to tell about nothing. You wouldn’t fucking dare. You didn’t tell your mum when you were in bed with her last night, licking her fanny.’