Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  I thought about what Angie had said. I couldn’t understand it.

  * * *

  That Saturday, I was invited over to Rove’s. Rove’s, of course, was actually the school. Dad came in when he dropped us off this time, shook Mr. Rove by the hand, talked about the bursary. Mr. Rove carefully called me and Waggoner by our first name. It sounded like he had planned to do so from the moment he woke up that morning.

  Mr. Rove’s bit of the house was just like the rest was: dusty and awkward. There were cracks and broken things. It was all at a curving angle, leaning towards the school. It felt like school with bits of a home sitting in it. Like a display.

  Rove, Drake, Blewly, Waggoner and me sat in Rove’s room, which smelt weird. We were going to play a computer game, which Rove was finishing typing out from a magazine. Blewly started talking about Selway again, but Drake made a noise, and he shut up. I looked at Drake. I wondered if it was getting to him. Two friends suddenly gone. He was just the same. Drake got his fags out, but Rove said no, his dad would smell them. Drake considered for a moment, then put them away. He looked under the bed, and after a bit of fumbling, found a video cassette. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  Rove looked furious. ‘I’ve nearly finished the game,’ he said. ‘Fifty more lines.’

  The game took ages to debug. We played it. Two blocks that were knights, and on the cover of the magazine had been drawn with flaming swords, bright shields and moustaches, moved back and forth, intercepting a green block that was a dragon.

  Mr. Rove knocked, and came in with hot chocolate. The tray shook in his hands. He stopped, and it stopped doing that. He said the school was going to get computers next year, that just by chance were called Dragons. We would all prepare ourselves for whatever future there was, no matter how worrying. He wondered what we thought about Mr. Reagan’s ‘star wars’ plan to protect us all from nuclear missiles. We didn’t say anything. Rove finally asked if he could get on with the programming. Mr. Rove nodded and left. We drank our hot chocolate. It had got dark.

  Drake put the video cassette in the VCR and hit play. Rove said it was a horror movie, with a monster.

  I looked down at my cup. The lights weren’t on, so nobody could see my face. The movie started. A topless woman in the smallest pants I had ever seen was being raped. She was strangled, then stabbed. The hands of the man doing the stabbing were green and calloused. He was a monster. The soundtrack was very modern, a synthesiser. She made huge gulping, screaming sounds as we saw the blade going in, in, in.

  Blewly laughed. ‘She’s thinking did she pick up the wrong guy in the bar!’ He sounded as if he wasn’t used to saying anything, ever. Rove laughed nervously. He kept looking at his watch, wondering when he could tell us it was time for us to go and we should stop watching.

  The woman’s body lay now on a mortuary table, still topless, her stomach open. A pathologist peered into the hole, looking closer . . . closer . . .

  The synthesiser blared as a green mass leapt at his face. ‘He wasn’t expecting that!’ said Blewly.

  Three more women had their clothes slit off and then blades or claws in cheap green gloves slit through them. The expressions on their faces were agony and ecstasy at the same time. Kill me, oh please kill me. This movie was too old for me. Were they allowed to put this in a film? Were we meant to laugh?

  A full-sized monster, who was a mass of tubes, was shot by a cop, but not before it had raped the cop’s female partner, who’d gone undercover as a topless dancer. As the cop helped her away from the warehouse, covering her with his jacket, the camera zoomed in on her eyes, which glowed green.

  I was shaking. I could feel my wound hurting, and I didn’t want it to and did. I was so angry. I was so desperately angry with someone. I wasn’t ‘Too Shy’. I’d seen this movie, hadn’t I? I’d taken part. Waggoner kept looking over to me, desperately trying to make eye contact. I wouldn’t look at him.

  Drake spat tobacco into his handkerchief. ‘Fucking stupid shit,’ he said, but it sounded like the highest possible praise.

  Blewly was laughing. ‘I’d give her one.’ He rewound the tape to the last rape and froze it, white bands shuddering across the girl’s gaping mouth.

  I let out a noise.

  They all looked at me.

  I held my face until my jaw ached. My teeth were bare. My eyes were full. I let out another noise. There was a huge sound inside my head, of something starting to crash down in slow motion.

  Waggoner leapt up. ‘Don’t tell!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t tell!’

  Then I was sobbing, actually crying, in front of them, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t see. My nose was full. I got up to run out. I dropped my mug. I blundered into a wall. My sobs were loud now, my body curling around it.

  The others had got to their feet, were grabbing me, pretend kindly and actual kindly and roughly all mixed up. There was sudden horror on the faces of Rove and Blewly, maybe something dredging up inside them about what I might be traumatised about. Drake’s face stayed cold, but it was coldness like a brittle sheet of ice. For the first time then I saw that everything he was could shatter. The video in the player reached the end and started to rewind. The light came on, and I was sobbing incoherently amongst them, and Mr. Rove was in the room, asking what had happened. He dived at the TV and hit PLAY and saw something on the screen.

  * * *

  Dad didn’t say anything as he drove me home, though several times it seemed like he was going to. Mr. Rove had taken him aside. Waggoner sat silently beside me, looking angry. Just before we turned off the A4 towards my house, I said to him, ‘Dad . . . when you got that samurai sword . . . was he trying to kill you?’

  ‘Of course he was!’ he said. It had been a shout.

  * * *

  When I got into bed that night, Waggoner only reluctantly climbed in beside me. ‘Why the fuck did you do that? I got you into Drake’s lot to protect you.’

  ‘You mean so you could get close enough to Selway.’

  ‘So? We’re on the same side.’

  Mum and Dad hadn’t said a word to me about what had happened. I couldn’t imagine them finding the words. ‘What did you mean about Louise?’ I said. Did you poison her too?’

  ‘Of course not. She’s taken something in, but it’s not poison. This has to be done right. There are rules. This is important.’

  ‘How long is it all going to take?’

  ‘It has to finish on the day it started. On Halloween.’

  Twenty

  As we got off the buses and headed into school the next Monday, Drake walked right into me. His chest pushed me against the wall. He spat into my face, grabbed me by the collar and threw me down. ‘Fucking twat,’ he said. ‘Rove’s dad thought that video was mine! You thought we were your mates. Fucking fooled you. Fucking poof! Fucking girl!’

  I had left Elaine alone that morning. The rest of the bus had been amazed at the silence. I’d looked at the ground. They’d started talking about other things. Elaine remained silent and still wouldn’t look at me.

  As I lay there, spat on, I felt a little better. I had no idea why.

  * * *

  Drake’s lot were split up onto different desks in the form room, with Waggoner on his own beside me, again. I hadn’t heard anything else about what had happened that night at Mr. Rove’s. My mum and dad never said anything more.

  We had English that day with Mrs. Frenchmore. She had once locked herself in a cupboard during class, by accident, I think. Mrs. Frenchmore never shouted at anyone; she never sent anyone to see Mr. Coxwell. We’d once read 1984 in her class. She said we should like it because it was like Star Wars. Which made Drake’s lot start using it as a weapon. ‘You love Big Brother, don’t you?’ Blewly had said to me. Mrs. Frenchmore’s weakness terrified me. It made her classroom into a space where anything could happen.

  Mrs. Frenchmore set us an essay as homework. The title was ‘The Contents of a Suitcase’. ‘You find a suitcase that contains (there follow
ed a list of objects). Write a story about the exciting and interesting things that happen concerning your use of one of these objects.’ English wasn’t one of my best subjects. My essays were minimal, functional.

  At first break, I went back over to my lot, to Surtees and Cath and Fiesta. They let me and Waggoner walk straight back into their circle without a word, and we started talking about stuff without any mention of where I’d been in the meantime.

  I watched Angie’s lot go past. Louise these days always had a strange look on her face, like she was trying to remember something. She looked ill. I kept wondering about that chalk. I don’t think any adult ever realised she and Selway had been going out. She managed to keep that secret. Angie stopped and actually nodded to me. She reached up to her collar and rubbed at something under there. She held up her hand and I saw ink on her fingers. She’d erased something she’d written there, and wanted me to know. Then she was gone again before I could work out what that was about.

  * * *

  That night, I opened my English essays book and squatted against my bed, my head curled over my body, the book on the ground. I always tried to do my homework immediately. I couldn’t start.

  I stood and walked around a bit. Waggoner looked puzzled at me. I dropped back onto the floor and made myself start to write. ‘It looks like suicide, Inspector, but actually it was murder by poison.’ I let go of the pen. I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from shouting. I grabbed the pen again and crossed it all out and looked at the page from the other side to make sure it couldn’t be read that way, either.

  Waggoner was staring at me in shock. I shook my head. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  I paced the room that night. I didn’t want to think about what Selway had looked like when he died. Or Lang. Not seeing them made it worse. This was what I’d wanted, though, and I hadn’t done it. I had just let it be done. I shook my head, trying to shake away whatever this feeling was. What had Angie been doing? She’d asked a real question of me before, the sort I was hardly ever asked, about what my favourite Number One had been, and I had given the wrong answer, but there must be a right answer. I felt like I should write a list of Number Ones and try to work it out. But I couldn’t do that now. This story I had to write was in the way of everything. I curled up around my exercise book again. I didn’t want to write anything that wasn’t true. I didn’t want to write anything that was. The contents of a suitcase. I could have picked my own list: a foreskin, a knife, a 50p piece, a Valentine’s card, a frog, some chalk.

  I thought again about what had been cut from me, wherever it was, decaying. What if Drake had found it? What if he showed it to me on April Fools’ Day? ‘Remember this, mate?’ The knife would still have bits of me on it that would have been crushed up with the tobacco he cut. He had smoked part of me.

  I made myself concentrate. What did I really have to work with? The list of objects the essay question stipulated included a bicycle pump, a hairdryer, a chef’s hat and a tin of boot polish. I kept starting the essay, kept stopping and crossing out. Waggoner sat beside me, placidly. ‘Why don’t you just–’

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said. I could say it quite loudly; Mum would never hear. Then again: ‘Fuck it.’ And again: ‘Fuck it!’ I started writing about finding this fucking suitcase, and about the exciting and interesting things that happened concerning every single fucking thing in it. I made those happenings genuinely things I found exciting and interesting, and it would serve them right.

  The story happened at Fasley Grange School. There was an alien in it, and she was called Louise. She was from the tree people. Angie committed murder using a bicycle pump to inflate Selway, in, in, in, until he exploded all over the Portakabin. Surtees burnt Lang to death with the hairdryer, cooking his face. Drake put boot polish on his cheeks and led a commando raid to take back the school from Louise’s reign of terror, because she was making everyone do these things against their will, and there I was, at the end, in a chef’s hat, stirring soup in a huge pot, made of everyone who’d taken part in the story. I didn’t display any prejudice: everyone went in the pot. In the end, it was all a dream, caused by a piece of pie before bedtime.

  At the end of it, I looked through the essay, and I was horrified. What had I done? This essay was obviously going to get me expelled. It was huge, for one thing, twenty pages long. Someone would punish me for this. Someone should. I was asking for it. No more bursary. No more Drake. No more Waggoner? Blewly and Rove and Drake just carrying on. Why had I done this? I grabbed the pen again, but I couldn’t cross it all out. Page after page. What would that say? I put my hands to the pages of my exercise book, and started to pull them out so I could burn them.

  But no, I couldn’t deliberately damage an exercise book.

  I paced and paced and finally shoved the book into my schoolbag. It would have to do. I had made something, and I would have to suffer the consequences. I felt weirdly worked up. In bed, I thought of Angie holding up her hand to me to show me she’d rubbed something out. I reached down, and, though I could feel Waggoner stir sulkily beside me, I put my fingers into the gap of the wound, and felt what was inside my cock. I experimented, I allowed myself to feel something, and suddenly I was desperate again. I found a place which felt good, though there was also a lot of pain, and aimed into a sock which would immediately go into the laundry-

  I came.

  I lay there panting. I didn’t think it had injured me. I waited for the pain to die down. It took a long time.

  * * *

  I sat through the next English class. At the end, Mrs. Frenchmore asked me to stay behind. That got a howl of laughter as the class filed out. Waggoner’s in trouble! I took a deep breath. I was ready to be expelled.

  ‘What a lovely story,’ said Mrs. Frenchmore.

  I think I made a little noise.

  ‘This was a complete flight of fantasy! The way you used the terrible recent events and made them into something . . . golden! Do keep your innocence. I’ve given you an A-plus.’

  I had to lean on a desk. Mrs. Frenchmore’s classes continued to be where anything could happen, and it was terrifying. Waggoner threw his head back and laughed, and slapped me on the back. He wanted me to join in laughing with him. But I wouldn’t.

  * * *

  When I got home that night, I wrote seven twenty-page stories. One was a rip-off of Star Wars, with Drake, Blewly, Rove and me pretending to be space fighter pilots. I emphasised the pretending, saying that was what we did at break time. One was a rip-off of Alien, with an alien laying eggs around the school over the Easter weekend and infesting Lang and Selway. Then there was one about football, where Drake led us all in a team. I didn’t understand the offside rule when I started writing that, so in that one we all talked about it a lot, and I think I got it sorted out. There was a vampire story, where Louise was chasing Angie around the school, and they were both in old dresses, and there was a lot of yearning. Louise ended up putting a stake through Angie’s heart. There was a thriller, where I played an innocent man who chose to defend himself in court, and was let out of the dock immediately to universal applause. There was a Doctor Who story, with Peter Davison and Nyssa landing at our school, and battling a snake that was made up of what everyone secretly wanted to do. The whole school was destroyed at the end of that, and Fiesta was the only survivor. Peter Davison took him away to be his and Nyssa’s new companion. Lastly there was a fantasy story about hill people. They came to raid the villages below. They seized our women. They killed everyone from Heddington to Calstone and set Compton Bassett ablaze.

  I stopped, not knowing what time it was. I found Dad watching snooker. I said sorry, but I’d needed the paper. I’d only just noticed the name of his insurance business at the top of every page.

  ‘What are you using the paper for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He took the pile of stories out of my hands. I panicked, couldn’t grab them back. He took a look at the top sheet, then picked up his glasses from th
e table and said he’d have a read of these.

  * * *

  When he drove me to the school bus the next morning, he asked me how much of the stories was true.

  ‘We don’t think we can really go into space. And the people from the hills–’

  ‘I mean, all these children at school, Mr. Rove’s son and all the rest. Are they all still such close friends of yours?’

  I considered what had happened last time I was at Rove’s, trying to figure out the right answer. I finally said they were.

  Dad said he’d like to read more of my stories.

  * * *

  That Thursday, during assembly, Louise shrugged off Angie’s consoling hand, and called her ‘bloody immature’, so loudly that Mr. Land heard and pretended he hadn’t.

  I heard them talking outside at first break. Louise’s voice had become strange, high and low, a roller coaster ride. ‘You don’t care about anything important! Don’t let me stop you distracting yourselves!’

  She marched off. Netty and Jenn tried to run after her, but Angie stopped them. She was muttering something under her breath.

  I ran into Louise standing alone beside the big tree in the freezing mist. She had one hand on the wood, like it was the only thing that could reassure her. She was looking slowly around her, like she was new here.

  Twenty-one

  That Friday was April Fools’ Day. Now we weren’t in Drake’s lot, that was as scary as it used to be. At the end of the Thursday when Louise had broken away from Angie’s lot, Mrs. Mills had announced that Louise had asked to be, and had been made, school chalk monitor. Angie’s lot looked surprised as Louise inclined her head, looking serious. Mrs. Mills went on with her announcements, deliberately casually saying that tomorrow Mrs. Pepper was going to begin her Biology classes in human reproduction. We were to tell our parents that tonight, in case they wanted to deny us permission to attend. Mrs. Mills had deliberately not used the word ‘sex’, but still she had to call out to stop the laughter before it settled down into whispers. I didn’t like the sound of those lessons, but being denied permission would be the worst thing.