Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  That night, I sat down beside Dad in the lounge and pretended to be interested in snooker. ‘Are you going to ask about that sword again?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well. No point in raking up the past, is there?’ He asked me if I was looking forward to my Easter egg. I said I was. I decided that he’d agreed to the lessons, that I would save him that uncomfortable conversation.

  * * *

  The job of the chalk monitor was to check how much chalk was left in the groove that ran along the base of every blackboard. Before the start of lessons on Friday, Louise was given dozens of new packets of chalk. Every lesson she went into, the first thing she did was to go to the board, run her finger along the groove, and, if there wasn’t enough chalk there, take a stick from her bag and add it. At first break she was meant to do all the rooms she hadn’t had access to. Just before she went to do it, Waggoner went over and gave her something from his pocket. I didn’t see what.

  * * *

  The first human reproduction class was going to be at 11:00 a.m. on April Fools’ Day. Various April Fools had been tried that morning. Fiesta had kept telling everyone that Shakin’ Stevens was dead, but nobody cared.

  ‘Right!’ said Mrs. Pepper. ‘Oh yes, everyone’s giggling, and nobody knows where to look. You needn’t worry, you’re exactly the same as every year. What you have to deal with is exactly the same as what boys and girls always have to deal with.’ She picked up a new piece of chalk and started to draw on the board, with deliberately quick strokes. ‘Now, can anyone tell me what I’m drawing? Fifty pence to the first one who gets it right. I know, I’ve never offered that to you lot before; it’s just for this picture, every year. I always get to keep my fifty pence, because once they see what it is, nobody wants to say . . .’ I realised at the same time everyone else did that she was drawing the outside and the inside of a normal penis. Maybe I got there first, because I was more familiar with the inside. It looked like Mrs. Pepper was going to keep her fifty pence. ‘And that’s a mercy, if you think about it. It’s one long line of people having sex . . . yes, there’s the S word, and not a snigger . . . and being just the same as you.’ The cock depicted was erect, and judging by the size of the balls, carefully not enormous. It did, however, stretch from one side of the blackboard to the other. Inside it were many double lines, and there were gates going back into the body, and a gap that led up at a curve into the wider world.

  I looked over to where the girls were sitting. Louise was looking furious. I thought for a moment that she was going to say something. That maybe she had asked for a note to be excused from this. Because she looked like she profoundly disagreed. With exactly what, I had no idea.

  Mrs. Pepper finished her diagram with a flourish that took her chalk down to a stub. She took her fifty-pence piece out and showed it to the audience, then dropped it back in her pocket. The trick was done, the power invoked; we were silent. ‘Right!’ She thwacked the tip of a new piece of chalk onto the board and drew one hard line up to the diagram. ‘This is a–’

  There was a screeching noise. The chalk broke in her fingers. The board divided. Then the topmost part broke under the weight, and the two halves fell off the wall. Mrs. Pepper leapt back with a shriek as the blackboard crashed onto the ground and shattered into pieces. A cloud of chalk dust burst up into the room. Kids jumped up from their chairs and shouted.

  From outside came the sound of the village clock striking twelve. The time for April Fools’ jokes was over.

  Louise raised her hand. ‘Please, Mrs. Pepper: is it a penis?’

  Mrs. Pepper shooed us all out of the Portakabin, saying it wasn’t safe. On my way out, I saw something glittering amongst the dust under the board, and picked it up. It was a narrow point of flint. It was covered in chalk from where it had been inside the stick. It wouldn’t have been enough to cut the board. That must have been done beforehand. But it had served to draw a line.

  * * *

  Louise stayed on as chalk monitor. How could a child have put that much effort into an April Fool? Perhaps the board had just somehow broken? I’m sure she denied everything, if they even asked her. In Art, she started painting in a different style, one that excited Mr. Kent. The people and grassy surroundings she smudged onto the paper were peat bog old, greens and browns, rubbed in and in. The girls started to copy her, and even though Mr. Kent was pleased by it, it looked kind of against what we should be doing anyway, so some of the boys copied her too.

  * * *

  On Easter Sunday, Mum made me an egg out of cooking chocolate. Dad reminded me, as I broke open the egg and ate one small piece of the chocolate, that this wasn’t all that ‘my Easter egg’ was. Last night, we’d seen local news pictures of the crowds on the first day of ‘Doctor Who, A Celebration: Twenty Years of a Time Lord’ at Longleat. There were meant to be monsters going, and actors and props from the series. It was on all weekend. There were thirty thousand people there, the reporter said. The roads were blocked with cars for miles around. I felt excited as I watched, but tried not to show it. Mum and Dad had looked uneasily at each other when the reporter had said how much the tickets cost, and how many people were complaining that their children hadn’t got to see anything. ‘Well, that doesn’t look very good,’ Dad said.

  I kept my face still.

  “There’s Doctor Who,” said Mum, as Peter Davison could be seen in the distance, surrounded by children, trying to get out of a car.

  “And they’re not even showing any of the new episodes there, only the very old ones.” Dad looked over to me. “Are you bothered about going to that, or shall we go to Longleat after it’s all over, next weekend?”

  “We’ll go next weekend.” I nodded, not taking my eyes off the screen, trying to soak it all up. “It’s a waste of money.” If I’d said, “Please, can we go right now?” he’d have leapt out of his seat and gone to put his sheepskin coat on, and ushered us all out to the car. I have a recurring dream about my father: there’s a war, and boys are being conscripted, and the authorities come to the door, asking for me. Dad tells me I don’t have to go. He’ll go instead. Again.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, David Bowie went to Number One with ‘Let’s Dance’. I saw the video on Top of the Pops two days later. ‘If you say run, I’ll run with you.’ I wasn’t sure if it was something Drake’s lot could like. The video looked more real than real was, the newest thing possible. I felt that I liked it, and wondered if I could. The playground offered varying verdicts, and I didn’t want to ask. I saw Louise pass by a group of girls talking about the video and suddenly start swearing at them, to the point where they all walked off together, calling things back at her.

  Term ended next Friday. We’d resumed the human reproduction lessons in a classroom without a blackboard, and Mrs. Pepper had sketched a huge, very colourful penis on a whiteboard with squeaky felt tips. She didn’t offer the fifty pence again. We’d been left dangling over the holidays to learn the rest of it when we came back.

  * * *

  The Saturday morning, after the end of term, waking up. I knew from experience that it would take a couple of days before I’d feel school wasn’t suddenly going to happen again. I opened my eyes and saw that Waggoner was standing by my bedroom window, looking out. I had no idea what he would do now we weren’t in school until May. The mock exams were next term, so I’d have to revise during this holiday. I even had to go back to school for revision classes. But there would still be a long while of blissful . . . nothing. Or so I thought.

  * * *

  On Sunday, as promised, Dad drove us to Longleat House and Safari Park. There were signs that led to an ornamental gateway, then a long, winding drive that led through gardens and forested hills, and then over a rise, and we were looking down onto the valley where the stately home was. The air through the window of the car was still cold but full of approaching summer. There below us were the house and gardens, and the flags and the lake already with boats chugging away on it a
mongst the sea lions and hippos. That sight made you want to get down there quickly, quickly, before they closed it or something!

  Dad glanced back at me, hoping every minute for a smile, so I smiled for him. There were a line of other cars in front of us, and a line behind us, but there weren’t thirty thousand of them, so we were all sailing along at ten miles per hour. I lay back and closed my eyes, and breathed.

  Waggoner sat beside me in the back seat. He said nothing. He was purposeless.

  I still love Longleat. It’s a country estate that’s been planned so that the lord of the manor owned everything he could see. There’s nothing he doesn’t want to have there, all the way to his horizon. In the 1960s, it became the first place to open a safari park: the Lions of Longleat. I associate the house entirely with the summer months, because it was closed all winter. It was the opposite of my school. We parked in one of the fields, excitingly flagged into our own space by a girl in an orange jacket. I could already see, even from this distance, that the ground to one side of the great square house was churned up into one huge sheet of mud. That had been where the Doctor Who event had been. We walked over the little bridge to the huge gravel expanse at the front of the house. There were just a couple of steps up to a front door here. I could imagine walking out of that door and looking up the long, straight drive that led from it right to a big gate about a mile away, and thinking that this was all mine, that there were big hedges and strong gates and wild animals between me and everybody I didn’t want to get in. Nobody would ever make you run up that driveway. This was my house.

  We’d do the safari park at the end, Dad said. We had to hurry, to do everything the ticket let us do. We did the house first. You went from room to room, keeping behind the red rope, looking into lounges and dining rooms, all of which smelled of some extraordinary polish which I never smelt anywhere else. Mum said that if she had a chair like that one, which looked like it was ancient and yet had never been sat in, she’d sit on the floor, except that the carpet was quite nice too. Nothing was cracked. Nothing looked like it was about to fall down. Things were right.

  We went on the sea lion and hippo boat ride, to see the gorillas on their island, and Dad even bought some fish for the sea lions to eat, and he had them pursuing our little corner of the boat. He was chucking pieces in expertly, dangling them only for a second and then giving it to them as they leapt, his face alight, like he’d learnt this on the rail of some boat that had guns and camouflage and a big, muddy river behind him. ‘Frank!’ said Mum, as if he were setting a bad example, but he just laughed.

  Out around the back, by the stables, was the whole point of Longleat for me, but we had to do everything. We even went into Pet’s Corner.

  I saw her first, a figure squatting by the low fence around the rabbit enclosure. She was wearing a long pastel orange skirt that looked very crumpled, with purple tights and flat black shoes, and a big white blouse with the tops of the sleeves all puffed out. She’d pushed her hair up somehow; it was nearly a quiff. Now she didn’t know anyone was watching her, she looked very sad.

  ‘Isn’t that Mr. Boden?’ said Dad.

  Angie looked round, looked suddenly careful, stood up. Her parents were with her. They looked rich. But I thought everyone else’s parents did. Dad had already stepped forwards and was shaking Mr. Boden by the hand. ‘Frank Waggoner. We met at the parents’ evening.’ Angie and I looked awkwardly at each other. Waggoner sighed.

  It turned out Dad and Mr. Boden had a shared interest in horse racing, Dad through betting, Mr. Boden through having shares in two horses. They fell into talking almost instantly, and so did Mum and Mrs. Boden, the wind blowing at their hats. Dad glanced covertly at his watch. ‘Do you think these two would fancy the maze?’

  ‘It’s Angie’s favourite,’ said her mum.

  * * *

  Angie and Waggoner and I were walked to the gate of the maze, and tickets were shown, and we had the gate closed behind us. I wanted to ask Angie about her smudging her collar with ink, about all sorts of things, but as soon as the gate clicked shut she was off, sprinting away into the maze without a glance behind her.

  I made to follow, but I realised Waggoner hadn’t moved. He was standing at the entrance, looking angry. ‘Why would you want to get lost deliberately?’ he asked. ‘It’s stupid.’

  So I went on without him. The Longleat Hedge Maze is a square box made of 16,000 English yews. The path runs for 1.69 miles. The aim is to get to the wooden tower in the middle, and then out of an exit at the other side. I’d never completed it. I’d always had the feeling I was working against the clock, that I wouldn’t get to see the attraction I’d come to Longleat to see unless I got out of there. I’d always flipped open the covered metal plaque that showed you the way out.

  This time, with my thoughts on trying to find Angie, I was lost almost immediately. I found myself at the crossroads of three pathways.

  ‘Hi.’

  I stopped at the sound of her voice. She must be behind one of the hedges. ‘Hello?’

  ‘So you’ve stopped pretending to be friends with Anthony?’

  I hated the way she called Drake by his first name. I wondered again how they could be together without her having heard all about what he’d done to me. But if that was the case, why would she ask all these questions? I didn’t like ‘pretending’, but it was the closest approximation to what had happened that might still sound possible. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you’ve stopped bothering Elaine?’

  I had to close my eyes. Just hearing her say Elaine’s name now felt bad. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  Silence. Then she spoke again. ‘Okay, then. So. What’s your favourite Number One single of this year?’

  This time she had said it like the answer should now be obvious, like she had proven something to me. I suddenly realised, with perhaps the most intelligent thought of my childhood, that I had been sent a message. Could Angie have been the person who’d sent me that valentine? If so, I had no idea why. ‘Kajagoogoo?’

  ‘Bless you,’ she said, like I’d just sneezed. Then I heard the sound of her running off again, and her laughter along with it.

  I stood there, puzzled. Had that joke been the whole point of the card? Had she April Fooled me on Valentine’s Day? What had that to do with how I’d been treating Elaine? ‘Hey!’ I shouted. I chose a path, ran down it, and found I was at the plaque that told you how to get out of the maze. I flipped it open.

  When I got out, there was Angie, standing with our mums and dads. They were all laughing about something. ‘Bless you!’ said Mrs. Boden to me. My relief turned to anger, but there was Dad, his eyes meeting mine with quick fear. Don’t let us down. I looked to Angie again, not knowing what to make of her smiling at me.

  Waggoner arrived sullenly beside me. Did I require his services?

  Dad nudged me. ‘Do you think Angie would like to go and see the Dalek?’

  Twenty-two

  The best thing about Longleat was what stood on the corner of a cobbled square: a police box with an open door, through which could be seen a ticket window, the Doctor Who Exhibition. It had been here for as long as I’d been coming to Longleat. Its presence was the reason, presumably, why last weekend there’d been the huge Doctor Who event here. Reluctantly, my ticket in hand, I led Angie into the stable block area, heading for the exhibition. Waggoner came with us. Every now and then I thought I saw Angie’s gaze turn to him, but there was an irritated look on her face when it did. We stopped at the threshold of the police box. From inside, I could hear the cries of the Dalek. I desperately wanted to ask Angie about the Valentine’s card now as well as everything else, but how could I? Not only did it open me up to the possibility of her laughing at me again, but the words I was putting together in my head, the form that question would take, sounded to me just like what I’d been tormenting Elaine with. That question had now become too horrible for me to ask.

  ‘Aren’t we going in, then?’ she said.

/>   * * *

  The Dalek had retreated into the shadows at the back of its glass case. As soon as we tripped whatever the mechanism was, it surged forward, lights blazing, shouting that we would be exterminated. Some small children beside us screamed.

  ‘Are you scared?’ asked Angie.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I expected her to ask more questions I’d have to say no to, but she didn’t. We walked around cabinets with costumes and monsters from the series hung on dummies. For the first time in all the years I’d come here, I felt kind of disappointed. There were displays of guns and spaceships, which were just dusty things that had been hung up. In the face of Angie, they seemed slight. I didn’t want her telling me this was just a dusty room. That would mean it suddenly would become that.

  We entered the central area, where the control room was, all sorts of mechanisms on the TARDIS console flashing on and off, and buttons you could press, and the column lit up, rising and falling. Angie pushed some buttons, found they didn’t do anything, and looked around like she didn’t think much of it. ‘This is all very futuristic,’ she said. ‘Do you like the future?’

  I nodded enthusiastically, which made her smile. Waggoner looked furious at me.

  ‘Is your favourite Number One single really “Too Shy”?’

  I felt, weirdly, like I could tell the truth. The TARDIS, after all, was outside of time and space. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Why did you say it was?’ She didn’t seem upset, like I’d expected her to be. She sounded pleased, like she already knew the answer.

  ‘I . . . just . . . needed to say that then.’ Because of the Valentine’s card. Could I ask about that? The words still felt like they’d be horrible.

  ‘Great.’ She nodded as if I’d just confirmed something. ‘So. What’s really your favourite?’

  I took a risk, hoping against hope. ‘It’s “Let’s Dance”.’