Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  In the next hour as we walked the halls, we saw blooms of colour on some walls, lines leading along others, swoops of it across the black and white tiles in the hall. It would all be washed away by the cleaners, or perhaps some of it would remain, in corners, neglected rooms, but it would have been there, Waggoner noted to me, and that was what was important. You couldn’t get rid of this stuff.

  Ahead of us now were Drake and Rove. They were making hushed, hurried plans. Drake was saying to Rove that he should be somewhere and do something, okay? Rove was nodding. I walked up to them, looking at them like I was looking at everything else.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ said Rove.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  He tried to grab me, but Drake smacked him on the shoulder. ‘Fucking don’t waste time. What are you fucking doing here, fucknor Waggoner?’

  ‘Doing the treasure hunt.’ I’d decided in that moment that I was. It was something to do. I took the list of items from my pocket and held it up to him. I wondered about the wounds on his back. I was glad he had them. They were nothing compared to my wound, I decided.

  ‘“Doing the treasure hunt!” You fucker. You know what the future’s gonna be like for you? You’re gonna be so beaten up. People will just see you and say, “Who’s that cunt?” and look at your face and want to fucking fuck you over.’

  How did Angie see anything inside that that was like a person? ‘It’s all going to change.’ I didn’t know how he couldn’t see it. Waggoner nodded solemnly beside me.

  ‘You wish. It’s always gonna be the same for you. Out in the real world, it’s just like it is here. It doesn’t get any better.’ He shouldered past me on his way somewhere, with Rove after him.

  We wandered until we got to the bursar’s office. I didn’t see anything much that would do for the treasure hunt. I found the door of the office was unlocked, and went inside. The room was empty. It smelt of Mr. Clare, like citrus that had gone off. There was a corkboard with keys hanging on it. I looked around. The list asked me to find something of great value. I opened a little cabinet. There it was. The Trilateral Cup. I put my hands on it.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Waggoner.

  ‘Why not?’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You take it for the treasure hunt, then you bring it right back.’

  I lifted the Cup out of its cabinet. It looked cheap. The surface was flecked, like the gold was falling off. It smelt musty. I took it out of the office and closed the doors behind me. Now I had this, I didn’t know if I wanted to fulfill the rest of the list after all. Either this would be enough or it wouldn’t.

  We wandered up the small stairs, into the roof. I found the room where Selway had died. There was nothing to be seen now, but like Waggoner had said, it felt like something had remained. There was sunlight across a clean wooden floor instead of a dusty one.

  I saw Netty and Rove standing in one of the corridors off the art room, near the old chimney. It was an old fireplace, to be exact, in the middle of a corridor, perhaps from some room for servants, now demolished. There was a wind that came through that chimney, only in winter, sucking the warmth out of the heights of the building. The grate was always full of dead cigarettes, ancient and modern, never cleaned up. That’s what kids came here for, if they were inside the building and so couldn’t get to the woods. They also left messages for each other, stuff that needed to be hidden, placed on a ledge up inside the chimney, because the fag ends said that no cleaner or teacher ever stopped here. Of course, I kept myself away from it. Those with particular messages would always write in code, and those mysterious phrases would be repeated, whispered amongst kids who had no idea what they meant. Everyone would reach up the chimney from time to time to see what they could find, except me.

  Rove was looking at his feet; Netty had her arms folded. It looked like they were on guard together, but didn’t want to talk to each other.

  They were so busy looking away from each other they didn’t see us. We tiptoed past them. We were now in the servants’ quarters: dust and dust sheets and paint pots and ladders that were themselves dusty and jobs never completed. There was new chalk here, lines and swirls that might never be seen.

  I heard her voice crying out. It was coming from one of the rooms ahead. I tiptoed forwards and looked inside.

  There were Drake and Angie. She had the buttons down the front of her dress undone, and her underwear was carefully hung over a chair. Her eyes were closed. He had his trousers and pants around his ankles. His pants were blue. His hand was up her dress. Hers was holding his cock. His cock was perfect, smooth, large.

  Behind them on the blackboard was drawn a huge golden knot of chalk.

  ‘It’s good they’re doing it with that there,’ said Waggoner, pointing to the chalk. ‘Louise put that there for us. Next she’ll add it to her map. We’re now in charge of everything that happens in this building. Angie’s not playing by our rules, so we’re going to use this to get her out of the way.’ He must have noticed my reaction. ‘Not like that. You stopped us from hurting her. So we’re not going to. What happens here is really your fault. It’s good you’re seeing this, anyway. Let it make you angry. It’ll make it easier for you to keep going.’

  ‘Go on,’ Drake was saying. ‘Let me. Just a poke.’

  ‘No,’ said Angie. She was taking quick breaths. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘come on. Go on.’

  ‘No,’ said Angie. She kept saying no.

  ‘Yes,’ he was saying, gently, insistently, a voice I’d never heard from him before. There was a note of pleading in it.

  Waggoner put a hand on my shoulder. ‘She wants you as a friend. A pet. Not a man. You can hate her. It’d be okay.’

  I looked at the Cup, still gripped hard in my hands.

  Angie took a deep breath, made a decision. ‘Okay. Just for a second. Just, gently–’

  There was a bit more awkward fumbling, him prying her open. She kept saying, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ He kept saying it was okay. Then he was inside her. She cried out. I saw the movement. I saw him start to move faster. She opened her eyes. She saw me. She started to shout.

  I wrenched Waggoner’s hand from my shoulder. I ran into the room. I grabbed her hand. Drake fell with a yell of rage and surprise, his trousers tripping him. I heaved Angie out of the door.

  She resisted for a moment, but then she ran with me. We ran down corridors. We ran for the door of the school. We burst through that door. We sprinted across the gravel. The tremendous shining green was dragging at us, unwilling to let us go, but we were off into the forest, soil flinging from our heels. We crashed through bushes and low shrubs and banks of ferns and dead nettles. I had the Cup in one hand, Angie’s hand in the other. We ran past the path that led to my clearing. We fought the current with our feet. We ran further into the woods than any kid had ever been. Ahead was a row of trees. We ran at them. We burst through. The forest expanded around us. There was a burst of birds from a thicket. The trees shot up and towered. The light slammed into being ordinary, glorious, summer treelight. The air got thick and still. There was silence from behind us.

  Angie was in a summer dress, and she was dignified again and standing calmly with me. We were in a different forest, the New Forest, maybe three weeks later. Our families were on holiday together. It was so quiet.

  Thirty

  The summer holidays lasted from July 23rd to September 4th, but I can’t pin down what happened during that time to specific dates. There was nothing beyond the forest that summer, no distant road with the noise of traffic. The trees were tall and deciduous. There was a warm carpet of soil. Life moved in every thicket. Natural sounds came from the distance. The light spread through the branches. There was no horizon.

  In that forest I walked with Angie Boden. She was sad, to start with, and I was awkward. Mr. Boden got his insurance from Dad’s business now. My mum would say how outrageous Mrs. Boden was, but in a good way. I’d
never heard Mum talk that way about anyone before. The caravans and awnings and deckchairs of the two families were parked in the Caravan Club’s official New Forest site. We were allowed to wander off together. They seemed to like us doing that. Mr. and Mrs. Boden didn’t know what had happened to Angie on the last day of school. I heard them talking with my parents, and they all seemed, though the exam results hadn’t come out yet, doubtful about the bursary, relieved to say that to each other.

  ‘You should have him arrested,’ I said. She shook her head and scowled at me. We walked in silence for a lot of the time, especially in the first few days. Waggoner stayed away from us. We saw him sometimes through the trees. I’d kept the Cup in my bag. I hadn’t told anyone about it.

  There was a fireplace, on its own, standing in the middle of nowhere. We saw it in the distance and walked to it. A sign said this was the Portuguese Fireplace, the last remaining bit of a barracks built by Portuguese soldiers staying here during the First World War. I decided the First World War was more complicated than I thought it had been. The fireplace was very well built. It hadn’t crumbled when everything else had. Angie put a hand on it and started to cry. In the past few days, KC and the Sunshine Band had gone to Number One with ‘Give It Up’. ‘I thought it was going to be that song,’ she said, ‘when I asked the question.’

  ‘What question?’

  She looked at me like I was stupid and like she hated feeling that about me and wished I was someone better. I reached into my bag, took out the Cup, and held it out to her. She took it. Her tears fell into it. She whispered all her lyrics over it, and let herself cry into it. It took into itself all we felt and couldn’t say. From then on, she never suggested taking it back to school, even though she knew that was where it belonged. When we headed back to the campsite, I let her take it with her.

  * * *

  Angie and I started to talk more, about stupid stuff. I was allowed to talk about stupid stuff with her. I made many mistakes and said many alarming things, but it was all okay. Lying in a field, we watched families of deer. With a few days left, we went to visit the Rufus Stone. It’s a metal pillar marking the spot where William Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror, is said to have been killed in a hunting accident. I’ve heard some people say that both his name and the day he died are auspicious, a sign that he was a sacrifice. Amazingly, he made sure his killer, Sir Walter Tyrell, was pardoned. I tried hard to understand that. I thought I could see the point of it, out of the corner of my eye. It hurt to think about. The sun had started to go down a little earlier, and the shadows of the trees were longer.

  Angie put her hand on the Rufus Stone. ‘What did he do to you?’ she asked.

  I walked around and around. It was too big to deal with. Finally, I had to come back to her. ‘I can’t show you.’

  ‘You can.’

  I had in my mind an image of her pouring water from the Cup onto me. Of me becoming healed and hard in her hands. But the hardness ruined the purity of the healing, stopped me from putting her on a pedestal, where I needed her to be. I pushed my top teeth into my bottom lip. My whole face went rigid.

  ‘There’s nobody around. We’d hear them from miles off.’

  I couldn’t stop myself now. I tried not to look like I was trying to be sexy. I turned away and unbuttoned the top of my cords, unzipped them. I took them off, and folded them. I took my grey Y-Fronts off and put them on the ground beside the trousers. Then I turned to her.

  She was standing with her hands by her sides. I thought in that moment that she was being so brave. She looked at me. She wasn’t horrified. She was so sorry for me. I didn’t want her to be sorry for me. But I did. ‘Okay,’ she said. I put my clothes back on.

  * * *

  It was dark by the time we headed home. I tried to backtrack, to talk about the Number One single. Instead, she asked me a lot of questions about what had been done to me. I told her. She was very mature. She accepted all I said. She grabbed my hand quickly before we parted and then let go, marching off towards her caravan.

  Back in the caravan, I reached under my bed and found my bag. All that holiday I’d been writing, many stories. A lot of them featured Angie and her music. They contained much that was true, much that was impossible. They included, for the first time, a lot about the people on the downs, events based on Waggoner’s experiences up there, and about how much of that had come down to the school. By the light of the moon, I made the stories into a bundle, and tied them with a red ribbon from Mum’s sewing bag. I felt different. I felt freed and forgiven. I had to thank Angie and celebrate the purity of us.

  * * *

  The next day, we were due to leave. I went straight over to Angie, and if she was going to be embarrassed about what I’d shown her, she didn’t have time to show it, because I started talking straight away about my stories, and how many I’d written, and that she was in these ones. She took the bundle from me and said she’d read them and tell me what she thought. She had the Cup, and now she had my stories too. I had given her all I could.

  * * *

  I feel like I should buy her flowers and fine wine and dresses. Not that I could. I want to write poetry and songs for her. We’re the Queen and the Knight, who loves her romantically and purely. I lay my sword at her feet. The two of us have always been together, the ones in all the songs. Like in ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’, that Police song about magicians.

  All the tracks we hear on the radio sound the same: they’re about us being together in the summer, right now. Level 42’s ‘The Sun Goes Down’, The Lotus Eaters’ ‘The First Picture of You’, The Style Council’s ‘Long Hot Summer’. Roman Holiday and Tom Robinson. Freez and Club House. There’s only right now. This one wonderful summer. I hope I always stay here. We could come and live here. I’m still here.

  * * *

  Angie went into her mum’s and dad’s caravan, and came out carrying a tiny pink lozenge-shaped box. She gave it to me. ‘The box is the present,’ she said. ‘Don’t open it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We went for a last walk; we touched hands again. I walked off into the forest, and couldn’t see Waggoner between the trees. I decided I was now keeping him inside the box Angie had given me. I came to my own edge of the forest. There was the corner where my house was. I walked down the hill to it. My own impossible forest moved back into the tapestry of the world behind me and time started again.

  Thirty-one

  August 17th was my birthday. Which, it had said on TV, was in the middle of the week when the BBC was going to start showing some old Doctor Who. Mum and Dad kept on looking worried about the bursary, wondering whether or not they should phone the school. The letter seemed to be taking a long time to arrive. I still hadn’t seen Waggoner.

  The letter arrived on Friday, August 12th. I saw the school crest on the envelope. Mum dropped it onto the telephone table like it was hot. She called Dad at work, and he said to wait to open it until he got home. That night, he sat down at the table, managed an ironic flourish with the knife with which he was going to eat his cod in butter sauce and opened the letter.

  I made myself be there. It was only justice that I was. I kept my face still. Dad read the letter. Then he looked at Mum. He smiled. ‘Oh, well, not this year.’

  I asked to see my marks, but Dad said the letter didn’t include them, and folded it into his jacket pocket. So I had to wait until that night to take it out and see them.

  * * *

  So I wasn’t expecting anything for my birthday on Wednesday. I spent the weekend being relieved about that. I was talking to Angie on the phone, and writing stories. Dad said I should see if she would call me, rather than calling her all the time and running up our phone bill, but halfway through saying it, his voice changed from angry to quieter, and he went into the kitchen.

  I was waiting to hear what she thought of the stories I’d given her. She hadn’t mentioned them on the phone. Did her voice sound different now? Had something crept over m
y horizon without me noticing it?

  * * *

  On Wednesday, Mum and Dad said happy birthday and gave me a card. Another arrived in the post from Angie. It had The Creatures drawn on the front of it; that was Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees and someone else from her band, with ‘Right Now’, which was the name of their single, in big, spidery letters above them. Is the time for your birthday, followed inside. Followed by Angie’s huge signature and a kiss.

  That was all right. Wasn’t it? There was nothing extra to it. Did she understand what my stories had meant?

  When Dad arrived home that teatime, he called me into the kitchen, and Mum and Dad were standing there, and on the table was a pile of presents. ‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘aren’t you going to open them?’ I did. It was the skateboard, helmet and pads. They felt up-to-date in my hands. They smelt of now. They looked like they worked. They were the most expensive things I’d ever touched. I told Mum and Dad this was the best present ever.

  I decided not to call Angie. I’d let her call me. She didn’t call. I couldn’t call her. Now I’d stopped, I couldn’t start again. Had seeing my wound got worse for her the more she thought about it?

  That Tuesday I made myself listen to the last chart before we went back to school. I wanted to feel the connection of what a new Number One single would mean to her. ‘Red Red Wine’ by UB40 was the new Number One. It sounded very sad.

  Thirty-two

  A Story Andrew Waggoner Never Heard

  By Waggoner

  Starring:

  Louise Callidge as the Imposter.

  And Angie Boden as Herself.

  Angie sat on the edge of her bed, reading the stories Andrew had given her. Andrew had been wounded by her boyfriend. She was so sorry for him, but now it had gotten complicated. She had followed what she’d thought the mirror was trying to tell her, but it was like she had walked into a trap. The stories told her terrible things about what had happened to the boy’s friends, but how could any of it be true? Who was this other Andrew that was in the stories? Was that just fantasy? She was starting to feel that she, of all people, didn’t have time for fantasy now. Something horribly real was calling to her, something she was trying not to think about. It wasn’t definite yet, but it was probably real. She wondered desperately how fantasy could deal with it.