Different Class

by Joanne Harris

  Poodle was sick again afterwards. We made him wash his mouth out, before he took the rabbits back. Then we waited and hoped for the best. But even though he was sick for days, we could tell he wasn’t cured. He’s staying away from school now. I think it’s because he’s avoiding me. Well, that won’t work. We can’t stop now. We’ll finish what we started.

  I know. You’re wondering why I’m doing this. Poodle’s my friend (well, almost). And you and I know that I don’t have a particular problem with being queer. The thing is, I can’t help myself. I think it must be the drama. Poking the wasps’ nest with a stick until they fly out like lottery balls. Who will they sting? Not me, for sure. No one knows about me at Church. No one knows about me at school. Except for Poodle and Goldie, of course, and they’re not going to talk. Not now. Both of them are in this too deep. There’s no way they’re telling anyone.

  Meanwhile, back in school, Harry’s directing the School Play. Antigone, by Sophocles. (Last year was The Frogs. I guess that’s what happens when the Head of School is also the Head of Classics.) Anyway, what it means is that Harry’s busy most lunchtimes; supervising rehearsals and helping with the production. Not that it matters. Thanks to horrible Mr Scoones, I’m spending my lunchtimes practising French essay techniques. Mr Scoones sits by, eating his lunch, listening to old French songs on his portable cassette player. People like Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Sometimes he puts on a French film. He seems to think it’s a great treat for me, which makes it all even worse. Mr Scoones is the kind of teacher who gives out detentions when he’s in a rage, and doesn’t dare go back on them. So now, he’s being really friendly, as if I’d chosen to be with him, instead of being with Harry.

  Harry’s lent me some more books, though; a book of poems called Crow, and a big book of prints by Escher. There are notes in both of them. It’s nice. It keeps me in touch with him. And of course, there’s Diamond Dogs, hidden behind my bookcase. I have to keep it hidden, because if my parents found it, they might guess about Harry and me. But I hardly see him now, except sometimes in the mornings, or when he’s on duty in the yard, or on the Upper Corridor. He always smiles when he sees me. I think perhaps he misses me, too.

  Everyone else is excited about the stupid school play. Mostly because Mulberry girls are in it. One of them is Becky Price, the red Flamingo girl from Church. Goldie told me that. (I think he’s got a crush on her.) Not that I care about the play, or the red Flamingo girl. But the end of term’s coming up. One more week till the Christmas break. Not that I care much for Christmas, either. Bad TV, and fruitcake, and presents that well-meaning relatives think will appeal to a boy of fourteen. But at least I’ll be free of Mr Scoones. For a couple of weeks, anyway.

  I’ll really miss seeing Harry, though. But I can come to his house, he says. He’s got a lot of stuff at home. Rare discs, concert programmes. Books. Lyric sheets and posters. He says I can pop round any time. I can borrow whatever I like. I can always tell my folks I’m going for extra English tuition. They’d believe that. I know they would. And I already know where he lives. It’s a terraced house in White City, not too far from the clay pits. He has a whole room full of records and books; red curtains and a red rug. From the street his house looks like a Chinese lantern, all lit up. I can’t stop thinking about it. And him. We’re so alike, Harry and me. I know he’s older, and everything. But he’s not like the rest of them. We talk to each other like equals. Even when we don’t talk, we communicate without words. Sometimes, I think that when I escape I could get a house in White City. Somewhere close to Harry’s house. I could see him every day. Maybe then we could be more than just master and pupil.

  Don’t be disgusting, Mousey. Of course there’s nothing like that going on. There’s more to life than sex, you know – although you wouldn’t believe it here. Goldie’s obsessed with it, in spite of his holy attitudes. He’s always thinking about Mulberry girls, or trying to see up their skirts on the bus. But sex is just a distraction. Harry’s above that kind of thing. Harry’s an intellectual. Harry values the spiritual over the mere physical. That’s why, when I go to see him, I won’t tell Goldie or Poodle. I’ll go alone, and we’ll talk about music, and writing, and art, and death, and drink tea in the living room; and maybe, if I’m feeling brave, I’ll tell him about Bunny, and you, and even about My Condition.

  All you need is courage, he said.

  Yes, I’m sure he’ll understand.

  6

  Michaelmas Term, 1981

  Nutter’s parents didn’t keep their Parents’ Evening appointment. Instead, there came a note the next day, saying that Charlie was ill with ’flu and asking his teachers to send work, to be completed during the Christmas break. I sent a number of Latin past papers and some Vergil, plus some Ted Hughes from Mr Fabricant and some German prose from Dr Devine. There was also a large amount of reading from the Satanic Mr Speight. It looked as if Nutter’s Christmas was going to be a busy one.

  The last week of term progressed more or less as normal. Antigone proved a great success, especially among some of the more susceptible of my fifth-form pupils. The red-haired temptress from Mulberry House who had caused such devastation took her final curtain-call and left, much to my unspoken relief. The pupils from La Baule came and went in a haze of illicit Gitanes. And Harrington and Spikely were quiet, polite and respectful – except that sometimes I thought they looked at me with a hint of anxiety, as if they were waiting for something that I had not yet delivered.

  As for Harry – I’ll admit I still felt embarrassed by what he had confessed to me, and by what the Chaplain had said. I didn’t exactly avoid him – we were both very busy that term – but neither did I go out of my way to seek him out. No more cups of tea at Break; no drinks at the Thirsty Scholar. Instead, I dealt with wet lunchtimes and Christmas card deliveries, and bullies and smokers and homework evaders and Dr Devine’s repeated complaints about his disappearing supplies. Eric, too, seemed distant – although I’d said nothing to him of what Harry had said. He’d never really warmed to Harry in the way that I had, and he could sometimes be puritanical about the strangest of things. Perhaps he was slightly jealous of the way Harry and I had become friends. But Eric was subject to changes of mood – one day cheery and talkative, the next day curiously withdrawn – and so I gave little thought to his silence.

  I suppose that even if I had known what was going on, I wouldn’t have known how to intervene. At least, that’s what I tell myself now. But sometimes, I still think about what might have happened, and I feel that absurd sting of guilt, just as I do when I hear the news that a boy I once taught has died – which happens more often now, of course, although I never get used to it – that feeling that I should have been there; I should have been looking out for my friend.

  Tonight, in my dark and lonely house, I returned to Harry’s box. Over a pasty and a beer, I opened one of his blue School diaries; read until I strained my eyes. There was nothing much to see: scribbled reminders; lesson notes; drawings; a few lines of poetry – his own, or another’s, I could not say.

  I dreamt that I was old. And you – you were beside me

  Forever young – in your hand, a cup of stars.

  And now I could hear his voice again; strong against the press of years. I’ll get through all the diaries eventually, but it will be slow reading. Harry’s writing is small and cramped, sometimes interspersed with little caricatures; boys, or sometimes Masters. Sometimes a line of writing straggles vertically up the page, like a climber on a rock-face; or circles erratically, like a string of wagons round a campfire.

  My eyes are not as strong as they were; after a while, my vision rebels. Still, I am certain that there is something in these notes for me to discover. Harry would not have left me them otherwise. He knew I would read them diligently; every note; every scribbled line. And so I shall. I will find what he left for me. All I need is a little time.

  7

  Michaelmas Term, 1981

  It was a cheerless end
-of-term: dark, wet and stressful. A number of the boys fell ill with a kind of intestinal ’flu, as did Eric, whose classes I was obliged to cover in his absence. Newman, still upset about the rabbits, took to crying in the Middle School toilets, from which defeatist behaviour neither the Chaplain’s manly exhortations nor the Satanic Mr Speight’s more sinister whisperings managed to dissuade him. After two weeks’ absence, Charlie Nutter had not returned, and when the final School bell rang, the boys all scattered like sparrows over the newly fallen snow, in search of roast dinners and mince pies and presents by the fireside.

  I don’t enjoy Christmas very much. It’s a miserable time of year for people like me, who live alone, and even in those days, when I was young and my parents were still living, I felt the burden of the year’s end heavy on my shoulders. Now, in some ways, it’s easier. I have my books; my radio. I go to church or not, as I choose. I have no family commitments. My Christmas decorations are limited to a sparse length of tinsel on the mantelpiece, a log, and a few greetings cards on the window ledge.

  But in those days, it was different. I spent Christmas at the Meadowbank old folks’ home, where my parents were residents. My mother was deep in dementia, and barely responded to anyone – except for the woman who came in once a month with a collection of small, docile animals – rabbits, cats, guinea pigs – which they would encourage the old folk to pet, believing it to be therapeutic. My father had Parkinson’s disease, and could no longer care for himself, or for her, which meant that they both lived in care: one able-bodied, but out of reach; the other proud and still rational in a body that was falling apart.

  We were never very close. I was a late child, born of a couple old enough to have been my grandparents. Of course I was fond of them, in my way; but there were no football games in the park for us, no youthful adventures. Both were greying by the time I could walk, and my most vivid childhood memories were of the three of us on Blackpool beach, both of them wrapped in blankets, braving the cold and rain for my sake, while I climbed and ran and built my sandcastles alone, and my mother drank sweet tea from a flask and my father read the paper.

  Now, they still had the blankets, but my father no longer read. That Christmas, which was to be his last, he seemed to have given up the fight, and barely even spoke to me when I arrived on Christmas Day, bearing boxes of biscuits (the only presents I was sure they would both appreciate). My mother, by contrast, was having what passed as a good day: sitting up straight, like a child at Sunday School, wearing a silver paper crown and stroking a fat brown rabbit.

  There was sliced turkey on cold plates, and roast potatoes, and mince pies, and party games, and weak orange squash served in tin jugs and beakers of coloured metal. We had the exact same beakers in the refectory at St Oswald’s, and it was strange to see them there now, in the hands of the old folk; those papery, misshapen hands that spoke more eloquently than voices could of age, and the fear of the darkness.

  ‘Nice bunny,’ my mother said, stroking the rabbit’s glossy fur. ‘We used to make rabbit pie, you know. Our little boy likes rabbit pie. Would you like to hold him?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mother.’

  I’m not a fan of pets, as a rule. And that rabbit made me think of Newman and those St Oswald’s rabbits, all found dead in their open pen as the boy came to feed them with lettuce and carrot-tops . . .

  ‘It was a fox. Poor boy,’ she said.

  I looked at her, startled. ‘What did you say?’ I hadn’t mentioned Newman to her, or the dead rabbits.

  ‘That’s what we told him. It was a fox. But it was wartime. We had to make do. I told him a fox must have got it.’ She gave her sweet and singular smile. ‘He loved the pie. He told me so.’

  ‘Mother?’

  Memory’s a funny thing. I seem to remember more about my early childhood nowadays than I remember of yesterday. That little house where I was born; the square of dirt in the backyard; the rabbit hutch, with its biscuity smell. At that point I’d long forgotten that I’d ever had a pet; but now the memory returned with shutterclick clarity—

  ‘Poor little boy. He cried and cried. Don’t you tell him now, will you?’

  ‘No, Mother. No, I won’t.’

  ‘Here. You can cuddle this one instead.’

  ‘No, Mother. You keep him.’

  It was the last time I heard my mother say anything that made close to sense; after my father died, she stopped responding, even to the animals. But that Christmas she was bright; beaming in her silver crown; fussing over the rabbit. And there I was, between them like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; pouring more squash; wearing a crown; cutting up my father’s turkey slice into tiny pieces.

  I tell you all this so you’ll understand why my mind was elsewhere. Why I’d forgotten Nutter; why Harry Clarke was so far from my thoughts. Eric had invited me to his house for Boxing Day, but I decided against it, and spent the day alone instead, listening to the wireless and watching the snow turn to sleet outside. Kill me, please, I told myself. Kill me if I ever get old.

  And then it began. Out of the blue, from that strange and sinister twilight that falls between Christmas and the New Year. In the Mayan calendar, the five days that came at the end of the solar cycle were ‘nameless days’, during which demons walked, and the portals between the living world and the world of the dead were left ajar. I am not superstitious, but the time between Christmas and the New Year has always felt the same to me; a limbo; the fag-end of the year; a time when nothing good can happen. Suicide rates go up; road traffic accidents multiply; the season of goodwill degenerates into a series of fist fights, break-ups, quarrels and burglaries. The local newspapers try to balance this with heart-warming stories of comfort and joy, but these are only the fires we light against the coming of the dark. Under the tinsel, under the snow, something bitter and bleak endures.

  A squib in the paper. A child’s pet – a Christmas gift – vanished from a garden shed: a reward was being offered for the return of a brown-and-white rabbit. Three days later, another piece reported two more attacks, one in a henhouse in Red City, the other, the theft of a guinea pig from a garage on Abbey Road. Urban foxes, or maybe a dog, suggested the Malbry Examiner – although there was no explanation of how a dog could have opened the door of a henhouse, then closed it after stealing the hens. I remembered Newman’s rabbits, dead and damp in their dry pens, and felt a little uneasy. That’s why I don’t keep pets, I thought. They make you feel so vulnerable.

  And then, the day before New Year’s Eve, came the news that a boy had disappeared. Not in the local press this time, but in The Times, and on TV, on Nationwide and the nine o’clock news. At four fifteen or thereabouts, a teenage boy had disappeared on his way home from White City, barely half a mile away.

  No one had seen anything suspicious. No one knew where the boy might have gone. Last seen at a corner shop, where Mill Lane turns into Parkside Road, he’d stopped to buy a bottle of squash, and then had apparently disappeared from the face of the planet—

  The boy was Charlie Nutter. And he had last been seen less than a hundred yards away from Harry’s house on Parkside Road, just over from the clay pits.

  PART FOUR

  Fama volat.

  (VERGIL)

  1

  December 1981

  So that was Christmas, Mousey. Old films; Queen’s Speech; dinner in front of the TV. It’s OK, unless you’re used to a higher level of excitement. And then there’s the way you have to pretend that you’re having a brilliant time; opening presents; reading cards; pretending they’re just what you wanted. The new bike on the front porch that you have to pretend is such a surprise. The money from your grandparents in a re-used envelope, with a card that looks as if it came from a second-hand shop in the fifties. And then there’s the turkey, dried to a crisp, and the pudding, and the mince pies; and the carol service in the Church, with the red-haired Mulberry girl wearing a long white nightgown and singing ‘Little Donkey’.

  I’ve not seen P
oodle or Goldie much. Poodle’s had some trouble at home. Doesn’t surprise me, really. He never could keep a secret. Anyway, his Condition now seems to be public knowledge, thanks to his mother. Seems she found some of Poodle’s drawings, hidden inside a schoolbook. It didn’t take long to get him to confess, and then it was just a matter of time.

  Poodle’s mother took the lead, with the Church’s help, of course. A group of regular preachers, including Goldie’s dad, Mr Speight and some visitors from another Church, got together, had some talks, and finally staged a Group Event. I didn’t join in. I could have done, but I’d been through something similar after what happened at Netherton Green, and I didn’t want reminding. I still remember what it was like: standing in front of everyone; the shouting; the chorusing; the noise; the way the preacher spoke to me, as if I wasn’t really there, but somewhere else, and floating. And then there was the baptism, in a font of water. Not so much a baptism as a drowning, I thought at the time; a means of getting those demons out. But the water was cold; and his hand on my head was pushing me under the surface; and the noise of the congregation was a giant clatter and baffle and roar, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I would die—

  ‘Why didn’t he go to the Chaplain?’ said my dad to Poodle’s mum.

  As if Dr Burke would have known what to do. A useless jellyfish of a man, who couldn’t spot a real problem if it were happening right under his nose. I didn’t say that to Dad, of course. But honestly, the idea of going to the Chaplain for any kind of personal advice is just too hilarious for words. He’d probably just tell you to run a few laps, take a shower, and pray.