Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer

by Hazel Barkworth

  ‘I thought you might need to chat.’ Marianne. Calm amidst everything. ‘School must be a nightmare.’

  Rachel felt her eyes twitch as she nodded. They were ringed with red.

  Marianne sipped a flat white, somehow finding the capacity for a hot drink despite the temperature. Rachel pressed the iced glass of her mineral water against her wrist, willing the coolness to enter her bloodstream and chill her entire body. Marianne sipped, but asked no other questions. Rachel had half-feared the offer of a coffee was a pretence to get information from a source inside the school, but Marianne left it there.

  ‘It’s horrible. School. It feels like everything we once took as read is upturned. We know something’s happened, but no one is quite sure what.’

  ‘It’s so unpleasant, but none of you should feel responsible in the slightest. We all know what teenagers are like.’ Marianne rubbed her hands over her face, across her cheeks and eyes as if she was wiping away tears. ‘None of us can control them.’ She had no fear of smudging make-up. Her face was the face she had woken up with. Rachel envied it. The ease. The embrace of her skin, her uncoated eyelashes, the hair that sprung out into a tight natural Afro. Rachel lamented every new crease that formed. The ghosts of her smiles were beginning to stay. The skin beneath her eyes was starting to puff out, to be bagged by the glee and tears of her past. It was like a penalty for feeling too much, for showing too much.

  Marianne didn’t wait for Rachel to reply, granting her the right to stay silent. ‘The girls must feel even worse than we do. Lily must have hinted at something. They can’t keep anything quiet, you’ve heard them. She must have dropped something out, if only they’d been paying attention.’

  Rachel wanted Marianne to keep talking. She wanted those comforting words to be the soundtrack to her whole day. And if Marianne stopped, Rachel might talk. She was so tired of not talking; so exhausted from hiding what she knew. She could tell Marianne. It would be simple; it would flow out. She just had to open her mouth.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ Rachel began. If she told her, they’d both know. The onus would no longer lie with Rachel alone. If she told Marianne, Marianne would take over; she would call on Rachel’s behalf. Marianne would know exactly what to do. There, in that wood-panelled chain coffee shop, her hands around a sweating glass of fizzy water, Rachel could tell.

  ‘I’m almost definitely sure . . .’ Rachel’s throat closed. It clenched so firmly she could feel the sides pressing together. She could only croak. She could only squeeze out easier words: ‘. . . that Mia doesn’t know.’

  Telling Marianne would have been such cool relief, but Rachel’s body wouldn’t allow it.

  Mia had torn one of the posters down. It lay, ripped at one corner, on the kitchen table when Rachel got home. It was sticky with fingerprints, creased as if it had been crushed into a ball, then smoothed back out. Mia must have been sitting at the table alone, staring at the image of her still-missing friend. The friend who had withheld the biggest secret of their lives, who’d overtaken all of them and not even looked back to say goodbye. Rachel could hardly bear to glimpse it. Those eyes, gazing unblinking from underneath their lashes, from behind her Lady Di tilt, were no longer clear, no longer simply blue.

  There had been a moment that changed them; charged minutes in an empty classroom that were the only way this could have all begun. Lily must have gone back to his physics lab to retrieve some abandoned cardigan after school had ended for the day. He’d still be in there for another hour, silently marking. She’d know that. She’d have learned his routine, watching him for weeks, months. She must have waited until after the buses had left and the corridors had emptied. She’d have lingered in the cloakroom, in the ground-floor toilets, until her friends had gone. Did she tell them anything of her plans? Her steps would have echoed as she walked towards the science block. The air would have felt heavy with anticipation. The school looked so strange when it was empty. Had it surprised him, when the door opened – would she knock? – when she was there with no one else? Just the two of them in his impossibly tidy classroom, with his System of Colours print on the wall, his phases-of-the-moon poster, his Nikola Tesla quotes. It looked more like the office of a tech start-up than a comprehensive-school room.

  Did she seem different to him as she stood in the doorway? Had she found some reason to lean across him as he sat, to reach for something – some paper or ruler – to brush his bare skin with her own? Did their eyes meet? How many seconds had to click by before they moved towards each other? Did he murmur some protest? Did she stop his lips with hers? They must have kissed. Nothing ever starts without a kiss.

  ‘Mum!’ The yelp came from downstairs, horrifying in its shrillness. ‘Mum!’

  Rachel dropped the hanger she was holding, let the skirt fall to the floor. She could decipher Mia’s cries as clearly now as when she was an infant. This wasn’t hunger or frustration. It was distress. She took the whole staircase in two leaps. Before she could swing her body into the living room, Mia called out again.

  ‘It’s Mr Webb.’

  Mark’s face filled the screen. It was twice its real size on their enormous television, twice as big as she’d ever seen it, as anyone ever had.

  ‘Mum. It’s Mr Webb.’

  The photograph was a Facebook profile picture. He was at a wedding. Grey suit, grey waistcoat, pale shiny tie.

  ‘They’re saying Lily’s with Mr Webb. Mr Webb from physics.’

  It must have been taken years ago. He looked nothing like himself.

  ‘They’re saying he took Lily. They’re saying Mr Webb took her.’

  He looked blank. Staring dumbly with that tense smile. The photographer would have lined them up, made them pose for so long their muscles would have frozen. The groom’s close family and friends, the wedding party alone. Dozens of photographs of the same people in the same positions, before they’d even had a glass of wine. No one ever looked natural at weddings.

  ‘Mum, they know he took her.’

  They knew. They knew it was him. Everything she knew was known by everyone. It was over. There was nothing she could add.

  ‘It’s Mr Webb. He’s taught us since Year 7. And they’re together.’

  Mia’s eyes were enormous. She looked stuck somewhere between disgust and wonder.

  ‘What will happen to them now?’

  Every element of her seemed alert, but she barely moved. Nothing so thrilling could ever have happened to anyone she’d ever known.

  ‘Mum, will they bring Lily home? Will he be in trouble?’ Her hand was now clamped permanently over her mouth. She talked through it, straight into her palm. Rachel wasn’t sure why. It could be to stop herself saying something irretrievable, to keep her thoughts firmly in her head. Or it could be to stop anyone getting to her lips. Lips might suddenly seem more perilous than before.

  ‘I don’t know, darling. I don’t know what will happen.’ Rachel wasn’t lying.

  ‘Fuck.’ Mia said the word more as incredulity than cursing. Rachel made no move to reprimand her. It seemed an entirely reasonable response. She had come up with little better herself.

  ‘Yeah.’ She exhaled slowly. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Does this mean Lily’s okay?’

  Rachel could only shrug.

  ‘Does this mean they know where they are? Where he’s taken her?’

  She gripped her hands together to stop them from visibly shaking.

  ‘Will it all be okay now? Is she safe? Will she . . . will he . . .?’ Mia trailed off. She seemed to run out of ways to ask. She seemed to have reached the end of her ability to comprehend it all. Rachel realised she was watching the moment it dawned on Mia what adults could do. The process was inevitable, but it was meant to take years, decades even. It was happening to Mia over the space of one ten o’clock news bulletin. They both stood still in the centre of the living room, the television bla
ring.

  Rachel couldn’t offer herself as a better grown-up. She’d missed her chance, missed the moment to absolve herself. She’d done nothing. She’d hugged the knowledge close, kept it only for herself. She’d abandoned Lily. Someone else had done it. Or technology had beaten her to it. They’d surely scoured the CCTV, and finally found a clear shot of his face. From then it would only have taken minutes to trace those tiny calibrations of eyebrow and nostril width to his NI number, his postcode. It didn’t register in Rachel as relief. There was no flood of calm, just a different form of tension. She was indicted by her silence. She could have done the right thing. She hadn’t imagined that this would feel worse.

  4

  His face in the paper didn’t look handsome. They’d dug further into his social media accounts now, gone beyond the public profile images. Of course, they’d landed upon a picture where he looked cruellest: his stubble patchy and his hair hanging in sullen strands, his eyes dark and blank, his lips reduced to a thin line. The headlines blazed. PERVERT TEACHER GROOMED MISSING GIRL. PHYSICS CREEP KIDNAP SHOCK. Lily’s picture had been hidden pages into the newspapers, but Mark’s was smeared across every front page. It took no flicking, no print-stained fingers to find him. He was public property now. The papers remained uniformly po-faced about Lily. A decade or so before, they may have salivated over her, practically peering up her skirt, but it was different now. Things had happened, high-profile horrors that made any kind of titillation too repulsive. Puritanical dismay was all they could get away with. There were no pictures of Lily on blurred nights out, no underwear peeking above or below her dress. She was all innocence. It was Mark they could lick their lips over.

  Rachel ran her hand across the printed picture of him, the way Mia had traced Lily’s image. Pervert teacher groomed missing girl. Mark was eyeballing the camera, staring right down the lens like he was furious. Rachel searched the image for a face she recognised. This was a different man. This man was made up of dots, thousands of tiny dots that merged to form a whole. If she moved her face closer to the paper, he disintegrated, fractured to nothing. When she pulled her head back, the image made perfect eye contact.

  ‘He looks rough.’ Mia was looking over her shoulder. ‘He doesn’t look like Mr Webb . . .’ She trailed off, staring at the pictures for a moment before seeming to decide something. ‘It’s disgusting.’ Her voice was firmer now. ‘He’s so old.’ She corrected herself. ‘He’s so much older than Lily. Think about it, his hands all over her.’

  Rachel was thinking about it.

  ‘Do you think he looked at all of us?’ Mia’s fingers were on the image, smudging the ink as if she was trying to get to him, to understand him. ‘Was he just a creep?’ She was already using the words from the headlines. ‘It makes me feel gross.’ Her hands now stroked her own arms in a gesture somewhere between cleansing and comfort. ‘To think about what Lily’s doing with him.’

  Mark hadn’t asked for her order; he’d just swung off the roundabout into the drive-through and gone for the classic option. Big Macs, strawberry milkshakes, fries to share. There’d been no question that she’d take what he bought her. They’d eaten it from the ripped paper packaging, in his car parked near the woodlands. That rush of saliva the second before the first bite, the way the salt and sugar spliced together, each needing the other, the smack of gherkin. There was no better bite in the world.

  She’d become suddenly ravenous. It had only been hours since lunch, but she’d taken another bite, far too big for her mouth, filling her from tooth to tongue, jamming her with bread and meat and cheese. The force of it was undeniable. Her synapses had fizzed at the mustard, the ketchup, the onion; no thought of the five hundred and sixty-three calories she knew lay within.

  Mark held one of the fries out to her, at the height of her mouth. She twisted her lips, tilted her chin to manoeuvre it in, then ate it right down until she was licking his salty fingers. The heavy scent of fried food filled the car. Without speaking, they clambered into the back. He unbuttoned her jeans one metal stud at a time. She could see blue denim, the flick of blonde hair, the faint blur of her own cheek.

  He pushed her down against the full length of the back seat. The windows were wound low to let the breeze flow and, as they moved together, the sudden hot sound of siren burst in, insistent and terrible. They both froze, cramped in position, and not even the muscles of their faces moved. She could feel his heart race through the light jersey of his T-shirt, through his skin. He kept low, hiding her, keeping their heads beneath the level of the windows. The siren came closer, unrelentingly louder, and she half-expected it to slow, to wail right up to them, but it dashed by, past the entrance to the car park and down the road beyond. It didn’t sound like a police car close up, but an ambulance, lumbering to someone’s rescue. Mark didn’t move, even when the car grew silent again, but stayed frozen in the moment, a grin spreading its way across his mouth.

  ‘Alright, Miss. Miss! Do you have any comment?’

  Having grown men call her ‘Miss’ felt humiliating. Rachel just walked.

  ‘How well do you know Mark Webb?’

  One television crew had felt intrusive only a few days before, but that Friday morning there were scores. The school was surrounded; the car park was so overtaken that staff members had to vie for spaces in the leafy side streets off the main road. The lanyards were no longer exclusively around the necks of young, stubbled men. The whole gamut was represented now: dozens of men charging around, an occasional impeccable female newscaster.

  Rachel found herself speed-walking from her car to the door. The weather felt more aggressive than ever. The heat wasn’t the main perpetrator; it was the glare of the sun. Even so many hours before midday, it had the power to redden her bare arms. It was working to physically harm her, to wreak permanent, deadly damage upon her skin. It was a hostile force she needed to protect herself from.

  As soon as she entered the gates, cameras sprung up from every angle. Bug-eyed monsters that loomed towards her, seemingly of their own volition. And voices, insistent, coming from within them.

  ‘Did you know Mr Webb well?’

  ‘Did you suspect him at all?’

  ‘Did he seem weird to you?’

  ‘Was he a creep?’

  Repeating voices with no logic. Rachel walked faster, her eyes fixed on the door. If she could get there she would be inside, away from the voices, the cameras, the questions, the violence of the sun.

  There was still a clear hour before the pupils would start to arrive, if their parents allowed them to arrive that day. An email in the early hours had told the teachers to go straight to the staffroom. As vociferously as he liked to be called Graham, the head liked them to call the staffroom The Hub. He’d arranged for that name to be embossed onto a metal door sign. He intended for the room to become a sort of open-forum, hot-desking space, to convene and collaborate. He’d bought a gleaming chrome coffee machine and seemed to take it as a personal slight if they stirred Nescafé into their mugs. Rachel saw how he frowned at anything that retained the whiff of the municipal. He visibly cringed at the clank of the ancient photocopier, at the shirt buttons that strained across the paunch of Mr Donnelly from the music department.

  There was nothing slick about The Hub when Rachel entered that morning. Everyone in it looked crumpled. No one was sitting down, as if it wasn’t possible to relax that far. They just paced or leaned, or slumped against the furniture. It was no longer just the heat that made the place uncomfortable. The room was almost silent. Mouths kept opening to speak, but few sounds emerged. They all seemed too scared to articulate anything, unsure what their words might indicate. There was only the odd muttered outburst.

  ‘It’s just disgusting. Disgusting.’ The tears over Lily’s disappearance were now dry eyes of horror, disbelief. Hands covered mouths or raked through unbrushed hair.

  ‘I just can’t fathom that something like thi
s could happen. Not here.’

  Smatters of conversation started up around Rachel, as people tried to pick their way through the new information.

  ‘Can you believe he’s done it?’

  ‘I don’t know, he was always a slimy bastard.’ Any closeness to Mark was denied, dismissed, as they wriggled themselves as far from association with him as possible. They were already beginning to turn on each other.

  ‘You were in his department, didn’t you see anything weird?’

  ‘Did she hang around his room?’

  ‘Of course not. Of course we didn’t see anything.’

  ‘You were her form tutor.’ They were already using the past tense.

  ‘What the hell’s he gone and done?’

  ‘How could he let it go that far?’

  Mr Donnelly spoke under his breath. ‘You know what the Year 10 girls can be like, though? They find make-up and short skirts all at the same time.’

  Rachel could practically hear the room start, the heads jerk. The comment was given no more than a second of oxygen.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Come on, that’s not on.’

  ‘Absolutely not, John.’

  Rachel knew that back in the early years of John Donnelly’s teaching career, comments like that would have been prolific. They may have prompted the odd tut, but nothing more. He’d have been met with sniggers, even a back slap. But the world had changed. Not a single teacher let themselves be seen to assent. Every head shook. Every voice made sure it clearly articulated disgust.

  A gritty silence fell again. Cressida’s voice was the one that broke it, thick with emotion. ‘Not Lily. Lily’s not like that. She’s not. She’s sweet. She’s so innocent.’

  Cressida looked at Rachel, as if urging her to agree. Instead, Rachel made tea. She made tea in every mug she could find, remembering as many people’s preferences as possible, and inventing the rest. She filled her hands, gave herself an endeavour. Mug after chipped mug of builders’ with milk and one, made from stale water that had bubbled for too long in the urn. Teabags pressed against the side, then piled up in sad heaps. The clink of teaspoon against ceramic. She handed them out, insisting that no one so much as walk across the room to get theirs. The minutes they’d all been in there seemed to have stretched out already into hours.