Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  I opened it. I don’t know if I expected a name. But there wasn’t even a rhyme inside. The card was blank apart from, tucked in the lower right corner, in tiny letters that could have been written by a boy or a girl:

  YOU’RE TOO SHY. Capitalised like that.

  I read it a dozen times, looked at the back of the card, held the envelope open to see if there was anything else inside it.

  I was too shy? That was fucking stupid! Nobody could say that about me now! This must be from someone who really didn’t know me! I was thinking that I might make myself come that evening, thinking about who this was from. But I wasn’t going to be able to do that, with it being like this.

  Finally, I showed the card to Mum and Dad. Because at least that would be all right. Mum seemed scared by it. Dad slapped me on the back. Then he did it again.

  Seventeen

  The next day, Kajagoogoo went to Number One with their song ‘Too Shy’. I’d heard it before I got the valentine. Now I listened closely to it, wondering if I could work anything out from the lyrics. I thought the sender was probably Laurie Coxwell, though Elaine wasn’t out of the question. Nobody at school the next day had taken the piss. I couldn’t ask anyone about the card, apart from Elaine. I kept asking her. She kept her head down.

  I saw the video for ‘Too Shy’ on Top of the Pops that Thursday night. My worst fears were confirmed. Kajagoogoo were like Culture Club; they weren’t a band one of Drake’s lot could like. They might turn out to be gay, or sort of gay, like Duran Duran. So the card had been an insult. Probably. In the video, Kajagoogoo’s singer, Limahl, was wandering through a modern disco, and everything kept changing back to the 1940s. I didn’t like that. Too shy. Too unable to say anything. Too trapped to speak up.

  When that wasn’t true any more!

  I leapt up and switched the set off.

  * * *

  The next Tuesday, Michael Jackson went to Number One with ‘Billie Jean’, which everyone said was shit. Selway told us all that he was going out with Louise.

  I didn’t know what going out meant to kids at my school. There was a club in Chippenham that Selway sometimes claimed to sneak into, Gold-Diggers, but I couldn’t imagine a girl from our school going to it. It was a place I could only imagine glamorous adults at, drinking Babycham.

  I knew, sort of, that nobody was having sex. ‘Virgin’ was a common term of abuse, but we all were. Just as we were all ‘tossers’ and ‘wankers’, and maybe ‘benders’, depending on what Madness meant by that line in ‘Baggy Trousers’. If Selway and Louise were even just ‘going out’, that would make Louise, as far as I knew, the only girl from school who had anything to do with a boy from school, apart from whatever Angie and Drake were doing. When any girl on the bus mentioned her boyfriend, it was like she was talking about a different sort of being to us. Possibly an imaginary being. Even the football kids didn’t seem to be what boyfriends were.

  ‘Which means,’ said Selway, ‘I make her gobble my knob.’

  * * *

  I saw Selway talking to Louise that first week of March. He talked to her with her friends nearby. He couldn’t have held her hand or kissed her or anything like that. That would have meant he was a poof. What did they have to talk about? Louise would be saying stuff about music Selway couldn’t like, or about baking things, which he couldn’t have any opinions about. Selway would be saying stuff about Marvin Hagler and Brighton and Hove Albion. He probably wasn’t talking to her about his cock, like he did when he was with Drake’s lot. Angie, Jenn and Netty held off laughing, and then laughed when he went, not at him. They looked like they had been told wonderful and mysterious things about Selway. I did and didn’t want to know what.

  Louise started giving Selway things to eat. Things she’d made in Cookery. She’d open a Tupperware box for him to take something sweet out of. Drake’s lot would crowd round whenever Selway brought something back from her, asking him urgent questions. Had he shagged her yet?

  My dad owned a whole homemade bookcase full of Nick Carter and Tobin books. They were meant to be spy thrillers and comedies, but they were mostly about sex. In the case of Nick Carter, that was lots of violent death, and then sex with gowns and suspender belts and girl guerillas of the Amazon. They would fight him, and then give in. In the case of Tobin, it was about insurance salesmen and frustrated housewives who wore enormous pants on the covers.

  Were Selway and Louise doing anything like in the books? Where had their parents been? Had they done this in the lounge or in the dining room?

  Such things weren’t for me now. Not until I was healed. My sex scene would be:

  Why, Mr. Waggoner, it’s so cold in my room, why don’t you come in and share with me? Oh dear, your slacks have caught on a nail! Let me sew them for you. My, that bulge does look big! Shall we shall what’s lurking under—?

  AHH! AHH! IT’S INFECTED! IT’S DISEASED! IT’S ROTTEN! IT’S CUT OPEN! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! TAKE IT OUT OF ME! IT HURTS!

  * * *

  One Monday, Waggoner stood with me as I was watching Selway and Louise eating together. I’d been trying to come all week, but my cock had stopped responding to my awkward touch. I hadn’t even been erect. This was very weird, and so I was getting slowly, deeply, scared. I wondered if something was growing inwards from the wound. From the moment I’d read that Valentine’s card, I’d felt like I was the card, cracked open, that something wasn’t right with me. If I hadn’t been ‘Too Shy’ before, part of me now certainly was.

  Waggoner saw my expression. ‘Selway next,’ he said.

  Eighteen

  ‘Turn around.’ I kept hearing that lyric. Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ was at Number One. Waggoner and I ran into Selway as he was heading back from where he’d met with Louise, a piece of shortbread in his hand. We fell in beside him. ‘What’re you up to with her?’ said Waggoner. ‘Really?’

  ‘She’s really gobbling my knob,’ said Selway.

  I didn’t want to hear that, but Waggoner asked for all the details.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Selway, like he was teaching us, started to talk about his great experience in the field of sex. He told us about rubber johnnies, how there was a pinprick in one in a hundred of them so the population wouldn’t die out. He told us about how no girl at school could be on the pill, because doctors would tell, and so a blow job was best.

  I remembered Selway hitting me. My head bouncing off that tree. I remembered him helping in slicing my cock open. I wondered what would happen if I’d said, ‘You know, I can’t come now, and I think it’s because of you.’

  Selway said you could say what you liked to a girl. He told Louise to show him her fanny, and she’d do it, because she fancied him. I couldn’t imagine Louise’s face hearing things like that. Then I could but didn’t want to. Then I did want to. Then that feeling didn’t reach my cock. The awfulness stayed warm and hard in my stomach and my throat and made the back of my neck lock in tension. I thought again of Elaine. And felt immediately terrible to have thought about her then, though I didn’t quite get why.

  Louise and Selway, we were told, did it in a shed at the bottom of the Selway family’s garden, that had been done up as a den for Selway. Their parents didn’t know they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The Selway property backed onto the landscape garden of Mr. and Mrs. Callidge, Louise’s parents, built beside their farm and stables. The shed had a couple of loose timbers. So Louise and Selway would both take a walk down their gardens, and get together in that shed, like Huckleberry Finn with sex.

  ‘You want to come over and see?’ asked Selway, like he had a point to prove.

  * * *

  One Sunday in early spring, Waggoner and I took our bikes over to Selway’s house, which was only a couple of miles away from Calstone, just outside the village of Heddington. Waggoner had a Raleigh Chopper. I had Aunt Dar’s girl’s bike with a basket on the front.

  Selway’s mum made us toast and jam. The kitchen was
warmed by an enormous cooker, with a copper kettle on top of it. Everything smelt like it was warm all the time, even at night. Selway grabbed a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock, which I’d never even heard of, from a crate. We went down to the shed together, and Selway reached round the back of some boxes and found a couple of porn magazines: Penthouse and Fiesta. Selway pointed at that title and laughed. I managed not to. Waggoner calmly took one of the magazines. I peered over his shoulder. There was an article about stock car racing. All the rest was incredibly naked women. Waggoner’s hands did not shake. I hoped Selway’s mum wasn’t about to come in. I worried about the women in the magazines.

  There were a lot of bright colours in those pages. Pink underwear. Orange stockings. Silver hair. Bright fluffy white rugs. These women were doing it in the lounge, sprawled on the sofa, their arses in the air in front of the wallpaper. There was one feeding her goldfish, in a carefully round bowl, rather than a tank, in her lingerie. Whenever any of the women had a dress on, in the first photo of the set, it looked like a cartoon of a dress, something you’d never actually see a woman wearing.

  Selway took the magazine out of Waggoner’s hands, like he didn’t want to leave it too long, or there’d be the question of what they might do next to share this experience. He showed us he had a key to Louise’s house. ‘Nobody home,’ he said. He pushed open the planks. Waggoner and I followed. We were in somebody else’s garden. We were trespassing. We walked up the ornamental garden of the Callidge house together, Selway still carrying his bottle of Dandelion and Burdock. I could hear tractors moving in the farm beyond, low moans from the cattle. Selway opened the patio doors and led Waggoner and me inside. We waited a moment, listening, then Selway made a cartoon ‘hee, hee’ and rubbed his hands together theatrically. If I’d ever done that, in the sight of anyone at school, I’d have spent years with everyone doing that gesture. Waggoner copied Selway, mirroring him perfectly. He followed Selway upstairs like they were two Disney characters, stepping with their knees high, avoiding nonexistent creaking timbers.

  I followed.

  Selway led us along a corridor with a fluffy white carpet. We came to a door with a white horse on it, purple stars and a swirl of glitter falling from its mane. Selway opened the door. The smell of a girl’s room: lavender soap and clean white towels, and underneath that, her. She had her own sink. Was that something girls always had? Why? Selway opened a drawer. He held up what I initially took to be a pair of swimming trunks. ‘Her special pair,’ he said. ‘Just for me.’ He showed us several more items of Louise’s underwear. At the time they seemed spectacular, luxurious, part and parcel of the porn magazine. But thinking back now, Louise probably didn’t own anything glamorous that her mother would have boggled at.

  We went back downstairs to the Callidge kitchen, and Selway went to the fridge, which was fed by three huge chest freezers. ‘They get cuts of meat straight off the farm,’ he said. He took a pie and cut himself a slice. Beside the pie, there was a glass bowl with cling film over the top, a kitchen label on it: Louise’s steak and kidney for school. Selway held the pie over his mouth for a moment, then gobbled it down in one like a cartoon snake.

  ‘They got any beer?’ asked Waggoner. Selway said he’d go and look, and left his Dandelion and Burdock on a shelf.

  Waggoner went straight to the bottle and took a handful of crushed leaves and flowers from his pocket. He ground them again between his palms and let them fall into the bottle, grabbed a pencil and used it to mix them in. Then he went to the glass bowl and used the pencil to pull up the edge of the cling film. “No,” I said. “Why—?”

  “Necessary,” he said. “I can’t do this all on my own.” He took from his other pocket a handful of white powder and dropped it into the steak and kidney. Again he mixed it in.

  “What is it?”

  “Just chalk.” Waggoner finished mixing, then used the pencil to reattach the cling film as best he could. He put the pencil back in his pocket.

  I was about to ask why that was necessary, when Selway came back in and said—and this was probably a lie because he was getting worried about staying this long—that there was no beer to be found.

  We went back up the garden to the shed, and got there just as Selway’s parents pulled into the driveway. Waggoner and I said hello to them, then rode off home.

  * * *

  Louise came to school the next day and brought her ingredients for Cookery. She made her steak and kidney pie. That lunchtime she came over to Drake’s lot to offer Selway some. He took a piece, but didn’t eat it, and later, when he thought nobody was watching, I saw him throw it away. He looked too ill to eat anything. That grey colour in his cheeks made me feel sick too. If what happened to him was going to go as far as what had happened with Lang, I didn’t want to watch it over days. I was afraid I’d say something.

  ‘She’ll give some to her mates,’ I said to Waggoner as, alone, we watched across the playground as Louise ate the pie she’d made.

  ‘No,’ he said, a satisfied look on his face, ‘because they’re vegetarians.’

  At the end of the day, Selway looked even worse.

  * * *

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I walked through the hallway in the dark, and passed myself in the mirror. I didn’t look at myself. I went into the lounge and put the television on with the sound down. On HTV, in a gap when there were no adverts, was the video for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Bonnie Tyler was wandering around a school like ours, in a tight dress that billowed, and she seemed to be saying that she wanted the schoolboys, and there they were dashing around her, monsters now.

  I put my hand on my wounded cock. Was it going to be okay? No.

  The next video was Kajagoogoo with ‘Too Shy’. I switched off the set and went back to bed and still couldn’t sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning, to my half relief and half agony, Selway was at his desk as usual. When we moved rooms for History, though, he wasn’t there for the start of the lesson, and Mr. Land asked where he’d gone. Nobody knew. Mr. Land said he assumed there had been a call of nature, which drew laughter, but when Selway hadn’t returned after half an hour, he set us some work about enclosure and went out to search. He returned towards the end of the lesson, looking shaken. I heard footsteps running past the door. Something had happened, he said, and lessons were to be suspended for the day. We were all to report to the hall for activities.

  Gradually, in one excited report after another, we heard the details of what had happened. Selway’s body had been found in one of the disused rooms on the upper floors. His mouth was open, and a pool of blood had flooded out from it.

  I looked over to where Angie and her friends were sitting with Louise. She was looking slowly around her, her shock so deep it seemed to have dragged her down to a place where her surroundings were entirely strange.

  * * *

  The inquest found a number of poisons in Selway’s system, all of which could have been found in cleaning supplies present at the Selway house. The police found a suicide note in the shed. It was written in what was taken to be Stewart Selway’s handwriting, but we’d all been taught to write in the same style. The note said Selway couldn’t stand the pressure to succeed at school, and missed his friend, the murdered boy Vincent Lang. The newsreader on Points West said it had been found inside a pile of magazines.

  Nineteen

  The day before Louise came back to school, Duran Duran went to Number One with ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ Angie, Netty and Jenn tried to rally around their friend. I saw them from a distance, holding her hand as she cried. Louise suddenly disentangled herself. She didn’t look comfortable. There was a special assembly for Selway where hymns were sung and the nature of his death wasn’t mentioned. I was relieved that Waggoner could stand there singing the hymns. I couldn’t join in.

  Drake’s lot were now us and Blewly and Rove and Drake. The others said tough and impassioned things about their mate for a couple of days.
They said they were angry at him for being a coward and taking his own life. That was the only emotion about suicide they’d ever heard on television.

  The curves of the school were obvious now. If you dropped a marble, it ran down to one side of the corridor and set off along the skirting board, roaring along the plaster. Everyone started playing marbles.

  On both mornings I’d kept it up at Elaine on the bus as always, making her silent, making the bus driver talk along with my usual question, in a sing-song voice, and say I was lucky I’d gotten any Valentine’s cards, because I was bloody obsessed.

  On Tuesday at second break, Waggoner went to take a piss, and I didn’t need to. That was odd. I turned a corner and ran right into Angie.

  ‘We should be friends,’ she said. ‘We could be. I’m your best friend’s girlfriend, and you’ve loyally kept our secret.’ I turned around to look for Waggoner. She stepped in front of me. ‘What’s your favourite Number One single of this year?’

  ‘There’s only been . . . six.’

  ‘From this school year. Your favourite Number One in the singles chart. What is it?’

  I did a quick mental calculation. That was easy. There was only one that one of Drake’s lot could like. ‘The Jam. “Beat Surrender.”’

  She rolled her eyes and gave a little hiss of frustration. ‘Wrong,’ she said. She walked off past Waggoner just as he arrived. He looked at me, alarmed, but quickly calmed down. ‘She’ll learn soon,’ he said, ‘Louise will be more than she can deal with.’

  * * *

  Since I’d started sexually harassing Elaine, I’d been doing better at my schoolwork. I’d recovered completely from the dip that had come after half-term, when pain had made me stare at the pages of my workbooks and wonder why I was bothering at all. I was going to get the bursary and not let down my mum and dad. I would let Waggoner do what he had to do. I would in the end be healed.